And still, 2004 feels "a few years ago" to me. I don't know if I'll ever get used to it.

That's were we disagree. I believe there are some human freedoms that nobody has the right to deny. I suppose I'm just an idealist.

> The current form of government in the United States is a representative republic that has a constitution that defines processes for dramatic change including a constitutional convention that allows for open-ended changes to the constitution itself.

I'm sure the goal of such openness of constitution was to protect the liberty of people, not to open doors for authoritarianism.

If that's all you took away from this conversation, then I agree - it's for the best to end it now. But I'll try to elaborate anyway.

I am not taking the position that Christians should have their right to vote curtailed, I'm taking the position that nobody, not even Christians, should have the right to impose their own standards upon others, unless they made sense outside of the Christian worldview. Abortion laws only make sense in the Christian worldview (and maybe a few other, equally intolerant, worldviews). The fact that Christians are the majority in the US only makes it de-facto a Christian state, while still pretending to be a secular democracy.

Here's a thought experiment:

If Talibans somehow became a majority in the US, would you still consider it "their right" to vote away the democracy and establish Sharia Law?

I understand and agree with your frustration, but I don't agree that the statement undermines the parent comment at all.

I always thought npm was open-source-centric. If npm somehow ran opaque binaries, I'd really like to know about that.

In an alternative universe where you don't feel that regret, you could probably keep wasting time for the rest of your life without ever noticing.

The low quality/safety of public infrastructure could be to blame. Why would anyone use unpleasantly hot and smelly public transportation, full of loud and potentially shady individuals, without any security around in case someone creates a commotion - when they could just pay a little bit more and not even worry about any of those things?

Why would anyone go to a public gym with a tiny shared space, number of subscriptions that far exceeds the capacity of the place, and deal with unpredictability of whether or not there will be room to train - when they can build a private gym and train whenever they feel like it?

Why would anyone stand around in the crowded "fan pit", having problems even moving because vendors sold more tickets then there is capacity, wait in the line for public bathroom, wait in the line for drinks, make yourself a target for pickpocketing, etc. - when they could just buy a VIP seat, enjoy their time, and go home?

People will stop isolating themselves when not isolating stops being so unpleasant.

I didn't think it was possible to run native binaries on Android. Cool to see it happen :)

    Ctrl+Z
    kill -9 %%

The circle of life?

Perhaps the next step would be to implement a Java Virtual Machine in PicoLisp.

In the context of programming languages, dependencies are a property of a programming language implementation. LLVM is not a small system, yet PicoLisp is a small language, which is why it might be considered a heavy dependency. There are scenarios like embedded where having a tiny implementation with little dependency pays off.

Ordinary programs can be very easily maintained by using only the language's standard library, as standard library is often maintained substantially longer than many third-party libraries.