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When I started learning make it wouldn't work and I wouldn't understand why so I dug into it and now I understand how it works and I can make it work but seasonned programmers still tell me my makefiles are wrong and then proceed to use even more arcade parts that render their makefiles incomprehensible. At some point I just gave up makefiles for anything non-trivial and went over to xmake where life is mostly simple and I never do it wrong.

As someone who has struggled with understanding Adorno for a long time, I found this recent review of a book about Frankfurt School a pleasant read : https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-dialectical...

You can read and enjoy Adorno in bits without swallowing a whole overarching theoretical foundation. As he also often wrote that way.

Minimia Moralia for example is a collection of more personal and essay form writings.

Also I absolutely love Negative Dialectics as a piece of theoretical writing but I am not convinced it fits into the standard "Frankfurt school" label. It's more about epistemology than it is about culture.

(He was, however, more than a bit of a snob. I wouldn't take his musings on culture at face value unless you truly believe -- like he did -- that jazz and other popular music is just intrinsically and objectively worse than Bach forever and always absolute truth. Ahem.)


From this (mostly fine) article you linked to: "Marx was a left-Hegelian, which meant he filed the serial numbers off God and called Him “communism”."

I mean, no. That's a complete misreading of Marx. (Though perhaps one that was convenient to Stalinists or Maoists to continue to let breathe...).

For one, it would only apply to Marx in his 20s. Grown up Marx substantially threw out most of the Hegelian stuff, seeing it as superstitious nonsense while he studied commodity prices in the British Museum's reading room.

Or at least -- in his own younger-self terms -- he "turned it on its head" by throwing out the Idealist aspects of the dialectic. Even a traipse through the Theses on Feuerbach shows him rejecting all the transcendent forces of history crap.

I'd argue by the time we get to Capital the dialectic and the Hegel stuff generally is barely present.

If he is speaking of dialectic, it's mostly as "here's a way to look at history as it has happened, let's go poke at the contradictions and see what's in there" not "here's a recipe for how history works and from this we can predict..."

And back to Adorno, this is actually precisely what he is getting at in Negative Dialectics. Reinterpreting the "dialectic" as a non-Platonic, non-Hegelian process of looking at contradictions in reality and history but without expecting any kind of unification or resolution to a more perfect form. Living with the negative and the unknowable. Because the alternative, in Adorno's mind, was the path to Auschwitz.


A misreading of Marx (intentional or otherwise) is precisely what I'd expect from Alexander.

Honestly, Marx's work is like "the Bible", nobody is really reading it honestly "from scratch". They are all coming in with an existing identity / framework / world view, and getting it to say what they want it to say.

Something about people pretending it was the official ideology of half the world tends to do that. The old man himself would have thrown up into his soup if he knew.


> I’ve long complained that communists refuse to specify the details of how a communist society will work, or why it would be good.

Did capitalists do this in any comprehensive or satisfactory way prior to the advent of capitalism? I’m not a communist, but this seems like a fairly weak criticism.


The advent of communism was sufficiently long ago that it I'm not sure your critique applies.

I'm not sure why that's relevant. My point is that it's never really possible to provide a detailed plan for a complete changing of the social order. While it might be nice in theory to have such a thing, it's not clear that it's really a reasonable thing to ask for.

> My point is that it's never really possible to provide a detailed plan for a complete changing of the social order.

That's correct, but if the communist avantguarde says (as they did) "we have to completely change the social order by force, uproot everything, to build communism", there might be questions if it's at least going to be directionally good or bad. And if the answers can't be provided, then perhaps they shouldn't be doing it at all?


Yep, that’s the classic small ‘c’ conservative argument against revolutions or sudden changes. It’s a fine argument, but it’s not specific to communism.

Pretty sure I've already used it 20 years ago.

Yeah it's not specific to communism, one just needs to look at the sudden changes the US admin is implementing to see it's broadly applicable, only they don't even pretend to be interested in societally good outcomes.


Aren't you confusing with HSV ?

HPV, not HSV. Acronym soup.

* HBV - Hepatitis B

* HSV - Herpes Simplex Virus (two strains, what most people call “herpes”)

* HPV - Human Papillomavirus


I feel like in countries which are mostly ethnostates, there is a tension around remnants of tradition and the business world trying to open up the culture to gain some new market opportunities (Unsure how to state this more neutrally). I think this tension is interesting and I think that in the U.S it feels like the market systematically has the upper hand.

I am not sure this holds scrutiny so I'd love to read a counter


I agree with you. Fundamentally, this is an article about the effects of market capitalism. Everything can be converted from cultural terms into economic terms.

Your list is imcomplete I believe:

Too merciful to slaveowners before, too merciful to warmongers as of late and way too merciful to grifters for as long as this country has existed.

I learnt that you should never bet against the U.S but I don't know how much longer you will be able to waste that seemingly infinite potential.

Good times creates bored, ignorant men. Bored ignorant, men create bad times.


This is true, but remember, bad times creates violent, ignorant men who also create bad times.

Curious: What does the "imac" stand for in the architecture target name ?

IMAC are the RISC-V extensions supported:

I = Base integer instruction set, 32-bit

M = Standard extension for integer multiplication and division

A = Standard extension for atomic instructions

C = Standard extension for compressed instructions

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RISC-V#ISA_base_and_extensions


Thanks.I can't believe they chose non-arcane, memory-friendly letters. Kind of rare in naming hardware I feel (unless it's not ?)

I see you are unfamiliar with `rv64mafdcbvh_zicsr_zicntr_zihpm_ziccif_ziccrse_ziccrse_ziccamoa_zicclsm_za64rs_zihintpause_zic64b_zicbom_zicbop_zicboz_zfhmin_zkt_zihintntl_zicond_zimop_zcmop_zcb_zfa_zawrs_supm_svade_ssccptr_sstvecd_sstvala_sscounterenw_svpbmt_svinval_svnapot_sstc_sscofpmf_ssnpm_ssu64xl_sstateen_shcounterenw_shvstvala_shtvala_shvstvecd_shvsatpa_shgatpa` also known as `RVA23`

rva23 is pretty friendly.

Needn't use the long thing.


Yea, but remove any one of the extensions and you have a distinct arch with a name that is basically just as confusing.

The point I wanted to make is that nowadays a lot of the extensions do not have such a nice (semi) easy to remember name.


RISC-V went wild with the extension naming in the past few years with the recently ratified extensions. The original extensions are all clubbed to be labelled as G.

The core set of extensions has pretty friendly single letters, but the flip side is you run out of letters pretty quickly.

The non-single-letter extensions should make you feel more at home. Like the supervisor instructions. You have Smcntrpmf which helps with benchmarking by pausing perf counters during traps. I think Smcntrpmf just rolls off the tongue nicely.

Then there's a lot of extensions that start with Z followed by a sprinkling of random letters which is secretly an abbreviation you couldn't have guessed. For instance you have your SHA-2 instructions in Zvknha and Zvknhb, since that's the Vector Krypto NIST Hashes.


There are a few lettered extensions to the base RV32I instruction set. e.g.:

* https://docs.riscv.org/reference/isa/unpriv/m-st-ext.html


where did you find it?

Wasn't sure what was best to post the actual spec lives there: https://standard.openrepair.org/standard.html

The main concern was that animal who feed on mosquitoes (birds) might be affected but most mosquitoes don't bite and the animals who eat them also eat a lot of other insects. I would worry much more about pesticides that may be the reason for the great insect population collapse.

I tried KDE 5 years ago and frankly I was a bit lost. Too many options and too many papercuts. Still better that the dumbed down GNOME experience but I went for Cinnamon instead.

I tried it again today and it really felt quite polished, no papercuts, no feeling of being overwhelmed, no bugs, good newcomer experience... I think this is it. They made it.


I don't think people have to be humble if they are proud of what they have produced and get recognition to validate them. I am much more concerned by her holding views that are in favor of hurting others.

Those two things aren't incompatible: you can be humble, and simultaneously speak frankly (and without ego) about your accomplishments.

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