2022-12-13 05:11:51 <veltas      > Who decided to enable visualbell by default on mingw's vim?
2022-12-13 05:11:55 <veltas      > So I can slap them
2022-12-13 05:12:03 <KipIngram   > Ugh.
2022-12-13 05:12:11 <KipIngram   > That sounds like a pain.
2022-12-13 05:12:39 <KipIngram   > I've never cared for terminal bells.
2022-12-13 05:12:50 <boru        > Agreed.
2022-12-13 05:13:05 <boru        > Sounds like they just enabled everything.
2022-12-13 05:13:09 <KipIngram   > Maybe there was some time in the old days when they made more sense.
2022-12-13 05:13:17 <KipIngram   > Kitchen sink, man.
2022-12-13 05:13:21 <boru        > Indeed.
2022-12-13 05:13:37 <KipIngram   > BTW, I actually ran over a kitchen sink once.
2022-12-13 05:13:41 <boru        > Well, yeah, sometimes a terminal bell is useful.
2022-12-13 05:14:08 <boru        > I sometimes do a printf \a when I run something  on a machine beside me that will work for a few minutes
2022-12-13 05:14:09 <KipIngram   > I was drivering from my work HQ to our production facility, on a major loop around Houston, and a sink actually fell out of the pickup truck in front of me, and I wasn't able to stop or swerve.
2022-12-13 05:14:27 <KipIngram   > s/drivering/driving/
2022-12-13 05:14:45 <KipIngram   > Seemed like a... uniquely odd experience.
2022-12-13 05:14:52 <boru        > No shortage of sink puns are coming to me in response to your story.
2022-12-13 05:15:01 <KipIngram   > :-)
2022-12-13 05:15:10 <KipIngram   > I know - it's that cliche usage that makes it funny.
2022-12-13 05:15:13 <veltas      > That really sucks
2022-12-13 05:15:19 <boru        > That is a fairly infrequent experience though, I'd imagine.
2022-12-13 05:15:26 <boru        > I feel like I haven't really lived now.
2022-12-13 05:15:29 <KipIngram   > The car weathered it pretty well, actually.
2022-12-13 05:15:35 <veltas      > I don't follow vans with stuff in the back, I've seen too many liveleak videos
2022-12-13 05:16:20 <KipIngram   > Also once on the highway between Houston and Austin the guy in front of me had his back left wheel come off.  It immediately started slowing down and I watched it go by me on my left.
2022-12-13 05:16:36 <veltas      > Wheels are really bad to drive over
2022-12-13 05:16:51 <veltas      > Because they can handle so much compression, if you hit it you will destroy your car and leave the wheel unscaved
2022-12-13 05:16:53 <KipIngram   > Yeah, that one I was able to avoid.
2022-12-13 05:17:26 <boru        > I only drive tracked vehicles for that reason.
2022-12-13 05:17:27 <KipIngram   > Those are probably my most interest things in 44 years of driving.
2022-12-13 05:18:01 <KipIngram   > Well, almost 44.   Just under a month to go.
2022-12-13 05:18:47 <veltas      > I've had a licence for over a decade now I think, but have only been 'driving' for like 2 years or so
2022-12-13 05:19:02 <veltas      > But I've done more miles than a lot of city people have done in their life, I live quite far from work
2022-12-13 05:19:23 <KipIngram   > Yeah, I guess the first couple of years I didn't drive "a lot."  Not any sort of long trips, like I did later.
2022-12-13 05:19:34 <veltas      > Some days I drive through China, some days I go through the americas
2022-12-13 05:19:46 <KipIngram   > I grew up in Alabama and went to college in Texas, so I racked up a pretty good stack of that 850 mile trip.
2022-12-13 05:20:17 <KipIngram   > And then after my divorce I moved from Austin to Houston, so I did that 150 mile trip until I was blue in the face, carting my kids back and forth.
2022-12-13 05:20:22 <KipIngram   > I could almost do that one in my sleep.
2022-12-13 05:21:00 <KipIngram   > That all wrapped up (at least as visitation) a few years ago, though - haven't done that one as much sense then.  They started coming here instead.
2022-12-13 05:21:04 <veltas      > My parents are about 150 miles away
2022-12-13 05:21:22 <KipIngram   > It's not a "horrible" distance, but it's enough to get your attention.
2022-12-13 05:21:25 <veltas      > I'm not sure there is a 850 mile trip I can do in these isles
2022-12-13 05:21:32 <veltas      > No it's not horrible at all
2022-12-13 05:21:41 <veltas      > But it takes a big chunk out of your day
2022-12-13 05:22:03 <veltas      > I've driven to Scotland and back in a day
2022-12-13 05:22:13 <veltas      > That's probably like 850 miles
2022-12-13 05:22:31 <KipIngram   > Ah - I've been admiring the Scotland scenery in the Highlander episodes that are set there.
2022-12-13 05:22:56 <KipIngram   > Probably only the "scenic shots' were actually Scotland, taken from stock footage.
2022-12-13 05:23:03 <KipIngram   > Beautiful territory.
2022-12-13 05:23:34 <KipIngram   > I think I'd like to visit someday.  There's a weird attraction.
2022-12-13 05:23:55 <KipIngram   > Almost enough to make me believe in some kind of "lineage memory" or something, which I know is ridiculous.
2022-12-13 05:24:04 <KipIngram   > But I don't have a *generic* craving to travel, at all.
2022-12-13 05:24:24 <KipIngram   > And it is the part of the world I'm large from, genetically.
2022-12-13 05:24:54 <KipIngram   > my ancestry.com report pegged me as about 90% British Isles.  And most of the remaining 10% Scandinavia.
2022-12-13 05:25:50 <KipIngram   > A tiny smidge of Italy / southern Europe.
2022-12-13 05:26:04 <veltas      > Your family tree will tell you where you're actually from
2022-12-13 05:26:30 <KipIngram   > Yeah.  I know a fair bit of my family tree, but only a couple of threads back across the ocean.
2022-12-13 05:26:46 <veltas      > You're more pure British than me, based on my genetics test
2022-12-13 05:26:51 <veltas      > A lot of people outside of the UK are
2022-12-13 05:27:05 <KipIngram   > My earliest American ancestors showed up in the Virginia region, and then sort of steadyly migrated southward from there, through the Carolinas, Georgia, and finally Alabama.
2022-12-13 05:27:06 <veltas      > The colonies and rebel colonies tend to be
2022-12-13 05:27:28 <KipIngram   > :-)
2022-12-13 05:27:43 <veltas      > And statistically they were probably against the american rebellion
2022-12-13 05:28:15 <KipIngram   > on one of those episodes they showed that scenery and played Bonny Portmore, and I was just enthralled.  That's a powerful song.
2022-12-13 05:28:29 <veltas      > Yeah nothing like your homelands
2022-12-13 05:28:38 <KipIngram   > It's not even really the words - it's just the sound of it.
2022-12-13 05:28:56 <veltas      > Nothing less than billions of lives lost defending such things
2022-12-13 05:29:22 <veltas      > It's forbidden to care about things anymore but I think most people do, and should be able to do so peacefully
2022-12-13 05:29:44 <KipIngram   > In some of my research I read that sometime back in the Bronze age a new group swept into Britain - the "Ancient Northern Eurasians," I think.
2022-12-13 05:29:57 <KipIngram   > And perpetrated like a 90%+ genetic replacement on the prior population.
2022-12-13 05:30:09 <KipIngram   > So I guess it's likely I track on back to them.
2022-12-13 05:30:28 <KipIngram   > Steppes of Russia.
2022-12-13 05:31:04 <veltas      > There are definitely different subgroups in Britain
2022-12-13 05:31:35 <veltas      > I'm probably mostly the sort of Anglo invader group mixed with the Celtic Britons, so Welsh people look down on me and spit in the street
2022-12-13 05:31:39 <KipIngram   > One of these days I want to get some more tests - specific Y and mitochondrial dna tests; I've read they can track migration patterns particularly well.
2022-12-13 05:32:02 <veltas      > And those celtic britons displaced a group (or groups) in the bronze age supposedly, as you say
2022-12-13 05:32:25 <KipIngram   > Yes.  The prior population was mostly a farming population from lower in Europe.
2022-12-13 05:32:41 <veltas      > But living in a place for thousands of years probably leaves a dent, or also you have to consider the bias of the fact your ancestors chose to stay there for so long
2022-12-13 05:32:46 <veltas      > So there is some kind of connection
2022-12-13 05:33:27 <KipIngram   > Yeah.  I mean, I know that isn't "my place."  It's not like I could "go there" and fit in.  But I do want to walk around in it a bit someday.
2022-12-13 05:33:29 <veltas      > But I don't like to spiritualise it, being a Christian
2022-12-13 05:33:56 <KipIngram   > Yeah, same here.  It's not a huge thing for me, but it's my training.
2022-12-13 05:34:12 <veltas      > Yeah your homeland stops being your home the second you leave, yet along after generations of living abroad
2022-12-13 05:34:19 <KipIngram   > I've always found it a little hard to believe that anybody has "exactly the right story," but I do feel that there's something more to us than just our bodies.
2022-12-13 05:34:20 <veltas      > Sad but true
2022-12-13 05:34:40 <KipIngram   > And Christian values make a lot of sense to me.
2022-12-13 05:34:40 <veltas      > I don't really have a home either, living in so many places in England, I feel like an outsider everywhere
2022-12-13 05:34:54 <veltas      > England is a very diverse country, you are a foreigner if you travel 50 miles
2022-12-13 05:35:13 <KipIngram   > I imagine a lot of people feel that way these days; we're just a much more mobile population than we used to be.
2022-12-13 05:35:36 <veltas      > There are some people who are part of a sort of urban group, but I'm not in that so I do feel like an outsider
2022-12-13 05:35:48 <veltas      > But when everyone's an outsider nobody (and everybody) is
2022-12-13 05:35:54 <KipIngram   > Also, I think we tend to live in larger cities and don't "form communities" to the extent we did in earlier days.  That part's a little sad.
2022-12-13 05:53:55 <veltas      > A lot of social theory went into this with industrial revolution and changes in commons preceding it
2022-12-13 05:54:15 <veltas      > People use to live off of commons, then the land was enclosed and everyone was forced to work for the landlords
2022-12-13 05:54:36 <veltas      > And then forced into towns to work in factories etc
2022-12-13 05:57:20 <KipIngram   > Yeah; I'm a capitalist, but I'm really not a fan of the excessive centralization of economic power that's developed over the last few hundred years.
2022-12-13 05:58:12 <KipIngram   > Things have changed an awful lot just since when I was a kid.  Back when I was in elementary school I could still look up Main Street of the little town I lived in, or across the town square of the next one we moved to, and see it dominated by small businesses, owned and operated by local residents.
2022-12-13 05:58:24 <KipIngram   > Dykes Drugs, Hollis Furniture, etc. etc.
2022-12-13 05:58:45 <KipIngram   > these days it's all Walmart, Best Buy, yadda yadda.
2022-12-13 05:59:10 <KipIngram   > I went to school with Dyke's and Hollis's kids.
2022-12-13 05:59:37 <KipIngram   > I think it was better.
2022-12-13 05:59:51 <KipIngram   > We've busily chopped a lot of the middle rungs out of the upward mobility ladder.
2022-12-13 06:00:58 <KipIngram   > I guess it's common for folks to think things were "better before" when they get on up a ways in age.
2022-12-13 06:01:28 <KipIngram   > Some things are better now.
2022-12-13 06:01:59 <KipIngram   > It's not as though we've accomplished nothing.
2022-12-13 06:05:49 <veltas      > Cars are safer
2022-12-13 06:05:56 <veltas      > That's one of the things that is better
2022-12-13 06:06:09 <veltas      > Although it looks like that trend is reversing of late
2022-12-13 06:06:26 <KipIngram   > Oh, yeah - technologically we've improved a ton of stuff.
2022-12-13 06:06:36 <KipIngram   > And also cheapened a ton of stuff (I mean in terms of quality).
2022-12-13 06:06:47 <veltas      > IMO most of the improvements are engineers working in spite of governments
2022-12-13 06:07:18 <KipIngram   > I theorize that computers have actually resulted in a lessening of quality.  Back before they came along, you couldn't design some things as "precisely," so to make sure you had a decent product you had to build in a safety margin.
2022-12-13 06:07:21 <veltas      > Silicon is smaller than ever, doesn't really require the fairest or most productive society externally for that to continue
2022-12-13 06:07:40 <KipIngram   > But now we can hone things down to the nth degree, and they use that to make things as absolutely "minimal" as they possibly can.
2022-12-13 06:08:39 <KipIngram   > Yeah, though I guess we are at least *beginning* to approach the atomic limit in semiconductors.  I read a few years ago that a lab in Israel had a transistor that consisted of just 12 atoms.
2022-12-13 06:09:00 <KipIngram   > So there's a wall out there *somewhere* on that front, not ridiculously far away.
2022-12-13 06:09:40 <KipIngram   > But on the other hand I've heard that if we use graphene instead of silicon as our semiconductor substrate, its superior thermal properties will let us ratchet up clock speed by a factor of 10-100.
2022-12-13 06:10:11 <KipIngram   > So I feel sure there's "more to come" on that front; if not fro miniaturization then from something else.
2022-12-13 06:10:35 <veltas      > Of course but it's been incrementally improving
2022-12-13 06:15:58 <veltas      > "capitalist" is such a charged and yet meaningless word that I wouldn't recommend using it at this point
2022-12-13 06:16:46 <veltas      > I think a lot of people use it to mean "I'm not a socialist" and yet 99% of people actually agree with some amount of socialist ideas or planning
2022-12-13 06:17:08 <veltas      > Saying you're a "socialist" is pretty meaningless too, although in the US it means a bit more I think since it's such a 'dirty' word
2022-12-13 06:17:24 <veltas      > It's like how in France saying you're a 'conservative' sounds quite extreme
2022-12-13 06:40:01 <olle        > I think a more important distinction than capitalism/socialism is centralist/decentralist
2022-12-13 06:40:41 <olle        > Communism is a horribly centralist system. Capitalism degrades to centralism, if not forced to split up.
2022-12-13 06:41:26 <olle        > And of course the most decentral system is a system without ownership ;D
2022-12-13 06:54:57 <veltas      > They're all extremes to me, fully centralised and fully decentralised
2022-12-13 06:55:02 <veltas      > I think some planning is appropriate
2022-12-13 08:26:13 <KipIngram   > olle: I actually agree with that; I wish we could find a way to regulate capitalism to keep that centralization from happening.  I do think the centralization is a natural tendency.
2022-12-13 08:27:15 <KipIngram   > Small enterprises should be regulated only lightly, for purposes like protecting the environment and other such things.  Larger organizations should come under more and more "limitation" in how they get to operate.
2022-12-13 08:27:45 <KipIngram   > It's not just "big government" that is dangerous and needs to be subject to constitutional controls - "big" anything can be dangerous.
2022-12-13 08:28:20 <olle        > KipIngram: Yes yes. The problem is that once you have money you can influence or even flat out buy the politicians
2022-12-13 08:28:45 <KipIngram   > Of course.  That's why it would be awfully hard to get to there from where we are.  The powers that be wouldn't just "roll over" for it.
2022-12-13 08:28:53 <olle        > There are patches for that too tho, to create more independence for politicans
2022-12-13 08:29:10 <KipIngram   > Any system is subject to corruption; it would be nice to have a system that at least "in theory" works well.
2022-12-13 08:29:19 <KipIngram   > Then we'd have to be as vigilant as possible about cheaters.
2022-12-13 08:30:00 <KipIngram   > But just handing big corporations carte blanche in the name of "free enterprise" doesn't lead to desirable outcomes.
2022-12-13 08:30:03 <olle        > Corrution is a hot research topic
2022-12-13 08:30:12 <olle        > That didn't exist when Marx and others wrote
2022-12-13 08:30:42 <olle        > Maybe "hot" is too strong, but it exists at least
2022-12-13 08:31:15 <KipIngram   > Any system we invent will get gamed.
2022-12-13 08:31:32 <olle        > I don't believe it can't be improved
2022-12-13 08:32:28 <olle        > I do believe it's worth trying to improve it and to do research
2022-12-13 08:32:49 <olle        > Sadly these days, globally it's going down the drain :( For human rights
2022-12-13 08:49:58 <KipIngram   > Oh, sure - I think we should always do our best.  There just are some super well-entrenched special interests, that's all.  Hard job.
2022-12-13 17:49:06 <KipIngram   > Hey, is there an archive of Forth Dimensions anywhere online?
2022-12-13 17:49:25 <KipIngram   > I've found a database of article titles and summaries, but no full archive so far.
2022-12-13 18:42:14 <veltas      > KipIngram: https://archive.org/details/forthdimension
2022-12-13 19:11:05 <vms14       > https://termbin.com/4eobc
2022-12-13 19:11:17 <vms14       > I trt to make a bot with the not-so-forth
2022-12-13 19:12:08 <vms14       > for now only reponds to ping and stares silently