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<style type='text/css'>body {font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12.3px; line-height: 1.4em; margin-left: 20px; text-align: justify; width: 650px;} a {color: #4183C4; text-decoration: none;} a:hover {border-bottom: 1px solid #4183C4;} .tumblr-post p { margin-left: 10px; margin-right: 10px; }</style>
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<p>Limitations, honestly faced, are the greatest assets in producing a work of art. I am always impressed by ones ability to push his limitations to unknown, unexplored, realms rather than settling for the unexplicable endowment of talent. Anyone with their five senses operating normally is talented.
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<p>11:13 AM> Applications create possibilities for millions of credulous users, whereas OSes impose limitations on thousands of grumpy coders, and so OS-makers will forever be on the shit-list of anyone who counts for anything in the high-tech world.
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<p>E-mail in particular and online writing in general have their well-known flaws and limitations, but they have also served as cleansing agents for prose, much as journalistic writing did early in the 20th century. (<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/25/books/review/Yagoda-t.html">Book Review - ‘The Tyranny of E-Mail - The Four-Thousand-Year Journey to Your Inbox,’ by John Freeman - Review - NYTimes.com</a>)
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<p>06:17 PM> My second remark is that our intellectual powers are rather geared to master static relations and that our powers to visualize processes evolving in time are relatively poorly developed. For that reason we should do (as wise programmers aware of our limitations) our utmost best to shorten the conceptual gap between the static program and the dynamic process, to make the correspondence between the program (spread out in text space) and the process (spread out in time) as trivial as possible.
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<p>10:18 PM> I have a problem with this idea: Perhaps we record an objection only to evils which are gratuitously added to the inevitable; the fact that it is worse to die at 24 than at 82 does not imply that it is not a terrible thing to die at 82, or even at 806. the question is whether we can regard as a misfortune any limitations, like mortality, that is normal to the species. Blindness or near-blindness is not a misfortune for a mole, nor would it be for a man, if that were the natural condition of the human race.
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<p>06:25 PM> Quotation marks should be used honestly and sparingly, when there is a genuine quotation at hand, and it is necessary to be very rigorous about the words enclosed by the marks. If something is to be quoted, the <em>exact</em> words must be used. If part of it must be left out because of space limitations, it is good manners to insert three dots to indicate the omission, but it is unethical to do this if it means connecting two thoughts which the original author did not intend to have tied together. Above all, quotation marks should not be used for ideas that you'd like to disown, things in the air so to speak. Nor should they be put in place around clichés; if you want to use a cliché you must take full responsibility for it yourself and not try to fob it off on anon., or on society.
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<p><strong>The Authoritarian High-Modernist Recipe for Failure</strong></p>
<p>Scott calls the thinking style behind the failure mode “authoritarian high modernism,” but as we’ll see, the failure mode is not limited to the brief intellectual reign of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_modernism" target="_blank">high modernism</a> (roughly, the first half of the twentieth century).</p>
<p>Here is the recipe:</p>
<ul>
<li>Look at a complex and confusing reality, such as the social dynamics of an old city</li>
<li>Fail to understand all the subtleties of how the complex reality works</li>
<li>Attribute that failure to the irrationality of what you are looking at, rather than your own limitations</li>
<li>Come up with an idealized blank-slate vision of what that reality <em>ought </em>to look like</li>
<li>Argue that the relative simplicity and platonic <em>orderliness </em>of the vision represents rationality</li>
<li>Use authoritarian power to impose that vision, by demolishing the old reality if necessary</li>
<li>Watch your rational Utopia fail horribly</li>
</ul>
<p>The big mistake in this pattern of failure is projecting your subjective lack of comprehension onto the object you are looking at, as “irrationality.” We make this mistake because we are tempted by a desire for <em>legibility.</em>
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<p>The approach I took on Diffle (<a href="http://www.diffle.com/">http://www.diffle.com/</a> - unfortunately it hasn't been exercised as we haven't really got traction yet) was to store the comment ID as a varbinary(255). A child comment takes the ID of the parent and then appends a 2-byte sequential number. So, the first comment is 0x0001, the second is 0x0002, a reply to the second is 0x00020001, a second reply is 0x00020002, the third is 0x0003, a reply to the third is 0x00030001, etc. To find the children of a comment, you look for all comments where the parent's ID is a prefix. MySQL can use leftmost-prefixes as indexes, so this computes very quickly. Also, with the standard varbinary collating order, 0x01 sorts before 0x0101, 0x0102, 0x02, etc, so all I have to do is order by the ID and everything will come out in proper threaded order. And nesting depth is calculated easily by len(id) / 2.</p>
<p>Reordering can be done just by looking at all records whose IDs contain the parent as a prefix and have a length 2 greater than the parent, and then renumbering them. This should be computationally feasible in most cases.</p>
<p>This does limit users to 65,536 replies to a single comment, and a maximum comment nesting depth of 127. Based on my experience with some very active LiveJournal threads, I considered these to be acceptable limitations (LJ limits comments to 5000/post anyway). A nesting depth of 127 would be nearly 2400 pixels over, so it's not like it'd all fit on one screen anyway.
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