> And you'll get a lot farther in life if you stop thinking of real people and their development and culture as video game abstractions.

Oh, it’s far too late for that. As the kids say, he’s cooked. He’ll be complaining about hypothetical Appalachians invading New England or New York or the United States (all actual examples, see below) in the nursing home.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

Have you been to Appalachia? Do you think it’s great?

The ‘Timeless Way’ was itself a trend. It’s the poster child for Clarke’s ‘Tao of the West’ style of mid-century Orientalism.

Late Alexander (The Nature of Order) is slightly less blatant and aims at a higher level of abstraction, but the effect is similar.

Fair point on the mid-century Orientalism. Alexander’s aesthetic was definitely a product of its time.

But even if we strip away the 'Tao of the West' style, there's a functional core that feels neglected today: the idea that systems (whether a building or a dashboard) should adapt to their users' organic behavior rather than forcing users into a rigid UI grid.

In 'The Nature of Order', he moves toward more abstract 'living structures'. Do you think that abstraction is actually more applicable to modern software architecture than his earlier pattern languages? Or are we just doomed to cycle through different flavors of aesthetic trends?

> In the Senate, bill sponsor Sen. Paul Rose, R-Covington, said speakers promoting racism would not be protected under the measure.

It really shouldn’t be permissible to blatantly misrepresent the content of a bill before the state Senate. There’s absolutely no carveout for racist speakers in the any draft of the bill that I can find.

Buckmister Fuller envisioned a worldwide high-voltage transmission network implemented with 1980’s technology, there just isn’t the worldwide political will or cooperation to build it.

The full title of the statue is “La Liberté éclairant le monde”—it’s impossible not to see it as a symbol of the ideals of the Enlightenment spreading across the world. That’s the common philosophical ground of both American and French Revolutions, and from there the source of the friendship that the statue represents.

At least some minimal notion of hospitality with respect to migration is part of that Enlightenment. (Kant’s Perpetual Peace is emphatic about this; Derrida annotates the relevant section with fresh eyes in Hospitality vol. 1, the first lecture and ff.)

That said, I also agree with you that symbols are not fully formed at birth and it is not the case that what they represent never changes at all in the course of their history.

Managed opposition requires qualitatively different resources than a general strike.

I’ve approved like a single PR today. It’s not great.

> Women get acid in the face for dressing wrong, and protesters are killed in the thousands. Gay people are thrown from rooftops or hanged.

By your standards, civilization in the United States has been dead for a long time and shows no signs of revival.

Where in the US is:

> "women get acid in the face for dressing wrong, and protesters are killed in the thousands. Gay people are thrown from rooftops or hanged."

happening?

I suspect you know that's an outlandish thing to claim.