Builder

We owe the verb "debug" to Grace Hopper, who also created the world's first compiler for the Harvard Mark I. She invented COBOL.
 
Oh yeah, and she also has a battleship and a supercomputer named after her.
 
I'm not sure how much more badass you can get.

http://narrowthegapp.com
 
 

When I left this board two years ago I feared the forum was headed in a bad direction with regards to how politics was being moderated, and I had better ways to spend my time than arguing with people over whether or not sexism is real and prevalent. After voicing those concerns I was informed by Slick that the rules had changed and that everything stupid that happened around the time of GamerGate wouldn't happen again. I still do have better ways to spend my time, and I realize that for those of you who never knew me I'm not missed and for those that did know me one user doesn't really mean much. But I thought it prudent to make this thread because I was horrified at the sheer cravenness of some of the shit around here. The sheer fucked-uppedness of this flaming shitpile of a forum was not apparent at first breach and probably still isn't to a lot of you, but just in case there's any confusion about why I left, this idiot's profile is a good encapsulation of why:
https://linustechtips.com/main/profile/143680-survivornvl/
 
Okay, what the fuck is going on here? The dude has a white nationalist flag on his profile and calls himself an "American Ultranationalist?" And what's more is he's said 
(of George Soros, the conspiracy theories surrounding which are far too silly to even warrant refuting. The dude's a centrist. You want to know what he believes, read Karl Popper. And speaking of Popper...well we'll get to that later.)
 
 
Why is this considered acceptable behavior? Forget your opinion of feminism or the left in general, a forum on which blatant white-nationalism and support of nazism is considered within the range of acceptable discourse is far too close to Stormfront for my tastes, and I cannot imagine I'm the only person that feels this way. I will refer you to the philosopher of science Karl Popper's evaluation of the paradox of tolerance:
Let's pause for a second and consider the difference between liberalism and leftism in this instance, and why I side with the liberals. This is a fundamentally liberal position in the political science sense, in that Popper does not want the intolerant to be slain en masse the way leftists do, he would just prefer not to have to argue rationally with Nazis who are speaking from a fundamentally unscientific and irrational position. Seriously, ask any Nazi or fascist. Rationalism and enlightenment are for liberals, Julius Evola prefers esoteric religious (even "magic") philosophy which eschews entirely the liberal convention of rational discourse.
 
As it happens this post is a pretty decent summation of why I don't bother engaging here anymore, because I cite Popper to trash internet nazis and argue about this shit day in and day out forever and ever and those skills are best put to use elsewhere.
 
Just for the hell of it, I'll predict what 90% of the responses to this post will be. I urge you to avoid using these phrases and variations thereof if you do choose to reply because their unsoundness has been demonstrated above: "suppressing freedom of speech" "creating an echo chamber" "safe space" "intolerant" "scared of free thought" "triggered" "anti-American" "anti-white" "just accept the election results" "whining" "sjw" "libtard" (cringes)
 
I realize I'll get banned for calling this out but let there be no question as to why, when it happens: the mods would rather have literal nazis on this board than people who are just here to discuss tech.
 
 

In an uncharacteristically shallow display of idiocy, my good friend, comrade, and occasionally saucy business partner @Kloaked has committed what we in-the-know know as a shitepost, an assay, a farticle if you will. (this is not to say that Mr. Kloaked is not normally an idiot, but simply that the depth of his ignorance is ordinarily far greater. if his ignorance were a mountain, it would be the marianas trench, the mount everest of oceanly low points.) As to the accusation of my shallowness, I will have you know SIR that I have an IQ score of at least 255,000 IQ points as verified to me by the most stringent of Facebook quizzes. It is theoretically impossible for me to be wrong about any subject at any time, and empirically speaking, it hasn't happened yet either. And I do realize that I am nowhere near as stupid as most people on here, (how many other people have an IQ of over 500,000,000,000 points? 14? 69? 2? -8?) and for that I do apologize for not fully comprehending your categorically inane babbling about freedom of expression.
 
Nonetheless, of all the subjects on which I am not wrong, I am unquestionably the most not wrong about politics. I consider being not-wrong a serious hobby of mine to which I devote a serious portion of my time. The profit margin on this time spent is not great in this forum as it continually refuses to recognize the extremely high level of not-wrongedness I have achieved. You would recognize this if you knew me in real life because I have received as an award for this massively ignoble achievement the word "GULLIBLE" tattooed across my forehead in Futura Bold. (I wanted Arial but all they had was Helvetica which is a shitty ripoff of Arial if you ask me) When the human race is broiled to death by global cooling, the history of monumental not-wrongedness will go something like this: Plato => Kant => Julian Casablancas => Builder. (unquestionably. i have proven the preceding in immaculately exquisite propositional logic. it is deductively true.)
 
As for The Strokes videos, they exist in my post as an open kitchen does in a high-end restaurant. You know my thinking was made with high-quality ingredients and I have nothing to hide. You can see here the meat cleaver, the stovetop, the bloodied stump of an arm that I accidentally hacked off while preparing intellectual gnocchi last night. You see, Mr. Kloaked, (or do you prefer Doctor? yeah, it suits you better. doctor of flunkosophy) you can really only use the "OP doesn't like other people's opinions" once before you run into an infinite regress of logic and reason (as proved by Fallacy Man) because in saying so you have established yourself as not liking other peoples opinions and yet have not actually done anything to refute them. This is to say in so many other words: right back atcha', asshole.
 
Furthermore, if I really did not like other peoples' opinions, I would perhaps not have spend or continue to spend so much of my time soliciting them, hmmm? In fact I love other peoples' opinions, I just find the vast majority of peoples' opinions ugly, boring, and stupid. Of course, the world is often ugly, boring, and stupid, and you have to admit there is always something redeeming, some je ne SAY WHAT in ignorance that makes the world go round. Nonetheless, I do happen to find opinions such as "George Soros should be the next Hitler" to be particularly distasteful, and SHOCKER I do find it particularly disquieting that you don't. You see, these are in the category of opinions that would have made Nixon's toes curl to say the least. Now if Mr. and Mrs. Ultra-Nationalist over here were proposing something like proletarian internationalism or "sex and burgers on the beach, for all, forever" (as I do) we might have something interesting to discuss. It's just that this whole fascism business has been done to death, hasn't it? We fought a good two wars on this shit before all those European Nationalists decided to pack it in for the greater good. White nationalism is passé in the worst possible sense, and if this isn't already painfully obvious to you keyboard neoreactionaries consider why all of your intellectual heroes died at the latest nearly 100 years ago. Those pasty white motherfuckers with the sadomasochistic mustaches couldn't even hold their own against those degenerate Russkies and stupid American liberals in 1942. (see https://twitter.com/BiasBe/status/812109660824207360 for infallible proof of this fact) By all means, keep spouting your bullshit, just don't be surprised when I don't want to listen to it.
 
 

Apple sells you the user experience, which may or may not involve the latest technology. They don't include whatever the latest tech buzzword is just to tick off a spec sheet. 
 
And surprise, every company out there is by definition a profit-maximizing entity, be it Microsoft, Google, Samsung or Huawei or whoever is next to bear the ironic title of "iPhone killer". They aren't selling you cheaper smartphones out of the kindness of their hearts. They charge that price because that is what the market will bear, just as Apple is able to command such high prices for their imposes precisely because consumers have demonstrated that they are willing to pay that much for one. 
 
Think about it this way. Apple's record profits allows it to stay in business for a very long time and invest in new technologies and further strengthening its ecosystem. Which other company out there has the resources to maintain its own platform the same way Apple has? The richer Apple gets, the more resources they have to round out their ecosystem and have it more self-contained and sticky, which in turn draws more users to their platform, resulting in greater profits, perpetuating a virtuous development cycle. 
 
The downside of cheaper Android smartphones is that these companies are earning razor-thin margins, which doesn't leave them with much to invest in further improving their products and services beyond boosting hardware specs and / or lowering price, which is in itself a vicious downward spiral. 
 
I don't see the relevance or the significance of market share here when Apple continued to leads in every metric which matters. Lion's share of profits in the industry. Developers continue to release apps for iOS first or exclusively. The iOS App Store actually rakes in more revenue compared to Android. Google reportedly earns more from iOS than its own Android platform. 
 
It's not like this huge android market share is being commanded by any one single smartphone vendor, but is instead spread out amongst multiple smaller vendors. 
 
Is is it just me, or is profitless market share the only metric critics can use to paint the iPhone as anything but a roaring success?

Most of the people who buy iOS devices do it for the user experience. Most of the people who buy Android devices just want a cheap phone, which is why only a small part of them use the really good ones. The amount of users who don't use the app ecosystem is way higher with Android. Someone who just wants to call and text will usually not buy an iPhone.
 
I'm really glad Windows Phone is dying. It's a taste of their own medicine for Microsoft. If it wasn't for the chicken-and-egg problem of software availability, desktop Windows would have died years ago, so they better not complain.

Careful there...Try not to cut yourself with that edginess.

Last year you could at least in the states, but it's only two color options and one size option in the states. I have a White 32GB Galaxy S6, I could've gotten 32GB, 64GB or 128GB and choose between 3 different colors. 
 
I think the S7 for what you're paying for is better than an iPhone 6s. But 16GB shouldn't be on the base model and the iPhone is still at 128GB max, though the iP7 will likely have 258GB as an option. 
 
32GB isn't small, it's plenty for me but then again I don't have that much stuff on my phone.

16GB on the base model is really unacceptable especially when you consider they only give you 5GB of iCloud storage by default. It's also a really transparent ploy to get more people to go for the 64GB because they know 16 is a bad experience. (it truly is) My tens of thousands of songs and movies and apps and everything I want on my phone don't fit on 32 or 64 so I have 128 and am currently around 80GB or so. I tend to add about 5GB every month or so and have been doing so for quite a while.

haha overcharging for inferior specs? apple's ARM chips are far and away the best in the industry, they had 64-bit two years before everyone else (hello overheating Snapdragon 810) and they still lead benchmarks.
 
as for the chips they put in their intel laptops, I suggest you compare directly the specs of Macs to PCs. you will find that they are very competitively priced for what you get, which isn't even taking into account build quality and the evident superiority of OS X over windows 
 
https://www.quora.com/Why-do-people-buy-MacBook-Pro-retinas-given-their-relatively-high-price?share=1
 
a few salient points from the top post:
 
 
Apple buys chips in such quantities that they are able to buy out the entire stock of the highest-binned product sold by any manufacturer that they want. They do this because they have somewhere around $200bn in cash in the bank and they want to make the best, most reliable product possible. If there are price discrepancies between products made by Apple and other manufacturers when all other recognizable specs are identical (i.e. SSD performance, high quality I/O ports, (thunderbolt, usb 3 etc), color-calibrated high-res displays, processor, graphics, network card, etc, this is why.
That, and this:
New Macs these days come with Pages, Numbers, and Keynote. I'll be the first to admit that I actually prefer Excel to Numbers and the Mac version of Excel is not great. However on Windows these are an extra cost whereas on Mac you can jump right in and start doing office work. I know they've made some progress on this front with the Universal Office apps but as far as I can tell they aren't really usable out of the box in the same way the free Apple ones are. 
 
Apple has never been about the low-end. If you want a low-end PC, buy a Windows computer. You can also get an amazing Chromebook for not a lot of money too.

haha overcharging for inferior specs? apple's ARM chips are far and away the best in the industry, they had 64-bit two years before everyone else (hello overheating Snapdragon 810) and they still lead benchmarks.
 
as for the chips they put in their intel laptops, I suggest you compare directly the specs of Macs to PCs. you will find that they are very competitively priced for what you get, which isn't even taking into account build quality and the evident superiority of OS X over windows 
 
https://www.quora.com/Why-do-people-buy-MacBook-Pro-retinas-given-their-relatively-high-price?share=1
 
a few salient points from the top post:
 
 
Apple buys chips in such quantities that they are able to buy out the entire stock of the highest-binned product sold by any manufacturer that they want. They do this because they have somewhere around $200bn in cash in the bank and they want to make the best, most reliable product possible. If there are price discrepancies between products made by Apple and other manufacturers when all other recognizable specs are identical (i.e. SSD performance, high quality I/O ports, (thunderbolt, usb 3 etc), color-calibrated high-res displays, processor, graphics, network card, etc, this is why.
That, and this:
New Macs these days come with Pages, Numbers, and Keynote. I'll be the first to admit that I actually prefer Excel to Numbers and the Mac version of Excel is not great. However on Windows these are an extra cost whereas on Mac you can jump right in and start doing office work. I know they've made some progress on this front with the Universal Office apps but as far as I can tell they aren't really usable out of the box in the same way the free Apple ones are. 
 
Apple has never been about the low-end. If you want a low-end PC, buy a Windows computer. You can also get an amazing Chromebook for not a lot of money too.

haha overcharging for inferior specs? apple's ARM chips are far and away the best in the industry, they had 64-bit two years before everyone else (hello overheating Snapdragon 810) and they still lead benchmarks.
 
as for the chips they put in their intel laptops, I suggest you compare directly the specs of Macs to PCs. you will find that they are very competitively priced for what you get, which isn't even taking into account build quality and the evident superiority of OS X over windows 
 
https://www.quora.com/Why-do-people-buy-MacBook-Pro-retinas-given-their-relatively-high-price?share=1
 
a few salient points from the top post:
 
 
Apple buys chips in such quantities that they are able to buy out the entire stock of the highest-binned product sold by any manufacturer that they want. They do this because they have somewhere around $200bn in cash in the bank and they want to make the best, most reliable product possible. If there are price discrepancies between products made by Apple and other manufacturers when all other recognizable specs are identical (i.e. SSD performance, high quality I/O ports, (thunderbolt, usb 3 etc), color-calibrated high-res displays, processor, graphics, network card, etc, this is why.
That, and this:
New Macs these days come with Pages, Numbers, and Keynote. I'll be the first to admit that I actually prefer Excel to Numbers and the Mac version of Excel is not great. However on Windows these are an extra cost whereas on Mac you can jump right in and start doing office work. I know they've made some progress on this front with the Universal Office apps but as far as I can tell they aren't really usable out of the box in the same way the free Apple ones are. 
 
Apple has never been about the low-end. If you want a low-end PC, buy a Windows computer. You can also get an amazing Chromebook for not a lot of money too.

No bullshit attitude while spouting a metric ton of bullshit :lol:
 
...sorry I had to... blame the chocolate I just ate.

Milo Yiannopoulos is a joke. He's a conservative who hates himself and thinks there is something wrong with him because he's gay. He might not be incompetent, but that doesn't mean he isn't being disingenuous.

Interesting how y'all cry "freedom of speech" and rail against "political correctness" the moment somebody asks you to stop being racist but you're unwilling to defend it when it's something you're against. Just sayin'.
 
Since none of you are, I will defend to my death the right of the people to access whatever information they want. It's none of my business what the hell you're doing with the internet, as long as it's not illegal. Think for a moment the disastrous consequences of censoring all traffic from an entire country let alone the slippery slope this could lead to. What if there are rebels trying to communicate over the internet with supporters in the US? What if there's vital information out there that will be censored from all view were this to happen? What about Syrians running blogs? Why should we let a megalomaniac authoritarian control our internet? These are serious questions, and I ask you to consider them seriously.
 
Donald Trump is a fascist, plain and simple. (Ted Cruz is as well, but he's currently riding Trump's coattails.) He says he'll do something impossible, when asked how, his reply frequently takes some form of "It will work because I am great." This is not the kind of cult of personality we as technologists, as hackers, and as Americans should be endorsing. These are obvious signs of fascism. Down this road lies authoritarianism, and I hope that we all understand that that's not a road we want to be on. Seriously, vote for anyone but Donald Trump or Ted Cruz. Vote for Rubio, vote for Bush, vote for Rand Paul (now there's an idea!) but please don't hand our country over to Donald "I'm awesome because I'm rich" Trump.
 
Be careful what you wish for, you're not going to get a second chance.

Norway, Sweden, Finland and Denmark are to the east of that wall and they're not moderate. The countries you are talking about are just, relatively speaking, still recovering from the influence of the Soviet Union so what you're saying is very disingenuous. Japan and canada are not moderate either.

What? Like giving people healthcare and education? Building infrastructure? Fixing bridges that are in desperate need of repair? Yeah, really retarded ways to spend money. Absolutely no value in them whatsoever. Seriously, why do public schools even exist? And hospitals? Psssh. I preferred it when the shit just ran through the gutter in an open sewer straight out into the ocean and people frequently died of preventable illness.

You're basically a communist with no sense of history at this point. Honestly, I'm stunned. But if you're looking into the manifesto or Das Kapital, give me a holler and I'll come help you figure it out.

Paint yourself green and throw forks at it.

Sure. 

What? Like giving people healthcare and education? Building infrastructure? Fixing bridges that are in desperate need of repair? Yeah, really retarded ways to spend money. Absolutely no value in them whatsoever. Seriously, why do public schools even exist? And hospitals? Psssh. I preferred it when the shit just ran through the gutter in an open sewer straight out into the ocean and people frequently died of preventable illness.

Please tell me you're joking. Remind me again who was the other person that said a certain demographic should be required to walk around with special IDs?

Wait, so capitalism with regulation (at least your own strange version of it)? Why exactly do you hate liberals again? This is the typical conservative pattern. Only liberal on issues that affect them personally.

No, you find Trump entertaining because you're a sociopathic fascist. Everyone with half a brain thinks he's horrifying.
 
Now, care to address what I actually said instead of dodging it? I'm here for a conversation but I'll happily leave if that's not something you want.

It's because you're in one of the reactionary cesspits of the internet. Nobody in the US actually believes most of this shit.
 
The last person to speak their mind like this was Hitler. That's not Godwin, I'm dead fucking serious. Can you detach yourself from the context for a minute and look at what Trump is saying? Donald Trump would be the end of this country as we know it. An America that censors and explicitly discriminates on the basis of religion is an America that I want no part of.