Interesting Links for 24-04-2023

[andrewducker]

1. What did Diane Abbott think would happen when she claimed that Travellers, Irish and Jewish people don't experience racism?

(tags:labour racism OhForFucksSake )

2. The Scottish Question: an overview

(tags:Scotland politics law )

3. This is how "We won't need coders" conversations always sound to me.

(tags:coding comic funny true )

4. A Simple Exercise to Strengthen the Lower Esophageal Sphincter and Eliminate Gastroesophageal Reflux

(tags:exercise health )

Comments

[danieldwilliam]

I've always been a bit confused by the starting point of Abbot's (apparant) position, that real racism only exists as perpetrated by white people on people of colour. Racism seems to be the word we've always used for a prejudice, usually negative, associated with a person's membership of a group defined by some collection or combination of nationality, ethnicity, culture, language, physical features, aspects of religion, domicile and the heritage of those. I'm not sure what other word we would use.

Given that race is pretty much a bogus concept (there being more genetic variation between individuals and population groups in Sub-Saharan Africa than in all of the groups of people who passed through the migratory genetic bottle-neck) I don't see how there could be a real racism that is different from common usage of the word.

And I don't see what else we could call things like the behavour of the Japanese towards the Koreans during their imperial adventures, or the behaviour of the Chinese towards the Quighers or Idi Amin's expulsion of Asians from uganda.

I'm not suggesting that people of colour haven't experienced racism differently but I'm not sure what you would otherwise call this type of prejudice to distinguish it from sexism, sectarianism, agism, classism and so on.

[cmcmck]

1. Having both traveller (Romani) and Jewish ancestry I did find myself wondering precisely that.

Diane Abbott is someone I used to have bucketloads of respect for. :o(

[ninetydegrees]

#4 Thanks for the link. Medication does little for me so I'll give this a try.

[altamira16]

I was confused by all of you and the first point because in the US, anti-Black racism is different from the type of prejudice that other groups face, and a lot of people in the US talking about racism against the Irish really are racists trying to erase the fact that chattel slavery as practiced in the US was far worse than what most other people, other than the Indigenous people experienced.

The problem with saying that Jewish people don't experience racism is that it is erasure of Black Jewish people, who do exist. But I have also seen Jewish people who are engaging in anti-Black racism, so this is all pretty complicated.

[fub]

I've been working with quite a bit of Robotic Process Automation software, which is a "no code" way of, eh, automating processes. It takes the programming out of most situations where you want system A to talk to system B, and it's great.
But the complexity is not in writing the actual code. The complexity (and the craft!) of making software (either the software itself, or making a piece of software do what you want it to do automatically) is knowing what you're doing and why, and all of the tiny variations that can pop up, and how to deal with them. Once you know that, you will have your "very detailed spec" and it's just a matter of either writing the code or drag-and-drop chaining of activities.

[simont]

I always think that the people who optimistically say "we can just write the spec and then the code can be autogenerated" are probably a bit confused about what a spec looks like.

They say "specification", in situations like this, but I suspect what they really mean is "incomplete and vague set of requirements". What they want to write is about the level of detail of "Let me manage my finances visually; make it easy to see [this or that kind of report]; under no circumstances [make some particular UI goof that really pissed me off in the last program I tried]".

By the time you've translated that into a full specification of what the program will actually do (as opposed to what it won't do, and/or how the user will feel about the experience), you're at least most of the way to code. But I think that is part of what the optimists want to have done for them – they not only want Magic AI to do the boring stuff like unit testing, debugging and wrangling arcane syntaxes and type systems, they want to wave their hands and airily foist off on Magic AI the whole problem of making their only-half-described desires precise in the first place!

[bens_dad]

4.Having his stomach about two to three inches higher than his throat when mending the roof was a big deal. But that seems a lesser inversion than the exercise itself.

How did he manage the exercise without spilling his stomach back into his oesophagus ?