joke shorts

Agda

At the Agda headquaters:

“OK, guys, so our user pool consists only of folks who already know Haskell and Emacs Is there a way to narrow it down more?”

“I got it, what if we allow unicode, so they also have to also know Latex ?”

“Brilliant!”

Philosophy beefs

This is a list of varioust arguments, quarrels, disagreements i.e. “beefs” that philosophers have had with one another.

Heraclitus vs. Parmenides (5th century BCE)

Beef: A clash between Heraclitus’s belief in constant change and Parmenides’s insistence on a static, unchanging reality.
Heraclitus: “Everything flows and nothing abides; everything gives way and nothing stays fixed.” (Source: Fragment 91, as recorded by Plato in Cratylus)
Parmenides: “What is, is; what is not, is not.” (Source: Fragment 2, as recorded by Simplicius in Commentary on Aristotle’s Physics)

Heraclitus vs. Democritus (5th century BCE)

Beef: Heraclitus’s philosophy of flux versus Democritus’s atomistic materialism.
Heraclitus: “You cannot step into the same river twice.” (Source: Fragment 12, as recorded by Plato in Cratylus)
Democritus: “By convention sweet, by convention bitter, by convention hot, by convention cold, by convention color; but in reality, atoms and void.” (Source: Fragment 9, as recorded by Sextus Empiricus in Against the Mathematicians)

Plato vs. Diogenes (4th century BCE)

Beef: Plato’s idealism and abstract philosophy versus Diogenes’s practical, anti-establishment Cynicism.
Plato: “Man is a featherless biped.” (Source: Diogenes Laërtius, Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers, Book 6)
Diogenes (holding a plucked chicken): “Behold! I’ve brought you a man.” (Source: Diogenes Laërtius, Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers, Book 6)

Augustine vs. Pelagius (5th century CE)

Beef: A theological dispute over original sin, free will, and divine grace.
Augustine: “Through one man’s sin, all are condemned. Without God’s grace, no one can be saved.” (Source: Augustine, On Nature and Grace)
Pelagius: “If I ought, I can. God commands nothing impossible. Humans have the free will to choose good or evil.” (Source: Pelagius, Letter to Demetrias)

Aquinas vs. Averroes (13th century)

Beef: A debate over the relationship between faith and reason, and the nature of the soul.
Aquinas: “Faith and reason are not opposed; they are two paths to the same truth.” (Source: Aquinas, Summa Theologica)
Averroes: “Philosophy and religion are separate domains. Truth can be reached through reason alone.” (Source: Averroes, The Incoherence of the Incoherence)

Leibniz vs. Voltaire (18th century)

Beef: Voltaire’s satirical critique of Leibniz’s optimism in Candide.
Leibniz: “This is the best of all possible worlds, for God, in His wisdom, has chosen it.” (Source: Leibniz, Theodicy)
Voltaire: “If this is the best of all possible worlds, what must the others be like?” (Source: Voltaire, Candide)

Hegel vs. Schopenhauer (early 19th century)

Beef: Hegel’s optimistic dialectical idealism versus Schopenhauer’s pessimistic philosophy of the will.
Schopenhauer: “Hegel, installed from above by the powers that be, as the certified Great Philosopher, was a flat-headed, insipid, nauseating, illiterate charlatan, who reached the pinnacle of audacity in scribbling together and dishing up the craziest mystifying nonsense.” (Source: Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena, Vol. 1)
Hegel: “The real is rational, and the rational is real.” (Source: Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, Preface)

Brouwer vs. Bolland (1904-1905)

Beef: Brouwer’s critique of Bolland’s Hegelianism and the role of language in philosophy.
Brouwer: “Language by itself has no meaning; any philosophy which searched for a firm foundation based on that presumption has come to grief.” (Source: Brouwer, Life, Art, and Mysticism, 1905)
Bolland: “Brouwer’s mysticism is the babble of a child who has yet to grasp the pure concept.” (Source: Bolland’s response to Brouwer, as cited in historical accounts of their dispute)

Brouwer vs. Hilbert (1920s)

Beef: A foundational dispute over the validity of the law of excluded middle in mathematics.
Brouwer: “The law of excluded middle is a dogma that has no place in mathematics.” (Source: Brouwer, Intuitionism and Formalism, 1912)
Hilbert: “To take the law of excluded middle from the mathematician is like taking the telescope from the astronomer.” (Source: Hilbert’s response to Brouwer, as cited in historical accounts of their dispute)

Wittgenstein vs. Popper (1946)

Beef: A heated argument over the nature of philosophical problems during a meeting at Cambridge.
Wittgenstein (wielding a poker): “Popper, you misunderstand the nature of philosophical problems.” (Source: Eyewitness accounts of the Cambridge Moral Science Club meeting, 1946)
Popper: “There are genuine philosophical problems, Wittgenstein, and your poker won’t solve them.” (Source: Popper’s recollection of the event in Unended Quest)

Sartre vs. Camus (1950s)

Beef: A falling-out over the role of revolution, violence, and morality in politics.
Sartre: “Camus, you’ve become a bourgeois moralist, betraying the revolution.” (Source: Sartre’s critique of Camus in Les Temps Modernes, 1952)
Camus: “Sartre, your Marxism is a prison of abstractions, far removed from the reality of human suffering.” (Source: Camus’ response in The Rebel, 1951)

Chomsky vs. Foucault (1971)

Beef: A debate over human nature, justice, and the role of power in society.
Chomsky: “Human nature is real, and justice is rooted in it.” (Source: Chomsky-Foucault debate, Human Nature: Justice vs. Power, 1971)
Foucault: “Justice is a tool of power, and human nature is a myth constructed by institutions.” (Source: Chomsky-Foucault debate, Human Nature: Justice vs. Power, 1971)

Dennett vs. Chalmers (1990s)

Beef: A disagreement over the “hard problem” of consciousness and the limits of materialism.
Dennett: “Chalmers’ ‘hard problem’ of consciousness is a pseudo-problem, a philosopher’s fantasy.” (Source: Dennett, Consciousness Explained, 1991)
Chalmers: “Dennett’s materialism is a shallow evasion of the real mystery of consciousness.” (Source: Chalmers, The Conscious Mind, 1996)

Žižek vs. Peterson (2017)

Beef: A public debate on capitalism, Marxism, and the meaning of happiness.
Žižek: “Peterson, your Jungian archetypes are a reactionary fantasy.” (Source: Žižek-Peterson debate, Happiness: Capitalism vs. Marxism, 2017)
Peterson: “Žižek, your Marxism is a utopian delusion that leads to tyranny.” (Source: Žižek-Peterson debate, Happiness: Capitalism vs. Marxism, 2017)

Teacher

Teacher (grumpy): “How did everyone on the class came to know this, and you are the only one who is still clueless?”

Me (entusiastically): “Interesting question! In fact I myself have been wondering the same thing?”

Nothing to prove

“I think I will stop doing logic, I feel like I have nothing to prove.”

On Hokusai

I consider Hokusai the greatest artist of all time, because he contributed to the two most prominent genres in visual art - landscapes and porn.

Which is better

Too much of the left wing/right wing discussion is about which is better, when every ideology is bad when pushed to the extreme: If you lean to the far right you get wars, genocide, people dying on the street etc. and in the far left you get degrowth, free health care and education for everyone and stripping the rich out of their capital. Obviously both of these things are equally catastrophic.

Haskell

“Oh, in Haskell this app is just a one-liner!”

The one-liner:

app a b c d e= runMonadT <(@)> ( (LiftValue a b c) *!* stop) . \a -> d(a) $ e

Battling my ego

Battling my ego.

The stage is set.

I turn to it and say “It’s gonna hurt ME a lot more than it hurts YOU”.

Bash

I think that bash is so popular because it is so terrible language and hard to work with, that every time you make something work you feel like a wizard and your dopamine is to the roof

Timezones

“May you become an expert in time zones!” Ancient programmers curse

We love opensource

Companies’ pages:

“We love open source!”

Companies’ Github profiles:

“5 followers”

Elon and capitalism

People who read the Economist seem to be the embodiment of middle classs folks, who see themselves as “temporary-challenged billionaires” who deserve to be rich because they are smarter than everyone else. Like, they believe than one day Elon will come and appoint them as CEO, like a 14-year old who learns to play a guitar and thinks they’ll be Jimmie Hendix.

By the way, the way Elon acts provides for me an irrefutable, proof that capitalism is dead — if the world’s richest person cannot just use their money to enjoy themselves and instead prefers to continually make a fool of themself and be ridiculed by the whole world on a daily basis, then what’s the point of it all?

Old tech

Most people, after owning a laptop, or another piece of tech for more than 2 years:

“Yeah, this things is getting outdated, doesn’t support XYZ, I guess it’s time for a replacement…”

Me, after my 10-year laptop fails:

“THIS IS BULLSHIT!”

Mayday

Hey, Captain is it just me, or is the airplane headed straight to this huge volcanic crater, full of hot lava?
Yup, we will likely be all dead in a minute!
OK, so will you try to maybe, you know, alter our course?
I won’t, because that didn’t work out when the Russians tried doing it the 1940s.

The course leading to drowning in lava might not be a good course, but it is the best one out there!

Hard things in computer science

Finally got the final list of the three hard things in computer science:

Naming artifacts
Concurrent
Off by one errors. data processing

writings on math, logic, philosophy and art