This brings computers into the classroom, and once they’re available, it is a slippery slope. It is easier for teachers to have students use semi-gamified "educational" apps rather than engage themselves.

Example for K-2 - https://www.cde.ca.gov/be/st/ss/documents/csstandards.pdf:

  K-2.CS.1 Select and operate computing devices that perform a variety of tasks accurately and quickly based on user needs and preferences.

  K-2.CS.2 Explain the functions of common hardware and software components of computing systems.

  K-2.CS.3 Describe basic hardware and software problems using accurate terminology.

  K-2.NI.4 Model and describe how people connect to other people, places, information and ideas through a network.

  ...

  K–2 K-2.AP.12 Create programs with sequences of commands and simple loops, to express ideas or address a problem

  K-2.IC.20 Describe approaches and rationales for keeping login information private, and for logging off of devices appropriately

If you have AVX-512, GFNI is faster for this task, but obviously many situations where you can't use it.

Yeah, that’s exactly what I did in my C++ code with intrinsics.

About ISA extensions, I’m lucky to work on a professional CAM/CAE software. We have specified AVX2 in the system requirements, I’m guaranteed to have the support on our customer’s computers. However, very few of them have AVX512 CPUs so we are ignoring that thing so far.

This has a huge impact on trying to hook actions, call-backs, etc (your "arbitrary procedure") to NFA states as you're frequently making many overlapping entries to these states, many of which go nowhere. Trying to figure out which entries correspond to which other entries isn't easy.

There are very stylized automata that are used in parsing that do interesting things beyond the finite automata space (like pushing things onto a stack), but they don't correspond to regex per se - instead they are generated from a grammar.

> interesting things beyond the finite automata space

State machines certainly can be glorified into LR parsers, or even into Turing machines by adding various bells and whistles. So sure, this idea shouldn't be limited to just regular expressions--we've got good methods of specifying even very complicated state handling.

I hope you saw the excellent comment on this thread where somebody talked about how Ken Thompson implemented paxos using yacc for state management. I've been around the block with state management too, but using yacc for state management is something that never occurred to me, and frankly, opens up a whole new world of possibilities.

BTW, it's also an answer to your point about the pitfalls of nondeterminism: yacc is a great example of how to specify a state machine while detecting, reporting, and resolving nondeterminism.

Doing the CSV version of the quote convention is actually wildly easier than the JSON version, as you can just treat a record like "foo""bar",hi,1,"hatstand,teakettle" as having 'left the quotes and rentered the quotes" at the double-quote spot when you're busy looking for ','. This isn't, of course, much help for normalization, but for the bit where you're hoping to simply find which ',' characters are separators, it's fine to pretend that there's a gap in your "quoted stuff bitfield" that happens at the "" in "foo""bar", as of course that gap isn't going to land on a ',' anyhow. So it's much cheaper than doing a tedious shenanigan to handle some crafty user who has hit you with 100 \ characters in a row (as opposed to 99 or 101), a la JSON.

IMO the cost of doing the CLMUL all the time vs taking a conditional to handle the 'I have no quotes today' case is pretty low. It makes for shorter and more easily understood (in performance terms) code. I wasn't allowed to take this to extremes in simdjson - we did handle the "common case" for UTF-8 validation (although I wonder if that's a very culturally determined notion of "common case").

This is a good sentiment, but it's worth noting that the overwhelming majority of pressure to "cancel" books and academics is directed at the left by the right, regardless of what gets column inches and think-pieces.

The parallel to my immediate life that comes to mind is when my kids are bickering about some inconsequential triviality and I say "I don't care who started it, I only care that you stop fighting". It must surely be an "important" topic for them that they feel the need to argue about it, but in the grander scheme of things, the resolution shouldn't come at a cost of a losing a core principle (i.e. aiming for resolution through vengeful means is not a productive course of action).

I stopped doing that when I realized this is systematically enabling aggressor. The kid that minds own business is on the defense and effectively forced always do what aggressor wants. Because if it protects or defends itself, adult steps in to tell him he is equally wrong.

In school there is a better (worse?) chance to meet somebody particularly nasty, who's bullying kids around. That should be answered by "authorities". In families it's less of the case, so GP logic is reasonable.

I keep a high respect to Gary Kasparov. I however have a question regarding what he writes here -

"It is the coordinated, coercive attempt to win a debate by ending debate—to punish, not to educate."

Could it be that those who "cancel" just found a tool which is more effective than those before, something which they were missing in the "old status quo" of inter-class interactions? Could it be that the voices of those who do cancelling today weren't heard enough, so now they use this new opportunity to participate in the societal decisions?

When I wrote "I have seen it" originally I meant siblings in families. At this point, I have seen dynamic three times. Each time one kid ended up being systematic aggressor and other victim. The victim was pushed to submissivity and aggressor honestly believed he/she is entitled to act like that. And that victim is bad for defending own toys or boundaries.

And each time it went on, until parents changed approach.

I can name dozens of books that have been "cancelled", almost entirely by conservatives.

Depending on the definition of "cancel", I can think of very few professors that have been "cancelled" [0] at all, and roughly equal numbers by conservative and progressive perspectives.

[0] "cancelled" in this case seems to typically mean not a lot more than had to listen to some unpleasant feedback on their views and/or behavior.

I am down with History of Racism, naked and in all its gory details. But, let's not confuse that with how fusion of Big Tech with Big Gov to move more and more towards totalitarianism - we've seen this happen in Australia in the name of COVID. Vast majority of this is a push from Left, not the Right.

Edit: Australia passes mass surveillance laws: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28451066 . I can't reply because of limits, been too much on HN, I need to get off :-). It is indirectly linked to quanrantine and other measures Australian government is taking as a result of COVID. I would go a step further and argue that the world has become more authoritarian post-COVID in general.

Edit: Those saying this is a naive and disingenious take - my observations are pretty much consistent with censorship is mostly from the left than right. Sure you can give examples of suppression from the Right (which I would oppose), but that doesn't really change my observation. Generally speaking, it is indisputedly obvious to me. Here is an economist article that goes in much more depth than single counter examples in the responses: https://www.economist.com/leaders/2021/09/04/the-threat-from...

This seems a very naive or disingenuous take. Here are two examples that immediately came to mind:

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Endowment_for_the_Art... particularly actions against Mapplethorpe

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pedagogy_of_the_Oppressed#Rece... 2006 Arizona State Legislature

Someone has to decide what to teach children. Teachers and parents both influence that decision. Teachers through what books they pick and parents through who they elect. And since Teachers are to the left the population as a whole, it makes sense that they would push books to the left of center, and elected officials would rein in that impulse.

To me these are textbook examples of censorship. Note that I don't think your summary captures the relevant facts.

NEA: the issue is not whether it should be funded but how the funds, which were already approved, were allocated. Exhibitions were cancelled after receiving funding due to political pressure, and 4 artists won a court case when their funding was vetoed due to political pressure.

Pedagogy of the oppressed. I'll just quote wikipedia here: "The book was among seven titles officially confiscated from Mexican American studies classrooms, sometimes in front of students, by the Tucson Unified School District after the passing of HB 2281." This was ruled a violation of the First Amendment: https://ncac.org/news/blog/what-you-need-to-know-about-the-a...

> This was ruled a violation of the First Amendment: https://ncac.org/news/blog/what-you-need-to-know-about-the-a...

It looks like that ruling was just because it was racist, and has since been overturned at the circuit court. Maybe I don't understand something, but the government fundamentally determines what does and does not get taught in public schools.

1. There's a difference between defining a curriculum (what needs to be taught) and banning things (what cannot be taught). The government is generally allowed to determine the first, but the second is more dubious. It's difficult to claim, for example, that banning certain books has a legitimate interest in improving academic freedom, as educators already had the freedom to not teach those books.

2. This specific example is from a university, where "defining a curriculum" is even more dubious due to the existence of elective classes. If a university wants to, in addition to its core curricula, offer a class on racial or gender studies, why is that any less legitimate than a class on water polo or whatever?

NEA: again, what do you think is an action against free speech if not someone organizing action against an art exhibition?

Ruling: I couldn't find anything about the circuit court overturning the ruling. Here is a direct quote from the article, emphasis mine: "After a lengthy trial, Judge Tashima wrote in an interim opinion yesterday, that the Arizona Superintendent’s office violated the First ... Amendment"

I don't know what you're referring to here, could you give some links? Thanks. (Sydney here)

edit: The link you added is about new laws that seem nothing to do with covid. What's the connection? (And you edited again. Maybe I'll wait until you stop doing that. In general, please reply to comments rather than repeatedly adding to your initial comment!)

The economist article you cite is interesting in that it doesn't actually explain what's wrong with the progressive approach, it just describes it as bad. It says

> Individuals, not just groups, must be treated fairly for society to flourish.

But this fails to realize that favoring "individuals" over groups disfavored the invidiuals in those groups. Intersectionality suggests that you can't treat individuals fairly without understanding how the groups they're apart of impact their identity.

And this is really just disparate impact, a well understood, classically liberal, civil rights era policy that the right is slowly scratching away at!

When I catch myself saying things like this, I contemplate whether the availability heuristic is deceiving me. It might not be -- I haven't done a rigorous review of this topic either -- but I usually find it's worth introspection when I have this thought.

"You may be right about one instance, but I've never seen anything but pro-freedom of speech from the right."

And then wind up saying sure, there are plenty of examples of right-wing censorship, but check out this article in the Economist?

Come on.

They are just called the Liberals, but they are Economic Liberals, not social, and are considered our "right wing" party with an evangelical Christian as our Prime Minister.

A right-wing think tank with strong influence on Idaho legislators produces this gem of a report:

'The report doesn't just call for eliminating individual courses, however. It calls for the elimination of five whole departments — Gender Studies, Sociology, Global Studies, Social Work and History — that it claims are infused with "social justice" ideology. (A sixth blacklisted department has since been added: Criminal Justice.) Eight other departments (later updated to nine) are on a watch list of sorts, judged to be "social justice in training."'

Lol. This is the first paragraph of the article. Is there any intellectual honesty in the discussion any more?

If this seems tendentious and unlikely, let's remember that Bari Weiss, now advocating for the University/grift that is University of Austin as a beacon of academic freedom, made her reputation attempting to get academics "cancelled" for having the wrong views on Israel.

There are a lot of people with a vested interest in beating the drum to claim that universities are a mess of "cancel culture", but I'd be intrigued to read some actual statistics on this, rather than heavily publicized anecdotes.

I tend to agree with the poster who complained this was some sort of blame-shifting ("he started it, mom!"). But the portrayal of normal academic life as being rife with endless left-wing cancel culture is a project being done for a reason. I don't like left-wing cancel culture either - and some of the leftiest people I know dislike it from a practical perspective (I know people personally teaching at elite institutions whose teaching has become unmanageable from constant weird student political demands). But any analysis of this that doesn't take into account the fact that universities are under pressure from the whole political spectrum is dumb.

It's also worth noting that "right wing cancel culture" sometimes just manifests itself by quietly shutting whole departments in favour of, say, expanding the "trade school" elements of a university. Just nuke the whole history department and double the size of business... obviously an apolitical act, right?

Deplatforming speakers is largely the left's MO.

Also, it's interesting that even the very ideological "FIRE" group (not exactly a neutral player in all this) shows roughly 60% of user-submitted cases being deplatformed "from the left", which is far from overwhelming.

So your observation is just "left wing professors often work on unscientific subjects and therefore more often gets their department shut down". It has nothing to do with politics, if you had a department full of right wingers who called their blog posts "scientific papers" then I'd call for them to get shut down as well. Blogging is fine, just don't call it science or make university courses based on your blogs.

Your mind is going to get blown when you find out there exist whole departments at universities that aren't sciences, and that there's kinda of a tradition of academic scholarship that goes back centuries in the humanities.

>In the interview, Cotton said the role of slavery can’t be overlooked.

>“We have to study the history of slavery and its role and impact on the development of our country because otherwise we can’t understand our country. As the Founding Fathers said, it was the necessary evil upon which the union was built, but the union was built in a way, as Lincoln said, to put slavery on the course to its ultimate extinction,” he said.

>Instead of portraying America as “an irredeemably corrupt, rotten and racist country,” the nation should be viewed “as an imperfect and flawed land, but the greatest and noblest country in the history of mankind,” Cotton said.

https://www.arkansasonline.com/news/2020/jul/26/bill-by-cott... via https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/tom-cotton-slavery-necessa...

One common historical argument (I think I got it from H. W. Brands' biography of Benjamin Franklin that I read recently), is that there would had been no union at all if the southern states (with slavery) were not accommodated.

Of course, any decision about a school curriculum excludes other curriculums, unless one chooses to deliberately cover all aspects of debate of any debated school subject, or take an anarchist attitude of no imposed curriculum by the state, giving total control individual teachers or maybe parents themselves.

In Finland, teachers have quite much autonomy as long as the minimum standards of vaguely specified curriculum is adhered to, which is more "free speech compatible" in some sense, but that comes with failure modes too. (I had quite professional teachers in my time, but I recall reading a complaints about politically partisan teachers. System like is prone to have issues because while government schools are, in theory, part of the democratically governed system, the actual decisions about education and choice of teachers are quite many hoops and levels of hierarchy removed from the kids and the parents themselves.)

An illiberal debate culture is taking root in the West, where certain positions may be publicly held only at great risk for one’s career. In academia, which is supposed to shape the thinking of future generations, this is nothing short of an inquisition. Read Anne Applebaum’a “The new puritans” for a detailed analysis of the situation in the US. Something similar is happening in the UK and Germany for example.

But if cancel culture is synonymous with effective public harassment, then virtually every single non-trumpist republican is a victim. Various public servants related to voting and elections have told a few harrowing tales.

A quick bit of googling find a bunch of articles devoted to conservative cancel culture, e.g. https://edition.cnn.com/2020/07/07/politics/fact-check-trump..., https://www.salon.com/2021/05/01/conservatives-claim-to-hate..., https://www.vox.com/22384308/cancel-culture-free-speech-acco..., https://www.thenation.com/article/society/republicans-cancel...

And while cancel culture may typically be about retribution for perceived slights by the public (or a mob), if you take a slightly broader view and include any backlash against speaking out, well, then most whistleblowers unfortunately suffer consequences that qualify. Many whistleblowers are treated absolutely terribly, and some suffer really serious consequences - inflicted not just by liberals, corporations, or the politically agnostic, but also by conservatives. While this may be stretching the definition, the most reasonable criticism of cancel culture I've heard is that it stifles reasonable discourse, and from that perspective cancel culture and whistleblower punishments are in a similar ballpark.

(I don't really want to express an opinion on right or wrong here - because given today's hyper-partisan and highly combative atmosphere it seems to me that these kind of backslashes or mob outrages are inevitable; i.e. this is a symptom, not really a cause.)

In fact that’s what makes it so concerning, this illiberal way of thinking is spreading in most if not all liberal democracies.

https://archive.thinkprogress.org/texas-board-of-education-c...

Thomas Jefferson was successfully removed from all Texas schoolbooks, as one example of many. The Right is no stranger to censorship.

I have seen stories recently about removing Jefferson from the public view / cancelling him, based upon far-left / progressive / anti-racist/slavery ideals (I think/assume) that are removing monuments around the country (and murals and building names, etc), not right-wing censorship, so I was quite curious.

sadly some of the supporting links are 404 on the thinkprogress page you linked to.

However reading the texas tribune article it says that Jefferson was not removed from all Texas schoolbooks, it says that he was removed from a list of 'revolutionary thinkers' - the other references were all left in.

- So this is kind of a red herring thing?

From the TexasTribune Article you linked:

"the Colbert Report got the board's move technically correct, noting it removed Jefferson from a list of "revolutionary thinkers," which is exactly what the board did. Colbert simply didn't provide the context that Jefferson was mentioned elsewhere. (Colbert, of course, is comedy and can't be held to journalistic standards.) "

... "None of the news stories from the day in The Dallas Morning News, the Houston Chronicle and San Antonio Express-News (which share state coverage), the Austin American-Statesman, and The Texas Tribune (that's me) mentioned the Jefferson amendment, much less asserted he had been removed entirely from the curriculum. "

Not that I disagree that "The Right is no stranger to censorship." - however this is not a good example for such, and perhaps the bigger debate should center around what tactics of censoring should be out of bounds, and example of such from different 'sides'.

Although it becomes tougher to paint sides when we have to wonder if a twitter mob is a side? if none of the leaders of a side are advocating for thing X - and which leaders are actual leaders of a side, and which influencers are a thing, and if 'leaders' denounce an influencer, then does it really count for/against a 'side'.. much to consider with all this.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/texas-lawmaker-says-850...

> Along with the letter, which was first obtained by The Texas Tribune, Krause appended the book list that includes well-known titles like the Pulitzer Prize-winning William Styron novel, “The Confessions of Nat Turner” and best-sellers that were turned into movies or television series, such as John Irving’s “The Cider House Rules,” Alan Moore’s dystopian “V For Vendetta,” and the graphic novel version of Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale.”

Censorship, especially censorship applied to schools and education, is simply a tool of those in power to remain in power. In my experience, the conservative states seem to do it the most.

The conservative states also force upon the textbook writers things like "Intelligent Design" or whatnot.

-------

Book banning, removal of icons (Thomas Jefferson), etc. etc. Its all the same techniques. Conservatives simply ignore it when their peers do it, so you don't get to see those issues come up in conservative circles / conservative bubbles.

Many would say that the overwhelming majority of the academy is left of center. This makes it intuitive that if there is censorship of academics, then the recipients of the censorship would be people left of center. But I do not think it follows that the censors are on the right.

I argue that most of the censorship on campus, be it people being uninvited or forced to resigned, comes from the academy itself. It is true that, quite possibly, the vast majority of the people being censored are on the left, but I think it is also true that the vast majority of the people censoring are also on the left.

The right simply occupies very little room in the academy. It mostly exists outside of the academy.

This is not to say that people on the right (mostly from outside of the academy) do not come in with censorious intentions... but my impression is that most universities are very well protected against external interventions. It is simply not the case that a business leader or a radio show host can easily censor a professor on campus.

So if we are thinking about, say, college professors, I would say that we are mostly dealing with a left-left censorship.

That is, the left is not this uniform block.

Kathleen Stock is a leftist: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-sussex-59084446 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kathleen_Stock

Bret Weinstein is a leftist: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bret_Weinstein

Verushka Lieutenant-Duval is a leftist: https://arts.uottawa.ca/visualarts/people/lieutenant-duval-v...

The people doing the cancelling were on the left.

Which means that they'll levy the most censorship / control over the academics. Its the nature of the beast. If local school boards want to force the teachers to teach "intelligent design" and remove references to Thomas Jefferson, it will happen (and does happen regularly).

The whole "Critical Race Theory" stuff going on is just the newest push by the right to reshape education into their mold. Whether this works or fails, we can be certain that in a year or two, another educational issue will pop up and the right will use it as a rallying cry to change education again.

Thomas Jefferson, Intelligent Design / Creationism, Critical Race Theory. Just a few of the culture wars that the right has waged in the past decade and more will come.

-----

Welcome to educational politics. We didn't start the fire. It was always burning, since the world's been turning. This "censorship" stuff has been going on for decades.

It would appear that the average school board in the US is only about 31% conservative ( https://www.brookings.edu/blog/brown-center-chalkboard/2017/... ) at least as of 2017 - I expect this to shift a bit post 2022.

"The whole "Critical Race Theory" stuff going on is just the newest push by the right to reshape education into their mold" - not sure I disagree with this, but the way it comes off is like 'the left' and 'the moderates' have not been trying to reshape education in their mold.. and I would say I think since about 12 years ago there has been an aggressive pursual of more liberal pushing within the halls of various academia.

I am glad that more parents are taking a look at what our schools are teaching - I think it had been assumed the education we got it was today's kids are getting, and I think now more eyes are open that today's lessons may be very different - in some areas that is great and in some areas we may not want out schools teaching certain things in certain ways or at certain ages - we should all pay more attention and have more transparency across the board.

I see you mention the Thomas Jefferson thing again like it's an abomination that some conservative folks wanted it removed - this even after I showed you details of your own linking that says that headline was overblown and used in pop culture wars in a way to make conservatives look extreme / outrageous - when the actual doing was leaving all the history of Jefferson in the books, yet removing him from a list of very influential American originalists or whatever.

The funny thing is that the far left has been more active in removing historically famous old school folks from statues to murals, school names and more. There are those saying that washington and jefferson should be removed from public places the same as confederate generals. - So if cancelling Jefferson is an example of an extremist thing to be shocked by, there is, I believe, more demand from the far left to remove / cancel him than there is the far right.

RE your GP comment:

I don't know much about the Texas school board being conservative or liberal - I do recall some years ago that Texas' decisions about what goes into their school books had national repercussions, as the book inclusions they chose ended up making reprints the most affordable and so most or many of the school systems in the US ended up buying the same books -

The good thing is that brought national attention to subject matter included - and lots of discussions about supplemental material that should be xeroxed and added to the classes.

You mention the school board and censoring in Texas, but the article you cited is not talking about school board demands, it talks about a Texas lawmaker wanting to know about books in public schools..

I don't know enough about the list of books you cited or the others mentioned in the article.. although "V" is one of my two favorite movies, and I think everyone should see it more than once.. I can understand that different types of parents may have objections to certain types of books that may be available to all the kids.

I don't see transparency about books in high/middle/elementary schools as a bad thing - and I don't think if some books were blocked from access in those schools is really the kind of censorship we should worry about.

If lawmakers were demanding that Amazon, Barnes and noble, etc are to remove books - then it's stand to make noise.

"The Underground Guide to Teenage Sexuality: An Essential Handbook for Today's Teens" - mentioned in the article - I would advocate that all schools should have multiple copies of such a book - however I would not object to it being only available to students who's parents have opted in to allowing such material.. and the cover being on the shelf, but the book being being the library counter.

What is right for each kid is going to be different for each kid and each family and at different ages. Each local school needs to take those things into consideration.

"Censorship, especially censorship applied to schools and education, is simply a tool of those in power to remain in power. In my experience, the conservative states seem to do it the most." - I wonder what you really mean by 'those in power' - is this a racial thing? a church vs non-church thing?

I'm not sure I am buying into the conservative state vs liberal here - I think it depends on each district within and even teacher by teacher.

"conservative states also force upon the textbook writers things like "Intelligent Design" or whatnot." - I'll need to research this more.. I did see an article where Louisiana made a law saying it had to also be offered, and maybe other states have done similar -

However most of the country teaches evolution as settled science - (around 59% ) https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/evolution-educati... )) - the ban on teaching that in TN ended in 1970 - a lot has changed since then.

I've got to add that I'm more concerned about what colleges are banning, and what they are not teaching... It's one thing to ban / burn a book.. but it's not much different to have all your faculty pushing exclusively a certain set of books.

Parents should be more involved in providing additional / limiting certain things for kids / teens.. but that option is not really a thing after 18.

I think we all need to know more about what the various schools are offering children and young adults, and what they are not offering - our collective future is certainly being affected by it unfortunately.

Public universities are not well-protected in the United States from conservatives seeking to defund programs with which they disagree. One might be well-protected against being fired directly for saying something controversial, but if your whole department is closed, you can be gotten rid of, even with tenure.

https://www.boisestatepublicradio.org/education/2021-04-07/l...

There's an echo chamber out there that amplifies the notion that there is some sort of epidemic of "woke cancellations" and critical race theory etc. - this is heavily emphasized by conservative media. There's plenty of ridiculous behavior by students - e.g. at Reed College - which I am aware of a massive amount of left-on-left cancellation - someone I know had their career upended by the unlimited claims of the rather stereotypically woke students there. But stupidity at places like Evergreen and Reed will beget endless think pieces and have left cancellation magnified endlessly.

Meanwhile, conservatives' own role in cancellation is minimized to the point of ridiculousness: so Bari Weiss can straight-facedly claim to be a fan of academic freedom.

There's a quieter, but considerably more effective, campaign to defund entire departments among conservatives - the model is a narrow "university as career prep". This means getting rid of the humanities and social sciences in favour of business/law/engineering/CS (good for us, I guess?).

In Australia, the conservative governments have been fairly unabashed in raising the cost of a humanities degree (paid for via our "HECS" scheme) in a way that seems pretty much Amazingly, this gets considerably less press in the echo chamber than some jackass left students acting like jackasses. I wonder why...

I'll agree with you that most of the noisiest and embarrassing cancellations are left-on-right or left-on-left, but this a narrow slice of "actions taken against academics", and their noisiness is not indicative of their effectiveness. Some of these cancellations are simply part of right-wing grift: schedule a talk from someone with credentials designed to enraged the "woke left" somewhere on their home turf, then enjoy the newfound credibility when you get cancelled and get to be a Free Speech Martyr.

What about being suspended? Being strong armed into "volunteering" into stepping back from teaching/speaking roles? Having career-advancing opportunities pass you by "for some reason"? Never getting a job in the first place because of your reputation?

Because all of the focus is on soft and hard right wing cancellation, anything actually on the left is seen as extremist. Extremist speech can be silenced and, just like with the hard right, not acknowledged as being silenced.

If by being "right wing" you mean strong authoritarianism and Mussolini-like fascism, then yes, American 'left' is right wing.

However, if right wing for you are conservative values, like family, independence, free speech, personal responsibility, and "judging by the content of the character, not the color of the skin" then American left is nowhere near the soft right position on any of those things. They are not even close to center.

And to be clear, I'm not taking a "both sides are equally bad" stance, I'm just describing the hypocrisy of this particular line of complaining.

He spent his presidency attempting to keep them happy and in particular working with them on Supreme Court appointments.

I would say that makes them relevant.

Also, there is a massive difference between using government entities to ban books, and a bunch of people on Twitter saying we don't like you and what you said.

> a bunch of people on Twitter saying we don't like you and what you said

No one thinks this is cancel culture. It's specifically wielding economic/political power to silence people you disagree with.

You are not entitled to a job or a platform and the people who have control over those positions are well within their right to remove you for the views and actions you take. Removing you from a position is a form of speech. And this isn't new, we've been doing this forever. Was Nixon cancelled? Were the Dixie Chicks cancelled?

Maybe you think they were, maybe you don't, but this idea that somehow someone is cancelled because society says "we don't like your bullshit anymore" is new or dangerous is just preposterous to me.

I find the influence that right/conservatives have in infecting our school curriculum (even if not always successfully) far more dangerous. "The war of norther aggression" is an actual thing taught to actual children in the south. I find that far more damaging to our society.

He's being fired because of his actions, not his beliefs or speech. Nixon resigned because he broke the law. There were two things that happened with Dixie Chicks, people calling into their radio stations requesting they be blacklisted, this is most definitely cancel culture. They also offended their core audience who just stopped buying their records which isn't cancel culture. Maybe in 2003 you were excited they had to face consequences for sharing their beliefs, but I wasn't enthused about it then, and I'm not now.

Would it be healthy to live in a culture where Walmart fired every worker who pro-BLM?

Where Amazon asks anyone they hire how they feel about unions before hiring them?

>The war of northern aggression

I grew up in the south. I've heard this term before but I've never seen it in a single textbook or ever heard a teacher use it.

And I don't really care about the Dixie Chicks, they were right, but people don't have to listen to them either. The same way I feel about all these people that are claiming that they have been cancelled. They might be right, I don't think most of them are, but none of us have to listen to them, they are not entitled to anything.

Walmart and Amazon could certainly try to do those things, but both of those specifics do at least have some legal questions that I am not qualified to answer.

And I'm going to go out on a limb that you haven't seen every textbook in the South. And while I will fully admit here that it may not be pervasive, it certainly was taught in some schools in the South. Another term more frequently used is the "war for southern independence". While not as objectionable, it certainly was not the intent of the Civil War.

Walmart and Amazon could do those things, but I want to live in a world where they don't because we have a culture that values freedom of expression.

There are over a million teachers in the south I'm sure at least one used that term. But it hasn't been anywhere close to common for a generation or two.

No, Nixon resigned because he (or, rather, his party) had done a whip count and knew he would be removed from office.

(Now, sure, that was because other people were not prepared to accept the manner in which he had broken the law, but Nixon absolutely did not resign because he broke the law.)

Free and open discussion lets me know who's worthwhile listening to and who should be ignored.

Without some kind of legal exemption, however, you cannot prevent them from saying more (unless you own the platform, but that level of control is limited only to the platform that you own).

Such is my understanding.

The saying goes that my right to swing my arms ends where your face begins.

Equally the student unions right to decide what they personally listen too ends when they prevent others that want to hear the speaker from listening.

At that point they are infringing on another's right to free speech.

In the case of the student unions it is an inherently political organisation using their power to restrict the rights of what I can only assume is a minority of the student body.

Edit - formatting

Are you seriously suggesting a students speech should be curtailed because they are in a minority! (Or a majority for that matter). You are either trolling, or you are part of the problem.

If I don't want to listen to somebodies ideas (or read their books), I will make that decision thakyou. Not the students union!

What is is about "I disprove of what you say but will defend to the death your right to say it" that YOU do not understand?

They are remarkably honest about it: "There is no advanced auto-completion of program names and flags, like hipster zsh and fish users might be accustomed to. But this really isn't an issue since Plan 9 has virtually no programs or flags to speak of, as you will discover soon enough."

Those with any kind of spidey sense for going down tech rabbit holes might also notice how front-and-center features for, ummn, connecting/emulating computers not running Plan 9 are in this guide.

Randomly cutting into the document presents you with a plethora of the usual fetishization of the fact that a nearly useless operating system, window manager, etc. doesn't take nearly as many LoC as something that more than a handful of people use, not to mention a giant list of things that you apparently shouldn't do, like use files made in Office: "There are a great many office suits (sic) on most operating systems, and other office utilities besides too numerous to count. So many are the choices in fact that it's easy to forget that "office" is just a fancy word for working with text."

It seems to close on some daft explication of how everything can be a database and how you don't need a real one, presumably after having invested thousands of words on how you don't need a spreadsheet, don't need a web browser, don't need an office suite, etc.

I cannot think of anything that captures the spirit of Plan 9 less than attempting to revive a dead, nearly 30 year old operating system and pretend that it's a useful daily driver. At the time Plan 9 was built it was a quirky and clean take on technology of the time, built on cutting edge and interesting hardware. At a time when distributed systems in Unix (not really Linux, then) were a tooth-grinding exercise in frozen NFS mounts and awkward, irritating incompatibilities, Plan 9 was a breath of fresh air. Honoring its spirit would be building a new operating system that applies this kind of simplicity to modern hardware (a hell of a task) - and learns from its mistakes, not trying to set up a homestead in this utter wreck.

It is pathetic that operating systems have remained crap for 30 years, but given that nothing has moved forward, there's no reason not to start with the newest operating system we have: Plan 9.

As a bonus, you'd get a vast array of device drivers and be able to run actual computer programs used by more than a handful of people, which I hear is neat for attempting to build an innovative research operating system with some relevance.

I'm not going to argue that a standard Linux distribution is not a giant mountain of cruft, but imo it's the user space and system software that's alarming, not the kernel per se. And to the extent that the kernel is crufty: well, it's supporting orders of magnitude more things that Plan 9 ever did, and that's a good thing.

I share your irritation at all the things you outline, but you don't need to be running a wacky Thompson C codebase on top of an old kernel to fix any of these things.

I'm also far from convinced that there's any aspect of the Plan 9 design that should be accepted uncritically for a clean sheet new OS design. Saying "nothing has moved forward" is hyperbole, and plenty of things have changed since 1990, even if we accept your claim about OS stagnation as a given. I'm far from convinced that the insights of the Plan 9 guys circa 1989 are so wonderful and timeless that they are better than what could be done with a clean sheet design on top of modern hardware and a minimalist Linux kernel now.

Harvey OS[1] is a Plan-9 based OS but with a modern toolchain using C11 and Go. Not much activity in the last few years, but then a burst of activity this summer.

1. https://harvey-os.org/

I'll just stop at the top- no, I can't use Linux as a base, except perhaps as a host for a virtual system. For me I've been playing with uxn, but Inferno does exist. And you're right, using Inferno on a stripped Linux system WOULD be better than using Linux.

But consumer computing will never change, it will remain made of a stack of legacy parts in a trenchcoat. The only real change we've gotten in a decade is Vulkan/DX12- and those APIs just expose graphics the way consoles do. We've done that for decades it's still not new.

Research because it's fun, because it's an artistic outlet. make tiny virtual computers you can run in weird places and then run them in weird places! Because you can! Learn because it is engaging, and because sharing what you learn is rewarding.

The reason that Plan 9 failed as a platform for exploring OS design (not strictly speaking "OS research" in a narrow sense) is that modern workloads didn't run there.

Honestly, who cares which platform supports a handful of processes running the moral equivalent of xclock, a few shells, a 1980s looking terminal and the occasional build? This isn't a proxy for anything that anyone cares about, and all modern hardware is ludicrously overpowered to do that. Give me a modern machine, and I could probably write you something that simulated a decent-looking 1989-level experience in pure Python (I am not saying this is a good idea).

It rapidly became impossible to test any meaningful ideas on Plan 9 because what consensus reality regards as "software" doesn't really run there. This filters down into potentially bad decisions about design of OS and runtimes. You can't test out ideas that come from anywhere outside your narrow circle of "the Unix room and miscellaneous fanboys and trainspotters".

For example, is "everything is a file" a good abstraction for a modern graphical interface of any kind? Who knows, we'll never see one ported to Plan 9, just a bunch of bitblt-level fingerpainting.

If Plan 9 had stayed popular (there's that word) enough to attract enough users to matter, maybe we could have explored these ideas. Not necessarily building a dumb clone of Windows and doing everything the same way, but having enough interoperability to make it a plausible daily driver.

You are a buzzword machine with no substance. All of these are nothing more than an obsession with some idea of success.

Will modern apps, workloads, quote on quote "meaningful" things run on uxn? No! But we can still research what you can do with modern aspirations and knowledge on an 8bit computer.

The goal is not to run some existing software, the goal is to learn. To make new software, new workloads, new ideas.

If you want to run "modern workloads", these days just grab a web browser- you can probably even do your GPU research in there!

Do that, that's wonderful if your research is about things you can do on normal operating systems like a web browser. But if your research is about computers, you probably need to say, design a new computer (uxn) or expose yourself to different kinds of computers. I suggest you do both, write a compiler and write a VM for it!

You'll get maybe a dozen users, and you'll learn, and you'll teach people things. All without any "success"

I'm not going to denigrate noodling around with uxn, which seems quite neat, but it's not in any way shape or form something that most people would recognize as "research": it might be cool, and it might be an effective way of learning things, but it is not going to let anyone do anything substantially new they couldn't do before.

The point of "popularity" is not to win internet brownie points: it's to get outside your own head and find out what other people's workloads look like. If "modern" workloads sounds too much like a cliche (and I admit it does sound a bit like I feel like all research OS work should be centered around supporting an Electron stack or some hipster NoSQL database running in Kubernetes when I talk like that) - it could just as easily be "scientific workloads" or even, god help us, COBOL workloads.

Just something that you didn't yourself make up. That's noodling. That's a hobby. We're all really good at asking ourselves questions and providing good answers for them.

Anyhow, enjoy your noodling. I'm sure you'll have some absurd and reactive response to this, and yell and scream some more about how I don't have any substance and how your notion of research is Super Awesome and we all should invest more time playing with 8-bit computers, but I have some 256-bit and 512-bit stuff to get to, so have a nice day.

Why are you so abrasive? The poster is saying nothing bad to you, but you keep insulting them. Why?

> Will modern apps, workloads, quote on quote "meaningful" things run on uxn? No! But we can still research what you can do with modern aspirations and knowledge on an 8bit computer.

uxn is a badly built architecture. It's an 8-bit computer with 16-bit addresses, no overflow flags/bits/registers, and inefficient jump modes. It makes no sense. It tries to ape 8-bit computers of its time without understanding the limitations of transistors and budgets at the time. You just need a passing understand of computer architecture and registers to understand that. And if you want something didactic, there's architectures like the LC-3 which do make sense, so this is definitely not a dead end as much as a bad implementation. I'm not sure why so many folks on HN have been latching onto uxn recently, I presume it's become popular in some computing minimalism circle.

> Do that, that's wonderful if your research is about things you can do on normal operating systems like a web browser. But if your research is about computers, you probably need to say, design a new computer (uxn) or expose yourself to different kinds of computers. I suggest you do both, write a compiler and write a VM for it!

Everyone _knows_ why a computer like uxn is a dead end. It's not like uxn has a monopoloy on 8-bit fantasy architectures either, so there's certainly viable options. There are others that don't have the same issues. nga, the VM underneath RetroForth, doesn't suffer the same issues for example.

Look, lots of people like reenacting period dramas and doing things like renaissance faires. But period drama and RenFaire folks don't act like they're doing fundamental research. They're having fun and expressing their creativity, which is great, but they're not coming up with new historical research. Call a spade a spade and call art art. And let folks have opinions on the way OS research should work without calling them names.

I'd say I'm just the only one here not pretending I'm not abrasive. This was abrasive from the start, and every comment has been abrasive.

> Look, lots of people like reenacting period dramas and doing things like renaissance faires. But period drama and RenFaire folks don't act like they're doing fundamental research.

Honestly look at this. Do you just want me to be abrasive in your special style instead? Should I make sure I patronize everyone subtly? Is that the end goal?

If you think that computers are solved, that you have to do some specific thing to research computers like use Linux, or run Docker, or get popular, you've missed the mark.

There's no reason you get to decide what research is because you came up with a funny insult, and if you're saying people can't learn more about computers by using them, you're just a gatekeeper.

> And let folks have opinions on the way OS research should work without calling them names.

Are you kidding me? You just literally wrote that it's comparable to the renaissance fair instead of research. How can be you so hypocritical?

There's nothing wrong with playing around with these concepts for purely recreational/artistic reasons, but I don't think that's where OP is coming from. OP talks about their reasoning in a sibling comment.

Also, rant whatever you want, but importing /net it's far better than all of the IPTABLES NAT crap you have to write in order to have an usable system build on top of stacked crap again and again.

9front is the future, and not that turd based on half baked networked file systems from Sun named NFS, or worse, Java as the 'standard' of enterprise 'computing'.

Don't let me start on X11, Bash having /dev/tcp and so on.

Or having to use VNC instead of X11's forwarding in order to be usable today (Or NX, Xpra...), thus, defying the basic scheme of X11's client/server model.

Why is the socket interface the way it is? Why isn't it like /dev/tcp in bash?

I tried Plan 9 about 10 years ago. Since then I use VPNs everyday and it can be tricky to setup at times.

The Plan 9 concept of just importing /net from the VPN machine as a union overlay is so elegant.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Bell_Labs#Combinin...

That's wrong. /dev/tcp or /dev/udp should be devices themselves, not a fake one for bash.

Open /dev/tcp/google.com/80 or /dev/tcp/192.168.1.1/22 or whatever.

Instead of having your web server start as root and then do some UID switching to drop priveleges why not have it start as a non priveleged user from the beginning?

The ports under 1024 are reserved for root but how about we get rid of that and have files for every port number? Then use chown and chmod to set permissions and only let the httpd user account read and write to port 80?

https://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/4th_edition/papers/names

It’s just a guide on how to do things with an operating system. The author isn’t even really advocating it’s use as a daily driver, just providing instruction for how to do so, if someone was so inclined. There’s nothing in there that’s warrants a multi-paragraph whining about OP is using something.

There seems to be a very negative option towards retrocomputing on HN unless it related to bitching about electron or resource usage, but this is the most virile I’ve seen it.

I'm deeply affected by this because I loved Plan 9 in 1992-1994. I wrote multiple user level file servers for my silly honours project and for summer research projects. I built compiler passes for Thompson C while I was at the Labs between ugrad and starting my PhD (mixed caller save, callee save register allocation and a retargeting to the R4000). I wanted it to succeed because of the things that were good about it - but even then was starting to realize how worrying the NIH stuff in Plan 9 was. I started CMU still wanting to talk to people about Plan 9, but it didn't last.

My complaint comes from disappointment: Plan 9 was exciting because it was a clean sheet design, coming from the best judgement of a bunch of very smart people looking around at what was going on with hardware and software in around 1989. People poking the corpse now are working in the opposite of that spirit.

Everyone is free to do what they want, of course (I'd love to fire up a Commodore 64 or an Amiga!) but it feels like a tremendous waste of time to me (subjectively, of course).

Apologies for the aggressive tone in my comment. I do a lot of weird stuff with retrocomputig and have found myself having to defend my time in the past

It was developed by a single developer.

Perhaps the use of Plan9 can spark a similar good idea?

After all 'art cannot be created in the absence of limitations' ...

How so? GP's post may be a little bit too harsh, but it's definitely well written and coherent.

Even dead things are worth studying, if for no other reason than to explore the question of why everyone isn't using them (in Plan 9's case, it has a lot more to do with accident of history than any technical limitations... Once POSIX standardized what a UNIX-like OS that managed processes and allowed IPC looked like, everything close-to-but-not-that became also-ran, no matter its technical merits. Esperanto is a fine language, but useless if almost everyone you meet knows English instead).

Also intellectually incurious: assuming that P9 expired due to POSIX eating its lunch. My personal take on it is that P9 expired partly due to bad licensing decisions but mainly due to a preposterously shitty attitude to Other People's Code. I vividly remember people in the Unix room clustered around the one Windows machine there that could do radical stuff like "run games" and "run a browser". If just a bit more effort had been put into Howard Trickey's APE Plan 9 might well have kept evolving and become useful, but NIH was more important. Or "Invented Here, But Not By The Right People" (C++).

POSIX could have been an asset to Plan 9 - a target to track instead of having to emulate a bunch of disparate Unixen.

Strange that.

I will agree it's not for everyone, but I still wouldn't put my mom on Linux either (not for a desktop... absolutely not).