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Is Swift Easy?

Michael Tsai on Swift:

I like Swift. But, having programmed in probably more than a dozen languages, I would not classify Swift as easy to learn. It’s at the end with the harder ones like C++.

People see the var declarations and think, “Javascript!”. Type inference hides a lot of the complexity of the type system. So, yeah easy things are easy. But then you think to yourself that you want to create your own collection and you’re deep into the a generics system that you never realized was there.

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That Sinking Feeling – Talking Points Memo

That Sinking Feeling – Talking Points Memo:

I suspect [the trump team] now fear[s] (no doubt rightly) that Trump officials lied during their interviews with the Special Counsel’s office and the investigators already had the emails that proved they were lying. That’s a real sinking feeling for everyone involved.

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Paul Krugman says bitcoin is a bubble - Business Insider

Paul Krugman says bitcoin is a bubble - Business Insider:

There's been no demonstration yet that it actually is helpful in conducting economic transactions. There's no anchor for its value. You know, unlike pieces of paper with dead presidents on them, those are anchored by the fact that you can use them to pay taxes. There's not anchor for bitcoin.

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How To Thank Black Women For Keeping Roy Moore Out of Office

How To Thank Black Women For Keeping Roy Moore Out of Office:

On Wednesday morning, the media erupted with calls of “Thank you!” to Black women for showing up. But as Kamala Harris said, we need to do more than congratulate them. “Let’s address issues that disproportionately affect Black women—like pay disparity, housing & under-representation in elected office,” she tweeted. ‘Tis the season, after all, and supporting black women should be at the top of your list. There are many organizations and causes that could use our support.

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An Expert's View on Trump's Lies

I study liars. I’ve never seen one like President Trump.

In research beginning in the mid-1990s, when I was a professor at the University of Virginia, my colleagues and I asked 77 college students and 70 people from the nearby community to keep diaries of all the lies they told every day for a week. … One category of lies was so small that when we reported the results, we just tucked them into a footnote. Those were cruel lies, told to hurt or disparage others. … An astonishing 50 percent of Trump’s lies were hurtful or disparaging.
 
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Repost.

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152 years ago today, the 13th ammendment was ratified, abolishing slavery in this country.

(via Nikole Hannah-Jones)

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Another attempt at the Grand Web Unification project, via Bridgy.

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Byword Test

This is a test from Byword

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Where is Amazon’s Prime Video app for Apple TV? - The Verge

Where is Amazon’s Prime Video app for Apple TV? - The Verge

(Via Daring Fireball.)

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MarsEdit Post

A quick test to post from MarsEdit

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Setting up my personal site for IndieWeb…

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Twitter Harasses Ed Sheeran into Deleting His Account

Ed Sheeran Deletes His Twitter Account After ‘Game of Thrones’ Cameo Gets Mixed Reaction

While some people were delighted to spot music star Ed Sheeran in Sunday night’s Game of Thrones season seven premiere, others were less enthusiastic, arguing that the singer’s cameo struck a jarring note in the show’s fantasy world.

I’m a big Game of Thrones fan, but never heard of Ed Sheeran, much less knew his face or voice. The thing that stuck out at me was not the extraneous singing, but the excessive niceness of the Lannister soldiers. There is no precedent for a crew of such squeaky-clean soldiers. That was outrageous. But the Ed Sheeran cameo? That fit right in.

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Movie: Funeral Parade of Roses

If you saw David Lynch’s Mullholland Falls and thought, “too conventional,” then Funeral Parade of Roses is a film for you. Describing it as a transsexual love triange set in 60’s Japan makes it appear more conventional than it is. It pulls just about every cinematic trick in the book and runs them through a narrative blender. The nonlinear narrative removes any orientation the viewer might hope for at the beginning of each scene. Some scenes seem to fit the narrative, only to be revealed as movie sets by a crew of young film radicals making a movie about transsexuals. An argument between two characters is shown in on-screen speech bubbles. Fights are sped up, Benny-Hill style, complete with organ circus music. It ends with a revalation of incest and gory visuals of a transsexual blinding herself with a knife.

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After the Fox

Last night’s move at the Austin Film Society: After the Fox. Peter Sellers plays a master criminal who stages a bogus movie production to smuggle a load of stolen gold into Italy. Directed by an Italian, set and filmed in Italy, partially dubbed in English, starring Peter Sellers as an Italian, speaking English with an Italian accent. Oh, and a script by a budding Neil Simon. It’s kind of a weird mish-mash that probably couldn’t exist today, but somehow seems natural coming from the 60’s.

All this manages to fit perfectly with the ridiculous tone of Sellers hoodwinking an entire Italian village that he is a famous Italian director. It’s a movie-making-fun-of-movies movie, with an aging Hollywood has-been and Italian movie industry serving as the butt of the jokes.

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Newt vs. Newt

Via David Wright:

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I don’t want to go back to Xcode 8.

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Trump v Trump: Sources

Lots of fertile source material in the reddit TrumpCriticizesTrump

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VPN

In light of how the Republican Congress sold the citizens privacy to the ISPs, here are a couple of reviews of VPN service.

The Wirecutter: VPNs Are for Most People–Including You

Macworld: Protect against potential ISP snooping by using https and a VPN

Via Ken White I found two projects that provide Ansible scripts to roll your own: Algo and Streisand.