This makes a lot of sense. It’s hard enough finding communities in real life as it is and the internet is at scale where the ease of social networking doesn’t exist like it did in the past.

At this point I think most people who been online long enough have a network that’s been sustained across many different platforms. Federation is great for these sorts of people when it’s used in the way that you’ve described.

Centralization still has its use as a meeting ground. The “public square” concept can still apply, but the thing is that it’s unhealthy to spend all of your time there and private/controlled gatherings are people can get a break and cultivate more unique bonds. Mastodon is interesting because it gives people the option to have both (public square or private hall).

Please share it if you can recall. As someone who just figured out what Base-2 and Base-10 meant, I’m eager for all sorts of Mathematica.

> If you told me that this was, rather than someone's personal blog, a piece of first-person 'Frasier' fanfiction, I'd probably buy that.

One can argue that ±65% of blogging is first-person fan fiction.

You know, I don’t share your antipathy toward the Islamic conquests of Europe in the least, but your response indicates to me that the angle taken by the author (which reeks of the kind of cultural self-flagellation that is en vogue these days) could do less to “challenge Islamophobia” as the press release says, than it can to embolden it or at least disturb people who would have otherwise benefited from the history without being force-fed a narrative that could be expressed differently (I’m not accusing you of Islamophobia, by the way).

My knee-jerk impression is that this book is using Islamic history as a pawn in today’s “culture wars”. It will enlighten few, and serve as material for the in-group who is most likely to purchase it to pontificate over at cocktail parties.

> your antipathy toward the Islamic conquests of Europe

While I'm certainly not a fan of them, I'm not particularly outraged about them either. Wars of naked conquest were simply the way back then, and the Islamic world was not exceptionally brutal compared to others, including Europe.

My antipathy is towards those that seek to erase or twist this history. I realize the main point is architectural influences, but that only makes the lie more insidious - a casual statement most won't pay much attention to, and simply assume it accurate, like the presence of kilts in Braveheart.

We can count beans over whether it's appropriate to address how Islam entered the region in a PR piece, but I think we'd just be waxing historian in traditional HN fashion.

After some thought, it's obvious that it's beyond the scope of this book to address the history of the Islamic conquest to the extent that you desire (I failed in my part to recognize this earlier). I can understand how it can be interpreted that the book is advertised in a way that compels some of its Western readership to assume an implicit guilt or adversarial role as "Islamophobes" who denigrate the influence that the Islamic world had on its land. I myself was skeptic of this tone at first, but as a whole it simply isn't the responsibility of this particular book to cater to readers who want the history of the Islamic conquests from the perspective of the West (as the colonized) to be brought forth aside from the architectural influences that the conquests had. War and colonization involve more than just the bloodshed of the belligerents. For us to even focus on the just the event of conquest at the expense of what occurred afterward does a historical and cultural injustice. The Islamic conquests are in fact unique in this regard, as opposed to say, the Belgian Congo.

The irony here is that I can make the same accusation of "self-flagellation" to those who are desperate to be recognized as "the colonized" (in this instance by a cultural "other", in a sense) as I can make against people who woefully lament their history as "the colonizers". The former accusation feels even more apt because if so much lengths have to be taken to recall this history, maybe that's indicative of the significant steps that the region (as a collective) has made in progressing past that stage of their legacy. Of course I feel that there are some exemptions.

But on the whole, as I've said elsewhere, the Western world (as a hegemonic region that claims the most prosperous nations materially) in a way has lost the "narrative privilege" of the periods where they didn't have the upper hand being popularly discussed.Of course there are exceptions to this, but the Islamic conquests primarily have the distinction of being carried out by nations who if not foreigners themselves were driven by motives—the Islamic faith—entirely foreign to the invaded lands. It's not that there's anything to erase or twist, my hunch is that aside from specific historical discussions like this one, it's not worth mentioning.

> the Islamic conquests primarily have the distinction of being carried out by nations who if not foreigners themselves were driven by motives—the Islamic faith—entirely foreign to the invaded lands.

from a scripture point of view, they are both Abrahamic religions, use a book as the center of wisdom, buildings to house worship.. but let's set that huge likeness aside.

India, the Middle-East and Europe, all expanded at a certain time via tribal groups maturing into land-owning, army building principalities. The City-state and the male-heirarchy of arms, taxes and authority. The book contains the "King of Kings" .. this seems trivial to observe but it is not. Original tribal groups had vastly different social structures, religious beliefs, literacy rates but ultimately did not scale.

I propose that the Muslim expansion into Christian lands was polarized but similar military methods on both sides, all with the knowledge of Rome in the background. Contrary to what each saw when looking in the mirror each morning, they had a lot of similarities. Compare to trading, agricultural or other practices, who saw these Empire builders as the blood-thirsty ego cases that they were. Compare to the military conquest of South America by Christians much later.

Invoke "otherness" all you like, but there are layers to that, and more layers under that. Evolution ends quickly by the sword, and those empire builders, of all stripes, ended a lot of human social evolution exactly that way.

> from a scripture point of view, they are both Abrahamic religions, use a book as the center of wisdom, buildings to house worship.. but let's set that huge likeness aside.

If we were to refer to scripture we would find that the concept of an "Abrahamic religion" is non-existent, and the presence of scripture itself as a primary fundamental source and houses of worship do little by way of comparing any religion.

The rest of the similarities that you list are useful, but it's unlikely that the valuable context that can be gleaned from any sociopolitical similitudes in retrospect were prioritized when the events in question were taking place. The glaring theological differences between Islam and Christianity were the defining factor as to why the Muslim conquests began at all. We can view sociopolitical similarities as non-trivial, but in respect to the initial impetus (the spread of the Islam), they become trivial. This isn't to discount any likenesses that can be found across certain structures within these regions or how these structures were affected as regions spread and interacted with each other, but the significance varies and how each region interpreted these similarities at that time likely varied as well. In the context of the Islamic conquests as a whole, the belief itself is paramount in beginning any discussions about them.

The point that I'm trying to make is that on the whole, i.e. beginning from as early as 629, how the Islamic conquests can be perceived is exceptional compared to other conflicts that took place involving Western European nations, in particular the conflicts that took place between Western European nations themselves. This exception could be compared to that of how the Islamic conquests of European territories could be perceived from the perspective of the Islamic states as opposed to the early conflicts that took place in Syria/Yemen, for example.

"Likeness" is equally nuanced, is often forsaken for opposing motives and is worthless unless it is predicated by shared principles, especially at the scale that we are discussing.

it feels like where you are going in this exchange is "pro-polarization" due to some inherent greatness of Islam or something like that. You can talk to others not me if that is the rhetoric now.

I apologize for the long replies. I promise you it doesn’t feel like so much is being typed in the text editing box before I post.

I'm not ashamed to say that my belief is that Islam is inherently great. I'm sure you have your own set of convictions that are guiding your arguments.

My view in this thread is that the perception of the Islamic conquests in Europe are exceptional in the way that they may be perceived due the differences between the Muslim world and Western Europe during that period of time and that this perception may carry over and affect how the relationship between the Muslim world and Western Europe is viewed today, especially within the context of what the book Stealing from the Saracens appears to be about and how society may respond to that as well. These differences were initially predicated theologically and more than likely had an influence on how any similarities between the Islamic states and Western European nations were interpreted by them.

Through literary means we can contextualize certain events like what we're discussing in a way that makes the differences less stark and open the door for a more conclusive, reconciliatory perspective but the efficacy of that is subject to the realities of the living human experience. Polarization is a natural characteristic of society. "Social evolution" can do much to make large groups of people alike, but it can also magnify the ways that they aren't. History and the components that make it are as well-retained in the human experience itself as it is within literature and "the pens are lifted and the ink is dried".

If this disturbs you, well...this is the world that we share. Enjoy.

> it's beyond the scope of this book to address the history of the Islamic conquest to the extent that you desire

You misunderstand me. If the author simply did not address it at all, and left it as "Saracen influence/legacy", or "influence of Saracen wars/conquest/invasion/conflict/presence..", I would have been content (even with something as neutral as 'presence'). It is perfectly reasonable to focus on architecture, and mostly or even entirely ignore wars.

It is in ascribing guilt to the victims ("stealing", "debt", "Islamophobia"), that changed it from mere focus on a narrow topic, to lying by omission.

Guilt isn't being ascribed to the victims or casualities. It's being ascribed to the Europeans who hold prejudices against Islam and are alive today. If you aren't one of those people, there isn't much left to critique until you read the book.

Can someone explain why the parent post has been flagged?

Yes, it's mentioned in the site guidelines:

Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead.

The comment picks a word out, then claims the book is 'framed as' that (it's not) and then pirouettes to exactly the sort of culture flamewar rehearsed talking point it wrongly accuses the book of engaging in, complete with the URL barrage such comments often include. Absolutely none of it has anything to do with Islamic architecture's influence in Europe - the topic of the book. As a first comment, it successfully kills any chance we'd get an interesting thread.

The people who flagged it were right and the people who vouched for it were mistaken.

Given that the title of the book is provocative, I really don't see this the issue here.

The title of the book is not provocative and even if it was, the guideline is there precisely because it is an issue for a messageboard with HN's aspirations. If you think escalation of yelliness is good thing for a forum, that's fine but HN is not such a forum and explicitly doesn't work like that.

But no one was yelling.

Nobody literally yells in on a text forum, no.

I’m taken aback by the idea of the integrity of the human spirit being kept together by songwriting and other artistic practices that AI threatens.

If anything, AI is proving how trivial certain aspects of art can be; that human beings have mechanized them at a scale that more vital aspects of life have yet to experience.

Is it really gatekeeping? Does this opinion (that was valid and useful to me) carry any preventive force that the term suggests?

The colloquial definition of "gatekeeping" doesn't require literal preventative force.

See https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Gatekeeping

I get that, but even figuratively, it's a relatively harmless opinion that can only achieve as much by way of influence or control as readers are willing to allow the anonymous commenter to hold over them. There's more to learn if we confront the opinion by its premises (as shown by other responses to the comment) than by subjective moral grounds.

The term has become common on the web to refer to enthusiasts trying to control how people enjoy/use a term or participate in an activity - for instance "real fans only like the stuff from before $album" or "only filthy casuals play the game that way" (or "you shouldn't use C if you want modern, good tooling"). This might be worth reading through:

https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Gatekeeping

It dissuades people who aren’t comfortable with Makefiles and Vim from using C, so I’d agree it’s gatekeep-y.

If vim and make are spooking somebody, they need to turn tail and run the fuck away from C. I love it to death, but it's a frustrating experience from another era. vim and make are the least of your worries when dealing with it.

I've used C since the 1980's, and vim most certainly "spooks" me. C and make does not

> but it's a frustrating experience from another era

Are you using C99 features? I find the "new" features extremely enjoyable, it feels like a different language compared to C89 or the common C/C++ subset.

I am, but C99 doesn't fix the various sharp corners and gotchas that are littered throughout language.

I don't say any of this as a dig at C, but at ~50 years old, it definitely shows its age.

Started coding in 1986, used my first UNIX (Xenix) in 1993, the only thing I care about vi, is knowing enough to rescue me when there isn't anything else installed to edit files.

Yep, plenty of really good windows/macos programmers have never touched vi or emacs. I'm not sure why users of those are so elitist. I tend to prefer vim editor keystrokes in my editors but that's just because I got used to it from college and terminal editing.

i think that's the opposite of the intent

they're saying that you don't need to be comfortable with ides and fancy debuggers and cmake and language servers and game development engines and ci pipelines and all kinds of complicated stuff to write c successfully

a bare-bones text editor and the most minimal build system are plenty

and if they aren't plenty, they're not saying that's a problem with you, but with c

i don't agree (ctags, valgrind, git, and gdb go a long way towards making c usable, and evidently c is the best language for a lot of things even ctags and gdb struggle with, like linux kernel drivers, and cmake evidently helps a lot if you care about ms-windows) but that's what they said, and you totally misunderstood them because you somehow got the idea that vim and make are some kind of super advanced tools rather than relics from the 01980s

they're maybe a bit unprepossessing at first glance but mostly what they are is simple and primitive

think of using a hammer rather than a cam-driven turret lathe

you can go lower tech than make too now that cpus and c compilers are so fast

    while sleep 1; do  # ci pipeline
      gcc -Wall -funny -mtune=i69 *.c -lm -liberty -letmypeoplego -o proggie &&  # build system
      ./proggie --run-tests  # test runner
    done

c compiles fast enough that this scales to several thousand lines of code, c++ very much does not

of course you need a testing framework

    if (!strcmp(argv[1], "--run-tests")) return run_tests();

... three seconds latair ...

    int run_tests()
    {
        return test_ui() ||
               test_network() ||
               test_parsing();
    }

    int test_parsing()
    {
        assert(trees_equal(parse("3+4"),
                           parse("3 + 4")));
        assert(!trees_equal(parse("3+4"),
                            parse("3 + 5")));
      ...
    }

now i'm not saying you shouldn't write a test runner in unity and distribute your ci pipeline with zmq and mqtt and whatever the fuck. better ux is worth my weight in gold, and i have programmer gut. also zmq is metal as fuck

what i am saying is that the difference between no test runner and an infinite loop in bash is much bigger than the difference between the bash loop and circleci or gitlab pipelines. so don't be intimidated by articles like this which make it sound like you need a team of phds to set up a test runner. writing tests and running them is what helps, not so much stylishness

except for version control. a build script in shell is a serviceable alternative to make, but cp -a proggie/src snapshot.$(date +%Y-%m-%d) is not a serviceable alternative to git

also if 3d test runners with inotify and particle systems with custom shaders mean that people write more tests and see the tests fail sooner after they break shit, that could make a real difference

I'm not a he (some other folks used "they" which is fine), but this is otherwise a pretty good interpretation - it absolutely was a dig at C, not elitism.

If you're going to learn a bunch of modern tooling and start a green field project that justifies that complexity, C is generally a poor choice. Learn a modern language.

I use C somewhat regularly, including for kernel stuff, embedded, and legacy code.

Mostly, though, when I use C, it's because I'm doing a small thing that I need to be very fast, and I haven't yet bothered to get comfortable with Rust.

oops, i'm sorry i misgendered you. i think i have fixed it now, but now the editing window has closed

on your other points i mostly agree, except that if i write a library in any popular 'modern' language, it can only be called from that language, which seems like a missed opportunity

and when i went back and compared development time logs, the development speed advantages of modern languages seem to be only a factor of 2 or 3 over c, once i get beyond a few hundred lines

which i guess is why linux, firefox, cpython, gcc, apache, poppler, libvte, and so on are written in c or occasionally c++. it's not because the authors didn't know about common lisp, scheme, ml, smalltalk, and so on, or couldn't figure out how to write a garbage collector

rust and some other unpopular modern languages look like they might change that situation (nim, zig, koka, a couple of others i can't think of right now)

I'm sorry, I'm having trouble hearing over the sound of that poor load bearing "generally" creaking under the stress of the thread. ;-)

Yeah, the "C is the universal ABI" problem is... annoying. Hopefully something safer eventually replaces it in that niche.

Also, I think the main reason I use a lot of the tools I do is just "suck cost fallacy".

heh

what the fuck is it with these people that they flagged your comment upthread

For what it's worth, the examples given on that page are either domestic instances or do not, as your parent comment describes, involve low profile individuals.

Who knows man, maybe it's their mother language or something.

Oh, oops :) Ok scratch that part then.

it actually is but also the vite and vue ecosystem go back a decade in the french naming scheme

The realist in me wants to label the sort of "digital romanticism" that the main text espouses as "materialist" in nature. With that being said, before I actually read the main text, I bookmarked the page because I appreciate it as a resource.

Whose interests can be likened to the intersection between acoup.blog, cat-v and Annas-archive?