Very cool. That use of attributes reminds me of HTMX.

Finally somebody's put some monster erotica in this thread.

Well, I was intrigued, so I found the cover:

a diffuse cold grey light with no character at all — Vera Mont

I tend to call that "Scottish weather" but I guess it's not unique to us.

Mind you, some parts of rural Ontario are none too shabby, either. There is a little observatory north of Wiarton, where some great summer skies are to be seen ... if you don't mind being eaten alive by mosquitoes.
We live on the east side of a highway, facing the sunset over fields - not bad - with thickly wooded low hills behind us. Not much for sunrises, but I saw a moonrise once (c1999) that almost had me calling out the fire department, it looked so much like the start of a forest fire. — Vera Mont

Both rural Ontario and the moonrise sound great. I think I might want to live in the country one day myself. If it was one of those massive orange moonrises that catches you unawares and takes your breath away, yeah, I love those. But I've seldom seen it precisely as it was rising above the horizon; usually there are things in the way.

Before, I was a little preoccupied with sunrise; this one takes place in the north-west of England - lots of hills and water, and no city lights. I wish I could go there to see what the light is actually like, but will have to settle for pictures. — Vera Mont

I can confirm. My best stargazing experience was in the Lake District, floating face-up in Derwent Water some time after midnight in the summer of 99.

Reminds me of the wanderings of my own youth, although they did not take place in Edmonton. Whether or not the experiences mean anything depends on how you fit them into some kind of story. I suppose you've begun to do that here.

Then Stanford (SEP) will give depth on anything that grabs you. — unenlightened

The SEP is excellent. Another good one, which is more approachable than the SEP, is the IEP: http://www.iep.utm.edu/

Otherwise, I enjoyed Russell's History of Western Philosophy, even though he is very much not to be trusted concerning Kant, Hegel, and Nietzsche.

Apart from that, I find I learn the most when I'm especially intrested in a particular issue, a particular idea, or in a particular philosopher.

Welcome to the forum :smile:

Larches are my favourite tree and they're magnificent in October. Almost bare now. — Vera Mont

Van Gogh was especially attracted to cypresses and olives, presumably because of their visual drama. I've thought about how and when we form these attachments to a particular tree. In my mother's case, she grew up by a river fringed with willows and spent many happy hours in their shade, before WWII altered her life and her world. I saw my first larch at 14, when we bought a little property in rural Ontario. I was captivated by their gentleness compared to the pines and spruces they resemble, their silence and their changes of colour over the season. — Vera Mont

elms — javi2541997

cherry trees — javi2541997

I'm using all this as an excuse to write about trees I like...

My favourite kind of tree is the pine. It's partly to do with the beautiful coastal pine forests of the Mediterranean, which I experienced at about ten years old on holiday in Catalonia and never forgot. Later I found similar forests along the cote d'azur, in Turkey, and other spots around the Mediterranean. In my thirties I started hiking and discovered what's left of the Caledonian forests in the Highlands of my native Scotland, and then had some special moments sheltering under umbrella pines in Rome. More recently, I had a couple of big sprawling pine trees in my garden in Spain, which harboured a small ecosystem of beasts and birds.

I also like holm oaks, maybe because I only discovered them in 2016. I had not known that evergreen oak trees existed, then in January that year I went for a hike in the mountains behind Nice and walked for hours through forests of oak trees that, to my surprise, still had their leaves. Also very common in Spain, mostly non-existent in more Northern regions.

Beech trees I like because my childhood was spent roaming beech woods. Beech forests are particularly beautiful and I think of them as quintessentially Northern European--the perfect setting for Celtic myths and other such spookiness--but europeanbeechforests.org tells me they're also very common in Italy, the Balkans, and other parts of Southern and Eastern Europe.

Other top trees: horse-chestnut, birch, and cedar (both the Cedrus of Eurasia and the western cedars of British Columbia).

Both November and December provide us with very gorgeous sunsets in the afternoons of our cities, neighbourhoods, parks, etc. — javi2541997

I think I'm more of a sunrise man :grin: But I love that VvG painting, which I hadn't seen before.

A pervasive refusal to try to learn. — fdrake

My favourite definition too. But I see it more as a lack of curiosity about the ideas and opinions of others, rather than, as you seem to describe it, a refusal to use one's learning ability to become more successful, i.e., to "excise their errors and expand their strengths across many domains they are in fact able to." Although I guess it can amount to the same thing, mutatis mutandis.

:up:

But I stand by it. Not Sagan and Coogan but Sagan and Partridge.

To be fair, Sagan and Partridge are not so different.

I've got one too: what's the significance of putting Alan Partridge alongside Einstein?

A lame question, but I'm fairly new to the forum: How do I make those arrow+name graphics that mean "view original post"? — J

Reply using the reply button at the bottom of every post, as shown below.



It only appears when you hover over the post, i.e., when you put your mouse pointer in that area of the page.

On mobile you have to click the ellipsis to see the reply button. On mobile the ellipsis is at the bottom of every post.

For quoting, see this guide:

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/13892/forum-tips-and-tricks-how-to-quote

No worries. I have the book and have read it a couple of times. I like it, but I don't know if I'll be joining in this discussion. I'll be reading along though.

I'm not angry or anything, but I really hate being misquoted. Shown below is how it went: a quotation from Russell followed by my summary of his view with regard to the directness of perception:

The real table, if there is one, is not immediately known to us at all, but must be an inference from what is immediately known. — Russell

If there are any directly perceived objects at all for Russell, they are sense data, not tables. — Jamal

Carry on :smile:

Well, I've been composing a reply but now I realize I don't want to get into this topic at the moment.

My parting shot is just to say that I think the following bit from the Russell quotation is indeed stating what you've implied it is not, namely that we are "not directly perceiving objects":

The real table, if there is one, is not immediately known to us at all, but must be an inference from what is immediately known.

If there are any directly perceived objects at all for Russell, they are sense data, not tables.

This talk of “not directly perceiving objects” makes me wonder, not for the first time, who Austin believed he was arguing against. — J

Stuff like this, perhaps:

We are all in the habit of judging as to the ‘real’ shapes of things, and we do this so unreflectingly that we come to think we actually see the real shapes. But, in fact, as we all have to learn if we try to draw, a given thing looks different in shape from every different point of view. If our table is ‘really’ rectangular, it will look, from almost all points of view, as if it had two acute angles and two obtuse angles. If opposite sides are parallel, they will look as if they converged to a point away from the spectator; if they are of equal length, they will look as if the nearer side were longer. All these things are not commonly noticed in looking at a table, because experience has taught us to construct the ‘real’ shape from the apparent shape, and the ‘real’ shape is what interests us as practical men. But the ‘real’ shape is not what we see; it is something inferred from what we see. And what we see is constantly changing in shape as we move about the room; so that here again the senses seem not to give us the truth about the table itself, but only about the appearance of the table.

Thus it becomes evident that the real table, if there is one, is not the same as what we immediately experience by sight or touch or hearing. The real table, if there is one, is not immediately known to us at all, but must be an inference from what is immediately known. Hence, two very difficult questions at once arise; namely, (1) Is there a real table at all? (2) If so, what sort of object can it be? — Russell, The Problems of Philosophy

Probably Ayer as well.

(I agree with you about Kant. I think of him as a direct realist.)

They [the "Germans"] worked to try to assimilate everybody into a single identity, but with limited success. One group they had absolutely no success with was Jews. Jews were an obstacle to their goals. In each case where Jews were persecuted, you have to sort through the events to discover why their separateness ended up making them victims this time around. — frank

You're fond of taking the high ground and lecturing people about what they have to do to know the stuff that you know, but your posts show very little evidence of having a clue about anything, to be frank.

You did say any thoughts on the state of web applications and websites are welcome. — baker

Yes, it's cool, I just wanted a bit more detail, that's all. No worries :up:

Perhaps a separate thread is in order. — baker

Could be interesting.

When you're attempting to contribute to a discussion it's better to go into more detail than "just read this book". If you're actually interested in this discussion, maybe you'll tell us about it when you've finished.

Thanks for alerting us all to its existence though.

Very good, though on the face of it it just seems like common sense. I suppose a systematic approach would be good though, so I’ll give it a tentative :up:

I’d be interested to see the details. Interested to a degree somewhere between mildly and rather.

Good point. I just had a look. Likes are quite heavily integrated but it is just about possible to remove them, it seems. I mean, it’s easy to hide them with CSS or remove the icon from the post menu, but then it takes some faffing around to remove the various references to likes elsewhere.

Anyway, I think you have to go to the user’s profile to see how many they’ve accrued, so it’s not like the number appears under their name in discussions. There are badges, which are connected with likes (at least by default), that do show in the user popup in threads, but they can be turned off.

I’ll have to read the discussions that were had here about it to remind myself of how it works on Plush and what people didn’t like about it.

So on NodeBB a lot of the customization comes through themes and plugins, which can be substituted, created, shared, etc. But the access to this customization is somewhat host-dependent (and this is especially true when it comes to hosts that do not allow command line SSH server access). If a similar thing holds with Discourse, then I would suggest double-checking that the hosting company allows that level of deeper customization (and ideally command line access). You could easily leverage the deeper level of customization if you have need in the future, given the many developers among your users. — Leontiskos

I actually don't think we'll need SSH access, and I don't want to need it. I'd prefer to separate off my coding and sysadmin type work away from TPF as much as possible (even though I was briefly toying with the idea of building my own). The host says they'll install any plugin we want, including any we write specifically for TPF. And there's an active community of Discourse coders making new plugins.

This sounds great. I am of course willing to help as I am able, although I should say that this is precisely the time of the year that gets busy for me. — Leontiskos

Thanks, your guidance will be valuable since you have all this forum configuration experience, but I won't burden you too much. :smile:

@Michael @Leontiskos

As of today I’ve got Discourse running now on a host that does managed Discourse hosting. Some people on meta.discourse.org say they’re very reliable. I think this is the way to go. I don’t want to deal with hosting. These folks take care of backups, software updates, and all the rest, while I have the power and control of the Discourse admin (e.g.,

Can I download my data?
Yes. You own your own data. A copy of your files (including uploads and avatars) and databases (full dumps) can be downloaded from the Backups menu of the Discourse admin panel at any time.

) and members get most of the features they've been asking for for years.

I actually set one up there a few years ago and didn’t pursue it just because I wasn’t in the mood or I didn’t want to face the data issue. This time I hope to see it through, some time in the next weeks or months. In the meanwhile I’ll invite testers once I’ve fine-tuned it (this week probably but I don’t know when I’ll get around to it).

Plush seems like it's working pretty well. I really like the feature where I can click on the title bar and return to the post I just quoted. My concern is that Plush seems near the end of its lifecycle. If you look at the second half of my post <here>, you can see a number of the things Plush hasn't managed, despite requests. Most of that stuff has been standard for years now, along with ignore lists and strong moderation tools. If Plush won't budge on those things, then I have to wonder if they are in maintenance mode, nearing their expiration date. NodeBB and Discourse don't show evidence of this lifecycle issue. — Leontiskos

Yep, and Discourse would take care of most of the feature requests, I’m guessing?

I think your experience is not normal because your moderation is not normal. I think that's why your forum is so much better than the alternatives: you have superior moderation and your moderators have a good grasp of philosophy. — Leontiskos

Glad you think so :smile:

P.S. One significant feature that NodeBB hasn't yet managed is composer keyboard shortcuts. For example, Ctrl-i won't give you italics. — Leontiskos

It's kind of a small thing, but I use that all the time, including here. Of course, when using Markdown you don't need it so much because it's so easy to just type the markup.

Ah.

Is this maybe the reason why some sites are quite slow in loading? I guess they must be the ones with a huge content. Do you know any of them --that use this method-- so I can check if this is true? — Alkis Piskas

If you mean SPAs in general: Gmail, Airbnb, Rome2Rio, Netflix.

If you mean the ones that load everything up-front, rather than those that use code splitting, I’m not sure. It can be hard to tell. I think it was the normal way around 5-10 years ago.

I've got a bug related to sessions and it's so hard to find out what's going on there! — flannel jesus

I feel your pain.

I like magic most when there's a clear way to demystify what's actually happening underneath the hood. The biggest problem with magic that you can't demystify is that it's hard to predict what other kinds of things you can and can't do with it, you know? — flannel jesus

:up:

There comes a point sometimes when the magic just gets in the way. But all the tools we use have some level of hidden magic (unless, I don't know, you're doing assembly or machine code), so it's about finding the right level. In my world the framework that's famous for hidden magic is Rails, whose principle is "convention over configuration". On the other side, the Python folks say "explicit is better than implicit." The two are definitely in conflict.

Java and Python are general purpose languages that can do anything, and on the other side you have PHP and JavaScript, which are just scripting languages

I get what you mean, but I wouldn’t classify them this way. — Bob Ross

Maybe I wasn't clear. If you look at the context of that quote, you'll see I did not wholly endorse that classification but offered it as an equally legitimate alternative to yours, in that it is one that is often used. Obviously I'm aware that Java and Python are fundamentally different.

It is not that I don’t like Python, but, rather, I don’t think it is a good server-side language for web development — Bob Ross

But that's what Django is, so like I say, there isn't much point.

Otherwise :cool:

So, Svelte is obviously doing a lot more magic than React, and I guess is more opinionated. Opinionated magic in frameworks has its pros and cons.

Maybe. Looks interesting...

Well sure, but what is an email web client but a collection of notes, albeit most sent by others and to and fro. If you do anything but opening a note or adding to it (responding to an e-mail) say, changing account settings it does a full redirect to a different URL. — Outlander

Gmail settings will not load a new page. Google account settings will take you to an entirely different website. Otherwise, I'm not sure what you mean; there's a lot of functionality in Gmail. I suspect the kind of example you're looking for is a traditional website model, but rendered as an SPA. Something like https://nextjs.org/docs is a good example. Not sure how it works over bad internet though.

Thanks FJ, so far there is no project but it’s good to know there are people here to help :up:

https://mail.google.com/ — Jamal

Gmail slack Trello Netflix and grammarly — flannel jesus

I was just thinking about the sites and applications I use, and thought of some more: Rome2Rio, Google Maps, Airbnb (edit: just to be clear, I mean the browser applications/websites, not the phone apps).

https://mail.google.com/

SPAs still use changing URLs, which in this context are called routes, corresponding to route handlers in the JavaScript. The page itself is not loaded.

:up: Yep, I was just describing an aspect of SPAs as commonly conceived. I said "often", probably going for "hitherto".

I abhorred these things when they first came out. If your internet is not good or perhaps is throttled due to reaching an allotted usage level, nothing would ever load and worse never told you it didn't. They seemed to have improved it by forcing a manual redirect/better fail-safes in more robust frameworks but there was nothing like clicking a link or performing an action and the browser itself telling you "hey it failed" right when it did so you knew to refresh or try again later. Just my 2 cents. — Outlander

Yep, although as you say, frameworks are dealing with that now, but I think it still partly depends on the willingness of developers to provide for it, as with accessibility more generally.

From my experience, I have seen python being used as a server-side language only relatively recently (but perhaps I just haven’t been around the right groups of people who love Python). Originally, people (as far as I know) used Java, C#, and PHP. If someone was running a website, it was most likely PHP or Java (and not Python). If python was used for web servers before PHP/Java (like Django) in a stable fashion, then I am simply unaware of it and will have to read up on that. — Bob Ross

Just to set the record straight...

There were three things you said or implied that I took objection to: (1) that Python is a new language or at least a new language for web development, (2) that Python and/or Python frameworks have not been properly tested and are unstable or insecure, and (3) that PHP belongs in the same language ballpark as Java.

What I did not claim is that Python was used in web development before PHP was; as far as I know the Django guys were the first to use it to build websites. But twenty years (since Django was released) is a decent length of time, and its record is very good. And yes, PHP has always been more popular as a way of building websites.

Regarding (3), you could just as easily classify things like this: Java and Python are general purpose languages that can do anything, and on the other side you have PHP and JavaScript, which are just scripting languages. (But I'm not making value judgements here, just illustrating different ways of looking at it)

I will have to checkout Django sometime though. Is it minimalistic or bloated? — Bob Ross

It's a difficult question to answer without knowing what you mean, but depending on which way you look at it, it's both. Flask, on the other hand, is certainly minimalist. But Django adheres strongly to conventions and paradigms, such as DRY, and the separation of concerns of MVC (although they use different nomenclature and slightly different structure, namely model-view-template), so it's a good coding experience. Things never got messy for me in Django, as they definitely did when I was building in JavaScript frameworks.

But since you don't like Python, there's little point in wasting your time on it. And PHP these days seems to be significantly faster than Python (that's what they say at least, though whether this results in faster websites and web applications is another matter). So I say, enjoy your PHP :cool:

NodeBB was originally built with MongoDB, but it runs on Postgres just fine. That's what I deployed it on. I think that compatibility was added sometime in v2. — Leontiskos

Great, I didn't realize.

The simple answer is that I wanted pagination, even prescinding from its SEO favorability. Infinite scroll on a long-form philosophy forum didn't seem right to me. NodeBB offers both, and individual users can even change the setting on the client side. So I'm not a great person to ask about Discourse, as I never installed it. I have it on good authority that it is a bit harder to install and consumes more resources, but those aren't deal breakers. Both platforms are robust, with more to offer than Plush. Granted, I have come to appreciate the simplicity and distraction-less nature of Plush. — Leontiskos

Aside from wanting to control the data and code, I'd actually be perfectly satisfied with the way Plush works with just a few changes, like better tools for moderation, "zen mode" post composing, Markdown support, dark mode, and ignore lists. (I know that for dark mode I could just use Stylebot as you suggest, but this is about built-in functionality; as admin I need to see what most people see).

I had that idea until I installed Misago and started digging into the Github history. There are many more features than I had anticipated, especially when it comes to security, moderation, IP tracking, etc.—but I think ChatGPT has already given you a good sense of what is involved. — Leontiskos

I know what you mean. At first when you think of how to build a forum it seems easy, but there's a lot more to it.

Also, after I joined I realized more concretely that TPF has one thing no other philosophy forum has, and that no forum software can create: a healthy community of users. Without that, it's all just window dressing. — Leontiskos

This is what makes a decision to move to another platform a big and difficult one. Incidentally, it always sounds odd to me when I see people saying that discussion forums are dead (because Reddit, social media, and Discord). I guess my experience is not normal.

Whatever you decide, I think a forum software would benefit from having a philosophical client. The things you guys have suggested and requested from Plush seem spot-on, and are much more thoughtful than the short-sighted requests I have seen from the business world. — Leontiskos

:up:

Although the Plush folks assure me that PlushForums will be maintained for the foreseeable future, they don't seem very interested in adding new features, perhaps because they've been putting most of their efforts into their new platform https://insta.forum/ (totally moving away from long-form, so not suitable for us).