Hacker Cinema
Precious: Based on the Novel 'Push' by Sapphire
2009 · Film · 110 min
Directed by Lee Daniels
In Harlem in 1987, Claireece "Precious" Jones is a 16-year-old African American girl born into a life no one would want. She's pregnant for the second time by her absent father, and at home she must wait hand and foot on her mother, an angry woman who abuses her emotionally and physically. School is chaotic and Precious has reached the ninth grade with good marks and a secret – she can't read.
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I saw Precious in two different theaters in two very different areas around Philly (I know, but both of my dates wanted to see it separately and they were cute enough not to say 'no' to). The first was in a 'white' off the main line. The theater was really silent and the film had a very somber feeling to it. Not a good date movie in the end. The second time was in a 'black' area closer to the city. It was a much better date movie. The audience, mostly black, interacted with the film loudly and actively. The scene where the TV is dropped on Precious' head from a few stories up was not a terrible event of violence, at least not as much, in the 'black' theater. The audience was yelling at Precious to get out, to move, to not just sit there. In the 'black' theater, Precious was not a passive victim, she was responsible for herself and a real person with real action, not a vessel to represent the grinding poverty, obesity, racism, and raping of inner-city America. It was a much better movie with audience interaction, she was real, not a thing. You just have to be comfortable with that kind of theater and you have to try to participate with it too. Life is created by us all together, not 'for' us to consume.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0929632/
>The people writing parsers are the ones who need a language specification to decide what to parse,
If an old 1970s mainframe is spitting out "broken" csv files that you need to parse, a new 2005 csv formal specification trying to impose some sanity to the landscape is irrelevant. That short RFC4180 tries to constrain what is "correct". It can't enumerate all the ways csv files are "incorrect".[1] The programmer has to look at the actual bad csv files he's trying to parse. As of today, Citi bank still exports broken csv for credit-card transactions. (Citi inserts extra CRLF in between quotes which breaks MS Excel csv import.) I don't need a formal spec telling me how it's broken. It's quite obvious by simply viewing it in Notepad.
>Meanwhile, writing CSV docs is just a for loop with a printf. That's it.
No. For example, if the field has a movie title with embedded quotes[2] or maybe a measurement using a one double quote for inches (e.g. [Sony 4k TV 65"])[3], using a naïve printf loop without generating extra escape characters will break many csv parsers that try to conform to RFC4180.
[1] although someone did try to enumerate bad csv files: https://donatstudios.com/Falsehoods-Programmers-Believe-About-CSVs
[2] example movie title [Precious: Based on the Novel "Push" by Sapphire] : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precious_(film)
[3] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/17808511/properly-escape-a-double-quote-in-csv
> I could argue that those that participate in this sort of public shaming have a lack of self-respect and seek the thrill of dragging everyone else down to their level.
I think this idea is well-reflected in the movie Precious, when Precious's mother is put on the spot for abusing Precious and is forced to confront her motivations:
> Mary Lee Johnston: But, those... those things she told you I did to her? Who... who... who else was going to love me? Who else was going to touch me? Who else was going to make me feel good about myself?