2,050 karma · joined December 29, 2022
1: C uses pointer arithmetic and any pointer can end up being nil or simply show to the wrong address.
2: Just because memory is initialized, that doesn't mean a correct value is read. Some types don't have a valid zero-state (think of Rational-Numbers or Date). Which is why you need a way to express optionality and want to throw an exception if it the empty-state is accessed.
- 1: In C (and relatives), you cannot rule out that any pointer is not-null. Simply due to pointer arithmetic.
- 2: Some values have no default-zero state.
On #2 I found the EG discussions on the Java mailing lists to be fascinating. Think of innocuous types such as "date", where a default value only causes problems. You end up with something like "1970:0:0" or "0:0:0" and it acts like a valid date, but its use is likely unintentional and leads to follow-up issues.
And once you have multi-threading involved, even a simple null-flag becomes a difficult technical challenge to implement under all conditions.
Oh would you look at that
Sense of smell strikes me as the sense with the greatest discrepency between individuals. Some are incredibly attuned, others are completely oblivious to it.
Clearly the piece is written by somebody very passionate about their own sense of smell.
I found the following to be most amusing, as the author explains the idea of “Iterations” without mentioning them by name:
> We work in 6-week cycles. Once a cycle is over, we take one or two weeks off of scheduled projects so everyone can roam independently, fix stuff up, pick up some pet projects we’ve wanted to do, and generally wind down prior to starting the next six week cycle.
> Note: These are not sprints. I despise the word sprints. Sprints and work don’t go together. This isn’t about running all out as fast as you can, it’s about working calmly, at a nice pace, and making smart calls along the way. No brute force here, no catching our collective breath at the end.
It's a garage fire-sale and China has just to sit there and wait.
Now couple the fact that most people are terrible at modeling with the fact that they tend to ignore implicit constraints… the result is something less resembling science but something resembling religion.
100% this, no doubt about it. There is a collective lack of investment into the future and I'd say we are witnessing managed decay more than anything else.
China has invested so much for so long into nuclear technology that they now have the industry which Europe once had. And to rebuild the same type of industry would take the same amount of effort that China had to do. Meanwhile, the US can't even build their own warships anymore.
Disney likes to use their past image of animation and artistry and the current way the company works couldn't stray father from it.
The Finnish EPR only took 18 years of construction. What a marvel of engineering and planning.
Contrary to capitalist believe you cannot solve all issues fast by throwing unreasonable amounts of money at it. You must built industries that synergies with each other, have deep institutional knowledge and capable workers that can deliver the tiny tolerances required to make nuclear safe and effective.
We simply do not have the (intellectual) capacity for this anymore and the effort is better spent on battery technology if Europe actually wants to have any stake in future of EV and renewables. It is significantly less capital intense too.
1: How man reactors were built in the 1970s and are nearing end-of-life?
2: How many reactors has Europe built since 2005?
3: What's the overrun time of reactors in Europe, compared to China?
The only reasonable conclusion to draw is that the industry has existed. It was world class, but the institutional knowledge to bring it back to this quality does not exist and would need to be rebuilt for the new generation of reactors. And we are not even talking Generation 4 here.
Look, I love nuclear technology. But time has moved on. The costs to rebuild this industry is astronomical and means we lose out on key-future technology like batteries.
Edit: But then there are bombs. And especially French love their nukes due national security. This is the only reason to keep pushing for nuclear, since Russia, the US and China are not gonna change direction on this either. But the very least we could do is be honest about it.
Edit 2: Changed from "World has moved on" to "time has moved on", since evidently China has invested for a good 2 decades to build their own fully functional nuclear-industry. Proving my point that it takes dedicated investment, network effects and scale to rebuild this industry. After all, they too want to mass produce nukes.
How so? I worked with Git all my professional life and I can't deny its efficacy. However, I would not call it un-improvable given all types of corner case issues I have had with it over the years.
So instead you got TeaVM which is essentially a whole JVM in WASM.
In any case, what are the proposed benefits of the "kotilization"? I tried it about a year ago but realized that it's just a syntax level-wrapper around the same old DSL underneath. In the end, I still viewed it as an ill-described DSL with a massive learning curve outside of happy-paths.
Transkribus got a new model architecture around the corner and the results look impressive. Not only for trivial cases like text, but also for table structures and layouting.
Best of all, you can train it on your own corpus of text to support obscure languages and handwriting systems.
Really looking forward to it.