amval

I am myself an immigrant to this country, one that has had itequally easy, if not more.

Lately, or perhaps for the last couple of years, I've struggled with negative feelings about the country. I do not like the direction things are moving politically and economically, nor how germans talk about politics, and the biggest reason to want to be in Germany is the very high living conditions one can have here. Culturally, it is hard not feel dettached when Germans themselves seem uninterested in cultural aspects that are normally a reason to want to learn a language (literature, films, etc). I can speak German, but maintaining it or improving it feels more like a chore than something exciting.

Anyway, this was a nice, positive read, and it made me happy to read it. It is often easier to focus on the negative aspects of things, while taking for granted the positive ones. Germany has a lot of good things going for it, and the power to be a better version of itself. A position lots of countries would wish they could be in. Sadly, this does not seem clear to the German political class.

I think the article is pretty fair at presenting GingerBill's legitimate grievances, Wikipedia shortcomings, acknowledging that GingerBill can be constructive and, at the same time, recognizing that the current interactions are coloured by his particular ideological grievances.

It is only at the end of a very long, well-argued article that he is very critical of GingerBill's positions. I don't think I agree that calling someone out on their contradictions or political opinions constitute "stalking".

What a fantastic article. I could not care less about the actual topic, but in these times of literacy scarcity, it is refreshing to see someone actually being able to read through sub-text and present their views in a well-reasoned manner.

Unsurprisingly, this seems to make quite some people angry.

I don't think I understand your point, beyond downplaying the severity of current events.

You don't think that the fact that Ellison is a staunch defender of regimes that disregard the international order in favour of military might is relevant to the fact that is also advocating for building a surveillance state?

In case you don't, to me it's painfully clear that these are just different aspects of the move towards more authoritarian forms of government. You CANNOT support a genocide and expect that this will not have an effect on democracy.

EDIT: Also note that I am trying to take your comments on good faith, but characterising support for genocide as "a foreign policy disagreement" feels a bit like an understatement.

Well, yes, it would be better if he didn't amplify propaganda for the country that is committing a genocide and would raise awareness for the victims.

Is this not self-evident?

> I was active in the Python community in the 200x timeframe, and I daresay the common consensus is that language didn't matter and a sufficiently smart compiler/JIT/whatever would eventually make dynamic scripting languages as fast as C, so there was no reason to learn static languages rather than just waiting for this to happen.

To be very pedantic, the problem is not that these are dynamic languages _per se_, but that they were designed with semantics unconcerned with performance. As such, retrofitting performance can be extremely challenging.

As a counterexample of fast and dynamic: https://julialang.org/ (of course, you pay the prize in other places)

I agree with your comment overall, though.

Even funnier: https://github.com/tensorflow/swift/blob/main/docs/WhySwiftF...

> Julia: Julia is another great language with an open and active community. They are currently investing in machine learning techniques, and even have good interoperability with Python APIs.

The second part of the sentence is very important ;)

"... but would struggle with different looking syntax"

It marketed itself explicitly as a "Python superset", which could allow Python programmers to avoid learning a second language and write performant code.

I'd argue that I am not sure what kind of Python programmer is capable of learning things like comptime, borrow checking, generics but would struggle with different looking syntax. So to me this seemed like a deliberate misrepresentation of the actual challenges to generate hype and marketing.

Which fair enough, I suppose this is how things work. But it should be _fair_ to point out the obvious too.

For a language that announced itself (and raised a lot of money on the premise of) claiming to be "a Python superset", this does not sound like a huge achievement.

In all fairness, their website now reads: "Mojo is a pythonic language for blazing-fast CPU+GPU execution without CUDA. Optionally use it with MAX for insanely fast AI inference."

So I suppose now is just a compiled language with superficially similar syntax and completely different semantics to Python?

Ah, yes. The dubious and evil Perro Sánchez.

Apparently this spans more countries? Very strange. Possibly a cyberattack or sabotage?

Growing up in Spain I've never experienced anything like this (not there at the moment, but friends have told me over WhatsApp).

Big companies tend to develop cult dynamics. This is not an exaggeration, but a consequence of how humans tend to operate in large amounts. And I'd wager that in the case of Silicon Valley tech companies, this is also something that they embrace and nurture. I don't think this is a controversial take at all, and rather obvious.

She was probably not "afraid of being let go" (fired), but had convinced herself that it was of the utmost importance to have this level of committment. The book probably reads similar to those books of someone who leaves their church or cult.

That's mostly because Julia questions get answered on its Discourse or Slack. The sharp decline is due to an automatic cross-post bot that stopped working.

No one bothered fixing it, in great part due to Discourse being the main place of discussion, as far as I know.

I think it ultimately is a sign of the need for better languages. Of course, there are always engineering compromises. But I think a better world is possible, in which we don't have massive software projects written in JavaScript or Python.

What do you mean, exactly?

Might depend on where you are in Spain. Having lived in both, I'd take Spain over Germany any day of the week.

It kind of reads like satire, to be honest.

Absolutely agree. We changed on my team to primarily use Macbooks. Originally just to make easier testing on Safari. Later, just because the hardware is pretty nice.

It has been a pretty frustrating experience at times. Most of the time is _fine_, but the problems after updates, Docker bugs, certain libraries that we cannot install..

On the other hand, it was never perfect with Linux either. But that was expected. And I can say that macOS does not deserbe the reputation it has.

Overall, kind of a mixed bag. There are some very nice aspects to both he hardware and software, but some that are jarring and make me thing "this is not really meant for professional users". Like the atrocious window management (that admittedly can bve fixed with a couple free applicaitons).

I thought he maybe meant that, but since LLMs were explicitly mentioned I wasn't sure if image generation was part of this rant.

I don't know, I don't really object to the arguments themselves, just how poorly written this piece was.

I fully agree with the sentiment, but I am bit... confused? with the section that raises possible concerns about the negatives of LLMs. In particular the "women" mention, without any ellaboration.

Am I missing something? It feels pretty lazy. Like an enumeration of things we are supposed to care about, rather than an effort to build a solid argumentation against Sam Altman's fundraising effort.

And I have other issues with how these potential problems are framed, as if something that happens kind of organically and not a symptom of an increasingly plutocratic system. But admittedly maybe that's me being uncharitable to the author.

Why do you say that, for those not familiar with it?

EDIT: And the article seems unaccesible to me right now.

To sell supplements, as evidenced by the ridiculously expensive olive oil that he sells on his website and the new line-up of upcoming supplements.

There is no way for regular people to "follow his protocol". But you can have shots of expensive olive oil and reap most of the benefits!

I encourage everyone to ignore Bryan Johnson, whose not-so-secret goal is to sell supplements to gullible people and has nothing to do with actual science.

No, that wouldn't make any sense. I would count them as anarchists.

There are plenty of things I dislike that are not fascism: soup as a main course, jogging, different flavours of authoritarian regimes.

Where I live no one pretends "libertarianism" is a real ideology. This has some upsides. For example, we can call a spade a spade. This doesn't, however, stop Peter Thiel's company from receiving enormous sums of money from the government to set up illegal, massive surveillance operations over its citizens.

How should we call those who use their massive wealth to undermine democracy and relax legislation so they can do as they please, if not fascists? Is "libertarian" already clear enough of a term?

How many calories do you eat per day? And how many meals?

My problem is not with Julia, my problem is with the Python ecosystem and its dependency management. Not sure how you can read what I wrote and reach that conclusion.

I run in production several Julia projects and I honestly can't say I know what you are referring to.

I do use some libraries through PyCall. This is a relatively frequent source of trouble, with libraries breaking because of 3rd party dependencies, behaviour changing, or even somehow installation suddenly stops working. This all happens in the python side, to the point that I am currently replacing all the libraries even if it means porting some of them or even a loss of functionality.