atq2119

Since you didn't get a real answer yet: Absolutely. For example, MIT is an OSI license but it's not Free Software.

Not at all. There are cultural expectations within each field of what kind of questions students expect to be on a test. If those expectations are violated by the test, students will reasonably be distracted, second-guess themselves, etc.

Of course. As usual, you tend to not hear about it when a system we rely on works well.

> Wait, you're literally advocating for handicapping everyone because some people can't handle the tools as well as others.

No, they're arguing on the grounds that the tools are detrimental to the overwhelming majority in a way that also ends up being detrimental to the disciplined minority!

I'm not sure I agree, but either way you aren't properly engaging their actual argument.

> I am honestly surprised all the time that a lot of US-Americans who are so freedom-loving and distrust the government concerning the restrictions of civil rights are not in love of cash

I suspect it's a combination of factors, one of them being that US cash has absolutely awful usability compared to the Euro.

Let's not give up just like that.

The rule of law is one of the greatest achievements of western society and a major reason for the west's global dominance.

True, it was always imperfect due to the realpolitik of power. But that doesn't change the fact that the very idea of rule of law is in opposition to rule of power.

From personal experience, it's definitely possible to earn more than 2x that in total compensation before taxes as an individual contributor in Europe. Maybe not all of Eastern Europe, but I can't really speak to that.

In what world does holding the user's private data for 30 days make sense for a spell checker? Even sending the data at all is sad. We've had offline spell checking for decades.

What's actually weird is how society normalized binding contracts that are far too long to be reasonably read by the people they are supposed to be binding to.

A well functioning legal system would throw out everything in those contracts on that basis alone.

To be fair, keeping your own resources in the ground as long as possible is often the strategically right move if your time horizon is long enough. It means they will still be there when other world regions run out.

I like your optimism that a decent end state can be reached at all.

There are so many ideas that sound good on paper but are bad in practice, and that happen to be convenient for the goals of unscrupulous powerful people.

The notion that society as a whole will at some point stop falling for such ideas seems very optimistic to me.

> The book [...] didn’t

You mean the book that has a 40(?)-page chapter in which characters you never hear from before or afterwards describe what's happening in their home lands didn't go into the day-to-day? :)

Lord of the Rings (the book) is obsessed with this kind of detail to the point that many people find it difficult to read.

I would go even further and call it the responsibility of high status to ask such questions.

As a high status person, you have an outsized influence on culture whether you like it or not, and an environment in which this kind of question can be asked ultimately leads to better outcomes.

That bit does seem a bit whiney. AMD's latest offerings are quite good, certainly better value for money. Why not buy that? The only shame is that they don't sell anything as massive as Nvidia's high end.

Sure, but we were talking about the perspective of software developers. The hardware designers take on complexity so that the software developer's work can be simpler.

CPUs are still a great example for how caching simplifies things.

There's a long history in computer architecture of cores and accelerators that don't have a cache but instead rely on explicitly programmed local scratchpads. They are universally more difficult to program than general purpose CPUs because of that.

More likely it's because the scene they're using is completely unrepresentative of what people are interested in: almost no triangles, primarily procedural nodes (for spheres), and in general a fairly simple scene.

In terms of how its business works, Apple is primarily a fashion company.

A deeply technical one, yes, but that's not what drives their decision making.

I'm certain that web style scaling is what the vast majority of desktop users actually want from fractional desktop scaling.

Thinking that two finger zooming style scaling is the goal is probably the result of misguided design-centric thinking instead of user-centric thinking.

Not to mention that only a small fraction of the world uses inches...

Thank you for that. The excellent fractional scaling and multi-monitor support is why I finally switched back to KDE full time (after first switching away during the KDE 3 to 4 mess).

That's a pretty snarky and unhelpful approach to the conversation.

That said, I'm also a bit surprised to see somebody discuss modular inverses without mentioning the extended euclidean algorithm, which is a more elementary solution.

While you're likely right in describing the status quo, it's unfortunate that it has come to that.

The one thing that's really objectionable in that section is the last part about people who attack or flame without apparent reason. Such people should be called out by other community members in the same way ESR describes for newcomers in the first part of the section.

It's fascinating how differently people's brains work.

Autocomplete is a total focus destroyer for me when it comes to text, e.g. when writing a design document. When I'm editing code, it sometimes trips me up (hitting tab to indent but end up accepting a suggestion instead), but without destroying my focus.

I believe your reported experience, but mine (and presumably many others') is different.

Many inventions simply happen when the environment is ready for them, e.g. manufacturing techniques have advanced to the point where something is possible.

That's the thing about sci-fi: almost all good sci-fi stories are really sci-fi + X, where X is some other genre. Often adventure or mystery, sometimes horror, and in this case political thriller / spy story.

That's a bold statement, considering that many of the largest C++ code bases - including at least one of the few remaining C++ compilers! - don't use exceptions.

This makes sense for objects that can enter an equivalent invalid state after successful construction as the result of a method call (e.g. a file or stream).

For objects that don't have that property, you're just exchanging one kind of badness in the design for a different but ultimately equivalent badness.

To be fair, there's a reason for the pattern with init methods you're describing.

C++ constructors can't return values. If construction is fallible, the only way to communicate the error is via C++ exceptions. If you're in a code base that embraces exceptions, that's fine. But (C++) exceptions kind of suck, so many code bases don't, and then you have to find some alternatives.

Over the years, I've increasingly adopted a pattern where the constructor is private in this case and the object construction can be done with static methods - which is a bit more like Rust, actually.

If you go the batching route, bisection on failure makes it more like O(log(1/commit rate)).