awesome_dude

The magic for me, to this day in fact, is knowing that mail is essentially anyone on the internet being allowed to write to a mail servers disk.

There are rules now, but the concept is still almost intact, random people writing to the servers disk - to be later read by someone

We know that the squeaky wheel is the one that gets oiled, and we don't want the wheels to come off, so we need the wheel to squeak loud enough to be heard ;)

Dependency management is still one of the hardest jobs in systems (languages, Operating systems, distributed applications, etc) - hat's off to you and your team for the hard work keeping everything together

See also: Recursion

It could be that those HR teams are engaging in some busy work - pretending to be looking for candidates so they/their company looks busier.

Doom - anything turing complete can run doom :P

> Maybe those who participate in democracy should have to demonstrate some level educations on the topics they vote on?

This has been raised for decades, if not centuries.

The problem is that what is or isn't considered an educated view is /heavily/ dependent on... the political bent of the person(s) articulating the view, and the person(s) making the determination.

What's worse is that "fringe" views can often lead us to something that has previously been overlooked.

Finally - Australia has 100% compulsory voting - everyone must vote in elections, else receive a fine. That's intended to be sure that everyone is involved in providing their opinion on how the political body that's being voted on is an accurate reflection of the people being governed. What it doesn't do is force people to care, and a phenomena known as a "Donkey vote" occurs.

You can force people to attend classes educating them on civics, but you cannot force them to absorb, or even care, because, for a lot of people, politics is so repulsive - all they see is people squabbling about abstract ideas that the voters have next to no understanding how, or even if, it will affect them.

They should train on some of my colleagues code - they have an inate skill of turning anything simple and clear into a mindboggling mess

The Vietnamese proved that it's not the bombs you can throw at the country - it's whether you have hearts and minds on your side.

The Americans learnt from that and went to Iraq claiming to have hearts and minds on their side - but quickly discovered that, in fact, they did not (and still do not).

The Americans need to take stock of their own actions in this conflict - they put Trump in the white house, they allowed him to be influenced by other governments, they gave him the power to get involved in the conflict.

It's Israel's immediate history (as in the last year or so) that's made it an easier scapegoat.

That and the Saud's, despite an appalling human rights record, are politically difficult to blame for anything (including Bin Laden), because of their (brilliant) petro politics - playing the Eastern bloc off against the West incredibly well.

I mean - you're arguing there about a small blast radius, and I genuinely appreciate that not taking down the whole system when a bug occurs is incredibly valueable.

But, the discussion is about dynamic typing, and the fact that the function is in a state where it cannot compute because of bad input.

This might as well be a Null Pointer Exception - the function has encountered bad input, and crashes.

The argument is, that a MUCH stronger position is for all callers to be forced to provide input that cannot get the function into such a state - and a major subset of the set of all inputs possible can be eliminated with static or strict typing (I know the nomenclature gets a bit hazy here, but I hope that my intended meaning is clear)

If the callers know in advance that they cannot provide input shaped in ways that the function will not handle, then they will not call the function in those ways.

And that forces the call chain to be sure about the data transferred from top to bottom.

"I'm presuming that is the case" - Veri lami

I presumed based on your complete and utter disregard for facts, logic, and scientific data, that it was all you understood, and it appears i was correct.

Very limited guard rails (WRT cameras) - they can't be in bathrooms is about all I am aware of as a universal restriction

is_int is doing the work of a type checker?

I mean I'm not an Elixer guy (not at all) so it's a bit opaque to me how that's not an enforcement of specific types (albeit the firstname, lastname can be anything?)

Once we get into the function itself, if two incompatible types, say a string and a filehandle.. (just random attempt, you may, if you choose, point to why the two types must have some alignment), what happens - the function dies?

That's my core issue with dynamic typing, you might argue that the function's explosion has a restricted blast radius, but that's not the point, the point is that the function was called, and was unable to compute whatever, and that's a bug.

Thank you for admitting your logic has no basis in fact - which was clearly your approach when looking at your rejection of data.

Let me know when you are actually interested in science, facts, or logic.

That's weird - where can you point to me having any such trust?

Wait, aren't I the universe experiencing time as a lowly worker in cubicle 4C?

For my $0.02 - it depends where you want to put the onus

Statically typed languages put the onus on the caller to transform the data into the shape(s) required.

Dynamically typed languages put the onus on the called to handle anything.

That is, in a dynamically typed environment your function has to defensively code for every possible type it could be handed.

How do we know that your cynicism isn't funded by corporates in an attempt to undermine the real science?

So, we believe nothing?

Or, we demand evidence that what you assert about this set of statistics is accurate

It's always been that way for me... is that not enough, you want actual data?

I have a saying - if you think the data is bad because it doesn't match your narrative, go out and prove you have better data collection methods.

Anecdata is well known to be problematic.

Anecdata isn't going to get us any closer.

Statistics gathered the way the are is all we have

I do have a favourite (couple of) design pattern(s)

SOLID

and

Hexagonal Programming

But these are not GoF patterns (although Singleton's are, and I do recall how it was incredibly difficult to produce a singleton in some languages - eg. Python)

There's a lot here to unpack - and it's incredibly nuanced.

Crime in most countries is on the decline, there have been "blips" or "spikes", but the reality is that crime is decreasing.

When people talk about communities not being policed, there's also multiple things at play - partly it's perception, which is subjective, and not very reliable (back in my dayyyyyy), and partly it's about focus.

As for prosecution - most countries are realising that prosecution leading to incarceration is counter productive - as the GP touched on, prison becomes a University for criminals, as well as a record being prohibitive in getting individuals "on the right track" - that is, they become more isolated and excluded, leaving them with fewer choices when it comes to behaviour.

I'm middle aged, and for my entire life, the same drum has been beaten - crime is rising, children don't respect their elders, youth are getting away with crime, there should be harsher punishments, and so on.

But the hard facts have shown otherwise (as to /why/ crime is dropping, that's a genuine subject for debate, for example the removal of lead in petrol is now thought to be one of the key reasons that violent crime is dropping)

Yeah - the plan was to word match - having the right words in the query was the key.

It was also why (one) SEO was to fill the page in a hidden block, every word that could possibly be related (synonyms) to the page content.

On that note I am wondering how the poisoning of the content for AI is going to occur (eventually someone is going to work out how to make LLMs say "Eat at Joes - 1313 Mockingbird lane" whenever someone [else] asks some food related question)

I think that the issue here is that the definition of search/results has changed (in my mind at least they were always - what knowledge are you looking for, followed by, here are the results that carry that knowledge OR point in the right direction, but I recognise that other people will hold more strict definitions)

AI has changed how I find and synthesise information in ways Google never managed - we've always had the problem with Google that we couldn't express exactly what we were looking for - that much I think we can both agree has changed dramatically for the better with LLMs

Edit: I have always held that searching for an answer (whether it be internet or human) has always been about asking the right person, the right question, at the right time.

LLMs most certainly improve that - I don't need to know the exact technical term I am looking to solve in order to get the results I want (eg. I can ask how to "stop (a) function from running too many times" instead of the industry terms "throttling" or "debouncing")

Absolutely - Right Wing core theorem is that people work as individuals - competition brings out the best, only the fittest/fastest/strongest will survive.

OOP and GoF are not the same thing - conflating the two has been the biggest mistake everyone has made (detractors and proponents alike)