delegate

It's a matter of habit. Once you get used to it, you quickly know how or why it happens and where (especially when you follow the correct workflow, see below). Modern editors/IDEs help a lot with the typos and wrong number of args.

Some advice I would give myself when I started learning Clojure:

Think not in types, but in data. It's a different model that requires an 'aha' moment, but it's revelatory when you do get it.

If you come from an OO language, think not in objects (Elephant), but in information about objects (elephant's record, a map).

Clojure is best served REPL driven.

You can technically compile and execute, but this is not how the language shows its power. Here's how I use it:

I evaluate code in the REPL as I write it, reload definition on every change. Inside a `comment` block, I call the function I'm writing with the required arguments. I can quickly test how my function behaves in corner-cases. You then construct another function, which calls the first. You evaluate/execute the function as you write it.

So your program keeps growing, while you keep running/changing individual parts of it.

Once you get the hang of immutability and working with maps/collections, this process becomes very engaging because of the short feedback loop between thought and result.

First question: what kind of weapons will people build using this ?

There was a time, not so long ago, when you could 'fix' the things that didn't work in the world by building a new app or website. This is how airbnb came about.

Sadly, that is a lot harder now, because all the apps have already been built and they're huge and have all the users. And now millions of people have to deal with the side effects or poorly built or abusive online services which are too big to disrupt or change. Policies upon policies, which, when applied to particular cases mean 'you gave us your money, now it's ours and you get nothing in return and we'll get away with it'.

I think time is ripe for new disruptions.

Consider that luck starts at birth. The genes you get, the health, the level of energy, stubbornness, personality, who you meet in life, etc .. these are all dice rolls.

It does take skill to build something, but having the ability to learn that skill is a 'chance', which is in the realm of luck.

Neither being lucky nor skilled is enough for success, it's the combination of both. And here I leave 'success' as loosely defined.

You can't get lucky at the lottery unless you participate in it.

Skill is due to luck and subsequent luck in some area is due to skill.

I just mentioned above - luck comes first, skill is the ability to get lucky at something.

It is the people, not the technology.

It is about money and getting rich.

Whichever problem a certain blockchain is supposed the solve, the main reason for its existence is that the people who create it want to get rich, fabulously rich and fast.

Besides getting rich, majority of these projects are solutions to non-existent or solved problems, which use a very complicated distributed immutable database that very few investors actually understand.

If it's complicated and convoluted, then it must be the future.

Fabulously rich is hypnotising and it can easily become the most important thing in someone's life.

They're betting a lot on being right.

Others, who see the side effects of these people's mission in life, try to wake them up from this hypnosis, but that's impossible.

And so far, they have been right and many got rich.

But I have yet to see a project that solved a real problem (besides dark markets and the ones that enable crypto)

The side effects are not negligible though, they really affect others - scams, ransomware, energy use, etc ..

So it's going to stay polarized.

I think the article should be titled 'JVM isn't for me'.

According to the article, the author moved to Janet, because it is Clojure-like without the JVM overhead.

Oh you're right, having coffee at the terrace while typing on the phone, I meant 'pure' functions which take and return immutable data structures.

I don't speak Rust well, but I can share my perspective from Clojure, where I tend to think in data. A program is a sequence of immutable functions taking input from the world and reducing that to instructions to mutate the world (aka side effects). The world here can also be some place that stores state. Ideally mutation is the last step of the pipeline, which takes the instructions and produces the side effects.

Or simply

input -> fn1 -> fn2 -> fnn -> mutate!

Where 'fn' are all immutable.

The Internet was totally open for Russians until 2 weeks ago.

Yet that did not stop the war, even after months of warnings and pleas from the entire world. People of Russia did not try to stop Putin from the inside, too few went to the streets to prevent the war from starting. They did not do enough to protest against the illegal annexation of Crimea and the creation of the 'republics' in 2014.

Most services were up until the day the war started, people could share information freely, they could use the word 'war' and 'peace' without risk of being arrested. Yet that did not help.

In fact, the power in Russia is known to exploit the unlimited access to world Internet to spread out misinformation, get involved in hacking political campaigns in other countries, kremlin bots, ransomware gangs, etc.

Due to this war, Russians are no longer considered trustworthy partners in politics, business, sports, science, arts, etc, so companies choose not to be associated with Russia because that hurts their business in other countries around the world.

I mean, to the world Putin is Hitler now. Would you agree to Hitler keeping all his international privileges while he was invading other countries ?

Businesses have to do what they have to do. Sadly that means that those 22% percent of Russians who oppose the war will have to endure the full impact of the world's emotional reaction to what the majority of Russians allowed to happen (and currently support).

It's nice that there are terms for any combination of words out there. But to get to the real point it's necessary to cut through the bs (reduce semantic complexity) and just say it like it is.

Yes, men protect their women and children during wars. Sounds raw and simple, but that is the truth. I advice you to think about it.

Photos of queues in shops and empty shelves is the only resistance left. Any non-official information about the war is punishable with 15 years in prison camps.

What's happening in Ukraine is a tragedy, but what's happening in Russia as a result of sanctions is quite tragic in itself.

Currency is in free fall, hundreds of companies closed shops and offices, many will lose their jobs, etc.

This will hit marriages and relationships. Men become depressed and paralyzed when they lose their incomes. So just like in the 90s, the economic collapse will hit women of Russia hard.

The smartest and most beautiful women - aka the ones used to live in abundance who got all the attention, etc will try to leave the country. 'Russian' is now quite a bad word for anyone in Europe, so women will have a hard time finding and maintaining European men (of course any men will take a beautiful woman for sex, but providing for her long term is another thing).

They say war is men protecting their women and children from the invading men. But in this situation there will be Russian women who leave their men for foreign men.

As much as I disagree with Russia's actions and even if the majority of Russians support the war (are afraid of the criminals running the country), I still feel sad for what these families are about to experience this year.

I think you're not getting the full picture. A dictator with thousands of nukes has gone rogue, saying and doing crazy things, eg. is unpredictable. Capitalism works in peaceful times, it stops when tanks are rolling by.

Genuine question: Who posts this content ? Are there really that many people who do this ? Can't they be banned on first offense ?

Of course. And now that we've done that, it's time to use all those resources and knowledge and rethink the core algorithms of society.

That is, if we want a chance to bring back the beautiful world we've inherited intact from so many generations of ancestors. My daughter can only see half of what I saw when I grew up, maybe less. There is no horizon without smoke, mountain snow contains ash and there are few bird that sing in the forests because insects are nowhere to be found. Eyelashes or plane tickets, those things cannot be compared to what we're losing in the process.

No amount of micro optimization is going to stop this train, we have to look at the algorithms.

Advertising is not a 'foreign exchange for attention currency' (metaphor used by author).

On average, it's manipulation, brainwashing and commodification of well told lies. But that isn't the real problem - the real problem with advertising is that it works.

Why is that a problem ?

Because advertising is manufactured demand.

Last time I looked at the 'Law of Supply and Demand' on Wikipedia some time ago, the word 'advertising' appeared 0 times in there. I've just checked, the word is there 1 time as the 6th item in a list. I think it deserves way more attention (pun intended) in the economic theory.

Just look at that simple chart. A positive shift in demand results in an increase in price and quantity sold of the product.

In other words, you can make people consume considerably more stuff they don't want by constantly nagging them with ads.

Given that 'stuff' are nature converted into object we temporarily use and discard, the result of this macroeconomic ideology - destruction of nature and change of climate in half a century.

We all know the names of the big tech companies who are exceedingly efficient at pushing up the global demand curve.

This business model really needs to stop.

For context, I've been an early bitcoin core contributor and paid 7.5 btc for this old laptop. In all fairness, I've only profited from btc and am still invested, but it doesn't change the conclusions I've had to accept.

The trillion dollars is a dream, it's not real.. Fugazzi.

Once the price starts falling, the scared 'investors' will get rid of it at any price to reduce loss. The network won't handle the load, so the price will drop even more. It happened before with BTC, where the 'billions' evaporated in hours, it will happen to the 'trillions'.

Web3 is 'the future' if you're invested in crypto.

If you're not (or have been and got out), then it's nothing but the delusion of a sect of believers who want to wish it into existence.

Being invested fundamentally changes the way people think and allows them to come up with any justification for their investment. It's not just crypto, but pretty much everything else where people expect easy returns at the expense of other people, nature, other countries, the future, etc.

There is nothing special or magical about this technology. Just because it uses an immutable data structure called 'block chain' and cryptographic hashes left and right, doesn't automatically make it useful or needed. In fact, the opposite is true due to the POW being a race to burn as much (mostly) coal for the benefit of very few.

The fact that the vast majority of crypto enthusiasts, who have absolutely no idea how it works and what it represents, decided to part with their fiat in the hope that money grows on Merkle trees and pushed the price to astronomical levels does not validate the technology itself, but rather is an example of human psychology and greed at work.

I hope the whole crypto delusion crumbles as quickly as possible before it takes down the whole world economy with it. Or maybe that is exactly what must happen so that the world wakes up to reality. Maybe that is the whole point of it.

Yeah, I have done it too.

I intended to delete a folder, but somehow `/` sneaked in and I pressed Enter...

I also think my PC back then looked exactly like the one in the picture from the article :)

I've been working on 2. since January.

All your photos, chats, e-mails, messages, health data (eventually all your data) into a single database, which can be distributed onto multiple removable 'volumes' (disks).

Plug in the volume and the db index is seamlessly merged and queries run on all the connected volumes. No files. No cloud. Data on your disks only.

There are processing nodes that run in the background indexing the content, finding people and locations in the pictures, chats.

It allows you to build up a fully search-able archive of all your data, which you can physically keep in a locker or safe.

But also, if you store and keep all your data on disks that you control, then many of the services that we use could just run as local apps on your server, reading and writing from your archive via an API.

Social apps are just two people's archives sharing content between each other, no 3rd party services required.

I worked a lot on it until about 1.5 months ago, when I got discouraged by how hard and big this project is. Breaking up with my girlfriend around that time did not help either.

But now I see you mention it and it's kind of inspiring, since I've been doing a lot of thinking and gathering strength for another crack at getting a prototype out.

It would be interesting to see what other people have been thinking/doing in this area.

But since there's at least one person who wants it, I might actually jump back to work ;) Thank you !

Climate impact is a bit like this: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=czLIj-4suOk

To be pedantic, the world is not mutable, rather, it is a process undergoing a continuous transformation.

Also, machines deal with data - which is encoded information about the world.

So when we say that a thing 'changes' in the world, what we're actually saying is that at time T, something happens to the world and from then on, the data we read back is different.

'Something happened' is new information which is added on top of the state of the world at time T-1.

Eg. the user e-mail does not 'change' to be come X, but rather, it used to be Y, then the user changed it to X on 1st of May.

So we can generalize that the world is a function `f` of some state combined with extra data of what happened at time T, giving us the state at T.

I look at it as an intersection between the feature sets of Common Lisp, Clojure, Scheme, etc. In other words - the most basic features of these languages that are common - S-expressions, data is code is data, REPL-driven development, etc

Given that it's a 'new paradigm' and enhances 'intuition', it's a bit hard to show simple examples which demonstrate that. You'll have to put in the work.

Will you be able to understand how to play the guitar if I show you a passage from a song ? You can play it with any other instrument, so it still won't be motivating enough for you to put in the time and effort required to learn it.

If I were to take you to a Led Zeppelin concert to see Jimmy Page playing, that still might not be motivation enough for you to pick up the guitar, but you'll be able to better understand what it can do to people :).

Back to LISP - it's a tool. The difference between other tools, is that you can program it too. The power lies in its simplicity and your ability to build programs iteratively while running them.

Clojure's power is not in its ability to be fast.

Immutability has a price and it's a price we're consciously paying. JVM also has a performance cost, but it's well worth paying due to the wins of running on a virtual machine.

For most boiler-plate tasks, especially where I/O is involved, Clojure is fast enough (eg. handling HTTP requests or talking to a database).

The true power of Clojure, in my opinion, is in how it allows you to think about problems; that machines produce side effects by interpreting a data structure, that the program is one transformation of the input data structure to the target data structure for the desired side effect. You don't think in terms of imaginary objects 'doing' things, you think about the input data structure and how the output data structure should look like, such that if fed to a library function, the desired side effect will occur (eg. the text will be printed or the robot arm will rise).

This mode of thinking about problems is closer to how machines actually work on a higher level and amusingly, 'close to the metal' C++, offers abstractions which take the writer into a fairy tale of class hierarchies, methods that 'do' things to other things, inserting, deleting, mutating everything all over the place. Because that's efficient and fast (and dangerous). But it's also focused a lot on telling the machine 'how' to run; while coincidentally making it do 'what' you want it to do. As a wizard who can put that orchestra with swords and knifes in motion without too much blood spilling on the floors, you can't but feel proud to have achieved it.

Data in -> data out. That's Clojure's way of thinking.

It's a lot simpler way of looking at the problem and maybe makes the `->` feel a bit insignificant and maybe not that important in most cases, as long as it produces the correct output.

The biggest performance hit will be choosing the wrong data structure for solving the problem in a functional way. If that's done correctly, Clojure does offer some tools for squeezing a bit more out of performance critical pieces of code (the articles covers some). Those should be a couple of functions in all your code base; for the boilerplate and domain logic or code involving non realtime I/O, it doesn't matter that much.

If performance is a big concern and you end up writing imperative code in Clojure, I think you'll be better off writing the bits in Java or choose a different language, which is better designed for that purpose.

Worth noting that us humans are also Universe. So it hasn't only tried all laws of physics, it has written an article which it reads and comments on. Remembering that we're Universe observing itself, mathematics not only formulates the laws of 'physics' - it's Universe understanding and predicting itself.

This is not reinvention of PHP as some are commenting. In fact I think this is extremely cool.

If I understand it correctly, it allows you to achieve reactive data flow in a single page app without any boilerplate.

Meaning - you update the database on the server and all the relevant UI(s) will automatically receive the updated data and re-render only the parts of the UI that display that data.

This would require a ton of PHP and Javascript dealing with networking, websockets, routing, serializing data and so on.

Haven't tried it yet, but very curious to see if it works.

> Business create jobs, wealth, improve our lifestyles, and grow our economy.

None of these good things are beneficial to the environment or climate. 'Economic activity' done by businesses is the main driver of climate change.

Thank you for the work, I've read a couple of chapters and skimmed through a couple more, I will return to continue it as it has many interesting concepts.

Some distinctions about Data which are not mentioned (or which escaped my skimming) are:

Data is physical (not ephemeral, like information).

Every bit of data can be mapped to a point in 3D space where it is ‘stored’ on some piece of matter (tape, disk, flash memory).

In other words, data has location in space, it can be weighted.

Encoding information as data actually means altering matter (the storage medium - piece of paper, disk tape, CD, RAM) in a way in which we can later infer data by examining the state of the physical storage medium.

And

Data is in time

It has a T0. Every single bit of data that exists ‘appeared’ in space (on storage) at a precise moment in time.

Every bit flip in the stored data has a point in time, so we can derive a 'history' time axis for data.

Data has an implicit refcount - the number of physical storage mediums where it is encoded. Data is lost when the last medium is damaged.

Just planting some seeds in case someone finds these distinctions useful.

It's not just payment processing.

A app store offers reliable hosting of the game binaries and provides a versioning and upgrade mechanism on a platform with billions of user accounts.

Keeps the user's OS and device drivers up to date, maintains the OS and develops the hardware that it runs on.

Maintains the developer tools, compilers, documentation, so that your binary can run on the device's OS.

These things are expensive. I don't know how much exactly it would cost a company like Roblox to develop and maintain all the necessary tools and services provided by the app stores in order to run on all those devices.

Probably a lot. In fact, if they could do it, they would be Apple or Google :).

Whether it's a lot more than it should be, I don't know, but it helps to keep in mind that the app store cut is for a lot more than just payment processing.