Small hiccup in the grand scheme of things. I believe that they will get a product car out this year!
314 karma · joined November 9, 2011
That being said, MobX is absolutely my go-to state management library now - it's probably the easiest free FPS you'll find anywhere, it's ridiculously easy to write, and it results in fewer LOC.
I've been using both on separate projects (with MS IDEs) and haven't noticed anything major.
Right now, we have the typescript ecosystem, the babel ecosystem, and the other wannabe ecosystems. If I like Typescript's type system but want to use babel for async-await (for instance, I'm aware it's in TS next), I'm basically SOL. Babel has more end-users (AFAIK), generally has the first/only implementation of <feature>, and my impression is that the surrounding development community is larger and more active (typescript stuff tends to come down from On High).
For instance, you can use https://github.com/gcanti/babel-plugin-tcomb to get run-time type checking with babel/flow for free. That's really cool! Unfortunately, the same is not possible with typescript (AFAIK), because MS decided that was out of scope. If Typescript was offered as a babel plugin, somebody else could implement it for typescript and we could all be happy.
I understand that people find Babel's plugin ecosystem confusing and intimidating (it is), but I don't think a separate monolithic typescript that reimplements popular babel functionality is the answer.
I would really rather not have to manually install a million packages when pulling down dependencies - "npm install && npm start" and then going to grab a glass of water feels great.
The given use case of a master parsing library doesn't really resonate. A handful of extra kb on disk doesn't bother me at all for an all-in-one solution, and I've never really had the problem of not being able to find a parsing library on npm to begin with.
Of note is that of these, I think only the elixir and ruby (?) solutions are distributed. Additionally, Phoenix channels are doing a lot of work that the other solutions aren't.
I'm in close contact with a lot of social justice groups, specifically ones based out of UC Berkeley. It's not super widespread, but there are absolutely individuals who abuse the concept of triggers as a way to give themselves pretext to be cruel to others, to control conversations, or just as something to get righteously indignified about.
This is an issue with the individuals involved and not triggers per se, but just as with other social technologies it's definitely possible to abuse triggers.
And as programmers, everything we use is just papering over the horror of writing network-connected cat-sharing apps on weird-shaped bits of metal - why worry about a light abstraction over the JS build step?
My experience with Atom has also been sub-par, but Visual Studio Code is pretty cool and built on the exact same platform (electron).
I think you're the exact target audience for typescript, for what it's worth. It will give you type checking, IDE integration, compiler errors, modules, etc basically for free and is (not exclusively, and IMHO) built for people who find javascript distasteful.
If you have to build a desktop app with jquery soup (or even angular), I definitely feel for you.
A more charitable stereotype might be that cryptocurrencies and automated contracts appeal to anyone who thinks that they can design (through their technical expertise) a better world than the current political elites. I'm not saying that they're right or that their line of thought hasn't been historically responsible for atrocities, but I don't think it's fair to paint them as sociopaths.
More likely is that immortal monkeys don't make evolutionary sense given the energy requirements.
I agree that tiny houses are a feel-good distraction.
Also, no invisible lines were crossed - we were told very specifically before arriving in NK by the tour company that under no circumstances should we go to the staff-only floor of the hotel and that people had gotten in trouble for going there previously (it's moderately infamous). My memory of that is hazy, but it may even have been in response to a question about that floor from Otto. As I said in another comment, I really don't think that the NK government is interested in oppressing tourists for no reason.
To be honest, I didn't get a whole lot out of my visit. Everywhere I go, humans are pretty much like humans elsewhere. If you've been to another repressive third-world country and pay attention to posts like this, you have a pretty good idea of what North Korea looks like - its aesthetic form is just more extreme and it's trying to pretend to tourists that it's a second world country. My inner giant-statues fan was pretty pleased. I would say that it met my expectations going in. If anyone is ever in China and has a few days and a few hundred dollars to kill, I would highly recommend it. I wouldn't recommend making the flight just for the DPRK.
My personal takeaway is that I no longer like the hard-line stance against North Korea, don't think the sanctions are a good idea (I did going in), and would rather see them brought into the international community via the inexorable march of global capitalism. I suspect that isolating them only makes them more dangerous to the civilian population and more willing to lash out to the international one. (In other words, they behave like humans everywhere else in the world!)
The way the North Korea tours work is as following:
1. The government-run North Korean tourist organization partners with foreign tour companies (all based in China, AFAIK). There are several foreign tour companies (Koryo Tours, Young Pioneer Tours, etc), which all cater to different segments of the market and advertise their services differently.
2. Every tour goes to the same locations and in theory gets the same commentary, but the various tour companies can send different foreign guides, and have some power to get different Korean guides. This, combined with the different sections of the market, has a pretty huge effect on your experience on the tour. I went with YPT, which is why it was a party with a bunch of mid-twenties Americans/British Commonwealth guys. If you go with, say, Koryo Tours, you're signing up for what I referred to as the dystopia experience where it's an older, primarily continental European crowd and the guides yell at you for taking pictures. I personally think that this is what the people taking the dystopia tours are looking for - they want to go home and talk about how they braved the tyranny of the government minders and snuck pictures of random rice fields.
On a personal note, I've been to some of the worst places on Earth by most objective and subjective measures, and digging under the skin (and into the dumpsters) of dysfunctional places is a hobby of mine. It's always a little funny to me that if you try to humanize the North Koreans a little (not even trying to make excuses for their government!), the default assumption from people who've never been there is that you're a rube who has been taken in by obvious propaganda.
Once you have nukes, you think, you'll have a shred of leverage over the US since you'll have the capability to nuke Seoul. With that leverage, you can ensure that your glorious people's republic will continue to prosper without another devastating war. Who cares if you throw the economy under the bus until you're nuclear-armed - that's just the price you have to pay for security.
I personally don't think that the DPRK has any real intention of starting a war - they know that there's about five minutes between hostilities being declared and Pyongyang turning into a radioactive parking lot.
That said, it wasn't that long ago that North Korea was on Bush's hit list ("axis of evil"), we regularly organize large military exercises preparing for a new Korean war, and we've got all sorts of belligerent rhetoric that a paranoid DPRK intelligence officer would definitely take as a threat. Even confirmed war hawks like Bernie Sanders name them as the biggest threat to the US on the world stage (which is ridiculous, IMO).
That said, it doesn't mean that the paranoia you see in these sorts of blogs is entirely warranted - in my experience NK wasn't particularly interested in oppressing random tourists (they want those sweet, sweet dollars). They will take a great deal of offense if you go in and rip down their propaganda posters, though. :)
1. He probably didn't need to modify his camera firmware - I took pictures of basically whatever I wanted and they didn't look or care. The only exception to this was the (singular) grocery store, which I thought was hilarious because it was actually pretty nice. (With surprisingly good food, too! I'm still snacking on some of the candies I bought there.) I went on a helicopter ride and took a bunch of pictures of anti-aircraft guns and the like hoping that they would make me delete them and I would have a story to tell, but no such luck.
2. There's a big difference between the different tour companies. Some of them really sold the dystopian totalitarian state experience, with extremely strict guides who yelled at people on the tour and checked everybody's cameras and so on. The people on those tours seemed to have signed up for that experience and were, I think, happy to receive it. My group was drunk off our collective asses literally 24/7, our guides were making dick jokes, a guy wandered off on his own on New Years Eve and didn't get back to the hotel until ~3am after getting in a fistfight with a cab driver, and it was generally a party. It seems to me like the author of this article went in looking for a dystopia to photograph, and the tour company gave him one.
3. North Korea is poor as hell, obviously has a horrible government, etc. If you've been to other extremely poor parts of the globe it's obvious that it's a poor country trying to pretend to be a rich one. The successful example of neighboring South Korea makes their failure to provide for their citizens even sadder. But I would guess total quality of life is comparable or better in the DPRK than many other places I've been. (Somalia, nasty bits of Bangladesh, etc)
4. The citizens and possibly government are (not totally unreasonably) terrified that the US is going to invade and crush them like ants at any given moment. I think this drives a lot of their government's malinvestments.
Another example would be the woman who has the gall to braid hair without a license - if she hadn't broken the law, nobody would talk about it, there would never be any chance for reform, and we would all be incrementally poorer for it.
I'm not taking a position on specific laws, just that it's important that some laws occasionally be broken so that as a society we can test whether or not it matters if someone breaks them. If breaking a law doesn't result in negative outcomes, it shouldn't be a law.