hetman

LLMs are not the root cause here, they're just an accelerant. This was always inevitable with the progression of globalisation. Even before the internet, kids were watching Disney cartoons across the world (to be fair, often dubbed in the local language, but still an example of how global culture had been narrowing.) Perhaps this wasn't felt as strongly by those in the US quite as quickly as the rest of the world, because their culture just happened to be the source for many of these common elements.

There are always trade-offs. Globalisation has too many benefits for most to want to go back. It is up to us to intentionally cultivate our cultural uniqueness, but I'm not sure the corporate environment was ever the right place to do so, given it was already constrained by rules and etiquette, and motivated by a desire to encourage universal communication styles. Instead we have to take it upon our selves, in a very intentional way outside the corporate setting, to cultivate our own unique cultural expressions to thrive. Failure to do so either directly, or by proxy, means cultural extinction, as has been the case of many cultures that have passed before.

Though, ironically, at least for some tasks, Russian is a better choice than English.

Back in 2025, a research paper titled "One ruler to measure them all: Benchmarking multilingual long-context language models" (https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.01996) published some benchmark results for finding and aggregating information found in long documents, measured by language. English ranked 6th in accuracy.

The top performers out of the 26 they measured were, in order: 1. Polish, 2. Russian, 3. French, 4. Italian, 5. Spanish, 6. English, 7. Ukrainian, 8. Swedish, 9, Portuguese, 10. German.

Ruby is beautiful in its design, but it made imports and namespaces (a.k.a. modules) separate concepts. This is so flexible it became hard to ever find anything easily in practice.

Likewise, it made classes incredibly easy to extend, which led to a monkey patching bonanza and far too much magic everywhere (Rails being by far the worst offender but not the only one). It meant having to keep too much stuff in your head and needing deep framework/library familiarity just to be able to understand basic code.

In the end, I feel like the incredible flexibility was Ruby's undoing, not just lack of library availability for a specific popular application. I was a Ruby zealot at one point but it began to lose its lustre not because it wasn't beautiful in theory, but because it was inconvenient in practice. In some ways, Python's restrictiveness became its greatest attribute. Then Python 3 helped to fix a lot of the inconsistency.

Both Python and Ruby have a consistent logic to them, just not consistent with each other. Just as all attributes are methods in Ruby, so all methods area attributes in Python, etc. Things get much easier in either language if you stop fighting their internal logic.

I would argue more easily.

I like Python but this was always actually one of my pain points. The CPython C API is full of foot guns, the API surface is expansive, and writing against it requires a lot of careful care. Anyone who's ever written C modules for both languages would be able to attest how much more pleasant the experience was for Ruby than Python.

Did you mean to say that Ruby doesn't link name spaces to file system paths? Ruby has namespaces and they're far more flexible than Python's... too flexible in my opinion, making it harder to find things.

I'm not sure I follow your meaning here. You can return unnamed lists, dictionaries, numbers, among others, or combinations of any of these. With some very light syntax sugar magic you can even make returning tuples look like your returning multiple values.

I'm not sure if I would call whitespace-as-syntax arbitrary, though it is opinionated. I admit though that for me it started feeling like a time saver once I got over my anti whitespace as syntax zealotry.

Trans and black people in the US are disappeared for speaking critically of their government? This level of hyperbole is dangerous for those who employ it; cf. the boy who cried wolf.

If all I'm doing with git rebase is reorganising my commits, and I have to deal with conflicts, after I'm done, I always git diff my pre-rebase head with post rebase head commit hash. I can quickly see I've messed something up if the diff isn't empty. For more complex tasks it's best to leave the rearranging until last, but where not possible, the diff is still pretty useful to double check my work.

You don't need to keep their hashes because git keeps them for you. If you realise too late that things went terribly wrong, you can get the pre-rebase hashes with "git reflog". (It can take a little getting used to knowing how to identify them quickly after a rebase but they're there.)

So you're telling me Trump has direct control over the topics and conclusions allowed into AI models built by Western companies? I don't think your off topic whataboutism has really helped dispel any ignorance in the world.

I don't think you'll understand what authoritarian means until you try moving to China and then criticising their government. For those of us who have lived under authoritarian regimes, it's an absolute travesty to see how diluted the meaning of this term has become.

Guess what you can do in the US and can't do in China? Talk about their respective atrocities. You've missed the point entirely as it pertains to AI if you thought my litmus test was about having the most moral government. It was about that government's ability to censor information.

I think there's no denying they each have an ideological bent (as is their right as private companies). I have had Copilot deny me access to historical information on ethical grounds, even though I don't think anyone would find it controversial (clearly it was overtuned, GPT and Claude had no problem answering the same question). What is different though is that they are each allowed to have their own perspective instead of a singular mandated one.

Why would it be a problem that they're Chinese? It's a problem because their country is ruled by an authoritarian regime. The West, by contrast, doesn't have a singular arbiter of truth, it has a plurality of perspectives (as much as certain interest groups would really rather that was not the case). It's not perfect, but those of us who have memories of living under authoritarian regimes can tell you there's no comparison.

Except in this instance the conflict erupted after the population size was reduced due to disease so it's not entirely clear this was caused by the scarcity of resources. Nor is it clear what selective advantage mutually destructive wars would have assuming plenty of resources. The researchers posit group relational dynamics being the primary factor.

Almost. After battling with support for several months, a friend of mine recently learned that versions of Office without AI do not allow you to create Teams meetings that last longer than an hour. Makes me wonder what other features they're leaving out.

Indeed. As an anecdote, I've come across a self professed frontend UI guru writing quadratic code that worked fine in testing because it only had to display a few tens of items there, but at a complete loss why it was unusable in production.

But Palmerston's quote isn't about convenience. It is not at all clear to me that supporting Nazi Germany would've served the US's broader global interests. For example, fascism and capitalist free market ideologies are somewhat at odds with each other on multiple points.

In fairness, the US kept indirectly funding the Khmer Rouge even after evidence of their atrocities came to light for their own strategic geopolitical reasons.

The realpolitic of international relations very often follows the words of the British prime minister, Lord Palmerston: "We have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow."

So has Linus straight up made it know this is where he would like things to head? Because it seems a lot of the resistance to Rust in the Linux kernel is coming from seasoned C developers who do not want to document these interfaces.

I agree with this sentiment. I find attempts to create these kinds of universal rules are often a result of the programmer doing a specific and consistently repeating type of data transformation/processing. In their context it often makes a lot of sense... but try and apply the rules to a different context and you might end up with a mess. It can also often result in a reactionary type of coding where we eliminate a bad coding pattern by taking such an extremely opposite position that the code becomes just as unreadable for totally different reasons.

This is not to say we shouldn't be having conversations about good practices, but it's really important to also understand and talk about the context that makes them good. Those who have read The Innovator's Solution would be familiar with a parallel concept. The author introduces the topic by suggesting that humanity achieved powered flight not by blindly replicating the wing of the bird (and we know how many such attempts failed because it tried to apply a good idea to the wrong context) but by understanding the underlying principle and how it manifests within a given context.

The recommendations in the article smell a bit of premature optimisation if applied universally, though I can think of context in which they can be excellent advice. In other contexts it can add a lot of redundancy and be error prone when refactoring, all for little gain.

Fundamentally, clear programming is often about abstracting code into "human brain sized" pieces. What I mean by that is that it's worth understanding how the brain is optimised, how it sees the world. For example, human short term memory can hold about 7±2 objects at once so write code that takes advantage of that, maintaining a balance without going to extremes. Holy wars, for example, about whether OO or functional style is always better often miss the point that everything can have its placed depending on the constraints.

The burden of proof generally lies with the one making the claim. As Hitchens's razor states: "what may be asserted without evidence may be dismissed without evidence."

Anyway, only because something feels intuitive, it doesn’t make it true. In this instance the original claim seems to contradict the article which states imaginary friends are not the result of loneliness but the process by which children explore the complexities of real relationships… i.e. a form of subconscious thought experiment.

According to the Kremlin, this means Russia dictating security policy to a population double its own. You may choose to believe that you can count on one hand the number of countries in the world with genuine sovereignty, but I assure you the citizens of the other countries will beg to differ.

Also it's not clear what "Even Donald Trump now admits..."is intended to mean here. Donald Trump has always repeated Kremlin talking points so I'm not sure why anyone would think of this as novel.

Which proves that talking about millionaires is no longer that socially relevant thanks to inflation. Somehow ten-millionaire doesn't have quite that ring though.

Alright, settle down. The only sources I saw laying into him over it were the ones that make this kind of critique their life mission (professional or otherwise). As for the broad population, in as much as I could tell, it seemed they were upset about pretty much everything but the shirt, which is what I'm more interested in for the purposes of this discussion. Certainly, every person I spoke to about it hadn't even noticed it until it was pointed out, and the trend online didn't strike me as particularly different. I guess we'll have to disagree in that we got a different read of the situation.

Pretty much everything else you said confirms just how ingrained the attitude under discussion is in this country. Which is hardly surprising. If it was perceived as aberrant by the majority then it wouldn't be commonplace.

Suppose you very crudely modelled the spectrum of American attitudes on this topic using some kind of bell curve. I don't think many people across the pond realise just how far apart the American and Australian bell curve means would be. These kind of "the truth is unknowable" truisms may sound wise but don't really teach us very much about reality.

On average, Australian culture views anyone, who even passively demonstrates any significant level of achievement, with a high degree of suspicion. Australians make a national sport of cutting down people who excel in any way. Sure, there are sub-cultures there which can vary considerably from this general trend, but even they feel the influence of this prevailing attitude. The end outcome is that Australians tend to go to considerable effort to hide the things that may single them out as excelling among their peers, and emphasise those things which make them similar. (A few months ago the CEO of the most powerful retail company in Australia gave an interview attempting to reduce public ire at their price gouging tactics, dressed in the uniform of a shelf stacker from their supermarket chain. I'm not saying this could not have happened in America, but there it would have probably been seen as a stunt or a statement... in Australia dressing any other way would have raised eyebrows, and in fact most people initially failed to even notice it for the PR manipulation that it was.)

Geographic proximity will always play a role in bringing cultural norms together, and while the US is a big place, the US population throughout the 20th century had incredible mobility, going where the jobs were, which helped to tighten up that bell curve.

Again, this would only be true if the platform had a laissez-faire attitude toward content, which it clearly does not. What can and can not be shown on the platform is heavily moderated, therefore there is _some_ mandate being fulfilled.

Now we've already agreed that it's not the US's mandate, and I suppose you could argue that it is not the mandate of any of the US's opponents ether. Whether there are any geopolitical entities who don't seem to have the same balance of criticism vs. praise as the others, I'll leave as an exercise for the reader.

Anyone who's used TikTok knows the platform is heavily moderated and not at all an "anything goes" paradise for the exchange of free ideas. So, if, as you suggested, the moderation does not favour the US government's mandate, then the obvious question one should be asking is: whose mandate does it favour?

Yes. For their own citizens, not foreign actors who wish to influence said citizens.