jernfrost

This is Trump's boy. He helped him get in power. In some ways Trump might have done a good things, because the Saudi needed a bit more crazy guy on the top for the west to finally wake up about what a terrible place Saudi Arabia is.

The whole west, and in particular the US has made a faustian bargain with Saudi Arabia. Sooner or later someone has to answer for that.

Our number one terrorists problem comes from Wahabism, the toxic strain of Islam, coming straight out of Saudi Arabia funded by petro dollars.

It was weak and embarrassing that we could not back up Canada when they stood up to these bullies.

In some ways and some ways not. Making a global change is much harder in a dynamic language. However static languages by their very nature tie the code together more tightly.

It is much easier to decouple something in a dynamic language. The re-factoring needs in a dynamic language is thus entirely different.

As an iOS developer I so hated getting into Objective-C code written by Java developers. They really don't get the principle of dynamic languages and they are too fond of making shitloads of classes for everything.

Is this made as a cluster of independent programs or is this actually a monolith, where you can access all functionality from some python method or class?

While I may personally prefer statically typed language for large code bases, I think people greatly exaggerate the problems of maintaining large code bases in dynamic languages. Python projects such has NumPy, SciPy and Pandas are several hundred thousand lines of Python. Pandas is 250k LOC in Python.

GNU Emacs is 1.5 million lines of LISP code, another dynamic language.

It is ultimately a question of sound software architecture. You don't have to care about how many lines of code is in the libraries you use daily or in the Operating System you use.

In similar fashion any software can be modularized so you only need to concern yourself with your part.

I think the key to safety for bikers in the Netherlands is simply the sheer number of them. When you visit the Netherlands. Within 15 minutes you have gotten used to scanning for bikers everywhere. There are so many of them and they come so frequently that you cannot not get into the habit of looking for them.

The importance of numbers is something often overlooked. I read an article discussing the different approaches to biking the Netherlands and my native Norway has. Here in Norway we are obsessed with bike helmets. The dutch never use helmets. Yet we have more head injuries in Norway for bikers.

So the number of bikers in the Netherlands seem to create a better protection for bikers than the usage of helmets. And here is the kicker: If you don't demand that people use helmets when biking, the number of bikers will rise to a level, where the number of injuries will be lower than if everybody used helmet.

That is what the research suggested anyway. I will probably still use a helmet in Norway due to the terrain, but it is still food for thought I think.

Loved a BeOS when it came out but is not the whole concept outdated now? C++ all over the place seems like a bad idea for enabling the usage of other languages as C++ is terrible at interoping with anything. Multi threading all over the place BeOS style does not seem like way concurrency is done today with higher order APIs.

I rewrote a commerical app to Swift and saw a lot of advantages. The rewrite uncovered a number of bugs due to the stricter type checking, and general strictness (no unitialized variables e.g).

It also allowed us to get more people involved in development. People new to apple development found Objective-C to be a bigger barrier. Odd syntax and a bit old fashion.

Mind you I quite liked Objective-C. But it seems a bit pointless when you got Swift.

It is not much in other languages because those languages are old. A lot of the Swift features have been in more academic functional languages for a long time. However it has taken time for the mainstream languages to adopt these ideas. The industry moves much slower than academic niche languages.

But most new languages has some variant of this stuff: kotlin, scala, rust.

I program a lot in Julia which is a script language and it does not have allow you to use null freely either. May seem odd for a language that does not type check at compile time. But it actually makes sense.

I would have been interesting to hear more about ideas for how to feed the fish. I think a lot of the fish feed today is from land based agriculture which is not very sustainable.

There has been experiments with using bio reactors to grow algae based food instead.

That is what the future of any food production is. Organic and traditional food production is terrible for the environment because it consumes far too much land. We are destroying far too much wildlife to produce food using traditional methods.

Indoor food production either as mentioned here or as in bio reactors and hydroponics systems use something like 100-700 times less land for the same food production.

Think how much land could be given back to nature if we use these more efficient methods and managed to stabilize our population growth.

Forests and fields could be populated by wild animals again.

I think one has to be fair about what sort of asshole Linus is. He is not like Steve Jobs, Balmer and Gates who could be vindictive and get personal.

For Linus it is more about being far too blunt. But you can clearly see Linus himself being aware of it and having some humbleness about it. Jobs in contrast would never admit his bad behavior.

As a fellow Nordic (Norwegian) I feel a significant component of this is simply Nordic cultural trait. We are quite blunt. We value honesty and directness. However Finns I believe are farther out on that spectrum.

The second parts is that I think he has probably mild asperger traits. I have that, my wife and oldest son. That does not make you an asshole. I don’t talk like Linus but it can mean you often are not able to pick up other people’s emotional state.

Keep in mind this is very different from being a psychopath. They can pick up other people’s emotions but don’t care of they are hurting them. Somebody with asperger don’t want to intentionally hurt others but may do so accidentally by not reading the person properly. Somebody with Asperger is willing to admit they have a problem that needs fixing just like Linus.

A psychopath does not think he/she has a problem that needs fixing.

It is a controlled platform which has pros and cons. The Apple way gives more security, privacy and better user experience. The downside is higher prices, less flexbility, reduced choices.

One of the reasons I can stomach it is that while Apple is an enclosed garden they tend to use rather standard formats on things so you usually have a way of getting your data out should you leave the garden.

I find that more problematic with the Microsoft world which uses much more MS specific formats which are often binary or hellishly complex to decipher or reverse engineer.

There is a financial incentive to NOT share data because there is a demand in the market for privacy. Apple can pursue this market because they charge for hardware. Google had no way of making money on privacy because they don’t sell a physical product.

So it is simple: Apple has a choice. Google doesn’t.

I write in many different languages, but I would say this kind of thing depends a lot on the type of language.

With Go, e.g. I would not spend much time on this, because it is such a plain language. You just accept there is no fancy way of doing this and move on.

With C++ I found it a bit different. Either I mess around thinking there MUST be some way of solving this annoying problem only to realize there just isn't. Other times I find a solution but it tends to turn into a horrible ugly syntax mess, so you abandon it. I've pretty much given up writing anything elegant or fancy in C++. It just turns to shit so quickly.

Swift I found fairly straight forward to write. All the typical stuff that get me stuck in C++, never seems to pose a problem for me in Swift.

Julia is the language which ought to have thrown me into the Haskell problem described, as you can do a lot of crazy stuff with types and macros. I do to some degree but mostly Julia just does what I want it to do. I guess it is partly down to the core functions being well designed and that despite the flexibility it is still not as magical as Haskell, Clojure etc.

I think you are drawing the wrong conclusions from history because you are conflating platforms and companies.

People think about the PC as successful because the platform is so big. Yet for the company that created the PC it was a failure. IBM lost the PC battle.

Sun would have lost whether they had made the software or the hardware, because the platform they made hardware and software for was outcompeted.

And anyway I think there is a significant difference. Sun and SGI were essentially hardware companies which happened to make software. I feel Apple is the reverse. It is a software company making hardware.

Apple harware was never impressive, sun harware was. Apple was all about the experience the software gave you. The hardware was just built around the software to facilitate that.

Shows the problem of capitalism. Eventually it all ends up as a big pozi scheme where it is all about artifically inflating bubbles and make sure you are the not the last one out when it bursts.

Afterwards tax payers can pickup the bill.

I gues the movie executives can pick some tax payer paid bonuses like American bankers in 2008.

It should be like in Finland where fines are tied to your income. Poor people get small fines, rich people get big fines.

That is the most logical as a fine is supoosed to be a deterrent and it does not deter if you are super rich. It is also supposed to be a fairly mild punishment so if it is always so high that you can’t pay but have to go to prison then you are suddenly handing out very severe punishment for minor infractions.

Interesting, given that I've read that Americans were far better at mass production than the Germans. My impression is that Germans engineered their hardware better than Americans but they were not as good at mass producing it fast.

So if I understand correctly, the British was exceptionally slow at manufacturing compared to the Americans then.

Thanks that is extremely interesting info. I have noticed when talking to Americans and reading about American manufacturing, I get the sense that workers are not expected to be particularly skilled and that production is designed with that in mind.

I am from a Nordic country and we tend to follow the German style system of vocational training where you go in an apprenticeship and get a certificate. I have tried to understand the American model but it seems less formalized to me. It seems to be more company specific. You get trained to do a particular job at a particular company.

What would be the Chinese incentive to lie about this? How hard is it to check the validity of their claims?

Ugh... as if we didn't have enough environmental problems already to deal with.

It seems like a very tricky problem to solve. Plastic is such a wonderful material with so many important applications it is impossible to imagine a modern world without it.

But from what I understand not all plastic products contribute equally much to this problem, so perhaps one can make substitutes for only some key areas to make a difference.

Agree, GDP is a terrible metric. However it is useful if you combine it with other measures. Like when you look at GDP and visit a country, you see there is a strong correlation.

One thing I’ve found difficult is comparing the US to e.g. European countries. Houses are much bigger in the US but that is in large part due to much cheaper land and often entirely different build quality. Yet a bigger house and yard naturally translates to a higher quality of life. Yet it is not an entirely fair indicator of economic strength.

Sometimes it could be downright deceptive. There was some right wing economists who deemed Mississippi more wealthty/developed than Sweden by looking as such metrics as house size, car ownerships, microwaves and TVs. Yet it did not caputure well that a lot of these people lived in houses bigger than in Sweden but in terrible condition, poor interior and could not afford important basic stuff like health care.

These mistakes don’t just run from native language to foreign language. Any time you know more than one language you will end up screwing up the other in some way.

I am a native Norwegian speaker and it annoys me how many things we say in Norwegian adopted from english which makes no sense in Norwegian.

We translate the english: “let us go for it” to “la oss gå for det” but that literally means “let us walk for it”

I got bilingual kids and they screw up both languages. Norwegian grammar sneaks into english and english grammar and idioms sneak into their Norwegian. Neithet language is really spoken correctly

I don’t use Julia for speed but because it is so easy to use and powerful.

Haskell e.g. is very powerful and elegant but time consuming and hard to learn. LISP is easy to learn and powerful but has kind of clunky syntax.

Ruby has quite nice syntax and is quite powerful but also kind of messy. Python is quite clean and easy to use but not as powerful.

Julia I would say has hit a sweet spot between all these languages. It is quick to learn and understand while also allowing you to write clean easy to read code. That may describe python. But with macros and multiple dispatch I would say it is a much more powerful language.

I also find it much nicer than Python to use as a script language as you got way more functionality out of the box.

I am a C++ developer professionally, and write little Julia script to help me with various boilerplate coding inn C++, processing assets etc. Julia is really quick to drop into when you need it.

With python I always forget which module some functionality is in. The name of a function etc. Julia has much better naming most useful stuff is already invluded in the automatically loaded base module.

Much less. Having lived multiple places I got to day the heavy bureaucracy of the US system is apparently immediately when you interact with it.

Some of it has to do with common law. Common law means a lot of stuff always has to be spelled out over and over again while in civil law things default to the law if not spelled out. Hence you don’t need the same amount of disclaimers e.g.

I said MOST free market. I never claimed it operated under ideal conditions. The fact is still though that most other health care systems in the west are considerably LESS market oriented than the US.

A more free market oriented approach than today would just make the US system even worse. Health care is not a natural market. There is too much information asymetry, and wrong incentives at play.

As for standards, you seem to have a rather naive idea of how government makes standards. Usually it will heavily involve industry. It is not like government just dreams up arbitrary shit.

As for example of lack of standards. I remember when living in the US having to deal with 4 different incompatible cell phone standards. I remeber arguing with an American on how it was better to standarize on GSM. He made your point that the market would eventually produce a much better standard than GSM. Except by the time the US market got anywhere we were already moving over to 3G. Sorting stuff out in the market is often simply way too time consuming when technology moves at the current pace.

Anything with banking and finance in the US seems to sorely lacking standards. But I am sure things must have improved since I lived there 15 years ago. Then there was no standard for electronic bills, sending payment to other bank accounts electronically, simple stuff like the formatting/layout of a paper bill.

Reading the denials of these people about the problem reminds me of the emperors new clothes. They don’t see what is plain to see for anyone with half an open mind.

This insane growth of bureaucrats is particular to the US health care system. While it grows in socialized medicine as well it does not do so at the same insane rate.

This is what the free market fundamentalists wont accept: that their precious private enterprise is often terribly bloated and inefficient.

I live in a country with socialized medicine and I’ve lived in others with universal health care. The most free market oriented I’ve experienced was the American one and it was by far the most bureaucratic.

In software development terminology I think it is easy to describe the issue. You got several components you want to talk to each other. In software engineering that means some central group of people create common interfaces for the components to speak to each other.

That is essentially the function of government. It is what creates the common interfaces. Except in the US this doesn’t happen because somebody is going to scream “socialism” from the top of his lunges.

Instead every component speak to every other one in a clunky manner. Through faxes, paper forms, which are never standarized.

That is what I notice most about the US. There are so often no standards for anything. People just wait for the magic of the market to create one, except that never happens and you end up with half a dozen competing and incompatible standards.

The bureaucracy is the equivalent to all the insane amount of glue code you got to write when nobody has agreed upon standard interfaces.

I wonder if China will be forced to encourage immigration. Illegal immigration is apparently already growing rapidly.

Companies can’t find workers anymore so they start smuggling in people to do the job

At some point this illegal stream will become so large that one has to consider legalization.

Agree that we need to lower the population but this is best done gradually. A sharp demographic shift cause a lot of instability and problems.

With too dramatic shift you can’t take care of old people anymore. People will reject essentially murdering old people to save the environment.

I think birt rates around 1.8 - 1.9 is probably a sensible rate. That will cause a gradual decline. 1.2-1.3 is way too low and will cause a lot of problems.