jrimbault

UX issues aside (running commands directly is worrisome), that example with ffmpeg is striking. That's really well chosen example of a program I (and many others I believe) dread using directly. Having the computer come up with the "correct" ffmpeg incantation based on the high level description of the goal is really tempting. Though as with the other exampmles, I worry they are subtly incorrect.

Magnetic refrigeration seems (to a complete layman) to show promise.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_refrigeration

Citizens are, generally, not supposed (nor expected to) to take justice into their own hands.

> So in this case, as an American browsing high-end groceries, I figured "Dijon Moutarde" would be an "appellation d'origine contrôlée" but I am mildly surprised to find out that it is not, and that I should look for "Moutarde de Bourgogne" instead.

I'm French and I can attest that my friends didn't know that [AOC for mustard is "Moutarde de Bourgogne" not "Dijon"] before I learned it a few years ago (well into adulthood) and told them about it. I think it's one of the few cases like that where the AOC doesn't match the intuition.

> quantum drag forces

Also known as the scenarium trace mineral commonly found in space.

Yes, I'm constantly referring to my "phone" as my "brain's third hemisphere". It makes people chuckle but no one stops at that joke. It's completely "in the culture".

I don't like Proust, but I'll play devil's advocate.

Overly long meandearing sentences are very much the point of those books. The form and content reflect each others.

War and Peace is also just a style exercise fashionable at that time among russian (and elsewhere) literary authors.

It's like a fantasy author writing an "epic fantasy", what makes it "epic" compared to regular, largely it's the number of words.

Furthurmore, in 2022 large scale professionals (and in this allegory, kernel devs are that kind) are more likely to use industrial hammers which have nothing in common with the hammers of the 18th century apart from the name and their basic function of hammering.

I'm really happy about the inclusion of Rust in the linux kernel. Not because it is Rust but because it shows that we can evolve. And I hope in a thousand years we aren't still stuck on C or Rust but "moved on" to even better things. It would make me quite hypothetically sad if in a thousand years we were still using tools designed by hackers in the infancy of computer science.

I've only seen twitter through tweetdeck for the last decade, and I believe it hasn't seen a new feature or design (both in functionality and form) change in at least 4 years ? It has become bug riddled (but I still use it), but all timelines are still linear.

(example: polls have never been ported to tweetdeck)

I don't think tweetdeck has seen active maintenance in years.

Not 2006, but in 2007 (in France, I was 15) you could get unlimited calls, sms and mms (and a generous data cap I can't remember the details of, but it was in the gigabytes), for a fixed monthly price. That wasn't the subscription I had, it was some tier above mine.

Are you talking about news.ycombinator.com ?

If you are, it's because this is not « the center of "modern development tools" ». It's a textboard and it serves that purpose well.

And this is completely off topic.

I was also looking for one (well, two) yesterday... even sent bloomberg a mail to ask if backorder was still possible (they said no and to check amazon/ebay/etc).

That mode was especially enjoyable in Assassin's Creed Odyssey, walking around a simulation of antique Athene is (for lack of a better word) something.

> dispute handling is handled by the city then

That would be the defintion of "socializing costs" while "privatising revenues".

He was selected (reported by him) for the eulogy he wrote for Robert Jordan on his blog. At the time he hadn't published "thousand pages" books. Though he later did, concurrently with writing the final Wheel of Time books (themselves thousand pages tomes).

And having read both of those authors, I really couldn't accuse Sanderson of being as long winded as Jordan. Sanderson's chapters (even in his long books) are bite sized and very comfortable for me, since that means I only remember the chapter number and don't use a bookmark. (often upward of 70 chapters for his Stormlight Archives series, which means less than 15 pages per chapters)

It should also be noted that Sanderson writes taking into account that readers can probably use a wiki to remember things, while Jordan keeps repeating things. Those books (while only a few months apart) weren't written for the same iternet era.

I got a GTX1080 in december 2016. It's still going strong.

TypeScript free from the historical baggage of JavaScript. With some runtime type checking, autogenerated typeguards from types, allowing things like checked de/serialization.

A TypeScript where (for example) string methods make sense, with all the number types and not just floats, with only null or only undefined and a lot of other things I can't think of right now.

Maybe add some pattern matching on top.

TypeScript's type system is so nice and ergonomic to use, it's a shame the basic objects of JavaScript (Object & co) are so "fickle" to work with.

To answer OP's question, I don't think there could be a "perfect" programming language.

I think the underlying question was "Why not eat food ?" or "Why do you use so much complements if you can eat normally ?"

Aren't there some studies about how stress level doesn't seem to change much in relation to income and education ?

Yeah. I have one physicist friend, and as I far I know from casual conversion with them, the whole team at his lab don't even know if they are writing C or C++. And explaining python to him, because he's required to teach a bit of it, was a rabbit hole of explaining fractal things.

My impression is that at least a number of scientists don't know and don't care.

I also do that but when I know I won't come back later for it. I use my history as shortcuts, so I avoid cluttering it with random word lookups.

Train stations in NYC are much less dense than (for example my own city) Paris subway network.

New-York subway network is impressive for its sprawl, but not really for its efficiency.

The difference is in the intent. A security camera films a place and doesn't focus on individuals. If the camera were to run software that would autofocus on a person, that would make them a subject, there would need to be consent.

You'll find a helpful diagram (though incomplete) on this page https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Droit_%C3%A0_l%27image (French), and there's of course (as anything legal, it's a rabbit hole) more specific laws concerning security camera.

> These are there to purposefully record your face and let you know that they're doing that full colour and HD whether you like it or not.

I believe (?) this, as it is stated above, would be illegal in France under the current laws. You have to consent to be the _subject_ of photography in a public place.

Of course, advocates of such systems would argue against that easily.

At some point, this becomes the dividing line between a "nu-ops" team and the dev team.

Just this afternoon I was with my father looking for a way to backup all of his emails on his yahoo account.

I was looking "naïvely" for the button to request all of his personal data. I didn't find one and there's probably one somewhere I'm guessing.

I resigned myself to set up Outlook on his computer and make a manual backup.

Are deno packages usable from the node side of the ecosystem ? and vice versa ?

Just that short text I think "proves" how good a writer Neil Gaiman is.

> But very few of them are segfaults. With smart pointers and some common sense, they're just not that big of a concern.

I think it's really a POV thing. Rust surfaces those concerns very directly, even if it would have been correct 99.999999% of the time, Rust will enforce another decile of correctness. Since it does this quite aggressively Rust's users tend to have their mind (mine included) a bit (over)fixated on those issues.

(also, in Rust you don't use common sense, you use the compiler, and imo that's great, my common sense has failed me enough)