knighthack

...So is this a transpiler of some sort?

If it is, consider looking in Nim. It compiles to C, and even compiles to Javascript. And is extremely performant while at it.

A nonsensical and sexist statement.

You can have good friendships with other men. Friendships with women is not a necessary contingent precedent for that.

Also reversing your statement to use women sounds immediately sexist: "...And be better able to discern which women to bother to pursue friendships with." The corollary being that not all women are good women, or worth your friendship, just because they're women.

There are many successful relationships that don't involve arguments - and which are about constant peace.

Relationships don't require 'arguments and fights and makeups' to be real. And if AI girlfriends offer 'ideal relationships', how is that not 'good'?

You are conflating what people actually want with the artificial drama of TV shows and Hollywood/the messy scenario of reality. If people can pay to get their fantasy girlfriends/relationships brought to life, they will, and it will be successful especially if all forms of conflict/relationship dissatisfaction can be avoided.

> Part of that was due to the bro culture of the software business, part of it was that I receded to support my husband in a partnership where he was effectively the lesser partner, and part of it was that women, especially in tech, often seem to disappear when the story gets told.

Why is sexism being conflated with cutthroat business decisions?

She and her husband didn't make the cut - doesn't mean that she was specifically excluded because of her gender. Look, the fact that she then mentioned "... privilege of being a white middle class male" made it very clear that she wanted sexism as a key ragebaiting element.

As the article author relied on sexism as the concluding answer, there's nothing wrong to call her out on it.

The issue is not "as time goes on".

The issue is now - the use of Swift outside of the Apple ecosystem is remarkably stifled, given the lack of Apple support.

A language truly acquires mainstream mindshare and community, only if it can extend its use beyond Apple's OSes.

'Educability' sounds a bit like the ancient Chinese saying, of how only empty cups can be filled:

> The "Empty Cup" or "The Empty Vessel" parable: 'A cup that is already full, whether with knowledge, opinions, or experiences, cannot be filled again. It is only the empty cup that can truly learn and absorb new information.'

Your characterization using the phrase "conventional wisdom" is demeaning.

I've found that a lot of wisdom PG passes on is novel, not 'conventional'; moreover the observation he offers is not something I would have been able to obtain through my own life experience, and I very much appreciate him putting his thoughts out into the world for us to learn from.

> "not whether or not" > > "doesn't mean that" > > "doesn't mean all"

Your statements are not only convoluted, but dubious. And why the need to constantly speak in alternatives/negatives?

Here are statements that are easy to understand:

1) Finding funding is difficult for everyone.

2) Group affiliation does not inherently grant entitlement to funding or financial support.

3) If 'disproportionate funding' occurs, that's simply the reality of how resources are allocated. It doesn't necessarily allow you to claim racism or bigotry.

The design here is some sort of Geocities-like '90s joke, right? And intentionally designed to be unreadable?

I really need to second keypress minimization as a competitive factor! One reason why Vim appeals to me is not the speed (which is great) but it's ability to minimize the keypresses needed to go somewhere, or to do something.

That may not equate to raw speed, but it does equate to pleasantness of use vis-à-vis other text editors, which matters a lot to the typing experience.

This was really fun! I could imagine myself really getting into this, as someone who enjoys Vim motions. It would also be great to see automated replays, based on the inputs in the leaderboard.

> accurate peer-review and unbiased evaluations

And how do you even guarantee this, 'accurate' and 'unbiased'? Any form of peer review will always have a slant, no matter how 'objective' it is intended to be.

Until that can be ascertained, I don't see how peer review is fundamentally superior. I would even argue that peer review can be detrimental to true science, especially those on the frontier.

I recently bought a machine with an RTX 4090 and a 7950X3D.

Installed Pop OS; expected there might be one or two hiccups with the Nvidia drivers. Yet I had zero driver config/installation issues - and there's not been a single Windows game I could not play on Linux at full settings.

On top of it the Linux machine also streams to my Steam Deck.

I've abandoned Windows 2 years ago - I see no reason to ever return.

As someone who heavily uses Manim with Python, I like the idea. But I really don't want to use 'Py5' if it then has a Java dependency.

> What you're doing here is replacing a possibly incorrect view of the world with another possibly incorrect one. You're doing this because (the search for truth is a futile one because) given the choice of being sad and maybe right and being happy and ever so slightly more wrong, you should choose the latter.

I completely disagree with this.

You must avoid a choice that lets you be happy and "slightly more wrong", if that choice ultimately deviates from the truth.

Always pursue truth first. It is knowing the truth that often leads to fulfilment, even if it may not lead to immediate happiness. because with truth can now grasp at the problem and find a way to fix it. Ignorant bliss is only a temporary salve, and cuts short the route to true fulfilment.

Always opt for truth no matter how sad/bad it makes you feel. Emotions are fleeting; the truth isn't, and knowing the truth is what gives you more control over your emotions.

You take a morally superior position, and you are condescending.

As if discussions and examples using imaginary characters are somehow 'lowly', and can't be used as a fair commentary of society.

In comparison, Plato's works often feature dialogues where characters, including Socrates, engage in arguments, which present various perspectives on philosophical issues through fictionalized conversations. That style of writing and the use of imaginary characters in argumentative discourse is actually hallmark of Plato's work.

The OP's style of writing (who you responded to) is therefore not out of the ordinary; just because you disagree with his or her "perceptions of the world" doesn't mean you should put it down as unworthy of reply for using "imaginary characters".

I've noticed: competent people who aren't interested in leadership tend to make the best leaders.

As compared to people who want to be leaders, for the sake of being known as a 'leader', but have neither the competency nor accountability to be leaders.

No offence to your wife, but I find it incredibly exhausting to speak to people like this.

I agree that unsolicited advice is not good. But one should make exceptions for advice from spouses, who's vowed to be by your side, and who has your general best interests at heart - no matter how direct the advice is.

This seems more like a "it's not what you say, it's how you say it" kind of scenario, which is pointless sugarcoating (especially when you have a problem to solve, so you should be willing to listen to advice or take direct instructions if you yourself don't know how to solve it).

I completely disagree with your assertion that "...rote memorization is neither necessary nor sufficient to internalize concepts."

I would recommend reading the book Moonwalking with Einstein. There is a lot of discussion there on how memory is linked directly to creativity, and to understanding concepts deeply.

---

A choice passage:

"...If the essence of creativity is linking disparate facts and ideas, then the more facility you have making associations, and the more facts and ideas you have at your disposal, the better you'll be at coming up with new ideas. As Buzan likes to point out, Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory, was the mother of the Muses.

The notion that memory and creativity are two sides of the same coin sounds counterintuitive. Remembering and creativity seem like opposite, not complementary, processes. But the idea that they are one and the same is actually quite old, and was once even taken for granted. The Latin root 'inventio' is the basis of two words in our modern English vocabulary: inventory and invention. And to a mind trained in the art of memory, those two ideas were closely linked. Invention was a product of inventorying. Where do new ideas come from if not some alchemical blending of old ideas? In order to invent, one first needed a proper inventory, a bank of existing ideas to draw on. Not just an inventory, but an indexed inventory. One needed a way of finding just the right piece of information at just the right moment.

This is what the art of memory was ultimately most useful for. It was not merely a tool for recording but also a tool of invention and composition. "The realization that composing depended on a wellfurnished and securely available memory formed the basis of rhetorical education in antiquity," writes Mary Carruthers. Brains were as organized as modern filing cabinets, with important facts, quotations, and ideas stuffed into neat mnemonic cubbyholes, where they would never go missing, and where they could be recombined and strung together on the fly. The goal of training one's memory was to develop the capacity to leap from topic to topic and make new connections between old ideas. "As an art, memory was most importantly associated in the Middles Ages with composition, not simply with retention," argues Carruthers. "Those who practiced the crafts of memory used them---as all crafts are used---to make new things: prayers, meditations, sermons, pictures, hymns, stories, and poems." ..."

Inception.

> The science of deduction as he's supposed to apply it in the stories would actually require rather encyclopedic knowledge of many different topics in order to understand the wide array of humans he's supposed to be reading

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I partly disagree with this.

You live with people. A trained person can learn to detect differences - of gestures, habits, behaviour - far more easily, and would not require the broad knowledge that computers need for effective pattern-matching and deduction. (And since Holmes is doing his detective work constantly, he would have been honed and trained enough for that sort of thing.)

That Holmes is ignorant of mainstream things - whilst being extremely conversant in the eclectic - does not necessarily impair his deductive abilities. After all, deduction is just the ability to tie facts after facts and event and event - and to trace effect to causation.

Deducing who might have done something seem entirely within the realm of possibility and limits of Sherlock Holmes' knowledge, given that the evidence he looks into often makes a look of sense in context.

(Now, deducing motive is a different thing altogether - no one really knows what's in the heart of men.)

The idea to emulate hierarchical folder-like functionality ala filepaths is quite brilliant - I might try it out.

This was such an an enjoyable read. My view of Ballmer has completely changed, in retrospect. Am also impressed that he was a mathematician by training and outscored Gates, and went quite against norms by his own business judgment (which is commendable - it means he made his own path, and didn't just chase after trends).

This fear that LLMs are hallucinating constantly, and therefore entirely unreliable, is unfounded.

Sure, that'll happen if you're going into extreme limits of areas of knowledge - but if you're dipping your foot into superficial waters of known areas, it's reasonably fine (and perhaps even more sound than the hotter areas of Wikipedia).

E.g. if you're programming in the most well-known languages (say Python), and you're only asking beginner questions (which is where high pedagogic value lies) it's unlikely that the program will hallucinate all that deeply to mislead you. Yes, you won't know, but simple/mid questions are easy to check.

You shouldn't of course head to LLMs for the most arcane scientific/mathematical knowledge and conclusions; if you do that, that's on you, because offering expertise is not what LLMs are designed for, and the disclaimers all warn against it. But you shouldn't throw out the baby with the bathwater.

I enjoyed the original Final Fantasy 7. Are you sure that your non-enjoyment of remake is not due to rose-coloured glasses of nostalgia?

This article reads like nonsense - even the header is clickbait material.

Claiming science needs peer review is like saying a painting isn't art until a critic reviews it. The results existsindependently of external validation.

Peer review is not essential for science. Science can be done, whether or not it's peer-reviewed.

Especially when you're dealing with scientific frontiers, where no one really can verify things - and peers don't even exist? How does peer review work then?

The idea that something can be 'less scientific' just because it's not been peer-reviewed is nonsense. Unreviewed scientific work can stand on its own merit. Moreover this insistence on peer review really opens up more room for academic dogma and politics to creep into the hard sciences - not a good thing.

Given the amount of scientific fraud going on, even with 'peer review', it's just not necessary for true science and it's something that should be done away with.

Which goes back to the argument on constant growth. Why is there such a need for that?

Hey Carson! I'm using HTMX on quite a number of internal tools. It's completely revolutioned the way we've done things, especially coupled with Django. Extremely grateful for your work - you're a net positive for humanity.

I am not sure how you would conflate an engineer with an intern.

That's like conflating a practising doctor with a medical student.

I almost feel like a discussion about how Go's compiler is crazy fast is warranted in this thread.