kwyjibo12345

I love python, but the GIL is IMHO the second worst early design decision ever made right after introducing Null pointers in Java.

I came across a website that wanted to force-feed ads to me before watching a video yesterday. However, they wanted me to select the best-fitting ad of 5 different ads with one ad playing automatically after 30s of not choosing one to play.

Sometimes this branch of reality feels like it wasn't meant for productive use. Needless to say I will never come back.

I'm less shocked by Alexa suggesting this than by the poor socket design in some parts of the world allowing to short-circuit the plugs while they are inserted.

This is as proper design: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schuko

I have been working as a scientist in academic and industrial systems research for most of my life now and I have a different view on this. There are plenty of ideas that float around in academia for years or even decades before they get adopted by the industry. Examples have been mentioned here. People declaring some research area dead are usually proven wrong by time (as was Pike), because nobody can foresee which results will be relevant in the future. I tend to think of it as sort of scientific entrepreneurship, you need 100 startups to get one unicorn.

The point is: (academic) scientists have no interest in productization, they are merely interested into the next hot topic and the next paper, because that's their job. Productization is for product managers and engineers. Occasionally the lines are blurred, but I consider this separation of concerns a benefit, not a problem.

The common life cycle of a paper is as follows:

1. Academics write and submit papers -> university/tax money pays 2. Academics review papers -> university/tax money pays 3. Academics organize and attend conferences -> university/tax money pays 4. University buys published paper from publishers -> university/tax money pays

So university/tax money pays for writing the paper, quality assurance via reviews, conferences, just to finally buy the paper via some insanely expensive subscription.

For a rational environment like science this model is simply insane.

Having worked as a researcher all my life in academia and the industry, I can only support Sci-Hub. Publishing as it works currently is an incredibly time consuming and expensive process funneling tremendous amounts of tax money into the pocḱets of publishers.

To some extent the whole situation reminds me of the video and music content piracy era in the early 2000s. I hope there will be an equivalent of Apple Music/Spotify/Netflix for scientific papers in the near future.