scoopdewoop

First, state communists kill anarchists. That's history.

Second, the Soviets were incredibly dogmatic about science because they used it to justify their materialist ideology. They promoted Lysenkoism (fake genetics) to conform to Marxist doctrine. That's literally the opposite of epistemological questioning.

Third, claiming Kuhn and Popper were Soviet mouthpieces is unhinged. Popper wrote "The Open Society and Its Enemies" as an anti-communist text. Kuhn taught at Harvard, MIT, and Princeton. They were Western academics, not agents.

You've gone from defending naive scientism to claiming anyone who critiques it is a communist propagandist. That's McCarthyism, not an argument.

The tobacco-funded studies that failed to prove cigarettes harmful? Those were scientists doing "objective methodology." Pharmaceutical companies suppressing unfavorable trials? Scientists. The replication crisis? Scientists following the same process.

These aren't exceptions. They show that science is a human practice embedded in institutional and economic contexts.

Acknowledging that science involves human interests doesn't undermine it. It's how you maintain critical perspective when bad actors claim scientific authority. Or should I trust the current experts that Tylenol causes Autism?

Religion is also a human endeavor full of interests, and can also ascertain certain truths. Often people who subscribe to scientism gloat that even in the farthest reaches of space, other aliens will arrive at the same equations. Similarly, I think at the farthest reaches of space aliens will have to reckon with wickedness, duty, hospitality, forgiveness, etc. It can even make numerical predictions like "there will always be the poor". So far so true.

I expected him to explain some core deficiencies: problems regarding the module system or multi-threading limitations, or some pathological case where latency spikes... and he said "I don't like the whitespace."

I never took him seriously again and left that company shortly after.

Anybody would, but Rust is not that wand, and there is no wand.

Code needs to _exist_ in order to matter. Time is finite, my free-time is even more limited. Most of my code is garbage collected, and runs great, but if I needed it to be really fast, I would use Zig.

I don't need to be told what software is for or how to accomplish my goals, and I'm sure you wouldn't understand my goals. I've been making code creatively for almost 30 years. You might as well tell an origami artist that folding paper is a bad way to accomplish their goals.

The attitude among _some_ Rust devs (or armchair coders) that there is no place for non-rust manual-memory languages is insanely disconnected with reality. Games exist, Rust ones hardly do. Synths exist, Rust ones hardly do. Not everything is a high-availability microservice or an OS kernel! Look around!

Edited to add:

> "Safety" is just a shorthand for "my program means what I say". Unsafety is semantic gibberish.

You know this isn't true, right? "Safety" in Rust specifically means memory safety and thread safety: no use-after-free, no data races, no null/dangling pointer dereferences, no buffer overflows. That's it. It doesn't guarantee your program is correct, and it doesn't even prevent memory leaks.

Things being manually managed doesn't make them gibberish, and something being implicit, rather than explicit, doesn't mean its gibberish.

The attitude of Rust being bug-free is _insaaaane_. A "bug" is just code that breaks expectations, I promise we can and will write those in every language forever.

I am fine with ignoring the problems that rust solves, but not because I'm smart and disciplined. It just fits my use-case of making fast _non-critical_ software. I don't think we should rewrite security and networking stacks in it.

The thing I wish we would remember, as developers, is that not all programs need to be so "safe". They really, truly don't. We all grew up loving lots of unsafe software. Star Fox 64, MS Paint, FruityLoops... the sad truth is that developers are so job-pilled and have pager-trauma, so they don't even remember why they got in the game.

I remember reading somewhere that Andrew Kelley wrote zig because he didn't have a good language to write a DAW in, and I think its so well suited to stuff like that! Make cool creative software you like in zig, and people that get hella about memory bugs can stay mad.

Meanwhile, everyone knows that memory bugs made super mario world better, not worse.

Edit: if you don't think this is true, look at the history of truly any country and see what happens when subsistence farmers and indigenous communities refuse to work for capitalists

I truly enjoy programming with AI, it is my favorite hobby by a mile. I'm also happy to say that, for now, I get to capture some of the productivity increase for myself while my employer catches up to how effective it is.

It is sad that there is no space to discuss these new techniques that isn't full of opportunists and clout chasers.

What are people supposed to do? Vote? We voted for the public healthcare guy in 2008 and the powers-that-be decided they would rather back "muslim ban" demagogues than let that happen again.

I get this is your corporate-facing persona so you could never actually speak critically to this point, but the health insurance industry broke democracy, and eventually they'll find out what the alternative is.

This video blew my mind wide open about the double slit experiment by showing the simpler case, the single slit experiment, and I think it clears up a LOT! Sadly, I can't do the explanation any justice

The timbre of instruments largely due to the harmonics that they exhibit, and for natural instruments these tend to be simple whole number ratios that we replicate in our scales in just temperament, and approximate more flexibly in equal temperament.

I had never considered what scales a synthetic sound with unfamiliar harmonics would sound best in.

Edit: Not even synthetic instruments, but Gamelan instruments too! Oh so cool, I've seen many Gamelan performances and its very exciting as a musician to hear such a rich and different paradigm.

For that example, couldn't you do exactly that? Multiplication is commutative

It is your drives, no? Does the browser make your system drives work a bunch? Much more likely, it is VSCode running ripgrep (rg in htop/activity monitor) in the background to find symbols in your codebase.

That would be exactly the same regardless of GUI toolkit.

edit: misread "system drives me bananas" as pertaining to "system drives" nvm