socialdemocrat

How do we verify the claims here. Ultimately anybody can post screenshots. To be believable, we need multiple parties with some credentials to get behind this. If a major news organization, well known journalist or representative from university in question could come out and somehow verify or discredit these claims.

That sucks, but the US lacks moral authority to point fingers as the US has such long history of manipulating elections all over the world, overthrowing democratic leaders. The US even actively spied on European citizens through PRISM at a scale never done by either China or Russia. When Snowden exposed the US, it just shrugged “everybody spies on everybody”.

Okay, if so, then why complain about Chinese spying? They are just doing what the US is even more guilty of.

As a westerner I would love to see the US stop embarrassing us in front of autocrats.

I don’t like the CCP, but in practice the US conservative movement is probably the biggest threat to democracy in the West today. They are spreading the idea that elections need not be respected and spread conspiracy theories people are eating up all over the world.

For instance when we started getting problems with vaccination of people in Norway it was not due to China but fake news and conspiracies pushed by the radical conservative movement in the US.

The US holds a special position in advancing and protecting democracy, but is itself turning into a liability. China is a concern but first priority has to be to fix American democracy before it drags the whole West into the mud.

I just have an issue with the CCP and their apologists. That is primarily who people refer to when they say China. It is pretty common speech. Same when talking about America doing something, we refer to the US government primarily, not its people.

I used to be a huge Ruby fan but I got to say Julia had proven to be a much nicer language than Python or Ruby ever was. It gives stronger typing so it feels a bit more like a statically typed language in terms of safeguarding you, but without getting in the way. Lot of the power of LISP without the odd syntax.

Problem is the community is not web focused so you may not find enough choice in web libraries to your taste.

No, they are great for cars. For infrastructure iron batteries are much better. Iron batteries are not suitable for cars though.

Stationary storage will more like be taken over by iron batteries which are much cheaper. Sodium batteries will happen in cars because not everyone needs really long range.

You can sign up for a free trial and cancel before any payment is required. I know that can be annoying, but as a writer you have to have some way of getting people interested in trying a subscription. Not easy to find a good balance for both readers and writers.

Agree, while I prefer the Go model from a usability perspective, I don't think that is the way to go for a language such as Zig. Zig seems to have done a really good job within the boundaries set by a language which aims for minimal level of abstraction.

I am actually the author, and I didn't start this thread. People have to decide for themselves whether it is worth reading or not. Lots of people subscribe to Substack to read experiences, opinions on various subjects.

Nobody will put in the effort to write these kinds of articles over time unless they can make some money on it either through subscriptions or ads. Personally I trying to find a balance by letting people read quite a lot for free, so it is worthwhile to look. Subscription can be had for free on a trial period, so you can can try reading my stories and see if it is worth it and cancel before you got to pay.

It is a certain mark of entitlement that people think they should be given all the content in the world for free without paying for it. Why should writers do all their work for free? You expect to walk into a magazine store or bookstore and grab whatever stuff you want for free and walk out?

Of course not. Content creators have to mix free and paid to make things work. One writes free stuff for marketing but you cannot only do that. Most people don't live of trust funds ;-)

Interesting video of how the Swiss created a tank simulator in the 1970s without computer generated images, but by using a camera in a miniature landscape.

While not sexy this technology could help deal with the fact that it is unrealistic for us to be able to convert all ICE cars to EVs in time.

I have seen several others remark that when you really need to squeeze performance Zig does better.

Currently writing a small Zig project, I can totally see that. Although frankly I will probably stick to Go. Zig is a lot more work in my view as it os very low level. However that is also what helps you squeeze out performance.

With Zig you really get a fine grained control of memory management and it is a lot easier to push anything you can to be computed at compile time rather than runtime.

They claim 90% efficiency, so I doubt you can compare this to heating a container and them driving a stream engine afterwards.

I suspect they are here also utilizing geothermal heat and heatpumps which allows you to increase efficiency. If you heat water that is already quite hot, then you can get more energy back than you put in. Higher temperature differentials give better efficiency.

Yeah… I seem to remember scratching my head because of a variation of this problem. It was kind of driving me nuts. Yet the number of moments like this has been low for me in Go compared to C++.

So you can create a distributable executable without any of the Lua code? Or will the exe contain a Lua interpreter?

I considered writing about Terra as ab examples of a similar language but I felt the fact that Terra did this at JIT time made it too different to compare. In that regard it is not all that different from Julia. That Zig does this AOT is significant I think.

That isn’t a C-like language. Doing it in a statically typed low-level systems language is an unusual thing.

It isn’t a claim about the capabilities or features of Zig or any other language. I don’t see how it makes a big difference to the the reader. We are talking about the exact wording was of those advising Andrew to not do comptime and their exact position. I feel this a bikeshedding.

Making this into a huge topic that requires evidence and citations seems a bit over the top. I would say you guys don’t know how journalism works. You equate article writing with scientific journals and papers. They are not the same thing.

I think what is at the core is getting the language description correct.

The purpose was to pick interesting features to talk about and select one language for each feature which is a good exponent for that features. For instance I used Smalltalk to cover image based development: https://erikexplores.substack.com/p/what-makes-smalltalk-uni...

Yet Smalltalk was not the first language supporting image based development. I would pick Julia to talk about multiple dispatch. Likewise Zig is picked not because it is the first doing comptime but because that is a central feature of Zig and it is a language which really puts emphasis on it.

Just commenting here as the author. Don't call people liars. Being wrong about something and lying are two very different things. I was writing that intro based on recalling Andrew Kelley stating in a video that he had been advised against running code at compile time by several people. I could not recall if he ever said explicitly who that was. It was an off-hand comment.

I choose to par-phrase him, and had no idea that this would get anyone this upset and lead to me being accused of being a liar. How much of experts these people where I cannot vouch for. Maybe they were second rate language designers or maybe Kelley referred to older papers advising against it.

Either way I cannot find the exact video anywhere where he made this remark despite looking through several. Does it really matter? Can you say for a fact that no language designer expert ever told Andrew Kelley this? I am not claim this is the general opinion among designers, only that this is what Andrew got told.

If anyone has the correct quote, I'll be happy to update the article.

Author here, I cannot vouch for exactly the competency level here, but I was paraphrasing a remark Andrew Kelley made in a video discussing Zig. From what I remember he said that many told him that running code at compilation time wasn't a good idea and you shouldn't do it. My understanding was that these must have been people with some experience with programming language design. Why would Andrew Kelley listen to random opinionated guys on the internet?

I will try to lookup this video when I have time. I was a bit surprised that this remark was a such a turn-off. Had I known, I should have looked up the video to get the exact quote.

It was just meant as a bit of a funny dramatic entry to discussing an unusual language design choice for a statically type language. Sure we are seeing more things like const expressions in C++ today, but at the time this wasn't very common.

Compile time code execution is implemented in a really neat way in Zig enabling anything from generics to meta programming.

As terrible as this crisis is perhaps this crisis is what will really kickstart the green transformation of our economies. Fossil fuels has exposed itself as an economic liability.

Having played with Zig I would say the tradeoff is complexity. Zig is harder to learn than C with more difficult concepts. Something like Go is much quicker. Yet I think Zig is finding an okay balance. You can still get productive much faster than in Rust.

Manual memory management gives obvious downsides which should be well known. Zig does this in the best way I have seen though.

Yes

Substack had 7 day free trial which can be canceled at any time

As the article author I want to point out that my aim is to popularize and present different angles on a variety of topics. I am not trying to do original research and thus I don't think it is fair to compare my writing to that. Also my writing isn't primarily about printing. I am trying to cover more broadly the period from 1500 to 1700 where one saw European powers starting to dominate world affairs.

Understanding why Europe rose to prominence requires looking at several different aspects such as development of glass technology, mechanical clocks, navigation, gun powder weapons and printing. If I was writing and publishing a book then that would be my topic. Naturally when printing isn't really the main topic of the book, but part of a larger narrative then you cannot cover that as extensively as a book which is ONLY about printing which is what you are talking about.

My writing isn't concerned with Chinese typewriters as that would come at a much later date when Western dominance has already been well established.

I didn't actually know that there are people who think Chinese letters are a conspiracy to monopolize knowledge. That is a very bizarre belief indeed.

I certainly use slightly tabloid headlines, but they are a reflection of what the article is about and I think it will become clear to anyone reading through the article that isn't meant to be some kind of civilization scorecard or competition. I have seen a MAGA republican retweet the article, but if they follow more of my writing I think they would be rather disappointed. I am generally promoting a fairly leftist view in my writing, so not really what would appeal to conservatives.

I probably didn't understand you original point well, and I not sure I understand it still. The point was that competition between states spurred innovation. But of course if all those states are constantly on the verge of collapse then I agree not much will happen. I would argue that in the later medieval period most European states had achieved a lot of stability which helped prosperity grow.

Yet in relative terms, I would say Europe was still embroiled in a lot more wars than China even during the industrial revolution. Think of the 7-years war, Napoleonic wars, American war of independence.

Why the industrial revolution happened in Britain is of course a big topic onto itself. I have argued before that it could in fact ONLY have happened in Britain due to the geography, resources and climate of Britain: https://medium.com/lessons-from-history/why-england-industri...

1. France and the Netherlands lacked the coal and iron. 2. Germany didn't have the right kind of coal, and no as ideal conditions to dig canals and utilize water power as Great Britain.

If you sort of go over a checklist of needed prerequisites, you are pretty much left with Britain. Sure it could have happened elsewhere but then only after a number of other innovation had happened. At the technological level the world existing in in the mid 1700s, Britain was really the only candidate.

Internal stability is of course always good, but Italy, Spain, France, Greece etc could not possibly have started an industrial revolution no matter how peaceful and stable they had been. They just lacked the resources, climate and geography to do so.

There was stagnation after the fall of the Roman Empire while new states and systems were trying to establish itself. However the later medieval period was full of innovation. It was far more active in using machinery than Roman Empire and China:

https://erikexamines.substack.com/p/the-european-mill-revolu...

Medieval Europe significantly advanced glass making, invented spectacles and lenses, laying the groundwork for telescopes and microscopes:

https://erikexamines.substack.com/p/glass-the-substance-of-s...

Medieval Europe pioneered mechanical clocks which was a pretty big deal: https://erikexamines.substack.com/p/the-missing-chinese-mech...

Medieval Europe also advanced gunpowder weapons more rapidly than in China, and already had evolved technology around plate armor and crossbows far beyond anything the Romans did: https://erikexamines.substack.com/p/why-did-europe-and-not-c...

The idea that no innovation happened in medieval Europe is severely overstated. I think it stems from the fact that medieval Europe had less production of literature, science and arts than Rome and Greece. Yet in terms of practical inventions, medieval Europe, did a lot more.