socialdemocrat

Apple should have made a modern Smalltalk on top of the Objective-C object model as a replacement for Objective-C instead of Swift.

I want to love Swift, but the funny thing is that as they solve more problem with Swift they also add so much complexity that you wonder if all the problems they solved just added new problems.

Think you are a bit quick to judge what people in Europe think. Juries have also been widely used in Europe. They are not unknown. It depends entirely on where you are.

Britain famously use juries. That is where the US gets it system from. In. All Nordic countries have had them. In Norway we phased it out years ago, but it isn’t one judge but several. Some are picked by citizens others are professionals. They determine guilt together.

In Norway we long had two systems to determine guilt. One was a jury system. A careful examination of the performance of both systems over many years concluded that the jury system was the worst. All serious miscarriages of justice we have had happened in a jury system.

A key reason identified was that juries don’t have written statements giving the reasoning for their judgment.

The jury system ended several years ago and nobody miss it. A panel of judges professional and selected among citizens akin to jury duty determines guilt.

I have long been skeptical of AI/AR because I also don’t feel like being strapped in like that. But I can see this as being useful for dedicated tasks: surgeons, building or repairing a PC, inspecting a buildings. It will be more of a professional tool than consumer tool I think.

People are increasingly running out of reasons to not use Julia. It really is the future for data science and machine learning. No let me correct that. It really could replace anything R, Python, Perl, Ruby etc is used for today.

Not right now as packages, larger communities etc need to be developed. But long term solutions the potential is obvious. A friendly, powerful and high performance dynamic language ought to have a very broad appeal.

That is not really true. People think that because they have spent time with Java which is excessively GC dependent. More modern GC languages such as Go and Julia have opted to use GCs in a far more conservative manner. They don't produce the exorbitant amount of garbage that Java produces. I've talked to NASA guys using Go for real time systems. They say it works great. GC doesn't need to be a problem if you do it right.

A clear complexity cost difficulty in extending these libraries. This separation force libraries to become huge complex monoliths. In Julia the equivalent is done with absolutely hilariously tiny libraries. In fact they are so small that many Python guys exploring Julia decide to not explore further thinking most of the Julia ML libraries aren't done or have barely started.

They are just not accustomed to seeing libraries being that small. That is possible in Julia because it is all native Julia code which means interfacing with other Julia code works seamless and allows you to mix and match many small libraries very easily. You can reuse much more functionality which means individual libraries can be kept very small.

For PyTorch and TensorFlow e.g. activation functions have to be coded specifically into each library. In Julia these can just be reused for any library. Each ML library doesn't need to reimplement activation functions.

That is why you get these bloated monoliths. They have to reinvent the wheel over and over again. So yeah there is a cost which is constantly paid.

Every time you need to extend these libraries with some functionality you are paying a much higher price than when you do the same with Julia.

Julia 1.0 was released in 2018. That is just 5 years ago. I would say that is very young. Especially since a language today needs more than in the past. Julia has package manager, virtual environments, version management. Stuff that tends to be bolted on much later.

You needed much less stuff supported out of the box when Python first came on the scene. Today expectations have gotten much bigger. A minimal viable language has far more requirements.

Not sure why you restrict this observation to UK and commonwealth countries. This is reality for many of us in Europe. Legal documents in Norway also refer to the king as the one deciding stuff. But that doesn’t literally mean the king. It is more of the institution of monarchy and the ceremony in which the king signs government actions presented to him by “his” government.

But this is of little practical consequence. What I find more bizarre is how conservative the US is around its constitution and political system. Norway may be a Monarchy but has gone through far more modernization in terms of how the political system works, elections and government than the US for instance.

I look at how voting and representation works in the US today and it is basically Norway in the 1880s or something. Back when we also had a two party system of liberals and conservatives. When there was a winner take all system. Censuses had to be done semi regularly as citizens were not fully and completely registered and kept up to date on a continuous fashion.

I would bet Britain in quite a number of ways is more modern in its constitution than the US. E.g. they don’t have å gerrymandering problem. That got reformed and fixed long ago.

You can just look at a map over the US and see quickly how the grid pattern exists at almost any zoom level. You also notice it in how people think about directions. As a European I found it tricky to deal with but I saw the opposite when Americans drive in Europe. They really struggle with a system not built around thinking east-west and north-south.

I think generally in Europe people think in terms of landmarks rather than fixed directions.

Extensive comparison of engines, design of shape, choice of materials, performance and strategies for reuse.

So Rust force you to do waterfall design? Sorry just had to tease about that as a dynamic language fan. I am much more in the LISP school of thought, believing in growing software through iteration and exploration, for much the same reason I think lean project development has been more successful.

The problem is that so much of the time when you are building something you don't really have a clear idea of what you are doing, but you build and understanding as you experiment and iterate.

I do writing professionally now and have much the same experience. It is hard to plan exactly what you will write in detail. So much of the greatest ideas materialize as you write. Both writing and coding is IMHO a thinking process.

On the other hand I fully accept that us developers are all different in how our brains work. But I have seen when working with people much smarter than me how much they get stuff wrong and waste time by trying to excessively plan before fully understanding the problem. Stuff I notice I solve easily by taking an experimental and iterative approach.

One small concession: I think JavaScript is awful and Ruby projects tend to end up as a mess. I am mostly a Julia, Lua and Go fan. So I kind of learn towards languages which are a bit in between dynamic and static.

Not at all. Nobody doubted this could be done. So there is no countdown as that would imply we didn’t know if fusion can be done. We do know. The problem is primarily engineering a working fusion power plant and this milestone didn’t advance that goal one iota.

It will never be cheap and limitless though. Is solar power isn’t free even if you don’t have to pay for the sunshine. It is the capital costs which gets you and those will very much apply to something as complex as fusion.

Why not a company running the garage seeing it as a way of making money? Cheap solar should make it an attractive position to sell power during peak hours.

What issue? Lots of us live in apartments in Norway and I see plenty of upgrades happening to get charging going at apartment complexes. Does not seem like an insurmountable problem. I got asked if I needed charging installed at my garage spot some years ago.

No, that is not the case. RISC-V was designed to work both in embedded systems, workstations, supercomputers and specialized hardware. That is why the instruction-set is made modular. It is allow you to tailor the chip to very different types of hardware.

The extension system is exactly why I would call RISC-V the return of RISC. It is what allows you to keep the CPU significantly simpler because you only add what you need for the system you are designing.

For instance if you want really strong vector processing capability you can design very small cores with only vector processing instructions and the most necessary scalar operations. All the stuff you need typically to run a multi-user OS (handle privilege levels) can be thrown out.

That is exactly what Esperanto Technologies doing. They got got four fat Out-of-Order cores with all the instructions you typically would want in a modern CPU running Linux, while there are 1088 small in-order cores with support for RISC-V vector extension. Vector processing actually adds very few transistors if the core is in-order rather than out-of-order.

I would say this is all quite RISCy in that you are making simple tailor made chips rather than making huge complex monoliths to do everything, which is the CISC way IMHO.

Intel btw is realizing their approach was kind of dumb when then tried making their big-little core design. To keep the small cores small they had to throw out the complex AVX-2 instructions.

The Esperanto system with lots of RISC-V cores is built with localized memory for small clusters of cores. It is programmed akin to a graphics card and plenty of workloads are done on graphics cards. That means it screams on machine learning, crypto, scientific computing and many other number crunching tasks. Sure it will not make your MS Word run 1 million times faster but who needs that?

The core count of Tilera CPUs is totally normal today, so not exactly a failed idea. AMD Ryzen thread piper has 64 cores and if you count number of hardware threads you got 128. That is more than Tilera had. AMD is a very successful company. You got also got Ampere Computing with the Altra Max with 128 cores. Anyway these are all cases of CPUs for general purpose computing while the 1000 core RISC-V CPU was really a specialized system for AI acceleration and scientific computing not general purpose computing.

Interesting to see John conclude like me after reading Patterson that RISC vs CISC was always about a philosophical difference in how you approach chip design.

This is what I argue in this article as well but I reach a different conclusion from him and I think that is in large part because the rise of RISC-V has made the RISC and CISC distinction more relevant again.

https://itnext.io/risc-vs-cisc-microprocessor-philosophy-in-...

When John wrote that article RISC processors had gotten very complex. Then it was a lot about complex address modes. But the last decades complexity stems more from lots of SIMD instructions.

RISC-V has aimed to reverse that trend and create å significantly smaller ISA. The RISC counter-trend to complexity is thus still alive and kicking.

Viking ships are often portrayed as primarily an advantage in warfare, but they played a significant role in trade. People tend to forget about Scandinavia after the Viking age, but those rich shipbuilding traditions did not remain unused. Much of Norwegian prosperity after the Viking age was based on ship building. With few large urban centers and absence of a rich capitalist class, ship building was long a community oriented endeavor. Everybody who contributed got a stake in the profits.

I wrote an article about this stuff for anyone interested:

https://erik-engheim.medium.com/how-fjords-made-norway-rich-...

The right thing to do, and I also don't really think reparations should be coupled to this as that opens another can of worms and probably isn't the solution needed.

That is sad to hear. You hear criticism of public IT stuff here in Norway too, but it mostly works. Like I got e-receipt since 2013. Can order new prescriptions, book appointments , look at test results online online. Well the latter doesn’t always work. But everything with taxes and banking had long been all electronic and working fine.

It is always puzzling to me with how Germany has many cultural similarities with us Nordics and is an advanced science nation, yet is always so much slower in adopting new technologies. In Norway we have used electronic receipts since 2013. That is like a decade.

But I suspect it is a difference in attitude. I think in Scandinavia we are generally far more enthusiastic about new things.

Kind of defeats the point of having separate operating systems. I think the best environment an OS creates where apps are deigned around that OS is the value an OS brings to the table.

I have discussed what I think are the primary reasons in this story and criticized some other theories I often see such as Mongols stopping industrialization or China not being capitalist enough.

Some shameless self-promotion here: https://www.manning.com/books/julia-as-a-second-language

It is not exactly a K&R style book but I did write it to appeal more to regular programmers than academics. The Julia world is very dominated by researchers which is reflected in how it is often presented.

It isn’t meant to show directly applicable code examples but focus more on things which could be fun and interesting to implement: such as simulate rockets.

For me it solved many reoccurring problems. One issue that popping up for me was the need for a clunky visitor pattern. Say you do collision detection between multiple shapes of different type, or you want to transform a serialized representation of a GUI into GUI elements.

In my mind it also removes a lot of cases where I need major restructuring and and refactoring in typical OOP languages. Getting type hierarchies and code organization wrong is so much easier with OOP and much harder to de-tangle.

Not always easy to explain with examples. Once you used MD for a while and try SD again you really start noticing how clunky SD makes code writing.

It is a variant of the US system, rather than the rich picking the candidates who can run, the priests do.

Sorry, I am teasing but I want to highlight that the problem with pre-selected candidates is a widespread problem undermining democracy in many places. Same applies to Hong Kong were China heavily influenced candidate selection.

“Iranians have agency” is a crappy argument to excuse American meddling and overthrow of democratic societies. That gives the US a blank check to do whatever they please and later blame the victim for the outcome.

A revolution is not about agency. You make a mockery of the whole idea. Agency implies what the majority wants. That is what they had with democracy which the US ruined. They took away Iranian agency. The revolution later happening is not a good example of agency. A revolution rarely express the popular will. Instead it gives power to those people most capable of using violence.

Democratically inclined and freedom loving humanitarians will frequently lose in a civil war as they lack the violent behavior to win.