xtian

Michael Hudson:

https://michael-hudson.com/2023/03/the-mechanics-of-a-bond-m...

How will you try to find issues? Many claims are made and accepted as true in the media without any verifiable facts to back them up. There's an inherently political valence to which claims receive this treatment at every level (national, geopolitical, etc).

What about when the journalists push conspiracy theories? (e.g., Russiagate)

How do you explain the US cables from that day that were leaked by Wikileaks which contradict the official Western narrative?

China needs the outside world, too.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belt_and_Road_Initiative

> The truth of the matter is that 99% of real world applications run just fine, and it doesn't pay off to invest in shaving milliseconds here or there.

You're taking deep quaffs of the Kool-Aid and so are most of the people commenting on this story. General software responsiveness and reliability (i.e., usefulness) has been in decline for decades. This is an objective fact.

Writing objective reality off as mere "milliseconds", "edge-cases", or only relevant for "toy problems" exemplifies the arrogance and severe incompetence of most programmers. People are seriously trying to talk down to Casey Muratori when in all likelihood they haven't accomplished even 1% as much as him as programmers.

I get it—no one wants to leave fantasy-land as long as the easy money is flowing. But sooner or later the glittering carriage turns back into a pumpkin.

So why do 99% of real world applications run like garbage? What’s the culprit?

That’s true of every methodology used by inexperienced or reckless developers. There is no shortcut to quality or experience. But Carmack’s approach has the distinction of ultimately delivering results by orienting one towards the objective necessities of the problem at hand rather than, for instance, the never-ending spiral of arbitrary and inefficient abstractions that OO ideology commonly produces.

This line assumes that each person exists in the world as an ideal individual, subject only to their own independent logic, biases, and whims. In reality, we all have concrete material interests which are determined by concrete economic relations. Our logic, biases, and whims—the very nature of our consciousness—all flow from our material and social reality.

These material interests are not entirely individual and distinct; they fall within broad strata based on the overall structure of the economy (e.g., the class of people with the capacity to own a major media organization and the class of people who make a living by serving them). Thus, there is no need for a conscious conspiracy coordinating every aspect of the media machine since the basic character of the consciousness of those involved flows from a more fundamental material reality. At the same time, there’s no reason one can’t become consciously aware of the stratum of shared material interests that one exists within, and I think it would be foolish to assume that the people at the highest levels of power and wealth in the world have failed to do so.

What actions would you say you can’t justify with that rhetoric?

Why are you interested in having a discussion on any of this when you can just talk to yourself (i.e., write your own)? It’s really not that hard.

Yes, Elm and its core packages had bugs and critical omissions that were outstanding for years, many of which affected our app. It was a running joke on our team to try to guess the vintage of the extant GitHub issue whenever we ran into a problem. I consciously fled the ecosystem and community many years ago so I don’t remember specifics anymore. And the repos were scrubbed of all past issues when 0.19 was released so we can’t go check either.

If you appreciate implied threats for creating a package which gives people some (unauthorized!) control over their own destiny, then I can see why this comment wouldn’t trouble you. Have fun in the sandbox.

The crucial point is exactly what you're referencing ("his language"). The way that contributions, feedback, and issues were treated was very much not in line with a tool that people depend on for their work. It was in line with a personal hobby project, but the marketing and promotion did not set those expectations. They strongly promoted the project as a tool for use in industry. So your defense is not convincing to me as someone who did try to use this tool in a professional setting where I was accountable to a larger organization for delivering on technical requirements.

People weren't asking to compromise or control the design of the language. They wanted to be able to contribute to the project (usually just first-party packages) in order to have their problems solved in a timely manner or have their issues addressed in some other way. This was usually after having invested hundreds of hours in the language, because the basic golden path was very polished in Elm.

I can only speculate on the reasons why there was this disparity between marketing and reality. Certainly the language gained a lot more interest and community investment than a Show HN hobby project, and some people did benefit from that. I'm not making any specific claims about Evan. The "nice" aspect is relevant because while following the Elm community closely, I witnessed many harsh interactions on the part of Evan and Richard Feldman that were simply wrapped in gentle verbiage.

Here's just one example (check the edit history): https://github.com/gdotdesign/elm-github-install/issues/62#i...

Some of the most manipulative and self-serving people you’ll ever meet are “nice”.

I was using Elm full time back then, and I think some important context to note is that 0.18 had outstanding issues which had seen no movement for years (and PRs were generally ignored). The official guidance was “wait for 0.19.” While 0.19 addressed many if not all of these issues, it came with a number of breaking changes, some very significant.

0.19 also coincided with a reorganization of the GitHub repos which happened to scrub all past issues, PRs, and discussion. A more stringent moderation policy was also instituted on the official forums which forbade discussion of potential forks, unapproved workarounds of the new limitations, or any criticism which was seen as too harsh.

If the quoted paragraph is simply false, how did John McCain, along with Democratic Senator Chris Murphy, end up on stage with a neo-Nazi in 2013?

https://fair.org/home/john-mccain-human-rights-ukrainian-naz...

How do you explain the Nuland-Pyatt call?

Yeah it’s fun to watch it fail as the empire collapses.

They ended the occupation of Afghanistan abruptly in order to redirect resources to a certain other conflict, more critical to US elite interests.

> they are very limited by foreign imports of iron (75% of their domestic consumption of iron is provided by Australia). If China had to stop imports from Western nations, its war material production capacity would probably drop by about 75% after its 30-90 day stockpile of raw materials was used up.

That’s a fair point, but US geopolitical decisions have incentivized an extremely close relationship between China and Russia, which has the third-largest iron ore reserves globally and is one of the largest producers of many other raw materials as well.

If you go beyond the level of shouting on a street corner and start building real power, you will be dragged through the mud by the combined force of corporate media smears and social media discourse swarm influence operations. If you go further you will be murdered by the state. Ask Fred Hampton and others.

I’m assuming that’s because of America’s deep base of industrial expertise and infrastructure as compared to that of China.

They don’t have to yet? Here’s CSIS estimating the replacement time for various weapons transferred to Ukraine:

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Fmc_WJsWAAUP8GL?format=jpg&name=...

Why haven’t they done so yet?

"Navy Secretary Warns: If Defense Industry Can’t Boost Production, Arming Both Ukraine and the US May Become ‘Challenging’"

https://www.defenseone.com/threats/2023/01/navy-secretary-wa...

Ask Fred Hampton about that. Ask Darren Seals. Ask Gary Webb. Ask Julian Assange. Ask Edward Snowden.

No I think we meet all other reasonable measures also. The experience of freedom in the US is the freedom to make increasingly virtual and arbitrary consumer choices. That’s pretty much it. It’s not the experience of freedom of speech in practice, not free time, not freedom from usurious debt, not the freedom of rising prosperity, not freedom from opaque government interference and meddling.

When people use the word “authoritarian” they are just signaling that they believe the narratives that our media speaks with one voice about those bad, bad other countries.

Absent outside influences, I agree the issue would be resolved peacefully over time. The problem is the Western elite want to use the issue to justify aggression and containment of China since China poses a mortal threat to the US-centric global financial system which is in a deepening state of crisis.

Paper tiger.

They won’t get to see the easy victory up close in those positions

Learn the historical significance of the One China policy. Then the answer will be obvious.

No big surprise there.