JohnStrangeII

I went for GTK3 in Go (Gotk3) and kind of regret it. Not that there is anything particularly wrong with it, but I'd go for Qt if I could start afresh.

For me, the biggest advantage of Lisp dialects is that they make it easy to introduce very powerful and far-reaching abstractions - and idiomatic good code encourages these. For some tasks that's pretty awesome, for example anything that has to do with classic symbolic A.I. or expert systems. You abstract every data type your program uses and write small functions that operate on these types. It's similar to classical OOP, except that you're not forced to use OOP for everything but can instead use a more functional style.

Another big advantage is the syntax, because it almost doesn't exist. The language allows you to focus on the semantics whereas the syntax of expressions becomes neglectable. S-expressions are also among the main reasons why abstractions work so well in Lisp.

Finally, and this only applies to CommonLisp: CommonLisp is very complete in terms of language capabilities. It has static and dynamic types, lexical and dynamic scoping, has OOP and allows for functional programming, and so on. It has less artificial limitations than any of the more recent languages. It doesn't attempt to "hold your hand" by e.g. disallowing the use of OOP with multiple inheritance because "it's bad for you", or any such nonsense. Most LISP dialects also have garbage collection, which saves you from crashes and saves a lot of development time.

There is no conflict of goals, languages offer certain features, some of them offer only "zero-cost" abstractions (C++ and Rust) and others offer more abstractions. You get what you pay for in terms of runtime executable speed / features trade-offs. The other factor is the compiler toolchain - see below.

If Rust had the same features as most LISPs have, then using these features would make Rust programs as "slow" as LISP programs. That is generally true for most programming language comparisons. What also matters for final executable speed is the toolchain, of course. Any languages that compile directly using GCC or LLVM and allows for compile-time typing will be roughly in the same ballpark. If they use their own compiler, such as Chez or Racket, then they usually don't match the performance, because there is not enough manpower in their teams to implement all those nifty optimizations GCC and LLVM have. SBCL is probably the fastest LISP with its own compiler. (Or Allegro?)

To give an example, here are some CommonLisp features that Rust lacks: Full object system with inheritance and multiple dynamic dispatch, dynamic typing, hot runtime code reloading/recompilation, garbage collection.

That's how I use the word, too. It's a Heisenbug.

That's how I use the word, too. It's a Heisenbug, though only one that manifests itself when you try to present something.

It's a difference of scale. A single bank is less likely to drag down a whole economy and might even be insured against certain types of losses due to criminal activities. In contrast to this, if the value of a whole currency is destroyed over night, then the consequences are way more severe. Bear in mind that currency speculations and transactions can even get traditional currencies into trouble, see e.g. what happened in Argentinia.

I don't think any of this is desirable. For me, it's similar to digital voting, I have strong technical concerns with crypto currencies. The cryptography behind them or the implementations will be broken. People claim that it's different now than it used to be. Every cryptographic system of the past has been broken, but now we have the computing power to make them future proof. There are no mathematical proofs for this assertion and there is no reason to believe it when you take into account the history of cryptography. Moreover, for some reasons the security margins in public cryptography tend to be far too low. I'd be surprised if many existing crypto currencies are even "quantum proof" yet - but attacks with quantum computers will likely be feasible in 10 - 20 years, if they aren't already for some state actors.

All it takes is one weakness in a protocol or one mathematical breakthrough in cryptanalysis, and the whole economy of a country could become vulnerable to attack and break down.

> One or two stories like that will kill Libra stone dead.

Unfortunately not. The problem is that only few people are affected by such problems. Privacy issues and unacceptable EULAs are similar, not enough people get actual problems with them, hence companies can get away with them.

I totally understand your position.

The point is that it is always opt-in, though. There is no such thing as "use it as you like unless the copyright holder opts-out" anywhere in copyright law. You cannot just e.g. use substantial portions of someone else's texts in your own publications[1], sample a part of someone else's music for your own song, use someone else's graphics as your own, use an unlicensed font, etc., without a written permission by the copyright holder.

The EU directive merely ensures that existing laws are enforced instead of being systematically violated by large corporations.

Independently, of course, you could ask whether copyright law should be that way. I personally don't think so, and think it should be changed in various ways that strongly disfavor large corporations, but that's a completely different discussion. What I try to explain here is the rationale of the EU commission, which primarily thinks in legal terms, not my personal views about that matter.

If you ask for my personal views, I do find it appalling that large companies like Google (and Uber, Microsoft, AirBnB, etc.) continue to try to circumvent laws in ways that no small companies could get through with in court, simply because they have the business power and enough lawyers to give it a try.

[1] beyond fair use, which is very limited and does not apply int his case.

Protection by enforcing applicable copyright law, not in the sense of "helping someone out".

The news companies can opt to give away their content to Google for free. The directive merely gave these companies more choice, by stopping illegal web scraping without asking first.

Interesting. This probably exists already in one form or another, but it could also be good opportunity for a major startup. "Netflix for news" - premium access to the best articles from the best newspapers and news agencies, with sophisticated A.I. powered recommendation system, custom content subscriptions, instant access wherever you are.

The directive works just fine. From the perspective of the EU commission it's perfectly fine not to scrap any content of other creators and not to make it available for free. It merely states that if you scrap content from other companies, then you have to pay for the content.

The purpose of this regulation is to protect the companies and journalists who actually assemble and write the news against a predatory business model.

That's not what happened, no matter how often you repeat your mantra. First of all, Minsky didn't agree to the offer, as evidenced by eye-witnesses. So there was probably no rape in any case, although there could have been one at another time and another party. For all that RMS and you can know, there was none. Second, nobody of the invited people had credible reasons to believe that the girl was underage - Epstein did not tell that to people he invited, for obvious reasons. For all that they could know, she was a young prostitute or a billionaire's "groupy." This is not uncommon at parties of insanely rich people, and Epstein was known for it. Whether you personally like that or not is irrelevant. Read some AMA's by sex workers to understand how this works in reality, you can find plenty of them on Reddit.

RMS also defended the view that declaring every sexual act of an adult with a 17 year old as statutory rape is morally questionable. That's a legitimate viewpoint that has been discussed extensively by lawmakers and legal scholars. Again, whether you like his opinion or not is not important. What's important is that it is ridiculous to insinuate in any way that discussing these matters is somehow morally reprehensible, especially when they concern accusations of a good friend who - for all you know and believe - is innocent.

You are being very dishonest in your posts by distorting the actual situation and what actually happened. I've personally met a guy who lost his job and all of his reputation for a similar matter - every single accusation was ruled out and disproved in court, even with direct video evidence contradicting the accuser's testimony, yet his life remains in shambles.

You can only hope that you will never become the victim of such a witch hunt yourself.

Since I'm trained as a new linguist, not the old school you're referring to, I feel compelled to reply in order to correct some potential misunderstandings here. Structurally, you could also just take the position of Pollard & Sage (1994), for which they were so heavily criticized, and assume that every language on earth has the deep structure of English. By purely structural criteria many languages that historically unrelated would be somehow closely related to each other.

That is clearly not adequate if you want to take a look at languages and culture (in that language). Classifications of languages as languages are partly political, sometimes even highly political, and mutual comprehensibility is not a working criterion.

I don't recall the details, but the classification used by ethnologue.com are a fairly reasonable set of soft criteria. The alternative would be not to speak of languages and dialects at all, and instead only about varieties of various language families with a certain degree of mutual comprehensibility to other varieties, but that would be even more counter-intuitive to laymen.

As to your personal experience: That's sad, you merely seem to have ended up in the wrong department / with the wrong professors. Find some general linguists and computational linguists and you should get your global insights. Phonology was actually at the forefront of general structural descriptions, sometimes even earlier than in syntax. For example, they invented optimality theory. It's worth giving it another try!

No, you're referring to very broad language families. See my other post or www.ethnologue.com for accurate information.

It's a bit of a tricky business, because what counts as a language is often also determined by political decisions. Mutual comprehensibility is not a reliable criterion. However, modern linguistics uses pretty good sets of "soft" criteria for the classifications.

Non-linguists tend to grossly underestimate the number of languages and diversity in regions of the earth. Because "language" is a political construct, it also depends a bit on how you count. According to official classification there are actually around 447 languages spoken in India by native speakers from the region. Of these, 122 are spoken by 10,000 people or more, and of these 22 are official languages.

Source: I'm trained as a general linguist, but are not specialized in ethno- and sociolinguistics. Check out https://www.ethnologue.com for more information.

The convergence is massive and even faster than in the 90s. Languages die nearly daily (a language dies when its last speaker dies) and with them their culture, and people consume the same media and news all of the world. I'm not going to dig up some links on the net, you can do that yourself, but these are measurable phenomena.

You're thinking in short, next twenty years or so. A resurgence of nationalism is a response to globalization, but unless we give up our ways of living entirely (no capitalism, no markets, no growth) these movements will have practically no effect. Mass media alone ensure that, let alone the nature of global trading and social mobility. Think about the next two hundred years and there is no way culture on earth will not be vastly homogeneous. Whether that's good or bad I will leave open, my personal view is that all massive shifts in human development are accompanied by positive and negative effects.

Your post has "false dichotomy" written all over it. Of course, space exploration is an international endeavor and most space missions are highly international. Planning international space exploration missions doesn't force anyone to give up their nation, just as global trade does not imply that.

Moreover, if mankind ever expands into space, it would be rather naive to think that earth's nations would play a role there in the long run. Earth's nations change all the time, they are mere human constructs, and of course the same would happen in outer space. It would take maybe a hundred years or so for space colonies to declare their independence. And afterwards, they form larger unions again, just like on earth, because forming unions is in their interests.

> The idea of a society that big being governable is part of the science fiction.

That's far off topic, but to reply to this aspect of your post: Claiming that you can govern countries like Australia, the US, and Russia, but not the world as a whole draws some pretty arbitrary boundaries. With a federal structure, it would be no problem.

People said about every country before it was united that it will never be united. Before Germany was united, people said that it's absolutely impossible to govern such a big country and that the cultures of Prussia and Bavaria are just too different. Before the EU was funded, people said that certain European countries could never closely work together or even form a trade union and that there would always be war between some of them. Heck, probably settlers in the US also were convinced that the South and the North could never live together or be governed as one nation, because it's just too big. And so on, and so forth, you get the gist.

It's ironic that the erroneous claim that national socialism is left wing is used as an example, given that the above poster seems no less confused. Has the knowledge between extreme right and extreme left be completely lost?

These people are against foreigners, for a strong police and military (in fact, some vigilantes in China seem to be directly backed up by government authorities), are racist, anti-religious, for Chinese imperialism (e.g. in the South Chinese Sea), and so on.

If you e.g. make a Youtube video criticism state policies in China, these people will try to find out who you are, your address, your family, etc., and then bundle up online to discredit you at your employer and at state authorities. Tons of death threats will enter your email inbox and they will accuse you of being a traitor to the fatherland. That's obviously right wing and fascist (coming from "fasces", the rods used to beat up people on the streets of ancient Rome).

The atrocities of communism are justified very differently, based on a fairly complex ideology. "left wing" would e.g. be if these people founded workers committees in which they'd force colleagues to discuss their "reactionary imperialist ideology" and confess their egoistic betrayals of society. It's different from "right wing" in dozens of respects, especially the justifications.

Of course, extreme right and extreme left coincide about totalitarian stances, and sometimes also use nationalism and populism to further their agenda. But they disagree about all the rest.

However, as a rule of thumb, larger and more complex systems tend to have more bugs than smaller and simpler ones.

Fair enough, but I did give a concrete reason why I believe some "no name mentioned" products may be better than Defender and other common antivirus products.

Some people like it, but I personally find the G-Shock (exterior) design intolerable. At least, they should remove some of the spurious writings on their higher end watches. I currently have an old Casio Protrek PRG-550BD that seems to be indestructible, too, but if it ever stops working I will probably go for a Seiko or a Hamilton Field watch.

There is an interesting story about Seiko I once read. Apparently they built two factories in the 60s whose main purpose was to compete with each other to break new precision records for their quartz watches. They almost destroyed the Swiss watch business.

Windows Defender is on every machine, so what would be the point of writing a virus that is detected by it? The same for Kaspersky. These programs are easy to test against and well-known. They are designed to work against old viruses that have already been detected and analyzed.

It's better to use lesser known antivirus products with good heuristic detection. I will not mention names but there are a number of products out there, including ones that block every executable not on a whitelist.

The idea that readers of the New York Times would need some kind of paternalist guideline on which side to choose in this conflict is quite hilarious. The NY Times is reporting on the issue, and there are two sides to it, the line of the Chinese government and the line of the protesters.

I really don't think there is any doubt among NY Times readers as to which of the two value systems they support, and if there was, it wouldn't be the job of the NY Times to tell them.

Editorials will reflect individual journalist's stance towards the conflict, though. That's why I personally find them boring and rarely read them.

The US doesn't have a citizen score, political re-education camps, Tiananmen Square massacre, widespread censorship (like disconnecting a phone when you say a certain word), filtering of all foreign content and blocking of sites like Wikipedia or New York Times, BBC News, massive displacements and forced re-settlements, a vast number of political prisoners, massive squelching of protests and demonstrations (right now, there are videos of large troop movements towards Hong Kong), and so on. Not to speak of Tibet...

Anyway, my point was not primarily meant political, it was more that Huawei has good chances of succeeding with this OS, because they are backed up and supported by the Chinese government. That's true even if you are 100% pro Chinese one-party government.

Of all the efforts at an alternative mobile OS so far, Harmony OS seems to have the best chances of success, because it is backed up by the Chinese state and its pervasive surveillance apparatus. With government help and full integration into the total surveillance of all Chinese citizens, they can get their share of the Chinese market and break the application barrier.

This is getting ridiculous. The reason why these classification of mass shootings was invented (by US Congress) is quite the opposite of what you suggest, namely to make sure that gang-related violence and "ordinary" shootings are included into the statistics Why? So politicians can point to cities like Chicago and argue that the police needs more powers instead of having to deal with the unpleasant reality of amok runs and domestic terrorism which cannot be prevented very easily and are often cited as an argument for tighter gun control.

Of course, you're less likely to get shot in Europe. If you start cherry picking locations, on the other hand, then I guess the US is 100% safe and crime-free, provided you take your mom's basement as reference area.

Wikipedia has an extra page on that, which I took as the basis of my comment.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_shooting#Definitions

To quote: " The term was originally defined as the murder of four or more people with no cooling-off period[1][5] but redefined by Congress in 2013 as being murder of three or more people."

Not only that, at the risk of repeating myself, the page you criticize as being "disingenuous" clearly mentions that definitions of "mass shootings" are controversial and provides 5 alternative definitions in the second paragraph of the article and then lists 7 data sources with definitions of "mass shooting" that either coincides with the one by US Congress or is more stringent (based on the pre 2013 definition).

The page also clearly states that "... only incidents considered mass shootings by at least two of the above sources are listed."

There is absolutely nothing disingenuous about this method.

What you and the people who downvote me cannot get into their minds is that there are official definitions that are used in statistics and that the listing on the Wikipedia page takes a slighly more stringent and narrower definition as a basis to safeguard against criticisms such as yours.

Again, you are of course free to re-define the term "mass shooting" differently from what e.g. the US Congress or Stanford University do, but this would not constitute a valid criticism of the list. How could it? Merely prefering your very personal definition over another one doesn't mean anything, especially if it deviates far from the official use of the term.

Yes, they use the official definition of the term "mass shooting", as it was adopted after 2013 by the US congress, which defines it as a shooting with 3 or more victims. Moreover, they mention in the very first paragraph that the definition is controversial and problematic, and they mention all alternative official definitions (e.g. before 2013) explicitly in the following paragraphs.

You probably have another definition in mind, since in your mind "mass shooting" is somehow associated with classic amok runs and terrorism. But how is that a counter-argument to using the official definitions and terms, as they are defined by US congress and used by police and the US judicial system? Why on earth would it be disingenuous for them to base their statistics on the official definitions?

Sure, some people think that e.g. gang-related gun violence shouldn't count as a mass shooting even if many victims are involved, but the US congress chose otherwise and the page makes it crystal clear that the definition is problematic.

Anyone who wants to commit a serious crime with the help of others will physically destroy the evidence that leads to those helpers before committing the crime. Getting the phone data after the crime has been committed is not going to help preventing these crimes.

Terrorists have been on the radar of secret agencies and police in countless cases. Unfortunately, if the police interviews a potential terrorist or mass killer for "behavioral irregularities" or whatever you call it, this will only radicalize the person more and prevent nothing. Or, at least, it is not a very effective intervention. If there is no crime, the police cannot do much.

To be clear, the NSA could probably easily eavesdrop into all cell phone activity within the US and collect heuristic indicators, and it's very likely that they could predict most of these mass shootings quite well based on these indicators. The problem is that this would be unconstitutional and based entirely on thought crimes like "conspiring to commit a terrorist attack". The laws for this are in place and used against international terrorism, but they are highly problematic and shouldn't be extended to domestic terrorism.

Social workers and maybe mental health support by people who do not have to report to the police probably work much better against radicalization and decrease the probability of an incident. I might be wrong but my guess is that in the US almost zero efforts are spent by social services to improve the social situation of right wing gun nuts and de-radicalize them. Again, no need for getting what's on their phone.