WastingMyTime89

That’s silly. There is a difference between buying material from a foreign country and being entirely reliant on another one for your survival.

I don’t mind the fairly honest debate and disagreement we are having. I understand your view on NATO even if I think it’s wrong and fail to acknowledge the actual effect the alliance has on its members. Still there is little point in going further if you are not interested in a modicum of intellectual honesty.

I guessed so. So it’s not at all done once, never done again as the OP suggested but rather done once, now keep redoing something slightly different every fortnight and enjoy your constantly half-broken system. In a way, it’s reassuring to see that niche Linux distributions have changed so little in the decade since I last used one.

> the point is to have it done once, and you won't have to do it ever again! NixOS is the only one that allows so.

Until the tooling introduces a breaking change or new cooler way to do things appear and people stop supporting the old way because "everyone switched anyway". Been there, done that.

> No one is NATO is a 'protectorate' this is absurd on the face of it.

If you can’t defend yourself and have to rely on a foreign power to do so, you are de facto a protectorate like it or not. That’s the case of at least the Baltic states in Europe and could probably be extended to other former USSR republics in the east.

I quite like how the average American looks at China (not always fairly by the way - some of what you accuse China of doing is actually illegal in China) while being completely unable to hold a mirror to how their own economy works. It’s kind of entertaining to see a bully complains that there now is another bully in town.

> Countries still need protecting

Countries don’t need protecting. Countries should aim to protect themselves. The EU doesn’t need the US for its protection and should have invested in a proper army decades ago.

It’s obvious that the main benefit for the USA is that NATO dissuades the EU to actually be a power. That some countries in the east are happy to play lapdogs is a major issue.

This is both Russia invading its neighbour and a proxy war between NATO and Russia. It doesn’t have to be one of the other. NATO and its allies are directly propping up Ukraine which would have collapsed without them and they do that mostly to curtail Russia’s ambitions which is fine.

NATO is first and foremost a military alliance setup to contain the western expansion of the USSR. It’s a strategic alliance. It’s defensive in as much as a military alliance can be.

What the US is using NATO for now that the USSR is no more and what is the EU getting out of it are actually very valid questions.

Less commercially motivated uninspired follow ups and more original content seems like a huge win for culture at large. Large video game and movie studios are mostly churning out copy-pasted garbage nowadays.

Polymorphism. This trick allows Ocaml to pass unboxed integer to polymorphic functions.

It’s about compiled code by the way, a lot lower down the stack. That’s the joy of working on a compiler. You deal with both very high level concepts and very low level issues.

To add to your good comment, doing inlining intelligently can get tricky in language using a lot of polymorphic functions like Ocaml.

To squeeze out performance, you have to detect when polymorphic functions are actually used on int and decide if you want to compile and store a special cased version which avoid the unboxing-boxing shuffle. There is a balance to find between compile time, program size and speed of running code which is fairly hard to get right.

That wasn’t done by Jane Street. This is part of the language from the start and was introduced by Leroy team at INRIA.

As to the point of studying boxing, well, it’s fairly basic compiler theory. It will be hard to avoid if you have even the slightest interest in PL.

Exactly my point. As proven time and time again through the 20th century by the like of Lenin, Castro, Mao, Sankara, Cabeçadas, Papadópoulos, Castelo Branco and others, an armed takeover restablishing order and gaining territorial control is the quickest path to freedom and democracy. /s

It's nothing to do with paternalism. Anyone who has ever worked as a teacher in the suburbs of Paris or has an actual understanding of what's happening gathered outside of the very right wing news channels could tell you that violence is now carried by younger and younger individuals. You can listen to Martin Aubry explaning what's happening in Lille for exemple.

But sure, as usual, the average French (nowadays 50-ish, dubiously educated, enjoying a remarkable prosperity which decades of chronic mismanagement have made but a dream for their own children) will blame the "foreigners".

The right will complain that the country is too laxist while ignoring the real issue of police violence and more broadly police management. The left will blame the government while ignoring that policies they themselves put in place are a large part of the social problems creating the current situation and remain in denial of, well, modernity. Peace will more or less be back in a fortnight and things will resume their usual course towards utter irrelevance and failure. Gosh, I hate this country.

Special units are called for everything nowadays. I live in Paris and police vans park in my street. Even for peaceful demonstrations, hundreds of armored policemen are brought in the city. That's a significant part of the issue actually with France insisting on using a demonstrably outdated and inappropriate way of policing.

France intentionally kept apart from the work being done on policing by its European neighbours in the last two decades and is now paying the price.

My advice is to stop watching CNews and go outside.

Sure but the country is not a war zone. At the moment, actual physical violence is mostly limited to fights between young protesters and the police in some suburbs. It's the usual misguided answer to a sadly very real issue except it's harder to reason with kids.

Just so things are clear, France is suspending all bus services in cities at night. Buses generally run city to suburbs routes and have been subjected to attacks for the past few nights. Trains, which are the most used form of public transport in France, are still running.

France currently has an issue with very young protesters (mostly teenagers) burning public infrastructures. Violence is still fairly limited. Riots might be a big word for what is happening.

In which part of Southern Europe do people excuse themselves when they are becoming intoxicated? Because that's not true in France, Italy, Spain and Portugal unless you have very prudish acquaintances.

I'm not old but it's fairly obvious that most internet companies have refocused from an exceptionnaly long growth centered phase towards extracting value from their user base in the last few years. As a consequence things have gotten measurably worse for said users.

We should be seeing competitors emerging right now but sadly years of lax competition laws enforcement and extreme concentration of wealth amongst said companies make that unlikely in the short term.

No shouting at the cloud required here.

Obviously what we need is a complete loss of individual freedom at the hand of an authoritarian state putting in place fascist policies. /s

The solution can’t be what actually stopped the prohibition era organised crime as, as we all know, it didn’t work at all. /s

Innovation and burning fossil fuel are not synonymous. Obviously having plenty of available energy is what allowed us to reach this point but we are long past the time when we couldn’t do anything without burning coal or using oil.

We have clean energy sources. Alternative are already there for the most polluting usage: nuclear power, wind and solar, electric propulsion. You are stuck thirty years in the past and arguing for us to go further back.

> Are you sure about that?

Of course I’m sure about that. Production has been above demand for decades. The issue is instability and logistic. We have the technical means to feed everyone and hunger affects an infinitely smaller proportion of the world than 200 years ago (population was multiplied by 8 since 1800).

> The choice is to be realistic and prepare for what's coming VS continuing business as usual

No one is advocating for continuing business as usual. Some are advocating strongly for curbing everyone freedom and accepting making everyone life worse to conform to their moral standards. Others want to actually tackle the problem like we have done for every other one: by working on finding and developing appropriate solutions which clearly do exist.

> All fun an games until bacteria started becoming antibiotic resistant

It’s still fun and game. The issue is broad antibiotic use in farming and poor economic return for companies working on antibiotic and despite that we still have effective cure.

The issue is not courage. Apple knows that the use cases for the Macbook Air and the iPad Pro significantly overlap. So they use software limitations to avoid canibalising sells of one with the other even if it means making the iPad Pro a lesser product than it could be.

I'm not oracle so I can't say if you are wrong but wouldn't that be a significant investment to go compete in a market where margins are not that great while risking to dilute their brand?

What got us there is burning fossil fuel not "innovation", even if you put scare quotes around it.

I know it's hipe to pile up on the modern world but I quite enjoy hunger being a solvable issue despite the population rising to unheard of before numbers, having eridacated or significantly reduced the impact of most of the nastiest diseases and education and well being steadily rising throughout the world. I don't understand how so many people got convinced that the solution is wallowing in sorrow and selfpity and advocating for a return to the dark age.

> Even green energy just is not profitable even though it's increasingly affordable.

Green energy has been profitable for years and investment is massively outpacing even the most positive projection of a decade ago.

> There's no reason to believe we can successfully run away from all the problem's technology's caused with more technology

There is actually a lot of reason to believe we can. People were basically having the same attitude regarding food production at the beginning of the 20th century just before the Green revolution happened.

The impact of innovation has been systematically underestimated by environmentalists and climate specialist for the past thrity years. For example, the part of the IPCC scenarios dealing with it is very poor (admittedly it's also old and couldn't really anticipate investement would grow so much).

I think most people face the climate issue from a practical and moral standpoint which is fundamentaly wrong. Sadly the level of applied scientific knowledge of the general population is going down the drain so fast, it's in no way surprising.

Fewer people is already on the way. We just need to pass the bump and things will be good. Demographic lag is a real pain.

Electricity is shifting massively towards renewable production so there really is no need to consume less of it (and we need more anyway - electrifying the part of the planet without electricity is a very significant gain in quality of life).

Less meat is also significantly engaged. Consumption is rising because the population is rising.

Meanwhile, we need effective solution now not in thirty years so any things which reduce the quantity of CO2 in the atmosphere is good to take.

> There's one sure strategy for beating climate change and no one dares speak it out loud.

No idea of what you are talking about. What you are pushing is sadly the only thing we hear about as most environmentalists in the west are actually looking to force people to change lifestyle because of what they believe to be morally right rather than solve our actual issues. I wish we had more people working on solutions and less people proselytizing their new religion but well, that's how it is.

Given the latest demographic projections, kids in 2150 might actually be asking: "Were there really so much people?" while the wilds will have regained serious ground.

If you are not completely opposed to the idea, you could try Singin’ in the rain or Swing time or even The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. Old musicals have some kind of charm which you don’t really find in modern ones. They are such a huge part of cinema history.

La La Land is intentionally mirroring traditional musicals with very strong nods to both Hollywood golden age and Demy. Are you sure you don’t actually like musicals?

It was a masterpieces factory until they sold to Disney and the people in charge of the masterpieces moved to revitalise the animation part of Disney. Everyone knows it but you won’t read it in an American newspaper because of the fall from grace of said talents.

Edit: While I enjoy the usual downvotes, I find it hilarious to read all these articles about Pixar not mentioning Lasseter and Bird despite them clearly being a huge part of Pixar initial success with Lasseter being part of why Pixar mostly produced good movies. Disney Animation started making good movies again (Zootopia, Frozen) once he moved there. It's clear that the quality control suffered once he started splitting his time more and Disney had more influence.