avgcorrection

Maybe someone went on a link binge (caused by the first one).

The rank and file making good money and managers making good money are narratives that might appeal to different groups of people.

Like my progressive rock band?

Okay, I can imagine it. Mission accomplished?

Using public French intellectuals who dabble in socialism to plot the assassination of an American president would be the dumbest thing imaginable. (If that is what the topic is about? The submitted article is awfully vague about what the McCharthian fears were even about.)

Ah I see, thanks.

> This shows a bad aspect of humans in the quest for truth. If many scientists are involved in nationalism, antisemitism, etc what can we expect of less rational people? Not saying that we need to be completely rational though but it is interesting when bad emotions beat rationality in smart people as a topic itself.

This framing is interesting considering how HN is such an IQ-worshipping forum: The context is the most pig-headed, blatant racism imaginable—doesn’t even try to rationalize it, just “Jewish Physics”—and then we pivot to how these exalted rational people (translation: physics-smart specifically) must clearly be more rational than “less rational people” (average people?) and in turn how racist they (less rational people) must be. So we went from blatant racism exhibited by physicists to inferring how these scientists must be leagues better than “less rational people” in terms of racial tolerance or rationality with regards to race (if race is even a thing).

Except the only thing we have in front of us is racism expressed by physicists. Not commoner racism.

So what grounds do we have to expect “less rational people” to be more or less racist than these exalted scientists? Absolutely nothing.

Imagine if a gaggle of biologists in Antarctica committed mass murder of another group of scientists and smeared their blood in some Satanic ritual. I bet the conclusion would be to speculate about how less rational people would be even more inhumane and cruel if they had to live through an Antarctic winter or two? Absolutely bonkers.

Hurray for deterministic tools! Yes, there is no reason to risk using an LLM when you have a code generator that you can trust.

> As if the world needed more unsafe C code connected to the internet.

Assuming (as usual) that the code generation is solid because of curl’s reputation: why not trust it? It would be pretty bad if the generator could emit memory-unsafe code. (I don’t know.)

> If you want to call yourself "engineer" then at a minimum all those standards and minimum requirements should apply, no questions asked.

I don’t call myself that so I’m all good. My general vocation is just “technologist”.

Plus: not a protected title in my jurisdiction.

Might and Magic has multiple planets. I think the humans and others have been scattered to different planets because of some cataclysmic events. So now they live in Medieval times. (With the occasional computer (oracle) and laser gun.) And sometimes a planet might blow up.

You seem to be agreeing with me as well as not agreeing? Even though you don’t track everything inside the repo, you can still keep the most relevant commit context inside the repository by using the pull request description in the commit message. That’s what commit messages are for.

(As for issue tracking: I use git-bug sometimes when the project doesn’t have an issue tracker or if I want to make my own issues. The issues are tracked in the same repository.)

Why do people write up great pull review descriptions and then merge them as lame duck “Merge major-security-vuln-oops into 'main' / Fixes #1624”. Can someone explain that?

People love the “BDFL” model. This is what they deserve.

My first instinct when people start talking about cool tech is also to ask if they are unemployed.

There’s this elephant in the room. But it name shan’t be mentioned. Explicitly.

Some words on how relatively older he is. No words on the technical side aside from “simple good” and some unfounded or not jabs about complexity being “for fun” or something.

Yeah you’re not gonna get any old age wisdom points from me when the technical argumentation is so thin. But I guess intuition is also a form of wisdom.

> And while the code in more complex languages can still obviously be readable, simple languages force the code to be at least somewhat readable even at its worst.

Derived implementations of things like `equals`. An advanced language feature I guess. Easy to read in the complex language, longer to read in the simpler language, and something you have to keep in mind to update manually or regenerate when you update your data structures.

I don’t know to what extent he was a messenger for Buddhism. But in some sects you aren’t allowed to teach the Buddhadharma without permission. So in that sense, “personifying” what you teach would be relevant.

We should stop linking this at every non-opportunity. In fact ban the number 927 just to be safe.

It seems impossible to solve this by just everyone adopting a manifesto that one GitHub guy wrote many years ago and which has been adopted in some communities but not in many others. And besides there is plenty of (1) human judgement about what is breaking and not (which goes against machine-readability), and (2) worrying about the minutiae of what is a “patch” and a “feature”, and (3) weird implicit social taboos about doing major releases “too often” (?).[1][2]

Most things might be solved by everyone doing SemVer. And for all I know some communities might be running like greased pigs in a chute exactly because they use SemVer (I don’t tend to hear about the everyday everything-is-working stories on HN). But also doing static linking a bit more seems like it would help a lot with the same problem.

[1] All based on discussions I’ve seen. Not really personal experience.

[2] Again, making a spec/manifesto which is both about machine-readability and about shaming people for vague things is very muddled. Although I don’t know how much the latter is about the culture around it rather than the spec itself.

sigh Someone is going to make their own Occupy The Earth–Moon Distance t-shirts now.

It also is perceived as being bigger when you shoot it with a sniper rifle because of the Marksman Target Salience Effect.

jamiedumont let out a rambonctious laugh to himself.

- Ah, you got me good you meddling kids!

jamiedumont was talking to himself again.

hackerbod slowly leaned over and squinted at the screen.

- Uh Typst?

- Yeah! It’s a typesetting markup language. It’s supposed to be better than things like latex.

- Ok. What’s so funny about it?

- Oh hehe, it’s written in—guess what?

- I dunno?

- Rust!

jamiedumont started giggling but hackerbod remained neutrally unamused.

- Oh come on! Rewrite in Rust? Language zealots? Young adults who can’t program without some Ruby syntax sprinkled in?

- So this “typt” thing—

- Typst.

- Right, Typst, this typesetting thing was created to promote Rust in some way?

- Oh I don’t think so.

- It doesn’t mention Rust on the homepage or something? You know, Written in Rust?

- Nope. Not to my recollection.

- So is it a rewrite of something else in—

- Nope.

- So then what does that have to do with—

- Ah, but you’re missing the bigger picture, hackerbod.

- Ok.

- Year after year of this eye-rolling promotion and nagging, blah blah blah memory unsafety is bad, blah blah this is why we used angle brackets for generics, and these sly bastards went and pulled off the most epic Trojan Horse that I’ve ever seen been—

- And what’s that?

- They made an actually useful language!

hackerbod had to scoot back as jamiedumont fell off his swivel chair because he was laughing so hard. hackerbod scratched his head.

jamiedumont finally recovered from the ab-induced euphoria.

- Ah hackerbod, I hate to admit it but they got me good! Those cursed language zealots got one over on me!

If `cl` is the climate change function then Climate Change really specifically is referring to the derivative of `cl` right now.

> There is also a different approach to the [unification] problem, which is highly influential though it seems to me not only foreign to the sciences but also close to senseless. This approach divorces the cognitive sciences from a biological setting, and seeks tests to determine whether some object “manifests intelligence” (“plays chess,” “understands Chinese,” or whatever). […]

> There is a great deal of often heated debate about these matters in the literature of the cognitive sciences, artificial intelligence, and philosophy of mind, but it is hard to see that any serious question has been posed. The question of whether a computer is playing chess, or doing long division, or translating Chinese, is like the question of whether robots can murder or airplanes can fly — or people; after all, the “flight” of the Olympic long jump champion is only an order of magnitude short of that of the chicken champion (so I’m told). These are questions of decision, not fact; decision as to whether to adopt a certain metaphoric extension of common usage.

https://chomsky.info/prospects01/

I don’t get it.

> Scientists who have studied these rusting rivers agree that the ultimate cause is climate change.

quelle surprise

Buddy. That makes it sound like doing this thing worsens the disease.

Assuming that the holy grail of businesses is the holy grail of society—even above the welfare of your children.

Are you literally blaming this on helium balloons? For kids parties?

We’ve already had half a dozen threads about the industrial uses of helium. Not relevant?

It’s funny. I keep getting back to reading pieces like this.[1] Then we talk about how this is terrible. And it is. But apparently we’re all powerless to stop it. Because we’re gonna be complaining about the same thing next year. Why? Because it’s something that people do “freely”. (Like smoking cigarettes (except where are the nicotine patches?).) Do something about it? Well why don’t you take a three month leave from your job and do a digital detox? Anyone can do that. But wait, that’s too drastic. Just a weekend-long meditation retreat. But then you’re back to the scroll grind.

Is there an opt-out button? Not symmetrically. You have all the options in the world if you want to scroll. But if you don’t want to scroll? Maybe Scrollers Anonymous? Become a semi-monk?

Because we don’t really take this seriously as a community. We’re all individuals who are supposed to get our shit together. And learn that individually. Well, we can learn things from each others’ tiktoks and blog posts about getting over digital addiction or whatever it is that is our malaise. But that’s as far as that goes.

But I’ll be here next year. Just scrolling. Falling for the same things again and again.

[1] Not that I read this one.