dllthomas

> But then, at that point, you're saying something pretty profound about computer science (roughly: that there was no meaningfully more sophisticated and complex place to go from where we are today).

Or that human taste and expertise cannot helpfully guide a project there.

> that's what "productivity", in the economic sense, means

That's too strong. It does mean we can do the same work with fewer people, but depending on the shape of the demand curve that can mean more jobs exist doing that thing than otherwise would (an instance of the Jevons Paradox).

I mean, in practice Rc is the one I run into the least, but pin only comes up occasionally, yes. Maybe once or twice a year on one of my projects.

Of those, Pin, by some margin.

Neat, but I'm pretty happy with my disintegrated development environment.

Yours is a response to someone providing clarifying information, something I often find helpful on HN.

Sometimes I sing under lights that are purple. Sometimes I'm shirtless and I tilt my head.

> [Performance cost] is (de facto) required for dynamically typed languages, but not for statically typed ones where the newtype constructor/deconstructor can be elided at compile time.

For a single value, it should reliably be free in any reasonable statically typed language that meet your other criteria.

For a collection, it may still be de facto required. Unwrapping a set of addresses into a set of strings takes unnecessary cycles, an unsafe coercion, sufficiently sophisticated affordances around coercion that it can be safe, or a smart enough optimiser. At least some static languages have at least one of these; I'm not sure all do, and certainly not all have always had.

Nitpicking, but this has bugged me for a while and I'm taking this opportunity to vent:

"Enslaved people were counted as three-fifths of a person, not as full citizens."

They were not counted as three fifths of a person in a way that matters for what we talk about today. They got zero percent of the vote they deserved. They probably got, on average, quite substantially less than three fifths of the respect and dignity they deserved. They were counted as three fifths of a person for how much they magnified the power of the votes of their captors and how much taxes their State had to pay. Slavery would have been every bit as wrong if they were counted as whole persons (or half persons, non-persons, double persons) for apportionment and taxation.

I think I'd say that the batch file is not itself autonomous but the system as a whole is autonomous (if limited) but I'm not prepared to argue that's the correct definition.

If you learned that a piece of the brain where meaningful computation takes place was stateless, would that cause you to question whether the human mind was "highly autonomous"?

You can avoid specifying agency in the active with some sort of placeholder. Hopefully, maybe, that placeholder is going to be more noticable than the omission of agency in the passive... but it seems more useful to simply ask directly whether agency is clear.

"Missiles were shot at Gaza" is passive and avoids specifying agency. "Someone shot missiles at Gaza" is active and avoids specifying agency. "Missiles were fired at Gaza by Israel" is passive and specifies agency. Sometimes you don't even need a placeholder: "Missiles hit Gaza" is active and avoids agency.

Importantly, specifying reasoning can have communicative value while falling very far short of formal verification. Personally, I also try to include a cross reference to the things that could allow "this" to happen were they to change.

Wildly, the Polish word "nagle" (pronounced differently) means "suddenly" or "all at once", which is just astonishingly apropos for what I'm almost certain is pure coincidence.

> so it's no surprise that we're not Boltzmann Brains

I think I agree you've excluded them from the definition, but I don't see why that has an impact on likelihood.

> IDEs don't make you dependent on constant Internet connectivity, charge a monthly subscription,

Sometimes they do! But not in general, yes.

I think there are both of those.

My understanding is that you are correct that "rizz" comes from "charisma", and when used as an adjective it's pretty well used the same (although there may be shades of difference I'm simply missing), but notably "rizz" also gets used as a verb in a way that "charisma" does not.

In this case, the measure itself is temporary. That's in the text of what we voted on. For it to not be temporary, we'll need to vote on it again.

Also, it only affects Federal congressional districts, not State Senate or State Assembly districts, so there's less feedback: the US Congress has little say over how CA draws its maps.

The effects on normalization are another question that you're right to be concerned about, but I can argue that either way. It's clear who started this mid-cycle redistricting, and it's obviously not actually a response to Joe Biden doing the last census wrong. Credible threat of retaliation may reduce the tendency to break further norms, when compared to the available alternative of not pushing back.

> Where is the DEI for men in the female dominated STEM subjects?

Is that rhetorical? Have you looked, or just assumed their absence?

My cursory search seems to indicate that there are some, although I don't have bandwidth to investigate in any depth and I'm not sure just what criteria you'd want to use for qualification.

For some monads the "wrap" gets awfully metaphorical (for State it's a function that produces the value and updated state, for Const there is no value, etc) but I don't think that's actually a problem, just a thing to be aware of. There is certainly no expectation that you can actually get your hands on the thing.

A bigger issue is that you're missing a piece. If you can "wrap" values and "wrap" functions such that they operate on wrapped values, you (probably) have a functor. To be a monad you also need to have the ability to turn multiple layers of wrapping into one layer of wrapping. For lists, that's "flatten".

I said "probably" above because there are rules these pieces need to follow to behave well. They're pretty simple but I don't think we need to dig into them at this level of discussion.

> Politicians shouldn’t be allowed to accept campaign donations from foreign governments. How can they claim to put America first if they are beholden to a foreign nation?

My understanding is that that's already the law, and AIPAC claims to be funded by domestic donations. It's obviously possible someone is lying, but then the answer to your "how can they claim" question is straightforward: believing (or pretending to believe) those lies.

Typically named after things that corrupt, control, mislead the person trying to use them?

I mean, it was named for fictional spying orbs that could break people's minds based on the will of a powerful individual with access to the system. Maybe that's not them telling on themselves, but I am not surprised that some people wind up suspicious.

I think we have that question regardless.

Not ideal, between sound from the washing itself plus whatever else is going on in the house, and I'd rather not add noise that others have to deal with. That said, it's certainly in the mix as competing with other potential solutions.

Then, too. I cannot compete with Mrs Roberts.

Typing speed is very much a bottleneck when I'm washing dishes, at least.

I was joking, although it was a gesture at a real thing. I don't know how much they don't care about success, versus caring but being deeply confused about how to reach it, versus in some sense "caring" but prioritizing other things. But regardless, retaliation against bearers of bad news is a great way to horrifically mismanage an organization, and we seem to be seeing it repeatedly from this administration, and it is alarming.

How can you say they don't care about success? When they got bad numbers they immediately fired the person responsible.