foerbert

> It's still a good option for various native GUI software and the occasional bit of number crunching/utilities, especially when used with Lazarus

Yeah, that was definitely quite the bright spot. At the time GUIs weren't really what I was interested in, so ultimately I moved on. But for a long while since I'd fire up Lazarus again whenever I started thinking about native GUIs.

Never did much with it though, as I was never inclined to do everything in Pascal and it didn't seem worth the trouble to make it work with whatever I was wanting to use for the rest of it.

I felt that way most of my first evening with it. Thankfully I stuck with it, because once I finally got the compiler to accept my awful C-in-Ada-clothes I was hooked. The damn thing worked, first time it compiled, no matter what I threw at it. And that's basically been my experience since, and I don't even need to carry all the paranoia I learned from C and C++ to do it.

I can even look up compiler messages if I need to, unlike my debugger state, which is nice.

I'm completely convinced it's worth it. What looks like pointless verbosity and sadistic pedantry at first turns into a comfortable security blanket that keeps you aware and in control of what the heck you're even doing.

I'd encourage anybody to try it out, just go into it knowing it's kind of similar to jumping into a functional language for the first time. You're going to need to adjust your paradigm a bit to really settle in. Ada is a bit deceptive if you're used to dropping into an imperative language and getting a decent feel for it in an easy afternoon.

On the bright side, even if you don't get as hooked as me on it, you might just get a new way to look at programs out of it. Never know when that'll come in handy.

It depends a lot on what exactly you need or want to use. Sometimes you find something great, or nothing, or something in-between. One nice thing with Ada is how easily it binds to C, and that just got some improvements. Not as easy and nice as somebody else doing it for you, but still. It's something I actually consider, which is more than I can say for any other language.

FWIW, in my brief dalliance with Pascal, I got the impression it's a good bit more, uh, fossilized than Ada. I didn't try too hard to find a pulse there at the time, but I don't think I tried much harder with Ada. Yet here I am, shamelessly shilling.

I'm not sure about that.

Dangerous, I can see it if it's not implemented reasonably. I'll admit to being less than a stellar ARM reader so I can't say for sure, but I'd bet this was well-considered when it was added. Considering these are literals conversions should be check-able at compile time with some reasonable limitations, and I assume those were added. If I'm wrong though, do let me know.

Hard to read? Maybe, but not really? It feels like a 'modern' feature to me in the sense that back in the old days it may have been a little too opaque and required a step more than is ideal to see through it, but with modern editor facilities it seems easily fine. And I don't think it's as bad as tagged types can be in that respect, so I don't see this being a problem.

And it will enable some much nicer to use interfaces for libraries, which is one of the few things I've really found myself still fighting in Ada. I don't think it's a general solution to the whole thing, but I'll happily take it.

I'm really excited by this! I haven't been keeping up with the 2022 stuff, and I'm quite pleasantly surprised.

I will admit to not liking using '@' for notation much at all in any language - never mind Ada - but I'm really looking forward to having a solution for the problem it solves. I do love me some long names, probably even by Ada standards, so it really will be quite nice. I also can't really think of a good viable alternative beyond simply replacing it with a symbol I just happen to find more visually appealing. So... oh well. It'll probably fade into the background soon enough.

Who says we don't? I think I'm past-due for my regular Ada plug, so uh, here it is.

There's another side to the coin that I think you're, understandably, overlooking. I don't think either side alone is the full story. It's a big grey ball of tradeoffs, no matter how it all falls.

Even with just your own description of your activities you can find perverse incentives and negative externalities.

You aren't exactly incentivized to just create content that satisfies common queries. More fully, you're incentivized to create content that makes people think (rightly or wrongly) their query is being answered while also marketing your goods/services to them as much as possible.

Even assuming the best intentions to actually answer the query - be it altruism, discerning searchers, fear of Google, or something else - the content itself is hardly unbiased. This isn't inherently some kind of moral failure on your part, but it's hardly negligible either for the searcher. Everybody is going to have different thresholds here for what crosses the line, but I think it's understandable that some people are just unhappy having to even put in the time and energy to disentangle this aspect in the first place.

And this dovetails into one of the obvious externalities. Who is doing SEO, and who isn't? That totally unaffiliated small-time blogger that just happened to write up a bit of info after having the same problem as you probably isn't doing a whole lot of SEO. At least, they aren't hiring you to help increase their hosting costs. Somebody trying to find less biased views ends up having to wade through all the sites making enough money to pay for SEO first, to actually find what they're looking for. It should be pretty obvious why that does no favors for SEO's reputation.

But as I said at the beginning, you're not wrong either. This stuff goes deep into 'small' questions like profit-motives and competition for limited resources. Obviously and trivially correct answers aren't here.

I really do appreciate that you're approaching this from the much better intentioned side of things. One of the few things that might be obviously correct is that your approach is better than the sleezy way.

But that doesn't make it all rainbows and sunshine either.

Perhaps, but after even just a few relatively short attempts to start organizing some of my files with tags I don't think this would be sufficient. I found the meaning of tags frequently started to drift. What I cared about and why just wasn't that consistent. Never mind being consistent with hair-splitting judgement calls in categorization.

And the more you tag, the more difficult it is to fix. Either you retag everything to fit the new standard or you accept that trying to retrieve things by tag will return some weird set defined by the intersection of your changing definition over time and the time at which you applied the tag.

I don't doubt a more structured and principled approach would help, but I found it just ended up soaking up tons of time, and thought, without actually providing much back.

> East Asia population are aggressive consumers of social media. If they are not getting depressed from it, then the Anglosaxon (which seems to be suffering from this crisis) should look elsewhere.

Only if you discount the rest of the sentence you quoted...

> ... although I have not yet found good data from those regions.

I don't think you can just "by definition" reality like that. Sure, the non-reactive strain won't be called a symbiotic partner, by definition. But that doesn't poof the bacteria out of existence.

That said, I think you're correct about not being so concerned. If the symbiotic relationship was so exploitable, it'd probably be a great evolutionary advantage to do so. The signal being a sugar itself, as you note, doesn't surprise me.

I probably should have clarified that I was responding to the content of the parent comment rather than the submission itself.

I think this is just the slop of language, but in this case it's obscuring all the important details so excuse me for being a bit pedantic.

Forming and accepting a hypothesis are very different things. You can't just come up with a new hypothesis after looking at some data and then immediately accept it because the data supports it.

It would absolutely be incorrect to look at the original data, form an alternate hypothesis, and then immediately go on to suggest it is an equally good explanation as the original hypothesis.

You don't have to accept the original hypothesis if you think the experiment is flawed, and you're free to propose any hypothesis you want, but that's the limit without new data.

This is not a sound approach. You're declaring what humans think random is first, and then throwing out any data that doesn't match your declaration. There is no way to learn anything from this.

I also think 'HHHHHHHHHH' is unlikely to be a good faith response, but if the goal is to actually learn anything instead of merely reinforcing my prior beliefs, it doesn't matter.

You need to find a way to design the experiment that discourages bad faith answers or let's you judge them objectively. Alternatively if you have some outside knowledge about the 'shape' of bad faith answers for your kind of experiment, you may be able to use that to properly adjust your data.

But 'nah I don't think so' isn't an acceptable reason to throw out data. It's especially egregious to do so when the data is answers that are, at a bare minimum, technically correct.

> processes for the production of wool may entail some impact, independent from the material but related to the sheep.

I suspect this is the massively buried lead here - one so huge and so buried that I'm having a hard time giving you the benefit of the doubt.

The lifecycle of wool itself is probably not at all the major concern. It will not take just a few more sheep to replace the entirety of the global use of polyester and other synthetics.

Livestock are notoriously land-intensive, and the reason behind much of the ongoing ecological devastation of places like the Amazon rainforest. Trying to pass those concerns off as minor considerations after the biodegradability and recyclability of wool is just... incredible.

Probably, yes. But it's not a guarantee until you include infinity. And that's the important distinction here.

Without any such guarantee of the larger result, all you have is a 50/50 chance for the next flip. With infinity, you can pick out a portion of the sequence with an unusual number of Tails and expect there to be an offsetting number of Heads elsewhere in the full (infinite) sequence.

That convergence towards 50% happens at infinity. You aren't flipping the coin an infinite number of times. There is no convergence happening without the infinity.

If that doesn't help your intuition, maybe try this technically incorrect view. Those 'extra' Heads you feel are due can appear at any point in the entirety of the future. What are the chances they show up in the next five minutes, never mind the next billion years? You're looking for a handful events spread over the entire rest of time itself, after all.

It's not really about light. It's not so much the case that the speed of light is itself special, so much as it is that light (in a vacuum) travels at a special speed. That speed is effectively that of causality, in the 'speed of the ability to cause' sense.

Trying to make conclusions about that by using simple analogies to light isn't likely to get you anywhere. You're not dealing with the actual thing you're interested in in the first place.

I can't say I agree with this. AWS has the size, reputation, and sheer near-unavoidability to find themselves with significantly more leeway in this kind of thing.

Just because AWS can get away with something doesn't mean you can.

In terms of (only) racial equality, it is actually only an issue for non-whites. That's not factually incorrect.

Hence we come back to the OP's point - it's hard to get broad public support for both racial and class issues simultaneously... regardless of how interconnected the problems and possible solutions may be.

Really? I made the same move (or at least finished it 100%) at the same time, and that's not a problem I've ever seen.

Some (surprisingly few, actually) don't perform well under Wine/Proton, or at all, but random freezing I've never seen. And certainly not all of my games.

Does this even help with that though? Without some further means of identifying users, what use is there in saying download#123 got installed x times? Even if you add the obvious IP information to this, then what? Run GeoIP and say "oh, interesting" when they do or do not correlate?

What could they realistically figure out from this that could help them figure out how people are getting Firefox?

Are government agencies somehow restricted to compromise telcos but not any other organization?

Nobody did that, though? One person mentioned it felt scammy for an ineffable reason. Another responded with that bit of history, including the fact it is only history. That's it.

Yes, that is the reason they mentioned the A* pathfinding algorithm - to solve that exact problem.

I'm all for cutting down total hours, but personally 4x10 hour days still sound much better than 5x8. There is a lot of time and effort - both physically and mentally - that goes into the transition to and from work that I'd love to avoid. A few more hours a day meanwhile wouldn't bother me much at all.

That's kind of what I mean though. None of those are particularly innovative and certainly aren't going to end up somehow protected. It wouldn't be hard to just follow along. In the time it takes to do that, a small fraction of the user base will have actually purchased a new machine. The majority of all customers will never even know the other company actually came up with that cool color scheme/whatever first. Not that they'd care if they did.

Particularly in the context of washing machines, I find this a little hard to swallow. What constant innovation is needed here? The product is infrequently replaced, and mainly just needs to do the one thing it already does.

Sure you have changes - you end up with a few major variations like top- and side-loaders and all that. But the old style doesn't fall off the face of the earth. And companies have plenty of time to simply watch and imitate.

We don't know that. We have a single report so far, just like GM apparently got.

I'm not sure why you think that's relevant. (Note - I am not OP.)

Being hypocritical is an indictment at the speaker, not of the speech. The most hypocritical person to ever live may well be completely right about their most hypocritical belief. It's just not relevant to the the validity of the idea.

So why do people constantly try to use it as a counterargument?

It seems especially prevalent in these sorts of discussions, and for some reason it's often used as you did here. You have no idea if they are vegan or not, but somehow the mere suggestion that a single person might not be is seen as some kind of refutation of the importance of animal rights in general.

I mean, plenty of people also have a problem with that. I'm not sure a discussion on the ethics of a thing should end just because a similar thing is more widespread.

Who says they aren't already? If Youtube had no more small creators from on, I have my suspicions about what their revenue would look like 1, 5, 10.. years out.