foxfluff

> Ukraine has neonazi militias that enjoy some level of government support and that have been involved in violent incidents in the past.

I'm trying to say that this would likely happen in any country where political unrest and corruption leads to a violent change of regime. That militia formed during Euromaidan, and they are useful to the government in so far as they are against occupation by Russia. Just as Nazi Germany was useful to my country (Finland) in the second world war.

Nazi bad, but a small group with nationalistic ideals fighting for the nation doesn't mean the nation is nazi, and it would be irrational to reject the aid of such a group in the fight against occupation. It'd be good for virtue signalling at most but you don't fight a country the size of Russia or China by thoughts and prayer and virtue signalling. And I'm pretty sure Putin would have some excuse for attacking Ukraine with or without a minuscle amount of neo-nazis in the soup.

If Ireland is invaded by a giant neighbor, the government isn't going to ask their infantry whether they're nationalists before letting them fight for your country.

If Putin thinks nazis are the reason to invade a country, he ought to invade Finland too. I'd still hope our nationalist party takes up arms and goes to the front lines to defend Finland. And they should have the Government's full support in doing so.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finns_Party#Ideology

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finns_Party#Controversies

> He argues that Russia invading Ukraine (and putting a pro-Russian government in its place), it is the same as USA invading Iraq.

Typical Putinist deflection. Watch some talk shows on Russian TV involving him from the past decade. Whenever people question or criticize his actions, he does not answer and instead start raving on about the US this and the west that. Even if the action has nothing to do with the US or the west. It's a simple tactic to try move focus from whatever he's doing to whatever evil he thinks the west has done. He's always doing everything to paint the west in bad light; he wants people to think the west is evil, and in doing so, he's supposed to get a free pass.

I used to watch (English) Russian propaganda channels on youtube. They're all full of this. Obviously a lot of people buy it.

The reality is that whether the war in Iraq was justified or not is a completely separate discussion, and the US going to war with Iraq (whether justified or not) is not a justification for Russia going to war with Ukraine.

You can draw parallels, but that is no justification. And vague "self-interests" is no justification. Anyone who thinks USA waged war for oil is probably also condemning that war.

For another example of self-interest, Finland (together with Nazi Germany) attacked the Soviets in Continuation War in order to regain lost territory and to annex East Karelia. You can argue that's self-interest but it does not justify invasion, and I think most people condemn that offensive.

> The 90s born generation like myself, mostly see Russia as neutral

Yeah, people who didn't live through the cold war and didn't suffer aggression or witness it being used against a nearby country are prone to being blue-eyed in that way.

I guarantee that a lot of the 90s kids are now having second thoughts and start to think more like the older population.

You can find small far-right groups in virtually every country, including the US and many European countries. Talk about them is mere distraction, they are not running the country.

And there's little doubt that if a country goes through a violent clash against corrupt government (see euromaidan), such groups would take the opportunity to gain standing. You can draw parallels to capitol hill events, or imagine what groups like Soldiers of Odin (the nordics) would have done had there been protests with bullets.

And when your country is invaded by a foreign nation, your army generals are not going to ask about the political opinions of those who are willing to fight for their country. A small group of nazis defending Ukraine from Russian invasion? So what. There will be nationalists standing in any country's army if they get invaded.

Talk about nazism is a mere distraction and something Putin's trolls would do. Please don't.

All over the news if you do a search. First hits:

https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-rejects-calling-ru...

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/24/china-refuses-to-call-attack...

They didn't have 200k troops and tons of military gear amassed around their borders for 8 years. It's hard to believe anyone who's been paying attention to the buildup would've thought they're there just to chill out.

> My prediction: A repetition of Crimea. The Donbas will be incorporate to the Russian area of influence, but not the rest of Ukraine, some noises will be done by the West about sanctions or whatever and in five years nobody will remember.

And in six years Putin will grab more land again, knowing that nobody will do more than "condemn" it because everyone is afraid of the other scenarios.

Neighbors of Russia joining an alliance to defend themselves is no more a threat to Russia than Russia defending themselves is a threat to their neighbors. One the one hand, the (comparatively) small European countries clearly need that defense because otherwise Russia is big enough -- and willing -- to invade.

I think the real problem is that NATO is a threat to Putin's imperialistic dreams.

> At the start I usually pick the quests carefully and watch all the cutscenes. By the end I'm hammering the skip key and just want to be done with it.

I've felt the same with many games. I don't think length is an issue per se, rather it's that they achieve that with filler and padding. I can imagine a bunch of young lowly paid game developers mass-producing low-effort side quests and other stuff to fill the world with. Like its only purpose is to give the player something to do (and some reward, for the loot & xp addicts) rather than to tell an interesting, compelling story and make you part of it.

Length is an issue for other reasons but the urge to skip forward and just get on with it is, for me, 100% due to repetitiveness and boredom and lack of lasting quality.

> Nah, they were targeting previous gen consoles

They even sold cyberpunk themed limited edition Xbox One X, a cyberpunk themed PS4 controller.. so I'm guessing the pressure to release for these consoles before they're completely obsoleted by the new gen must have been immense.

> Will NPCs finally resist when you rip open their car door, pull them out and drive away in their vehicle?

https://www.reddit.com/r/cyberpunkgame/comments/sxjb5f/just_...

The animations are fine but the game fails to load them. As it fails other assets too, for example you might see your main character in a cutscene with her tits out because the clothes didn't load. [1]

At launch the game had you T-pose without pants while riding a motorcycle...

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/cyberpunkgame/comments/sx031p/start...

I'm gonna say that if you were content playing it on PS4, your expectations probably were far below that of the average player.

I completely understand why people with high expectations were disappointed with the game.

Any kind of touch typing allows ring finger to substitute for pinky when the latter is shift-locked.

I lost my gmail account a decade ago. Since then, year after year, I've been watching people suffer the same fate with gmail, youtube, google play, etcetra. There's always someone who won't believe that google can screw you over all of a sudden. There's always someone who will be surprised, always someone who thought it couldn't happen to them...

I don't know what else I can say. It's a shame I haven't been maintaining a list of all incidents I've come across.

Yep. It's mostly a knee jerk reaction.

After accustomization with a style that doesn't force explicit declarations of identifiers and their types, verbose type conversions, line breaks and indentation after every statement and brace, etcetra., one could definitely make a different (and similarly exaggerated) human language metaphor. For example, take some English text and feed it through a parser. Feels good to read?

    (S (NP Parsing)
       (VP refers
           (PP to
               (NP (NP the activity)
                   (PP of
                       (S (VP analysing
                              (NP a sentence)
                              (PP into
                                  (NP its component categories and functions))))))))
       .)

That's a bit how mainstream languages feel after using something that hasn't been forced into such an artificial form :) If you're willing to let go of that, you can write sentences and clauses on the same line, almost like prose!

I don't know if there's a proper name for it. At least people who are aware of the style would probably recognize Whitney's name so that's the best term I've come up with yet.

For me, the end goal isn't Whitney style, but I've been pursuing effective programming all my life. When I learned to code, I wasn't talking to anyone except my computer, and that alone was exciting enough to make it a life-long hobby and profession for me.

Do you know what brought me to Hacker News? Arc. And Paul Graham's writings about Lisp. The message was never about a popular language that everyone speaks. If anything, it was rather the opposite: pg saw in lisp a powerful and expressive (if niche) language that makes you competitive against larger players who stick to boring mainstream languages. I wasn't interested in competition or startups, but merely in powerful ways to make the computer do what you want. I don't particularly care if I'm the only person on planet earth willing to wield that power; it's for my own enjoyment. Programming for me isn't about "product" so "productivity wall" isn't something I think about, and complaining about productivity wall would be a bit like complaining that getting fit for Tour de France is time consuming, why don't they just drive it by car?

That said, I think there are people who find K, APL, and related languages very productive in their niche. I'm definitely not speaking for everyone.

Anyway, it is the curiosity and desire to discover a powerful way to command the computer that has driven me to study Haskell, APL, PostScript, forth, TLA+, lisps, BQN, K, Erlang, and more. "Whitney C" is just one milestone along the journey, and I don't know where the journey will eventually lead; I'm just not happy with any existing language right now.

So the answer is no, learning Whitney C will not make someone immediately productive with my code, just as learning Java does not make you immediately productive C++. They are different languages. However, anything you learn can shrink the productivity wall; knowing APL or BQN, K, and Whitney C might make it easier to grasp whatever I come up with next. That applies to all of programming in general though; the more you know, the more you know, and some of that knowledge will almost always transfer. There will be familiar patterns and ideas.

I also think people seriously overestimate the productivity wall. As you say, one can learn to read cyrillic in an afternoon. Kana in a weekend. But learning Russian or Japanese is significantly more work than learning the script. In terms of scope, I'd say learning APL or Whitney C is closer to learning kana than it is to learning Japanese.

(EDIT: I also find it ironic that programmers are ostensibly excited about learning new things, yet at the same time programmers really love to complain about languages that look alien won't give a few weekends to learn them)

The difficulty is that traffic lights are rather unpredictable. Some actually require you to speed up to the limit if you want to keep up with the wave. And others won't light up until you pass a sensor so coasting and regulating speed far ahead doesn't work. Others still may be triggered by sensors on crossing traffic, whether you get a green or red is unknowable.

I'm guessing the signals on railways are much more predictable.

It might be unreadable in the same sense as Chinese or Russian is to someone who hasn't learned to read it. Learn to read and it turns out not to be unreadable?

I like it because it makes it easier for me to see the big picture. The forest and the mountain. It doesn't over-emphasize the bark on the trees; it doesn't drag on and make me scroll & jump through a maze of boring minute detail. At the same time, it doesn't actually bury and hide whatever detail there is; it's all there for when you need it. Whitney also generally simplifies things a lot and avoids tedious contortions others would make for portability or some theoretical conception of maintainability, readability, or vague "best practices". It's very straightforward and -- once you get past the Whitney vocabulary and general style -- there are no mountains of abstractions and layers you need to grok before you can work on the code.

The biggest problem is that after getting used to that style, "normal" code starts to feel like kindergarten books with very simple sentences written in horse sized capital letters, a handful per page. Except that those letters are not used to write a short children's story, but a complex labyrinthine machine, and the over-emphasis on minute detail just obscures the complexity and you end up with cross cutting concerns spread over thousands of lines of code and many many files. It might look clean and readable on the surface, yet: there be dragons. And nobody wants to tame those dragons because there's so much code. And then I find myself sighing and asking: why on earth do we need an entire page for what would really amount to a line of code if we didn't insist on spelling everything out like it's babby's third program after hello world? It's just tedious.

Whitney certainly writes his own sort of dragons, but it's easier to keep them all in your head. For example, the b compiler won't work out of the box on multiple platforms. I'm fairly confident I could port it without much effort, as long as the platform meets some basic requirements.

Red lights are sometimes silly for cars too. And sometimes they are upgraded with sensors that make them automatically go green when you approach an empty intersection, making them a little less silly.

They don't always work well; in my area some sensors seem to trigger too late, resulting in unnecessary braking, and others trigger too early and might encourage you to speed up for the intersection to avoid getting a yellow or even red just before you enter. Sometimes they give a green for the go-straight lane just when you're switching to the turn lane, which stays red even though there's no traffic..

One of my favorite solutions is simply turning the lights off altogether when there's not much traffic. They do that at quite a few intersections here.

Have you ever seen it used in the wild?

𝐼 𝘭𝘪𝘬𝘦 𝑢𝑠𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝐛𝐨𝐥𝐝 𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝘪𝘵𝘢𝘭𝘪𝘤 𝑡𝑒𝑥𝑡 𝑗𝑢𝑠𝑡 𝑡𝑜 𝒎𝒆𝒔𝒔 𝑤𝑖𝑡ℎ 𝑎𝑛𝑦𝑜𝑛𝑒 𝑤ℎ𝑜'𝑠 𝑡𝑟𝑦𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑡𝑜 𝑢𝑠𝑒 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑠𝑒𝑎𝑟𝑐ℎ 𝘧𝘶𝘯𝘤𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯 𝑖𝑛 𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑖𝑟 𝑏𝑟𝑜𝑤𝑠𝑒𝑟 𝑜𝑟 𝑒𝑑𝑖𝑡𝑜𝑟. Sᴍᴀʟʟ ᴄᴀᴘs ᴡᴏʀᴋ ғᴏʀ ᴀ sɪᴍɪʟᴀʀ ᴇғғᴇᴄᴛ. ℑ𝔱 𝔤𝔢𝔱𝔰 𝔢𝔵𝔱𝔯𝔞 𝔣𝔲𝔫 𝔦𝔫 𝔯𝔦𝔠𝔥 𝔱𝔢𝔵𝔱 𝔢𝔡𝔦𝔱𝔬𝔯𝔰 𝔴𝔥𝔢𝔯𝔢 𝔶𝔬𝔲 𝔠𝔞𝔫 𝔪𝔦𝔵 𝔲𝔫𝔦𝔠𝔬𝔡𝔢 𝔰𝔱𝔶𝔩𝔢𝔰 𝔞𝔫𝔡 𝔯𝔢𝔞𝔩 𝔰𝔱𝔶𝔩𝔢𝔰. pᵁrⁿoͥvͨiͦdͩeͤs oͤpⁿpͩoˡrͤtˢuˢnities cᶠoͦnͬfusing aᵖnͤdͦᵖˡᵉ sͭoͪfͤtͥwͬare.

You would think legal would have put an end to that madness..

Exactly. And the end result might be as bad as antivirus: horrendously slow software with a huge database of heuristics that cause false positives and at the same time let malware through. It's going to suck.

> This isn't the end-game: I fully expect that IP address blocklists would crop up in no time, and will be painfully maintained by folks pouring their life in to it.

Proxy can be hosted on the same server as the site itself. In that case this simply becomes a blocklist of naughty websites. Someone still needs to do the hard work of figuring out which sites are naughty.

> Yeah that sounds like the easiest way to make your colleagues hate you

Well I'm not Whitney's colleague but I really like his code.

> The Unicode people veered off the tracks and sank into a swamp when they decided that semantic information should be encoded into Unicode characters.

As if that weren't enough, they also decided to cram half-assed formatting into it. You got bold letters, italics, various fancy-style letters, superscripts and subscripts for this and that.. all for the sake of leagacy compatibility. Unicode was legacy right from the beginning.

I agree to an extent, though it depends on to what degree do you consider economy to be zero sum. Are the resources required to make everyone physically and mentally healthy finite or not? If they are finite and cannot be scaled to provide for everyone, then someone must be left out. In that case you could print money (or transfer it from billionaires) and come to a temporary state of affairs where everyone can afford wellbeing, but if the labour and resources that provide said wellbeing don't scale accordingly, it just results in inflation on that sector and soon enough someone will be left out again.

Same reason why you can't solve housing shortage by just giving people more money so they can pay their rent.

Generally speaking I agree.. but having observed human behavior long enough, I don't think it's realistic to break that addiction. People are attracted to free services like flies are to manure, and often these free services are advertised with a huge budget and hype, and often come with network effects (~all of your friends and family are using said free service). Nobody reads the ToS, nobody cares about the implications of trusting their data to someone who doesn't care.. year after year we have these reports of people getting burned by the big G and still people keep using Google and acting surprised when they screw you over.

It seems to be human nature, and also nature of the market. It's the digital equivalent of race to the bottom. The shortsighted, uninformed, apathetic, and irrational people outnumber those who care, by a huge margin. "Just educate people" isn't happening any more than we can just tell people to "git gud." And that is why, in the physical space, we have laws that offer people some protection against terrible products that are unfit for purpose, unsafe, broken, etcetra. We wouldn't need those laws if we could just fix people and make them informed & rational; in that case, the market would truly sort out itself. It's just not happening, and it's also not happening in the digital space, so it's very possible we're going to see the same laws in the digital space.