hetman

While I'm generally on board with this principle, I felt, given the nature of the conversation, this was a particularly egregious instance. Besides, sometimes new users can use a reminder. I'm generally not a fan of absolutist rules as they always tend to break down in some corner cases doing more harm than good (though of course we can disagree whether this was such a case). Either way, thank you for your reminder to my reminder :)

How do you define "explanation"?

It's also worth adding that the scientific method is fundamentally based on unprovable axiomatic assumptions. In other words it's still philosophy all the way down. To be clear, I don't think all philosophical ideas are equally valid and this particular set of axioms has proven quite useful in practice, but at best all we can really say is that it provides a user window for examining reality. We don't know how wide that window happens to be and how much of reality we can see through it.

We don't even know if the scientific method is the best it could be in what we use it for. After all, it was only expanded with the idea of falsification in the 20th century yet we were still doing useful science before than.

It's worth mentioning though that in general as our technology has gotten more exotic, so too the chemicals needed to manufacture it have gotten more toxic.

Yes, Ruby. But there's tradeoffs and frankly Python's file name = namespace name approach makes finding things much easier when you don't know where they've been imported from.

In Ruby people achieve something similar by convention (explicitly creating a namespace and keeping the names in sync with the file name), but not everyone follows convention and things can turn into a mess.

If I had to suggest one flaw in Ruby it would be this, in many other ways I find it nicer to code in then Python, but honestly this one thing is enough to really sour the experience.

I don't like Emacs and still thought it was funny :)

Are these startup times even significant enough to actually be noticeable anyway?

Not if they're bad at it. ChatGPT and friends is a tool that's useful for some things and that's where it'll see adoption. Misuses if the technology will likely be exposed as such pretty quickly.

There's quite a bit of a gap between an understanding sufficient to follow someone else's explanation and an understanding sufficient to build something (including learning a rigid syntax understandable to a machine in order to express the concepts).

I doubt that's the case for 8 year olds. C requires a mental model of more hidden abstractions than something like Small Basic (a decent grasp of pointers is kind of non-negotiable). I mean the Array and Stack objects in Small Basic sound like they would be a lot easier to handle for a beginner than anything equivalent in C.

Since we're trading anecdotes. I have a 2013 Lenovo Yoga 2 Pro which refuses to die. I've always used it when I travel so I definitely haven't coddled it. I've kind of been hoping it would die so I could justify replacing it because it's been good enough to get the job done. And the best part is that since it's running Windows I've been able to upgrade the OS and still get security updates.

As other posters have demonstrated, having a laptop last this long is part good design and part good luck.

I don't think this has anything to do with Brittain or geography but rather the language of the Angles, which is posited to form the primary substrate for modern English.

Your thesis assume that Eastern European countries were fully on board with Soviet ideology until the fall of the Soviet union. In fact, most of the Eastern European nations had been forced into the Soviet sphere of influence against their people's will. Multiple popular protests that were brutally crushed by Soviet aligned militaries suggests the discontentment never went away. So I don't think the ideology in those Eastern European states needed to shift significantly after that fall of the USSR. The EU didn't need to conquer Eastern Europe because their people wanted to align themselves with Western Europe all along.

Suggesting the US wanted to go to nuclear war is a rather colourful reimagining of the whole Cuban missile crisis. In fact the crisis demonstrated the complete opposite, that neither side wanted full out nuclear war. Both the USSR removed their nuclear warheads from Cuba and the US removed theirs from Turkey and Italy as concessions. Soviet military presence didn't end in Cuba nor did US military presence end in Turkey and Italy.

Capitalism isn't the entirety of US ideology, and I would hardly say Russia was aligned given how vastly different their outcomes were compared to other eastern European nations.

Of course not, but they lose their power in the imagination of the people when the people realise they had been lied to.

The ideologies and power structures of the axis powers ceased to exist as a result of the outcome of WW2. This was not the case when the Russian Federation took on the mantle of the inheritor of the legacy of the USSR. Therefore it does not make sense to equate the history of authoritarianism in these places.

The UK was already aligned with US ideology.

That really worked out for China didn't it. Under Xi Jinping there's a resurgence of Communist ideology and not at all the gradual acclimation to Western style democracy everyone had expected.

What serious intellectuals in the West are making statements about "corrupt Asiatics" today? This is clearly taken directly from some kind of propagandist talking sheet because anyone making this claim clearly understands nothing about the West of today.

It's ironic that we can talk about Western petulance but ignore the petulance of the Russian Federation when their outrageous demands were not met by their neighbours.

Ah the old "there's only two sovereign nations, USA and Russia, and everyone in between are just puppets" line of thought that seems so entrenched in the Russian Federation, presumably because the Soviets could not conceive the common people of any country wanting anything without being agitated through propaganda (after all, when you have near total control over the media, independent thought does seem like an aberration).

What people who complain about NATO expansion seem to forget is that the countries being "expanded into" still have living memory, within one generation, of Soviet tanks rolling through their streets to put down any attempts at independence in governance. There was Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland... the US didn't coërce these countries to join NATO, these countries were practically begging to be included.

Then the Russian Federation made the demand at the beginning of 2022 for NATO to remove its troops and equipment from Central/Eastern Europe as if they ruled over those nations. The gall to think to dictate the international military security policy for a population totalling twice the size of their own is astounding.

Which ever way the cause and effect happened, I think parent's point stands that there was little the US could have done to intervene.

I see this claim pop up pretty frequently but I think it ignores a rather important factor and that was that those countries suffered complete defeat at the hands of the US, that meant the US could impose any ideology they wished on the country. This was never the case with Russia. Now for sure, the USSR ended its life as a failed economic state, and the Russian Federation that emerged may have been willing to accept any economic ideology imposed on it... but capitalism needs more than this to work.

For example it needs the firm rule of law to be established, yet it is not clear there's anything the US could have done to prevent the divvying up of state resources amongst clever individuals who appropriated vast wealth, through usually dishonest means, becoming today's oligarchs. Nor could the US do anything to eliminate the Russian pride that remained in their former empire, which placed fairly unique pressures on Russia's leaders ("we may be poor but at least everyone else is afraid of us" was not as much of a fringe attitude among the common people as one might think).

So I don't think the conditions were at all similar between Germany and Japan on the one hand, and the Russian Federation on the other, and I don't think any kind of Marshal plan could have ever worked without these missing conditions.

After all, for decades we thought of China that if we just made them all rich, they'd all see the benefits of Western democracy and become more like us ideologically. So the West encouraged open trade with China and... the end result was a country which now had the resources to reäffirm their state ideology. Today we see a China pushing to strengthen the Maoist values it was founded on, rather than dismantling them.

Unfortunately, without utter national humiliation that completely breaks the people's belief in their former state ideology, I just don't think ideological transformation in any kind of short period of time is possible.

It might illuminate the limitations of the study.

Everything we have seen so far seems to indicate that you get maximum productivity when you pair human and AI, rather than having either on its own. What that means in practice is that (at least until someone actually develops GAI) aspects of programming may be automatable but you'll always want to keep a human in the loop somewhere to get maximum productivity. This should be true until society's need for programmers becomes saturated... but since programming is essentially itself automation, it's hard to imagine that need subsiding any time soon.

I'm not sure what you mean about Python. In Python, if you run an async function without an await, you will simply get a coroutine object that is ready to be executed by... someone (it's essentially a generator under the hood).

In fact, unlike JavaScript, you can't even call await from a synchronous module context. You have to either schedule that couroutine object onto an existing async event loop, or create a new event loop and run it your self.

What lock down related mechanisms do you propose could be responsible for 4 million deaths? Working with more concrete examples might help determine how likely this scenario is.

Carbon is not the only possible cost to the environment. Building batteries is not exactly easy on the planet either.

You mean, if only there was an economically viable way to store electricity. Still waiting on that one.

It's ironic (though by this stage I don't think anyone can say surprising) that the drive to reach Mars has been producing technology that will help Earth. For example, advancements in renewables energy in the short term. But also in the long term, once we can dig up our resources from space rocks, we won't have to dig the earth up to do it.

I've never understood this assumption that focusing on one thing must necessarily always be to the detriment of another.