182 karma · joined August 2, 2019
Shame be upon such short-sighted folks who think that their "freedom" to not wear a mask is greater than others right to merely live.
I'll say it again: can you imagine what the survivors of World War 2 lived through? 10 years of being nervous everytime you try to go to the toilet... and these modern crybabies and their anti-vaccine lies want you to take them seriously?
It's not right.
It's such a pity that you have Trumpelstiltskins over there too. I had thought you smarter...
The fact is, over 150k have died in the US due to COVID, and this exceeds the US death toll from any known war, so there's no real minimizing such a figure.
It's likely precisely due to a failure to contain the spread of the causative virus, precisely due to waffling around lockdown.
For one, his per-capita-death-rates are wayyy off. (1 out of 200 dying? try around 8% in Spain and Italy...)
For 2, yes, it's precisely about slowing the spread 1) giving a chance for emergency services to handle the influx instead of being slammed in one go 2) attempting to quash a given outbreak
So many sweeping generalizations here and so little counter-point to the facts the general public have become well-acquainted with, I'm afraid our Good Doctor seems a bit eccentric and witless writing such a trivializing dismissive blog post.
Let's call him "an outlier" even for Sweden, as travel is not making his strange claims that "covid is over for Sweden" look even sillier.
Covid is not finished for "the world" at large, and it's an interconnected world, and suspicion of "t-cells bearing COVID immunity rather than antibodies" as if the PCR were just a cheap placebo test and no antibodies were detected in prior COVID sufferers (it does detect them.)... this is all making light of what deserves serious engagement.
Fire this man or get a committee investigating his various claims as flippant blogs are not the appropriate realm for such incendiary topics.
go on though, I'm curious.
I was thinking "this person repeated the same comment 10 times" works as well as "they mentioned pudding and i hate pudding"... The bar to click down-arrow instead of up-arrow is lower than limbo-ing under a park bench ATM, that's all...one could inadvertently do it. One could go on a spree just downvoting every comment ever. "Just you try to stop me!" etc.
I'm less and less convinced that we are doing the world any service by demonetizing all content and cutting the heads of all tall talent, hence the authors presumption of a sort of public UBI or other non-private-sector basis as a condition to liberating the content.
The IP systems certainly are byzantine and punitive towards actual free information flow, as outlined in the article. However, if one approaches this as a typical Free Market Libertarian American (tm), as the author expressly does NOT, one arrives at different economic conclusions, and basically, journalism will not survive the complete demonetization of all content for ONE reason:
content will become even more corruptly tied to out-of-band payment than is currently the case.
why bother writing articles against the big bad polluter, when you can get paid to write apologism for them?
The $4 billion rich Netflix CEO says that artists should try harder if they don't want to starve (source, this same article we are discussing)
It would also appear that you didn't read the article, as your point is not the topic of the article.
The article is about copyright law running counter to information accessibility, running counter to an interpretation of "freedom of speech".
The article is about economic rather than technological barriers to information sharing.
That's the problem with knee-jerk first-paragraph-read comments.
I don't really want to read 20 hackernews' argue about how hard it is/isn't to make a hit album. Quality music takes more effort, training, and skill to make than low-quality music, and this is not about the production alone. Expert-level musicians are generally disregarded by Joe Q. Public in favor of Joe Q. Publics "favorite" musicians, training and knowledge and compositional skill notwithstanding. The limiting factor is Joe Q. Public's musical listening skills, which certainly will not improve in a world that is racing to achieve cheaper mass-produced conformist "music" that likely will be replaced by algorithmic generation in the near future.
I am hardly a great composer, but even I could describe formulaic "genre music" in such a manner that a decent music AI could iterate it nonstop.
The subject of people "liking genres" rather than following individual artists of talent across their works as they explore all genres, etc... that's a different topic for a different day.
I will also contend that grooming a public to like simplistic rhythms that are easy to program on 16-note step sequencers is not accidental.
Indie artists are sinking more into getting their songs promoted on playlists than they gain in streaming revenue in return. It's literally "pay to be played"
(Remember "Pay to Play" in Sunset Strip clubs in the 80's? You would literally front the money for renting the club on a Tuesday or Thursday and then sell tickets and hope to pay off your "concert" (Friday/Saturday had music the club actually booked & paid, hence their "reputation" was solid)
Anyway, I severely resent the massive influence these relatively new corporate overlords have had in reducing the value of music significantly.
BANDCAMP is one suggested remedy, as they take their (relatively small, I think its' around 10%?) cut from your sales and allow you to have your bands page and sub-domain "yourband.bandcamp.com" etc... in other words: they treat you respectfully as humans should treat other humans.
This race to the bottom can only end in more Aututuned Pop, lol...
The syntax is like Ruby, but it's statically typed and compiled and the executable uses very little RAM.
It appears to be the sweet-spot (a GC'ed but typed/compiled lang) as I've yet to achieve high productivity on web apps with C or C++
FWIW it's worth, I gave Rust and Rocket a whirl. It seems nice. I didn't quite understand the borrow-checker... I'm familiar with RAII, ARC, pool-based approaches, trying to implement a malloc myself once (very badly) on an mcu... didn't get Rust yet...
One occasionally has to deal with Go, and it's getting rather widespread. Luckily, it's rather easy to transpose concepts to from your general algol family style stuff. I wasn't excited by Go, but it's not been frustrating either, and there's a LOT of stuff out there that has been getting it's "generational rewrite" in Go during the last few years... (wkhtmltopdf will be rewritten in trending languages every decade or so, right?)
Silly stuff like "I like wide-code-formatting, not vertical stacks with 4 characters on a line or something. (cultural)
"Too many moving parts" in almost every implementation of anything, (as in "modern" javascript/front-end frameworks and their build-toolchains) such that its built for a large corp to use lots of warm bodies to "divide et imperis". (I can understand this with regards to Flutter, half of the complication of this cross-platform thing being Googles fault, of course. Android Studio needing it's own dedicated 32-core terabyte-ram compute cluster, naturally, and trying to find cross-platform layout containers etc without being verbose = good luck!)
Particular pain points? Let's go with some Flutter stuff, as it's arguably the primary use case folks will encounter Dart for, now that the Dart VM isn't going to be embedded in all the browsers suddenly, as was proposed at one point.
Arguably, I'm doing it all wrong, as someone will point out. Elaborate (client-side) modeling that will only work if everything is completely fleshed out:
We have our classes, but OH let's make the state a separate object and let's basically have you haul 3 paragraphs of junk around to represent one thing and some related stuff that should probably be part of the same object... Hey, who knows, maybe it'll be like CSS in some future revs in which you have to look for 20 class blocks extending the same class, but that's in Crystal etc, and it's raison-d-etre seems pretty established (extensibility) but it does make localization a PITAS.
...and then we have factory methods, and we can't really debug passing stuff through them until we get data, but it's not as simple as if(this.readyState == 4 && this.status ==200) {boom, does it look like JSON? is it an array instead? what do we have here?} so there's this "build an elaborate model on the client side, but then you are basically only validating and attempting to JSON.parse whatever your (likely http) API spits out.
factory TextLine.fromJson(Map<String, dynamic> json) {} Never mind that I have to finish tiling all model bits to pull something through and see what I have, although the flutter hot-reload helps speed things up a bit, which you then end up pulling data through what pretends to be fancy/modern but is actually no better than the browsers HTTP XHR methods
//the future Stream<List<Album>> fetchCards(int limit, int skip) async* { http.Response response = await http .get('https://mobile.somesite.com/albums/'+ limit.toString() + '/' + skip.toString() ); List responseJson = json.decode(response.body); yield responseJson.map((m) => new AlbumCatalog.fromJson(m)).toList();
Syntax is generally fine, text is better than SVG, but somehow working with Dart makes me feel depressed, in a Javascript kind of way... (lot's of tooling and attempts to not be what it really is underneath, hence my gut reaction to arrow functions and pretend-classes in Javascript, etc...)
I don't want a better node.js nor any node.js at all, really. Node.js called and it wants it's browser back. It's an event loop, for crying out loud, and has no business trying to pretend that it understands operating system processes and threads and such...
Dart reminds me of the worst of large corporate committee-ware. Go is at least a decent and respectable programming language, even if it IS garbage-collected...
I suppose I will get flagged for having strong expressed emotions about Dart. I dislike working with it, immensely, and this was even before Flutter... let's please avoid discussing Android Studio, chip heat dissipation, and global warming... Clearly the Goog has no influence on the fact that you need 6 cores running at 1.whatever gigahertz to open Farty Birds or whatever is hip. Flag away. Sorry, "null safety"... is that like "if (cat ==== 'undefined') {break exception omg try catch}?"
.... What does Dart do better than it's nearest competitor? What does Dart compete with again?
Oh sorry, one other nation did, and it's argued that that clown was installed the same way our clown was by the same foxy Australian media mogul.
No other nation had a total jackass absolutely hamper every single effort to contain the virus.
No other nation had such a moronic leader who literally stalled for 6 weeks in his initial response to this.
Spare me the nonsense, please don't LIE to my face. We all saw it.
Selective support of states rights when it's Pandemic Time counts as "kicking the can down the road" to the poster below me.
TBH, I was initially imagining your family being a bit sick of all the weeping and rending of clothes about Sacred America, the national entity one must worship or be unworthy. Embrace the flag or GTFO!
Get over it, it's a place. It's a country. It has a checkered past, as most countries do. It's not perfect, nor is it the most villainous regime ever.
The current trend towards realizing Americas flaws is related to it's decline as an empire. Expect more of the same to the degree that said flaws are not addressed, expect more decline and plan for it, ideally by de-imperialising like Kemal Ataturk would have recommended, lol.
What some smarter folks may realize is that America has created a global empire and an imperial structure to match it, replete with satrapies. Surely there are some consequences for being the Global Cop (TM) As history assures us, no empire lasts forever.
I would humbly propose less handwringing but also less manipulation of the rest of the world, as this will save us from future handwringing. Let's back out of the Global Empire business and start trying to back the values we actually stand for.
Supporting Mubarak and Sisi in Egypt is not a long term value I will argue we should be projecting. Do I need to elaborate further on this theme? We risk leaving the world a legacy of mere "might = right", which is not likely the legacy we want to be remembered for.
If one truly "LOVES" ones country, (It's a bizarre thing to require compulsive adoration of an abstract entity on par with the feelings one has for a spouse or family member. Such compulsory adulation is a tool used to build armies and blind loyalty, which is wrongful. I realize that one may need to find a structure of meaning to comprehend the loss of a loved one who died following orders and "defending a nation") one will seek to fix its flaws and will address criticisms as bringing up potential flaws to address.
Hubris and the unwillingness to comprehend real problems and the desire to cover them up with "SHUT UP IT"S GREAT!" won't go down well.
What I'm seeing is more apologism for wrongful historical actions, perhaps in RESPONSE to what you described, but at this point it's become an "AMERICA IS GREAT SO SHUT UP"
Does criticism equal hatred in your mind?
It's not a European thing, it's an "I'M OBVIOUS" thing.
I see your anecdote and raise you a "European Tourist gets off streetcar at 6th and Market St. in SF, because it's allegedly the city center and thus must be a great tourist location"...
*I'm originally American and I've lived all over Europe for over 15 years.
"keep right" only works in right-hand drive countries, nor is it consistently applied (shopping center escalators, etc.) except for Germany, lol
2 install CNAB on that
3 goto 1
Yes, Levi's jeans used rock and roll and rebellion to sell jeans.
What's your point, James?
(Besides using more words than even I do to attempt to waffle his way around being WRONG, lol)
(to anyone attempting to bring me back around to the ostensible class critique nexus of this piece, I apparently didn't get it. It went over my head. I'm kinda thick I guess.)
quote: "A comprehensive study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that the number of researchers needed to develop new drugs, improved crop yields, and better microprocessors has risen substantially over the past 50 years. Other studies have found that research and development (R&D) productivity has fallen across a wide variety of industries, with lower growth in corporate revenues per research dollar than in the past, and that the impact of Nobel Prize–winning research has also declined. From a given amount of effort (or dollars), less knowledge and innovation arise. Our optimism about the economic prospects of new technologies and innovation should be going down, not up."
Is this, perhaps, also a product of system complexity? maturity and limits of certain processes? guidance and management seeking goals that are de-coupled from reality?
Declining VC investments in, what I read as, CORE TECH. We are so busy funding some website social convenience service that we forgot about the chips powering it, the power powering it, etc. and rapidly hit EOL on processes.
Perhaps real innovation requires
1) actual major efforts, efforts that our economic system doesn't prioritize enough. there's a million monkeys happy to use your platform for trivial mc-innovations, but you have to slog it out and build said platform first.
2) a deliberate plan, path, trajectory. (I hate to use the manhattan project as a good example for anything, perhaps Arpanet is a little less ugly of an example, in terms of impact.)
Favorite Quote: "The strategic management discipline places far more emphasis on capturing value through managing revenue streams (e.g., advertising versus subscriptions or product sales) and the scope of activities (e.g., the degree of vertical integration) than on creating value through high-performing, low-cost products that improve productivity in industries. Currently the most popular method of capturing value is with so-called platforms that organize an industry around a single product or service (think of Airbnb, for example, which offers a platform by which homeowners can rent out rooms), often enabling the platform provider to capture most of an industry’s profits. Not only is value creation clearly more important for increasing productivity than is value capture, it is not a coincidence that most of the current money-losing start-ups (e.g., Uber and Lyft) emphasize platforms in their announcements and IPO filings, building from the hype that business schools created."
Which of course leads to me saying: "there's very little incentive to build a platform that's useful for other actors. there's very little incentive to respect and treat users like humans"