pdamoc

There is a comparable divide between web-designers and web-developers.

People can have both sets of skills and, obviously, there is an overlap BUT, in my experience, very few web-developers have good enough design skills to produce a professional looking UI. Most resort to pre-made frameworks like Material Design or Bootstrap in order to produce decent looking UI.

> It feels to me like "science" has become something of a religion unto itself.

This might be because there is very, very little scientific thinking in the general population. People like doctors who, due to their education, should have scientific thinking, no longer can be trusted to have this scientific thinking. Instead of approaching issues with a scientific attitude, the resort to "trust me, I'm a doctor".

Scientific thinking, at its core, is just "things might not be how you think they are". It is a type of skepticism about your own thinking and a reliance, or trust, on a set of processes that have been proven to produce useful epistemic truths. A good example of this is the Monty Hall problem where loss aversion would make most people pick the suboptimal solution. The Cognitive Bias Codex [1] documents a lot of these cognitive biases.

So, the way to move forward is to fix the education process so that this kind of thinking is inculcated into most children by age 12.

[1] - https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/65/Cognitiv...

there are a lot of implementations (some of them obsolete):

https://eugenkiss.github.io/7guis/implementations

Get Jaak Panksepp's "Affective Neuroscience" OR "The Archeology of the Mind" instead.

Actually, there is scientific data in the form or the books and articles written by Jaak Panksepp. It documents the source of anger in the RAGE primary affect, complete with anatomical analysis of the nuclei involved. It just happens that the data from those articles supports a view that is the exact opposite of hers. ;)

Read "Affective Neuroscience" (or Archeology of the Mind) by Jaak Panksepp for a better understanding of where emotions come from (primary affect).

Read "Mindsight" by Daniel Siegel for a view on higher level emotional processing. You can "sample" his ideas by watching some of his interviews on Mindsight.

Read "Passage Meditation" by Eknath Easwaran for a simple and accessible program of meditation. Meditation, in its various forms, improves emotional control.

We are more animal than human. In other words, our emotional brain is far larger and far faster than the neocortex.

There are far fewer "adults" than you might think.

As one spiritual master said: "Most people tell you they want to get out of kindergarten, but don’t believe them. Don’t believe them! All they want you to do is to mend their broken toys. “Give me back my wife. Give me back my job. Give me back my money. Give me back my reputation, my success.” This is what they want; they want their toys replaced. That’s all. Even the best psychologist will tell you that, that people don’t really want to be cured. What they want is relief; a cure is painful."

This looks very interesting. I wonder how much data would be required in order to imitate a particular handwriting style? i.e. if I know someone with a lovely penmanship and I can ask that person to create such a reference data set, how much should that person write in order for the network to be able to reproduce the style reliably?

Robert Kegan has a constructive developmental model where he uses "Subject" and "Object" to describe the progression in development.

Basically, you identify with the Subject and at the next level you become aware that that identity is actually something you have, not something you are. Foe example, you have wants and needs you are not your wants and needs. Your identity is not grounded in the fulfilment of your needs.

Mindfulness helps with this. You stop identifying yourself with your body and you realize that you have a body. At an advanced level you stop identifying yourself with your mind and you realize that you have a mind. This ownership allows you to choose your reactions to outside stressors and to approach in a more rational manner changing the things you have. You can change your mind because you want to change it.

At ultimate level subject-object distinction disappears. Glimpses of this ultimate level can be obtained through proper use of entheogens but it is meditation that is the slow and steady road to the mountain top. In other words, you might get to experience the state in a psychedelic trip but if you want to live there, you need to pay the price. The price might be 10 years of daily meditation.

For a frequently funny and light-hearted approach to this subject I recommend the work of Anthony de Mello. He used the word "Awareness" to label this space an "Wake Up" for the process of getting there.

I just finished going through the "De-Mystifying Mindfulness" course on Coursera and they do warn about the fact that "mindfulness" has become an industry and that the people who offer courses are often unqualified to teach them.

MBSR and MBCT course with qualified teachers do have a very good track record and solid scientific backing.

There are also some replicated studies of the synergy between mindfulness and psychedelics. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S10538...

There are places where they are legal and you have the option of planning a vacation around a psychedelic experience.

My first experience with ayahuasca was in Netherlands and the afterglow of the experience was a good 3 months. The first month my depression was significantly better, the next 2 months noticeable better. After 3 months I remained on a plateau that was higher than the one I was on before the experience. The experience permanently removed my (arguably light) PTSD symptoms (I would get tensed every time I crossed the street due to an accident on the pedestrian crossway) and a particular "dark heaviness" that was part of my days from time to time.

> "It's like a stepladder to look over a brick wall that's a little bit too tall for you. You use a stepladder, you get to see this crazy landscape that you kinda had an inkling about every time you walked by this wall, and then some people, you know, can sit in front of the wall, and, like, meditate, and then the wall becomes transparent, and they see beyond it, you know? So, there are many pathways to arrive at the same realization." - Reggie Watts - Have a good trip (Netflix)

I believe that the responsible use of psychedelics could open the door to a new leap in human civilization. They are powerful tools and should be approached with upmost respect.

"Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise; seek what they sought." - Basho

One of the reasons that the wizards stopped teaching SICP was the fact that the world changed. Back in the 80s, most programming was done from first principles, since the middle of the 90s it switched to programming against an API.

While learning to program from first principles is still amazingly useful, it is not what beginners need because most of them will never end up programming like that.

Robert Kegan's Constructive-Developmental Theory could be useful in understanding this.

It basically defines an evolving relationship between Subject (what one is) and Object (what one has).

Criticism targeted at objects (what one perceives) is tolerated. Criticism targeted at the subject (what one is) is frequently a source of stress.

For example, criticism towards one's religion elicits different reactions if the religion is part of Subject (what one is) versus if the religion is Object (what one has).

The same with programming, if the piece of software gets entangled with one's identity, criticism of the software becomes criticisms targeted at one's identity and losing a piece of identity is akin to dying. For someone who only views software as objects, the reaction of a person that has their identity entangled with the software would appear blown out of proportion.

Something like Elm but that compiles to native binaries. It should come with Material Design level of HIG documentation and a tone of examples. The compiler and the Native/Kernel parts should be implemented in a modern systems programming language, maybe rust.

> A "transnational socialistic union" is a bizarre dream.

I think the perception of such a dream depends on a series of factors. One of them is the ability of the person to deal with complexity. See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mW4LTqRJDW8&t=2s

A person on the third order of consciousness (Social) would tend to find the idea repulsing.

A person on the forth order of consciousness (and 5th) would tend to find the idea attractive.

Trouble is that we are not yet at 4th order at a global level. We are actually nowhere near that. Unfortunately, not even the leadership is there yet. Some are but not all.

The higher one goes on this scale of development the clearer the interconnectedness of everything is.

Kegan even argues that the reason we live longer might have something to do with needing to develop the higher levels of consciousness that are required to deal with the global challenges that we face. It is impossible to deal with global consequence by using the 3rd order of consciousness. The ability of people with this type of consciousness to deal with the complexity of the issue is simply inadequate.

Your brain is rewiring in order to expand the domain of analysis. It is rewiring for dealing with higher levels of complexity.

Take a look at the bellow video for a short explanation of the evolution of the processes involved.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mW4LTqRJDW8

I learned Elm and Elixir few years ago. In both case, it took me about a week from "hello, world" to having the feeling that I can program in that language. I did this using only online learning materials and the support forums for those languages. With a colleague available I imagine that things would have been even smoother.

A lot of companies vastly overestimate the difficulty of getting a decent developer up to speed with a new language. In a lot of cases, it might be easier to learn a new language than a new, complex library for a language that you already know.

The information on that site is amazing, I just wish there was an open source version of it.

In Romania, we make a clear distinction between Supa, Ciorba and Bors.

Supa (Soup) is the un-soured base, Ciorba is sour (usually soured with lemon) and Bors (Borscht) is soured with an wheat bran based fermented liquid by the same name. :)

Mentioning compilation speed needs solid data to back the claim. This would have delayed the release. To my understanding, there is some work being done on a script that would produce this kind of reliable data and a later post will be made to cover this detail.

To my understanding, derived serialization is in conflict with type inference. You can have one or the other but it is very complex and difficult to have both. Maybe one day Elm will get it but it is not a trivial implementation and there are other, more important issues that take precedence.

The best idea I found around this topic is https://www.ethicalsystems.org/

If there is a move from shareholder primacy to stakeholder primacy, the environment can be one of the stakeholders and there could be laws preventing businesses abusing this stakeholder.

If you want to learn more about this topic, look at the work of Jaak Panksepp. "Archeology of the Mind" is one of the most interesting books I have ever read.

His TEDTalk is a quick overview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=65e2qScV_K8

I want something very similar. A language powerful enough to get almost everything done with very few and very well thought through escape hatches in form of DSLs. For example, Elm has a mechanism for writing shaders:

    vertexShader : Shader { position:Vec3, coord:Vec3 } { u | view:Mat4 } { vcoord:Vec2 }
    vertexShader = [glsl|

    attribute vec3 position;
    attribute vec3 coord;
    uniform   mat4 view;
    varying   vec2 vcoord;

    void main () {
      gl_Position = view * vec4(position, 1.0);
      vcoord = coord.xy;
    }

    |]

I can think of at least a few other DSLs that would be useful: some logic/query languages (SQL/Datalog/GraphQL) and maybe a highly mathematical visual language like gezira (vpri). It would also be very useful to be able to write things in a lower level language for performance optimization (where needed).

What I would love to see is a declarative object oriented language. It would marry the idea of FauxO from Gary Bernhardt's Boundaries talk [1] with the syntax of Elm.

Elm already allows for escaping into other languages. I would love to see that mechanism expanded and a bunch of "core" DSLs implemented using ideas from the "STEPS Toward the Reinvention of Programming" [2].

[1] https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/boundaries [2] http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2012001_steps.pdf

If it's easy to remove, then you can think about the thing you can remove in isolation.

I think that the ability to partition code in such a way as to think about each bit in isolation is the mark of high quality code.

Give Elm a chance. It is less complex than Haskell while retaining a lot of the declarative nature. Since it is mainly involved in generating HTML, the declarative nature is a good fit.

> The easy part is pretending animals are like us, even if there's no rigorous reason to believe they are.

You should look into the work of Jaak Panksepp. Watch his TEDTalk [1] for a quick overview but the really mind altering information you will find in his books. I highly recommend "The Archeology of the Mind" to everyone who wants to learn more how the concept of SELF is being created into the brain and the role primary affect plays in complex enough organisms (mammals, some social reptiles/birds).

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=65e2qScV_K8

This has to do with state partitioning.

The official Elm Architecture tutorial used to contain some examples of encapsulating functionality into modules that would then be reused. The pattern presented there was abused by some folks and some problems that were introduced by state partitioning started to appear. There was a lot of talk about boilerplate and inter-component communication. A lot of these problems could have been avoided by not being so aggressive with the partitioning and so, "thinking in terms of components" has been discouraged ever since.

You can still define components by implementing the model/update/view triplet pattern but the main recommendation is to do it only when this is unavoidable (e.g. Pages or highly complex widgets).