vitiral

Most deep discussions require some amount of discussing your terms. A surprising amount of insight can be gathered by playing with and altering previous assumptions of a word's meaning.

For instance, by seeing violence as a spectrum you can see that while lying to the Nazi about the Jewish person in your attic is "committing violence" against said Nazi, you can also recognize that the lie is quite obviously justified violence -- and there is a spectrum of justified violence in that case.

When you lie to someone you damage their ability to see reality as it is, especially the reality of yourself (your thoughts, motivations, etc). Its not as severe as a punch to the face (in most cases at least) but it still causes harm.

Not all violence is wrong or illegal, and not all screaming is violence.

Words are defined by people. By seeing violence as a spectrum you can see the spectrum of possible responses to violence. We can then distinguish the different forms of violence with other words, like "physical"

So screaming at someone is not violence?

Definitions vary depending on context. I think of violence as a spectrum. Talking peacefully and negotiating is extremely low violence. Threats etc are more. All our war and atomics are about the limit.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violence?wprov=sfla1

> Some definitions are somewhat broader, such as the World Health Organization's definition of violence as "the intentional use of physical force or power, threatened or actual, against oneself, another person, or against a group or community, which either results in or has a high likelihood of resulting in injury, death, psychological harm, maldevelopment, or deprivation."

Violence IMO is anything which causes harm or can be used to force a condition.

Because we all know who SBF is by now

Lying is a form of violence and so is stealing. Not physical violence mind you, but violence nonetheless.

Traditionally I believe tariffs and trade agreements were the typical approach at shoring up domestic production.

I have very little knowledge over their current effectiveness or use.

So the article seems complete, but literally doesn't even mention continuous dilution due to employee compensation or related issues. It only mentions "issuing stock" like it's a single event instead of a continuous process.

I mean I get that argument too. But is what I said wrong? Isn't stock being continually issued, diluting the value over time? If buybacks were _never_ done, wouldn't it keep getting diluted forever?

Edit: for instance, if Google has 200,000 employees and is granting an average of $50,000 stock per year, that is $10 billion. So id be okay with buybacks of that size.

The actual buybacks are much bigger if memory serves, so that seems like manipulation like you're saying

Somebody correct me if I'm wrong.

I always thought of "stock buybacks" as a form of "debt payment". Stocks are created by companies out of thin air, as a tech worker I am (partially) paid in stocks. Those stocks aren't purchased by my company on the open market, they are manifested -- diluting shareholder stock.

Buybacks put a payment on that "loan". I doubt people would be so up in arms about companies paying off their debt, even prematurely. The number I'm more interested in is total stock buybacks / total stocks issued, which of course is never reported.

Am I wrong here?

I love projects like this, but why S-expressions? Optimizing your frontend for the computer to parse (instead of the human) is the wrong tradeoff IMO unless you really really need an ultra-powerful macro language.

Also, I'd call it "C runtime" not "C-like" of you're not going to have C-like syntax

Just my 2c

I'm surprised C++ doesn't support it. I wonder how rust does (with Traits)

I don't believe the VTable can be so simple when you have, i.e. multiple classes implementing different mixtures of common interfaces and inherited methods. All lookups have to work the same across all the different interface implementers.

Yeesh, is he both defining the VTable _and_ dereferencing the pointer into his VTable? That's... terrifying

I'm amazed C++ defines a user-vieible struct of virtual methods but doesn't define a user-visible mechanism to retrieve it from a pointer. This hack of converting the pointer into the VTable seems.... concerning

Why does C++ hate it's users so much?

That is a good point, and something I've actually (personally) used quite a bit when writing parsers

In Lua it's only the start/end of the string

> A pattern is a sequence of pattern items. A caret '^' at the beginning of a pattern anchors the match at the beginning of the subject string. A '$' at the end of a pattern anchors the match at the end of the subject string. At other positions, '^' and '$' have no special meaning and represent themselves.

https://www.lua.org/manual/5.3/manual.html#6.4.1

Lua's pattern matching is much simpler than regexes though.

> Unlike several other scripting languages, Lua does not use POSIX regular expressions (regexp) for pattern matching. The main reason for this is size: A typical implementation of POSIX regexp takes more than 4,000 lines of code. This is bigger than all Lua standard libraries together. In comparison, the implementation of pattern matching in Lua has less than 500 lines.

https://www.lua.org/pil/20.1.html

Integer is a good point. I just learned about math.type in 5.3!

Love it but don't quite get it.

Lua only has 5 "data" types: nil, bool, number, string, and table. There is also "userdata" (defined in C)

Would this improve performance for functions that take in the non-table types? Or does it provide some mechanism for structured data besides tables?

I have a hard time believing there are many performance gains to be had for the few functions that take in only native types. I suppose compiling those could have major performance improvements in a few tight-loop use-cases?

In general? Mostly ignorance. From cephalopods? I guess it's the seals

I really enjoyed this article, but I was really disappointed. For some reason I thought it was going to evolve into a Lovecraftian epic of how the grand and horrifying civilization of the ancient cephalopods and their relatives was thwarted by another species, one who paved the way for our own ignorant and doomed civilization to thrive.

I kept this feeling until the very end [spoiler] even when it was revealed to be seals I held out hope they could be a Lovecraftian player in a grand epic saga.

http://civboot.org is basically trying to answer exactly this question

Cleaning solar panels? Did you read the article? It's about solar pumps enabling aquifer exhaustion when used for agriculture

Perhaps two people can who don't fluently speak the same language can better communicate. But that's not really the bar is it? These are writing articles on behalf of fluent speakers for other fluent speakers to read. Is it improving THEIR "communication".

I'd say by definition the answer is no, since it's no longer humans communicating with each other at all.

The unfulfillable desires for greed and power are what destroys people and civilizations. Lust likely a close second. The ancient Stoics taught on this very point and it is just as true today. We've created some clever tricks of seemingly infinite growth, but all things that grow also die.

Restraint and being satisfied with what you already have are the keys to stability.

Life is not overwhelming hardship my friend. It is bliss. At the end is the tiger eating your insides saying what bliss is your life, please become part of me. With words we deceive ourselves, convinced that we are separate from the living world we came out of.

toss1's comment [1] says

Ford F-150 = 5,700 Lbs 1995 Ford F150 = 3886 Lbs

Which makes me wonder: why are these (non-electric) vehicles getting heavier? Is this from engine/parts needed for emissions compliance? Is it perceived safety? Are we getting worse at manufacturing?

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39642641

Don't forget Rankine, although you are making equally bad decisions as Kelvin there

I highly doubt that is a coincidence

Just because you love a place doesn't mean you can't recognize when it's coming to an end. The Dolphins had a grand old time swimming and eating fish, but alas it was time to go.

Not saying Google is coming to an end, but perhaps the author feels this way?

Which is a reference to what the Dolphins say at the start of Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy as they leave the earth just before it is destroyed for a new intergalactic roadway.

It's not quite the same when failing to meet peak demand means pipes freeze or people die of heat exhaustion. There are areas in the country that are over a hundred degrees at night. It's going to take a lot of solar to cool all those homes.

Could we all live a different way, communally instead of in our own big boxes? It's physically possible but socially impossible. The truth is we'd rather burn the planet to the ground and we will. That's our nature, little use fighting it.