ShardPhoenix

I liked PG's essays better when they were more concretely rooted in the details of his work his work at his startup and at YC. This one feels like a sort of non-specific variant of Bulverism - diagnose a bunch of people without presenting evidence, then start psychoanalysing them (also without evidence).

Based on the chat transcript Demz seems like either another bot or someone who just doesn't give a shit. Can't be bothered helping someone? Just spam the "I'm sorry you're frustrated" macro then cut them off. Easy job.

When Git was taking over from SVN, the main benefit I remember reading about was the much faster/lighter-weight branching. IIRC in SVN making a branch makes a complete copy of all the files. Since then it's benefited from being the standard everyone (kinda) knows despite its sharp edges.

>When I described this to Amy, she responded with a magnificent rant that was something like “this is a romanticized utopian ideal about a thing that was inhabited by socially inhibited, white male nerds who consider themselves too smart to be misogynistic but, well, often are.”

This kind of thinking is itself a major cause and component of the Miasma.

The first four words of the linked Gwern article are "Joel Spolsky in 2002". In fact he gives him credit 3 times!

Note: this applies to new updates to Java 8, as a result of the upcoming Java 11 taking over as the LTS version. Oracle is not charging for Java in general.

As a result the headline and article come across as a bit FUDdy to me.

"Good actors" isn't some term of high praise, it just means those who aren't "bad actors" (who do harmful things).

Such large swings in basic things like "Mandarin" make me doubt the quality of the data.

An AI doesn't need to be upset at humans (or even have emotions as we know them) to be dangerous - it just needs to be powerful and to not care about us as much as we care about ourselves. Humans weren't angry at Dodos.

>The part I don't understand yet is who is the dumb money buying shares in these hollowed-out debt-laden husks from the private capital vultures? It almost always ends up badly.

Is this based on reliable statistics or on highly visible anecdotes? Perhaps the "dumb money" isn't as dumb as you think.

Thanks to the very lucid explanations, I feel like this gave me a better understanding of why computers might be implemented in a certain way (eg why certain gates or instructions might be used - obviously a physical computer will have different constraints).

>You also would probably mention that the code would be less likely to be buggy and crash due to the null safety principle. Not really. Although it makes it easier to deal with null values, Kotlin is no miracle cure. A null value comes from somewhere. If your logic is wrong, your logic is wrong, no matter what is the language used.

I haven't used Kotlin extensively enough to know how much the null safety really helps, but this reasoning seems incorrect to me. You could extend it to say that static types aren't useful either, but in both cases there's a significant benefit from getting faster feedback that your logic is (or might be) wrong.