gammalost

Sure, you are in part correct. Fast fashion, cheap electronic that breaks in a few years, and are also problems.

But there can be more problems than one. I'm discussing the one that the article mentioned.

I do not get your point. Is it an issue that I have an opinion on policies that impact other people? Are you against the concept of causing issues?

I think we cause issues all the time. For example, by importing trash that we do not need. It is a part of living. But the we need to address these issues, like a tax on imports. This will inevitable lead to other issues, such as the small scale import of books not being economically viable. But the fact that it causes issues is, in my mind, not a good enough argument against it. Because all things that impact other people cause issues.

I think you're just splitting hairs. Are you denying the fact that most of the stuff private indivduals buy from outside the eu is not a necessity?

It is an issue and it needs to be addressed.

I want to reduce the amount of trash being shipped straight from China to our landfills. And yes, that will come at the expense of some things. Is that evil? In my opinion it is a necessary solution to a problem

Well yeah that's classic wealth inequality for you. A fee for import can only fix part of the problem.

Are you arguing for a cap on the amount of stuff a private individual can import instead of a fee? I suppose it would be a bit more invasive, but it could work and be more equal.

Well we (as private consumers) need things such as: food, clothes, entertainment, a place to live, energy.

Things we do not need: kickstarter passion projects, temu trash, a very cool custom built split keyboard that broke after a few days. I'm not against the idea of small scale importing, I bought the super cool split keyboard afterall. But the unnecesary pleasures of life are a sometimes thing and deserves to be treated as such

I get that it is a shame for you personally. Despite this I think high processing fees are good. First of all, it addresses the issue of people in the EU importing things we really do not need. Secondly, if it is something you really want then it can be imported at a noticible (but managable) premium. If the set of die are special, then paying 3 (or even 10) euro extra would, in my opinion, be fine

What is it about the code that suggests it is vibe-coded? Is it the commit messages? Is it the large comment blocks? I'm asking because I almost never read code written by SWEs.

As someone with english as my second language this style is just too much to bother. Sure, I get that it is elegant and precise. But for me it results in stilted reading.

Hence I disagree with the "Never write for your audience" part of the essay.

My point is that something is not useless if it has the potential for future use. I would, for example, not call the example in the article (in any stage of its development) useless because it has the potential. Same for any possible paradigm-changing work. If it is proven (in the strictes sense) to not work, then it could be deemed useless.

Now if something is profitable is a whole different thing.

I do not know how it is in other countries, but in Sweden hospice is for a calm end. You are dying regardless

I do not get the "against usefulness" portion. The article still discusses the projects she deems "useless" in relation to their future potential usefulness.

At the risk of sounding a bit pretentious: I think the relationship a lot of people have with books can best be described as commodity fetisishm.

People see some value in the physical books themselves. They are sacred, discarding them becomes a crime against knowledge. Sure I get it, the nazis burned books; but these libraries are in no way comparable to that

Well, yeah, 99% of arXiv papers were not written for me or you. They were written for someone who works in a niche within a niche. That's (in my view) the beauty of research.