hetman

The problem with taxing vices too heavily is that it incentives a black market to emerge... and all the crime that comes with it. Australia is a great example of a place where this is causing a lot of problems.

I know parent is probably talking about a different type of threading, but Thunderbird's lack of process threading means the UI just gets stuck when it's syncing a large numbers of emails, which can happen if your subscribed to a lot of mailing lists, etc.

LLMs are not the root cause here, they're just an accelerant. This was always inevitable with the progression of globalisation. Even before the internet, kids were watching Disney cartoons across the world (to be fair, often dubbed in the local language, but still an example of how global culture had been narrowing.) Perhaps this wasn't felt as strongly by those in the US quite as quickly as the rest of the world, because their culture just happened to be the source for many of these common elements.

There are always trade-offs. Globalisation has too many benefits for most to want to go back. It is up to us to intentionally cultivate our cultural uniqueness, but I'm not sure the corporate environment was ever the right place to do so, given it was already constrained by rules and etiquette, and motivated by a desire to encourage universal communication styles. Instead we have to take it upon our selves, in a very intentional way outside the corporate setting, to cultivate our own unique cultural expressions to thrive. Failure to do so either directly, or by proxy, means cultural extinction, as has been the case of many cultures that have passed before.

Ruby is beautiful in its design, but it made imports and namespaces (a.k.a. modules) separate concepts. This is so flexible it became hard to ever find anything easily in practice.

Likewise, it made classes incredibly easy to extend, which led to a monkey patching bonanza and far too much magic everywhere (Rails being by far the worst offender but not the only one). It meant having to keep too much stuff in your head and needing deep framework/library familiarity just to be able to understand basic code.

In the end, I feel like the incredible flexibility was Ruby's undoing, not just lack of library availability for a specific popular application. I was a Ruby zealot at one point but it began to lose its lustre not because it wasn't beautiful in theory, but because it was inconvenient in practice. In some ways, Python's restrictiveness became its greatest attribute. Then Python 3 helped to fix a lot of the inconsistency.

Both Python and Ruby have a consistent logic to them, just not consistent with each other. Just as all attributes are methods in Ruby, so all methods area attributes in Python, etc. Things get much easier in either language if you stop fighting their internal logic.

I would argue more easily.

I like Python but this was always actually one of my pain points. The CPython C API is full of foot guns, the API surface is expansive, and writing against it requires a lot of careful care. Anyone who's ever written C modules for both languages would be able to attest how much more pleasant the experience was for Ruby than Python.

Did you mean to say that Ruby doesn't link name spaces to file system paths? Ruby has namespaces and they're far more flexible than Python's... too flexible in my opinion, making it harder to find things.

I'm not sure I follow your meaning here. You can return unnamed lists, dictionaries, numbers, among others, or combinations of any of these. With some very light syntax sugar magic you can even make returning tuples look like your returning multiple values.

I'm not sure if I would call whitespace-as-syntax arbitrary, though it is opinionated. I admit though that for me it started feeling like a time saver once I got over my anti whitespace as syntax zealotry.

Trans and black people in the US are disappeared for speaking critically of their government? This level of hyperbole is dangerous for those who employ it; cf. the boy who cried wolf.

If all I'm doing with git rebase is reorganising my commits, and I have to deal with conflicts, after I'm done, I always git diff my pre-rebase head with post rebase head commit hash. I can quickly see I've messed something up if the diff isn't empty. For more complex tasks it's best to leave the rearranging until last, but where not possible, the diff is still pretty useful to double check my work.

You don't need to keep their hashes because git keeps them for you. If you realise too late that things went terribly wrong, you can get the pre-rebase hashes with "git reflog". (It can take a little getting used to knowing how to identify them quickly after a rebase but they're there.)

So you're telling me Trump has direct control over the topics and conclusions allowed into AI models built by Western companies? I don't think your off topic whataboutism has really helped dispel any ignorance in the world.

I don't think you'll understand what authoritarian means until you try moving to China and then criticising their government. For those of us who have lived under authoritarian regimes, it's an absolute travesty to see how diluted the meaning of this term has become.

Guess what you can do in the US and can't do in China? Talk about their respective atrocities. You've missed the point entirely as it pertains to AI if you thought my litmus test was about having the most moral government. It was about that government's ability to censor information.