ii41

It's wild that people say this. Japan attacking China (and later the Western colonies, and later the US) knowing that it could not win was one of the most important events in the 20th century. There isn't a country as infamous as Japan for starting wars it cannot win.

Also that attack happened on Sept 18, this very day, in 1931.

Aeroplanes were pretty indeterministic until people made them less so, and yeah, somehow they were indeed more encouraged to fix the randomness to prevent people from getting harmed than oai/anthropic currently are

Well, sorry but not really sorry for that. We all know that literature aka the art of conveying something regardless of what that thing is is an art. We all need to take responsibility for not only what we say but also how we say it.

A lot of Americans do have a policy of "as long as we're comfortable (economically, etc), we'll let the government do whatever they want.", some justifying it by saying "they're doing it for the Middle Eastern people's freedom!"

Well no. This series of events happened exactly because the laws set up by colonial British would let loose a murderer.

Joshua Wong went to the streets for the murderer, not against him, by the way.

And those "Free Hong Kong" protesters were for him, not against him.

> how is an advanced society handling the practical matters of writing contracts and keeping records without it

By "it" I guess you mean grammatical plurals? It's indeed semantically redundant. Say in a context of contracts, how is "3000.00 dollar" in any way more ambiguous than "3000.00 dollars"? The Chinese language indeed has been supporting an advanced society without grammatical plurals for thousands of years.

> disparity between I can’t afford a car, and I will never be able to afford a car is vast

There's no disparity. Either way you're not going to own a car any time soon.

You're not freer when the legal system prevents you to do something because you don't have enough money than when the legal system prevents you from doing that thing for other reasons.

Ai is a she. Ai is a common given name for girls in Japanese.

Rust doesn't require you to think about concurrency if you don't use it either. For global variables you just throw in a thread_local. No unsafe required.

The site UI has been going downhill these years. It's become heavy and slow, and the buttons are more and more randomly placed. Like after you search for something in the repo, to go back to the repo front page you needed to click on the most unexpected button.

It's still getting things done, for sure, but no longer pleasant to work with.

Isn't it the other way around? I mean, I keep seeing western people advertising that the ways of living in those countries are wrong and they must change, while I don't often see anyone urging western countries to change their way of living.

You can't learn these from either Gaza or Ukraine. Neither is over. Not even close to an end. Both are longer and the technologically superior side suffered more than expected.

About the `if else` producing a value matter. Well, if you look at things that way, C can be said to be syntactic sugar of assembly, as for every C program you can write equivalent assembly. `if else` producing value is very useful because it allows you to write if else wherever a value is expected. You can call methods on an `if else` or pass one as an argument of function. When such an expression is sufficiently complex your equivalent code using non-value-producing `if else` would be a lot more verbose and unreadable.