kalenx

I can understand that "advanced" python programs may be difficult to understand for beginners (lots of implicit/hidden behaviors, possibility to change basically everything one should expect, etc).

But to _learn_ programming, I really, really don't see how using Haskell would be simpler than Python. Perhaps if you have a specific background (e.g., math), but else python is almost pseudo code already. You'll really have to convince me that a more abstract language is better...

I'm all for pragmatism. The issue is that most people claiming pragmatism are usually, in my experience, simply justifying status quo.

Sure, I get it, we won't literally _stop_ fossil fuels usage in the near future. I get it, other countries are large CO2 emitters. But why is it an argument to do nothing?

In Canada, Carbon tax was a pragmatic, reasonable policy. It was even enacted by conservatives. It was done at zero and even negative cost for most people. And yet, it was gunned down because it was easier to just yell "ax the tax" without even understanding what it was. All of it under the cover of "pragmatism" (hey, families are suffering, businesses are failing, we need to do something -- and of course, that something has nothing to do with the root causes of these issues).

I could go on: you cannot put bike lanes to encourage bike adoption (that's pragmatism: people stuck in traffic in their gaz guzzlers produce CO2!). You cannot improve public transport (that's pragmatism, it's too expensive and families don't want that anyway). You cannot have laws to enforce maximal arsenic content in the air in a residential neighborhood (that's pragmatism, what will the workers do when the plant close?). I could go on and on, just in Canada.

It's tiring to see pragmatism systematically invoked as an justification for doing the worst possible thing, environmentally speaking. It's tiring to see that this always raises the bar of what is environmentally acceptable, such that next decisions are even worse.

Kudos on you if you actually make pragmatic choices to reduce your fossil fuel consumption, both at an individual and societal level. But somehow I doubt it. I've seen too many "pragmatics".

> And how do you propose we do that if we’re not the ones selling the fossils?

Because we would be the ones not _buying_ the fossils? There are multiple ways to reduce fossil fuels dependency, and they are known (and no, they do not involve genocide or colonialism). In Canada, carbon tax is an example, backed by economic studies (from right wight economists) and originally introduced by conservative (in Canada at least). Of course, then right wing parties started to convince people to "axe the tax" because it was the root cause of their problems (which is was, of course, not).

That's always the issue, and that's always been bugging me. Why is it that not being able to replace, today, 100% of the fossil fuels usage means "gee, we should do nothing, let's actually increase our production!"? How do we come from "such an energetic transition is a multi generation work" (which is true) to "meh too hard, let's double down"? How can we seriously make the argument "hey, I _could_ clean up the mess in my backyard, but anyway my neighbor is way worse and he has a larger backyard, let's do nothing instead"?

I really don't see how these positions are seen as the "voice of reason". To me, there at best the voice of laziness.

Well I was trying to go with it for the sake of argument. I don't really think there is a "clean" way to extract fossil fuels, especially in oil sands like in Alberta. My point was that even if that was true, it still doesn't make sense to me.

Fair enough. I'll expand.

> The political criticism in the US (and in Canada where I'm from) against fossil fuel extraction makes no sense.

If you _must_ extract fossil fuel, you can arguably say that it's better to do it somewhere with higher environmental standards (of course, here I'm disregarding people disdain to see wilderness areas they know and have an emotional attachment with transformed into oil fields). But what about _stop_ fossil fuel usage? Sure, it would cost a lot of money. So is AI currently, for doubtful returns. Sure, it would require people changing habits. So has the Internet, and we went through it.

It's like hearing an alcoholic telling you that sure, he still drinks 3 bottles a day but hey, it's Canada-made alcohol, "all in all better than alcohol coming from Russia", right? Yes, I guess it's better for the Canadian economy, but what about just stop drinking?

About your Tesla, deciding to buy without any political consideration is your choice, which you are entitled to. But why would it be impossible to understand someone actually considering the political/social side of things? All your acts and conscious decisions are strictly driven by objective, scientific criteria, never taking into account anything else?

I don't understand. Are you making the argument that extracting fossil fuel here is better than extracting it elsewhere? Or, perhaps more to the point, you do see that the issue is the use of fossil fuels and that extracting _more_ is just contributing to it?

About the (unrelated) boycott question, I would invite you to consider the reasons motivating people to boycott Tesla. If think everyone do that to "hurt" or "punish" Musk, perhaps that's why it doesn't make sense to you.

Taking the same example as above, if you have any nVidia card pascal or older, you have no other choice than using AUR for your driver; it was literally advertised as such on the Arch Linux home page :

>Users with GTX 10xx series and older cards must switch to the legacy proprietary branch to maintain support: > Install nvidia-580xx-dkms from the AUR

And those are packages very difficult to thoroughly review. At some point, just saying "users have been warned, too bad" might hold from a _legal_ point of view, but I feel like it is deflecting the blame a bit too much.

Many packages are _way_ more complex than 3-5 lines to review. To take an example (perhaps a bit extreme, but realistic as many nVidia users _have_ to install it), check nvidia-580xx-dkms Every patch (which runs in kernel space) may of course contain backdoors, so you'd have to review them. Every install line in the PKGBUILD may be installing a malware. Of course it is _possible_ to review all of it, but clearly not simple, even for a fairly technical user.

Sure, if you assume that every attack would be as glaring as the ones we've seen before, that makes it easier. But think of an attack at the level of the xz one and virtually no one would catch it.

Well, to some extent, yes. Of course the literal number of works you can write per minute is not, but:

- someone with a good understanding will often come to a concise, clear answer while someone struggling will produce a convoluted paragraph.

- the way to get to the result will vary depending on your understanding (e.g., are you blindly applying some method or understanding what's going on). For instance, "hey, this is a vector field, I don't need to evaluate this complex integral, I just need to compute the difference between the start and endpoint of the curve!". Both answers will be correct, but one denotes a much better actual understanding (and will take way less time).

Not sure about that. Outside temperature above 37 were common in many highly populated areas, even before "high temperature summer" (e.g., India, Indonesia, most of Brazil, etc.). If there was an actual selection pressure, we would have seen its results by now.

It wasn't really necessary to have a special lineup of laptop CPUs because the base CPU power consumption was already low. 486 were using around 4-5W, if I recall correctly. Mobile CPUs really became necessary when the megahertz race started and power consumption increased to much higher levels.

Good point, I was trying to figure out how I would actually pronounce "féte". My main argument was that in any case, it wouldn't sound close to "fête" (or "fète"), which sound more like "faîte" in French -- as in "au faîte de sa popularité".

Ok, so what did I misunderstand in OP sentence "no differences, we pronounce them all é and we don't care."? "them" is not referring at all possible accentuation of the letter e?

You pronounce "fête" as "féte" (basically, equivalent to the English "faith" without the "h" sound at the end)? To my hear these two sound very different.

Or "est" (he is) and "est" (the East) although English also has plenty of such "non-homophonic homographs"...