ps101

> i worry that medication harbors a reliance on drugs

It can also get you out of bed when nothing else does. Or prevent you from killing yourself when you otherwise would have. Or give you a push to take small steps to get your life together. All of these effects are valuable despite efficacy being far from 100%, there being side effects and issues with reliance.

The reason for the tracking is to better target the ads, you can't separate the two in Google's model.

Thank you, I really don't think that questions like "Why do we do X?" lead anywhere, because they have the built-in assumption that everyone does X and that everyone does it for the same reason.

No. If a multi-billion dollar company completely overturned its revenue model, it wouldn't be the same company anymore. And the billions of people who have used their services for years wouldn't be happy with suddenly having to pay. Can some subscription services work for some people and some products some of the time? Sure. But Google has so many services, coming to so many people for free, and making them so much money from ads, that even the hypothetical is ridiculous.

> quickly become an expert on a topic you know nothing about right when you need to be

This simply doesn't happen for anyone.

But the first 10-100 hours of learning and using a new language feel so good.

1. Not really, the richest x% own and run the companies, and can spend more, but the mass of consumers of the products are spread across the wealth spectrum.

2. The idea to reduce the population based on some metric is a dangerous road to go down on.

3. By definition there will always be a richest 10% regardless of how many humans you get rid of.

> Go is in the same category. People are inventing better versions of C++ when I want them to invent better versions of Python. :)

In terms of use cases Go is much closer to Python than to Rust and C++.

Which idioms in Python are you referring to?

What's the more general pitch for learning a functional language in the first place?

Do tell more, what high level stuff do people want to use Rust for?

Isn't it also kind of dying out in terms of popularity? (I really don't know)