swift

I agree with a lot of your comments, but just FYI, you can do a couple of those things:

> (I can't even compile FOSS apps on my own without owning a mac + 100$/year dev licence - this is a real shit show for me!)

You do need a Mac, but you can build FOSS apps and deploy them to your own iPhone, iPad, or Apple TV with a free developer account. You only need the paid license to distribute them to others.

> Finally I have a device that could replace things like a Wacom Tablet connected to your computer but that opportunity was missed.

There have been apps that support this for a while, but this is now a built-in iOS/macOS feature called "Sidecar".

There are definite tradeoffs here, but one thing to consider is that dev tooling generally can't benefit from that kind of massively distributed parallelism. If you make a change to a widely-included header file, code intelligence tools suddenly have to do a huge amount of work to reevaluate their internal model of all affected translation units. This can really result in an unpleasant and laggy editing experience, even on medium-sized projects. That's the kind of thing that modules can help with; I certainly wished fervently that they were already a thing when I used to work on C++ static analysis tools years ago.

FWIW, Bison (which I'd expect most people are using rather than the original yacc, though I can't be sure) does support GLR parsing.

I haven't seen GLR used in production either, but my experience with projects I've been involved in is that this is sometimes just due to inertia. Taking full advantage of GLR's support for ambiguity requires reworking both your grammar and your early stages of semantic analysis, and even if people agree that the result might be nicer, nobody has the time or motivation to do all that work.

PEG uses ordered choice instead of alternation; all PEGs are thus deterministic. The article's description of PEG is so off-base that it makes me question the entire article.

The compression MP4 (or any other modern video format) offers is much better than what you can obtain with GIF. MP4s are, perhaps surprisingly, actually the better choice in terms of bandwidth and load time.

The hypothesis that life on Earth originated elsewhere is somewhat independent of abiogenesis, really. At least in my experience, most supporters of the former also support the latter.

2 works on macOS too, for what it’s worth. (My memory of this, which may not be entirely reliable, is that Linux and OS X both had 2 forever. I wish I could say the same for 1.)

There’s definitely a schism along the fault lines you describe. If you’re not familiar with the concept of a “TERF”, look it up.

I’m probably making a mistake here by commenting before reading the article, but I’ve seen many cases where issues with food prices and food supply have been diagnosed as long term effects of food aid or cheap imported food. What can happen is that local farmers go out of business or stop growing staple crops because prices collapse. When conditions change and the food aid stops or the price of imported food rises, there aren’t enough local farmers left to feed everyone. That will obviously cause food prices to go through the roof. It’s always something that has to be considered when planning aid to a country.

It’s generally a bad and dangerous idea, especially for someone who is schizophrenic, but antipsychotics can have very serious side effects, and I think it’s painting with a brush that’s a bit too broad to suggest that someone would only stop taking them for “some psychotic reason”. People who take these medications are often facing some very difficult trade offs.

People misunderstand this stuff in part because of the failure to make a distinction between a theory (which is often a mathematical description of a system, though this depends on the discipline) and an interpretation (which really is an idea in someone’s head, though often one we have good reason to believe). Scientists mostly work with the former day-to-day, but the general public is mostly interested in the latter.

Usually this distinction isn’t really a big deal, but in some cases - quantum mechanics, for example - there’s a big difference between the two, with multiple interesting interpretations to consider.

When we don’t make this distinction it creates an opening for people with poor understanding (or, occasionally, bad motives) to nitpick extremely well-established theories on the basis of quibbling about interpretation. I worry about this with respect to climate change specifically: deniers come up with a million reasons that climate change may be partially natural, or that this or that industry may be unfairly maligned, but we can’t get sucked into those debates so much that we forget the big picture painted by the data and models we have.

I’d argue that you have to get pretty deep into experimental GHC language extensions to get into anything as weird as some of the SFINAE-based template metaprogramming tricks I’ve seen (and used, sadly) in C++.