wirrbel

i work for a for-profit owned by a non-profit. This is a weird take. You can shape a product, sure you need to bring in a profit, but there are options of working with your owner (the non-profit) that you just don't have in a publicly traded company.

I am sure people would queue up for the job, fully aware of what it entails.

is that like a Landau Lifshitz for Math?

I think there was a funding campaign once where a developer offered to re-implement the missing Apple APIs, but since they basically put up a standard salary it didn't reach the funding target.

I always wonder at these attributions. Like all windows versions gave you bluescreen and ran Microsoft excel. To me not one stood out particularly bad or good compared to the others maybe after Windows 98 service pack something

this summarizes pretty well my first thoughts when reading the headline: "How python grew from a language to a community", because the Python community in 2000, the Python community in 2010, these are a different place to "whole world uses Python" in 2025.

Back then it felt like a bit of a club, one that forms around a common hobby. Nowadays it feels more like the "community" of a high-school graduation class. Sure there is community there, but its mostly one of folks randomly thrown together into classrooms.

Folks like Raymond Hettinger would today be totally drowned out in the listicle-style attention seeking times.

> in the web world

I would put that more broadly though, it was web, data-science, there was a point when it became the universal scripting language, and part of me kind of hoped that the crowd would move to nodejs for all of it, so that Python can become more peaceful again. But I guess there is no going back, we went from dinghi to cruise ship, and when the crowd leaves, it will just be a deserted cruise ship.

Just reading the title.

As a college student the premise of screening through the cocktail menu would have sounded like a great project.

As a 30 something I am more interested of drinking my way through the mocktail menu.

> I think this is a very lopsided way of looking at pull requests. They are about a lot more than just trust. Reviewing and being reviewed is a great way of learning from colleagues, making common practices gel in a team, and keeping up to date with changes to the codebase. It’s not just a barrier.

I am old enough that my first 2 jobs were subversion-based (repo side, client side git-svn) and both teams didn't care about branching. It might have to do with how awkward subversion branches felt.

Anyway, we would commit (in git lingo pull-rebase & commit) directly and we basically maintained the id of the last reviewed commit and jointly did PR reviews commit-by-commit with the code on the projector in the office.

We had a joint look at code, everyone voiced their feedback ("I don't understand a variable name like `xzc`"), "where is the unit test", "I read in a blog post recently you are supposed to not use classes...". etc. pp. Sometimes fixes would be pushed right in the PR review session so you had the variable renamed 4 commits further.

Anyway, in retrospect it worked surprisingly well at helping the team to develop a joint understanding of values & virtues that the team would like to maintain in their code base. This might of course be nostalgia of a dev looking back into their junior years.

When we finally got pull-requests, we really felt thrown into the future. It was just great. But after a while I started to miss the direct conversations about code with fellow humans.

And honestly I couldn't tell whether PR really improved the quality of the code base in the long run. They lowered the probability of bad code being committed to the code base, but also lowered the probability for a dev to just fix awkward things while they stumbled over them.

Indeed it was.

I used to think this way, i.e. assuming a misunderstanding on the product development side.

Nowadays I think its more of a conscious decision many times. Like "We know someone could travel to france as a tourist, but its a small fraction of french IP addresses so screw these people". etc.

Honestly, its infuriating. There are three languages that I speak and understand sufficiently well for consuming youtube videos. I don't ever want these to be translated.

And then, the translation of video titles etc. is often surprisingly bad, because (I think) they don't consider the video context / content while translating, so it almost looks like a translation-by-dictionary-lookup translation.

Most infuriating though is when you watch a video of a channel you watched for years and all of the sudden the audio is auto-translated into your primary language. So cringe.

I studied at a German university where one of the prominent advocates for universal basic income, Götz Werner (the owner of a well-known German health and beauty retail chain), gave several talks. As a member of a student club, I participated in a smaller event with him, which allowed for plenty of questions and interaction. At that time, the concept of universal basic income wasn’t particularly associated with left-wing politics.

To summarize: Universal basic income can be seen as a kind of negative poll tax (a poll tax being a fixed tax per person). Werner argued that the current tax system is unsustainable because it places a disproportionate burden on labor. He suggested that instead of taxing income, we should tax consumption—essentially, by significantly increasing sales tax and eliminating income tax. Of course, this would make life unaffordable for low earners, so a negative poll tax (i.e., a basic income) would be necessary to make higher sales taxes socially acceptable.

In practice, a large portion of the universal basic income would end up returning to the state through sales tax anyway.

Even back in 2010, I sensed that Mr. Werner was promoting a system that would benefit his own financial interests. As an employer with high labor costs, he would gain from lower taxes and fees associated with employment in Germany. And, as a wealthy individual, only a small part of his wealth would be subject to sales tax, since he wouldn’t need to spend most of it on taxable purchases.

When pressed about numbers (how high the sales tax, how high the negative poll tax) he just wouldn't discuss numbers saying society would have to figure it out and potentially one might start out with some amount and then progressively increase the negative poll tax, increase the sales tax and decrease other taxes. It really felt like someone not having done any actual simulations / calculations.

oh and one thing he really emphasized is, that UBI could allow for people to go from like a 40h work week to a 30h work week being employed and use their fridays for example to become entrepreneurs/artists/etc. That really felt like as close to prosperity gospel as one can get in germany.

That is an interesting example because the second amendment is I think a primary example of a law that is very creatively read by folks that consider themselves literalists.

if the 2nd amendmend was literally interpreted it would be (quoting from memory) “in order to form a well-ordered militia the right to bear arms shall not be infringed”

As in you cannot infringe the right to bear arms in a well ordered militia, but gun ownership might be regulated for example by the militia organization owning the arms. Nothing would speak against codifying in law what constitutes a well-ordered militia, etc.

thank you for a well written reply, that I did not have the patience to write.

ah, thanks, that isn't extremely exotic.