_wc0m's comments

Interesting how when it was top-voted comment it read more as the light-hearted poking of fun which I intended (I really have no problem with Wolfram, I think he's funny). But now it has been demoted to the bottom of the thread it has started getting lots of downvotes and somehow reads (even to me) as being mean and bitter.

Curious example of how the thread position/reaction of others really primes how we receive a comment.

Wolfram talking about Wolfram for 14,000 words. The most Wolfram thing imaginable. Wolfram!

How can I bring a child into the world when it appears likely that the child will suffer greatly?

The West hasn't really grappled with this question yet, but give it 15 years - when climate breakdown starts seriously affecting quality of life - and I expect the birthrate to crash.

I did specifically mention "normal code". `unsafe` is not normal code. Obviously if there is a segfault, I'd fire up a debugger - GDB is just fine for such purposes.

The comparison with Java is interesting. With Java, I have often found that errors occur in a rather non-local fashion, due to dynamic code loading, confusing inheritance trees, and ubiquitous mutations and what have you. Maybe I'm not actually calling the function I thought I was, maybe because I have actually received a subclass of my expected class. Print-debugging is often too narrow to highlight the cause. In such a situation, I would fire up the debugger and inspect the general state of the application (which Java makes relatively easy to do).

In contrast, in Rust things tend to happen in a very constrained fashion. You can't randomly mutate things, you can't (without considerable effort) make complicated graph structures where everything can touch everything else. With the occasional exception of highly generic code, your call sites and function arguments are exactly what you expect. So I can rely on print-debugging to quickly find the cause of my problem.

Incidentally the same is true with Haskell, moreso even, except due to laziness the evaluation order can be harder to ascertain - debug statements can appear in a strange order (or not at all).

> I myself am a print debugger

In Rust, everyone is a print debugger. The only thing that really goes wrong in normal code (once it compiles) is "why is this value not what I expect?". Dropping down into GDB is way overkill.

The left regularly address each other as "comrade", albeit sometimes a little tongue-in-cheek. Solidarity is an important and necessary part of the culture, given the odds are heavily stacked against them.

I had to do a double-take here, I was thinking "I don't think Bernie is all that radical, but I wouldn't describe him as center-right". But of course the US gets the colors backwards.

I’m sold, let’s get rid of the part of the government that costs the most and delivers the least. I’m talking about the military, of course.

Cars must surely be the main cause. There is an interesting phenomenon known as "shifting baseline syndrome" where we tend to compare our environment to what we recall as a child and inevitably conclude that is has gotten nosier/busier/more polluted, not realizing that environment of our childhoods were already heavily degraded.

The world in which we evolved would have been almost silent, almost all of the time, apart from the sounds of birds and insects. And there would have been very little to 'look' at (no text/decor/branding, few hard surfaces, few straight lines, little color and texture variation). And of course no pollution, and very little to 'do'! So it shouldn't be a surprise to find that the sheer sensory intensity of modern living contributes towards depression and schizophrenia [1].

What is the endgame here?

[1] eg https://www.gwern.net/docs/nature/2010-peen.pdf

We use this is production. It is fast, looks good, decent API. The kind of thing that makes the web go round. Thanks, whoever made it!

You can be almost certain that LinkedIn knew it was illegal when they did it, and accurately calculated that the fine they would receive (if any) would be much lower than the value derived from increased membership. In fact they would be stupid not to in winner-takes-all markets like social media.

Silicon Valley has a phrase for such flagrantly unethical practice, it is called "growth hacking".

Would you give up more to ensure your children don’t grow up in a dystopian nightmare? What if the necessary amount is 60% of your income? 90%? What if our only hope is to go back to a 18C standard of living? Unfortunately the planet doesn’t care if you have enough cash to pay rent once you account for your environmental externalities.

The implication that “actually, it’s all the lib’s fault” is absurd.

Don’t let the language of capitalism mystify you. These companies have shareholders and management. The profits they make go directly to these people. They are the ones getting rich at the expense of everyone else, not some abstract legal entity.

I agree this article isn't as terrible as average. Going vegetarian and cycling to work once a week might make you feel good but it ain't gonna make a difference. It's a political problem. It needs a political solution.

Agitate and vote for the most left-wing party you can (that has a realistic chance of winning/influencing an election). Campaign for them to institute a ban on fossil fuels. Protest. Climb smokestacks. Make headlines. Break the law. If you work in the media, subvert their agenda as much as possible. Capitalism is crisis.

Of course, the BBC would never state these things. But given how little has been achieved in the last 40 years by playing by the rules, at this point they are obviously necessary, if not sufficient.

> Please show your evidence that global trade is a zero sum game and that the "imperial core" has reaped all the benefits.

I didn't say it was zero sum. Poorer nations have experienced some growth, and a lot of that growth has been extracted by the West. Generally, the more a developing country has embraced globalization, the worse it has been exploited. This is not a hugely controversial statement.

If you'd really like to understand the power dynamics, you'll need to do some reading. Former World Bank chief economist Joseph Stiglitz's "Globalization and its Discontents" is a good start, though a little dated now.

See you on the picket lines, comrade!

> But Facebook only earns a few dollars per user per year, who in their right mind would turn off their adblocker for a few dollars?

This is a good point and it is interesting to think about the economic logic of advertising. It seems to me the burden it places on it's viewers is far greater than the (often questionable) value it brings to the advertiser. A huge unaccounted-for externality.

In fact, when you consider the huge psychological weight that a consumerist society places on it's citizens, and the attendant healthcare costs, you could easily make the case that even strictly in economic terms, advertising is a huge net negative, before even considering the social costs.

How much does my city make from all the billboards everywhere? It can't be more than a few dollars per person. I'd happily pay that much more in tax to have them all removed.

This is true. Nothing to do with what I said, but, it is true.

It isn't what happens at the moment. Every dollar of growth worldwide is subtracted many times over from our environmental commons. At the moment the global economy is a heavily negative-sum game.

Globalization is a hegemonic project of the West, best understood as a means to transfer capital from the economic peripheries to the imperial core, and has tended to wreak havoc on developing countries that have exposed themselves to it. China has been very sensible to ignore the dogma about free trade and to exploit weaknesses and loopholes in trade treaties when they find them.

Are electric cars genuinely seen as part of the solution to climate change? Surely there is no place for cars in our utopian green future, they are terribly inefficient means of transportation and completely anti-social and anti-urban. The future is in advanced metro systems, high speed rail, cycling etc. In this future, cars would become decided niche.

I had never thought of Tesla being one of the 'good guys', especially with Musk's backward - even reactionary - views on public transport.[1] It hadn't occurred to me that this might not be mainstream thought.

https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-awkward-dislike-mass-t...