_wc0m's comments

I was actually just amused to see climate change used in a throwaway manner to justify some kind of AI whatever. The topic of climate change deserves to be talked about seriously or not at all.

As a creature capable of empathy, I am quite upset at the thought of incalculable suffering we are condemning future generations to just because we can't be bothered not to.

It's pretty clear from context that I meant things will change catastrophically for the worse. Extinction unlikely within 60 years, though.

Well that's OK then (???)

I always find it strange to hear people talk about climate change as if it is some sort of tricky challenge we need to solve, like improving education or curing cancer. It is a 'problem' of completely different magnitude. It is on track to end civilization as we know it within two generations. A rational society would think about nothing else.

Our children will be astonished and mystified - and furious - to see all the things we got up to instead of dealing with this thing that is the only thing that matters.

Should people be encouraged to hang around near an intersection? Surely the pollution is off the charts. How about just banning cars 1 day a week? Then 2, then 3...

The AW block is tiny but has so many great talks. All the queues end up merging with each other and jutting out into the foyer. Chaos!

Such a thing is not possible, because news is not neutral. Specifically, the decision of what is newsworthy is not neutral. I understand that certain US papers - NYT? - are considered mostly value-free in their reporting, but from my (left wing) perspective they appear highly ideological.

I have some sympathy for UK newspaper attitudes that "we have a point of view and we're proud of it". The fact that they are all terrible rags written by the worst kind of hacks is a separate problem.

As for sibling argument that the FT have no agenda, well, the clue is in the name. It's written for upper management. The fact that such people don't need or want their news as heavily filtered as their underlings is more an expression of the requirements of capital that anything else. Upper management can't afford ideological flights of fancy when they need to keep the system running.

The astonishing amount of time, money and effort that has been put into cryptocurrencies is a sociological marvel. Every emotion, every cognitive bias, every aspect of the human experience is on display. And it's all fully documented, in real time. Mass delusion in Big Data. A thousand sociology PhDs could be written about reddit's /r/cryptocurrency alone. A joyous, despairing, dissonant, gloating, brooding, witty, witless, confusing, euphoric mass.

This article is part of a curious subgenre of cryptocurrency literature, that of an advocate of one cryptocurrency (Ethereum) holding forth against a different cryptocurrency (EOS). Do the words have any meaning beyond the confines of the beautifully elaborate internal world in which they reside? Perhaps, in a strictly metaphysical sense. I can't appreciate it, or even comprehend it, but I can sit back an delight that such a thing exists at all.

"I drew an upward sloping curve and a downward sloping curve that meet in the middle, and therefore socialism cannot work."

The 2008 crash called for a massive reassessment of the political and cultural status of economics. It required honest economists to recognize their profession not as a neutral description of the world but as a tool for the powerful to exercise dominion over the rest of us. But "cognitive dissonance doesn't work like that", especially when doing so would mean giving up prestige, lucrative consulting opportunities, the ear of the government. For some reason, those other social sciences don't seem to get invited to nearly such lavish parties...

Of course, many people within and without the profession have been making this argument for decades, since way before 2008. But funny thing, the way power works is - those sort of people are never listened to. Why would that change now?

Edit: For a nice overview of these arguments I recommend the book "Economists and the Powerful" from 2012.

Rust hasn't really got 'faster' in that time, barring the odd optimizer improvement as noted in sibling. Much more likely that whatever benchmark you refer to has been rewritten for better performance.

Indeed, less 'confusing' and more 'broken'.

I always use it with

> "compilerOptions": { "strict": true }

But given the huge number of other options I worry that like GCC's '-Wall', that doesn't actually give you the strongest possible type checking. Anyone know about that? My aim with Typescript is to turn JS into OCaml.

A more generous interpretation might be that Rust has sparked a CLI renaissance, since it lets developers write CLIs that have that satisfying zip that previously was only possible in C. None of PHP, Ruby or Java is responsive enough for a good CLI tool (also, static compilation is a must for wide deployment).

The point isn't that it is particularly difficult (if you know what you are doing). The point is that from a cost-benefit perspective, it probably isn't worth more than 2 minutes of your time, if that.

When I read things like that, I always think of the paper "The Rational Rejection of Security Advice by Users". [1]

Yes, content injection is bad, but the chance of it happening multiplied by the damage it could cause to your users is probably less than the the effort required to shift a static blog site to HTTPS. (Do not underestimate the leap in difficulty from copy-pasting from an Nginx tutorial to understanding how Let's Encrypt works).

[1] https://www.nspw.org/2009/proceedings/2009/nspw2009-herley.p...

It's still getting commits, by the looks of things[1]. As always, I'm sure they welcome contributions.

[1] https://github.com/rust-lang-nursery/nomicon/commits/master

Google allows it's employees to put their 20% projects on the google github, provided they a disclaimer in the README. It doesn't mean much but perhaps it's good for publicity. Xi has always been in there.

Obviously, the wealthy own the debate. And that is no accident but the result of a highly successful political project that has been instituted over the past 40 years. Hey, there was even a study about it[1]:

Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence

It wasn't always like this.

[1] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-poli...

Time to mount a 51% attack and steal land in Georgia.

"It doesn't work like that"?