pcstl

21 ms·

181.
by pcstl 7y ago
I find it somewhat hypocritical that this article describes Google as a safe haven of dissent and open discussion, while it is pretty unanimous that expressing even slightly right-of-center opinions at Google will have you ostracized and po
182.
by pcstl 7y ago
I didn't. Guess I assumed I had used it based on your response. Sorry for overreacting.
183.
by pcstl 7y ago
Sanity does not mean necessarily "holding only true beliefs". I believe the issue here is we do not define sanity in the same way. Given your example of the soldier jumping on a grenade - clearly they value the life of their frien
184.
by pcstl 7y ago
The article mentions "conversing with beings which cannot be perceived by anyone but the person themselves" as a canonical example of hypersanity. I find that pretty comparable to "believing you are covered with spiders when
185.
by pcstl 7y ago
Also, please do not condescend to me by saying stuff like "so-called third world countries". I live in a third world country and I will call third world countries what they are. People suffer here under corrupt kleptocrats every d
186.
by pcstl 7y ago
And that's exactly my point. We are making actual progress, we are changing people's lives for the better, but if you live in the first world, you won't feel that, as most of the Big Issues of human life have already been sol
187.
by pcstl 7y ago
Based on this article, there is absolutely no way to distinguish "Hypersanity" from just plain old insanity. Rationality is systematized winning. Unless your actions are benefitting yourself in some significant way, you cannot be
188.
by pcstl 7y ago
>The 'hypersane' are those among us who have realized, for better or for worse, that the traditional things that most in a society strive for - material wealth, social status, conformity to social structures, etc. - aren't
189.
by pcstl 7y ago
Spoken like a true resident of the First World. When progress is so ubiquitous in your environment that it becomes invisible, it's easy to forget that people die of easily treatable diseases in places that don't have so much &quot
190.
by pcstl 7y ago
Europe's solution to this is glass cages. I'm not sure that's much better on the "not treating people like dogs" scale.
191.
by pcstl 7y ago
There's also option c. which is: Someone figures out how to produce animal tissue in a lab without requiring us to raise an entire animal and slaughter it.
192.
by pcstl 7y ago
While I am all for the end of the beef industry, I don't think it's happening until we get actual synthetic lab-produced animal tissue. It's great that we have companies like Beyond Meat and Impossible working on this - this
193.
by pcstl 7y ago
Popularity is very different from quality.
194.
by pcstl 7y ago
I think that's plausible, even though Google's intentions with it were the opposite: I've had the opportunity to talk with a few people who were involved in Go's design and they explicitly said the idea was to get fresh-
195.
by pcstl 7y ago
People who spend all their time writing software tend to be very good at pushing out very large amounts of lines of code very fast, but that doesn't necessarily make them good engineers.
196.
by pcstl 7y ago
There are a lot of hidden assumptions here. One of them being that protein-dense foods always has a greater impact on the environment than other foodstuffs. There are plenty of vegetarian or even vegan bodybuilders, and we know how to isola
197.
by pcstl 7y ago
I never said it was. Just that it should have been mentioned.
198.
by pcstl 7y ago
Sure, but depending on the recursion, that technique will vary from "inelegant" to "maddeningly brittle". It seems like going pretty far just to avoid recursion, unless you're in a resource-constrained domain.
199.
by pcstl 7y ago
A recursive data structure is a data structure that contains a pointer to another instance of itself. Linked lists, trees, etc.
200.
by pcstl 7y ago
It's the opposite, actually - every loop can be trivially encoded as recursion, but loops can't encode many common recursive patterns without a lot of work. Recursion also has the potential to be much clearer than loops in some ca
201.
by pcstl 7y ago
My point is that people should at least know the basics of recursion. Mentioning "programming without loops" without even mentioning that recursion is an option in that specific case seems neglectful to me.
202.
by pcstl 7y ago
I never said people should always use recursion. It's just that it's a technique that's useful to have up your sleeve unless you are working in constrained domains (embedded comes to mind)
203.
by pcstl 7y ago
While the article is a cute way to introduce the loop body extraction refactoring, I think it is a disservice to talk about not using loops without mentioning recursion. I am quite often shocked at the number of programmers who, even after
204.
by pcstl 7y ago
The conclusion that this will lead to the eventual extinction of insects as a whole also does not pass scrutiny. Even if 99% of insects are extinguished, the remaining 1% that are adapted to the new conditions will populate the now-vacant e
205.
by pcstl 7y ago
This kind of irresponsible reporting and backpedaling by media and government is, imho, a large part of why the public is so slow to react to climate change. Imagine how someone who heard Al Gore say that, by 2014, the poles would have no i
206.
by pcstl 7y ago
Then not having children won't change anything.
207.
by pcstl 7y ago
The reports really do not say we're fucked. Things are going to change a lot, yes. It might require a lot of changes to the way we live, yes. It might have some really tragic consequences, yes. But speaking about climate change as if t
208.
by pcstl 7y ago
Not having children because of climate change really seems like a terrible idea. More people increase humanity's power to solve problems.
209.
by pcstl 7y ago
Well, we have Intero ( https://haskell-lang.org/intero ) now.
210.
by pcstl 7y ago
Honest question: Aren't both equivalent? If the process will eventually traverse its entire state space, you should be able to infer the behavior of the process across all time from a finite (sufficiently large) sample of the process&#

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