repolfx

6 ms·

31.
by repolfx 7y ago
Yes, I understand, fair point.
32.
by repolfx 7y ago
I'd say it's actually because of Graal. LLVM is helpful for writing a compiler but only changes the difficulty by say, one or two orders of magnitude. But the difficulty of making a fully statically typed compiled language is many
33.
by repolfx 7y ago
I understand this argument but find it brittle. Firstly, yes, empires can be good for peace in some ways. The Roman Empire had Pax Romana. But the Soviet Union was also internally fairly peaceful, at least as much if not much more than the
34.
by repolfx 7y ago
Russia has a GDP smaller than Italy's. It's a threat only in the minds of a very particular segment of society that seeks to blame it anytime they lose an argument. "Kremlin propaganda" isn't responsible for Trump
35.
by repolfx 7y ago
If tomorrow the Spanish state disappears and we just become one big European country, I would not mind at all. I have unfortunate news for you. People hating larger governmental forces that control them isn't something weirdly unique
36.
by repolfx 7y ago
The question of what's right and wrong is a topic for religion and theologists. I don't mean that in a cynical or nasty way. As the years go by I get more convinced that the rise of atheism is causing some of our biggest problems
37.
by repolfx 7y ago
Type systems and compilers are much more complex to implement than interpreters, so you need a bigger team to make them feasible. It's no accident that Python and Ruby were both the work of one guy in their early years: very, very sim
38.
by repolfx 7y ago
NB: The Scottish independence referendum did not allow the rest of the UK to vote. It was considered a matter for the Scots alone. Arguably this wasn't fair. Splitting a country in two affects everyone, so why couldn't everyone vo
39.
by repolfx 7y ago
Spain would just cease to exist. Spain will cease to exist anyway given the trajectory of the EU. I don't know why anyone in Spain seems to care about Catalonian independence. They seem to want to immediately turn around and (re)join
40.
by repolfx 7y ago
This is complicated, but let's say that the EU's arguments are all basically arguments for empires and they are happy to say so. Look at the recent speech by Verhofstadt where he praised empires and said Europe must become one. Bu
41.
by repolfx 7y ago
I know. That's my point. The EU very much much wants them to be and had imposed trade sanctions on its financial sector as part of applying pressure during a treaty "renegotiation".
42.
by repolfx 7y ago
The EU is absolutely happy to interfere with internal matters when it suits them, to a huge degree. Look at how they have been treating Poland and its reforms of its court system. Or look at how the EU is trade sanctioning Switzerland due t
43.
by repolfx 7y ago
But Bell Labs is remembered for things like the transistor, which had huge impact. There's a basic assumption you're making here and which underlies a lot of the writing on this topic - that it's desirable, even morally virtu
44.
by repolfx 7y ago
One of the biggest sources of browser security flaws was browsers during that era, also. Moreover browser makers had access to the Flash source code, and Flash was an open spec anyone could implement. I don't think it's as simple
45.
by repolfx 7y ago
Almost all GUI toolkits work that way, except HTML, because HTML is not designed for GUIs. For instance look at AnchorPane in JavaFX. You can lock things to the edges or offsets from the edges. You can nest layout managers if you want somet
46.
by repolfx 7y ago
That's not true. Flash had accessibility features added to it some time ago: https://www.adobe.com/accessibility/products/flash.html
47.
by repolfx 7y ago
It makes sense because a search engine is a vastly expensive thing to run, there aren't enough users like you to be interesting to advertisers, and you aren't willing to pay the huge sums it would require to make such a niche (use
48.
by repolfx 7y ago
The whole point of weapons is to help murder civilians. If weapons were only useful when pointed at military personnel, nobody would fear an invading army or even bother putting up resistance at all: what is that army going to do, exactly?
49.
by repolfx 7y ago
Your political opponents think exactly the same about you, though. Your belief that "truth" would be objectively measured and enforced is pretty naive. Especially if you count "refusing to acknowledge problems that are inconv
50.
by repolfx 7y ago
Seems like a straightforward first amendment violation to me, exactly because nobody agrees on what's "true".
51.
by repolfx 7y ago
Actually newer models don't predict the lag / the pause at all. Instead what happened is they decided the temperature records that showed a pause were wrong, went back and adjusted them so there's no longer any real pause if
52.
by repolfx 7y ago
Sure there is, there's a lot wrong with it. Would you be so sanguine about promoting businesses because they are not women owned? Why can't you see that it's just discrimination against men? Because you believe it's fi
53.
by repolfx 7y ago
I think you missed my point, which is quite tricky to put into words so I may have not done it well. "Google" in that context doesn't mean exclusively its management, but rather, the whole group of people. When Googlers stage
54.
by repolfx 7y ago
The models used today have all predicted more warming than actually happened, so I'm very skeptical models got progressively worse over the decades instead of better. Also note it's impossible for models in the 80's to have b
55.
by repolfx 7y ago
Googlers are overwhelmingly young compared to what they used to be. What these people want most, beyond the usuals of money and perks, is for their employer to give them moral structure in life and the constant reassurance that they are goo
56.
by repolfx 7y ago
There's JavaFX with FXML.
57.
by repolfx 7y ago
Firefox tried decentralised identity via the Persona protocol. It failed to gain market traction and Mozilla canned the project. Email is already the decentralised identity protocol.
58.
by repolfx 7y ago
Don't read too much into that. Prior to 2016 people talked about Brexit and a Trump presidencythe same way.
59.
by repolfx 7y ago
Usually it just means gutting the department that moves. The UK has been trying this with the BBC, forcibly relocating the organisation to the north of the country. It encodes a basic assumption that in government, skilled and experienced p
60.
by repolfx 7y ago
The Phoenix failure wasn't really a software failure, if I recall correctly. It was more that when everything moved to Miramichi the people who understood the byzantine government pay systems basically didn't follow and the result

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