you could fully redesign libc to be modern and toss out the null terminated string concept and use fat pointers and slices. But at that point why not consider moving onto a more modern language with things like explicit type conversions, modern PEG type grammar, etc.
Technical analysis is a basket of heuristics. Support / resistance / breakout (especially around whole numbers) seems to reflect persistent behavior rooted in human psychology. Look at the heavy buying at the $30 mark here, putting a floor under silver:
https://finviz.com/futures_charts.ashx?p=d&t=SI
This is a common pattern it can be useful to know.
Kelly’s indignant attitude and commitment to “engineering excellence” suggest a bright future for Zig. It’s good to see the leader of a technical project get angry about mediocrity.
The methods for influencing results within an organization exist on a spectrum, and failing to adequately utilize the breadth of that spectrum is always counter-productive.
If you want to measure the language used by the productivity of the desired outcome. I'd encourage you to survey the ratio of comments talking about the problems with github's very broken CI and UX, with how many people expressed an objection to the language and words used in the announcement. Failure to convey ideas with tact and respect, is demonstrably more counter productive.
I assume you'll choose to dismiss those who object as fragile birds... but then you don't really care about the productivity towards the goal then do you? You just want to be ok with being mean because it doesn't bother you.
> Why do you consider that a useful metric? Hit dogs holler, after all.
you do...
> The methods for influencing results within an organization exist on a spectrum, and failing to adequately utilize the breadth of that spectrum is always counter-productive.
Or did you have a different expectation for result in mind? The one you thought would be counter-productive without insults.
My assumption was that ark wanted to put support behind codeberg, and encourage others to take a critical look at how bad github has become, and to consider other options. Not rally additional support and defense of github's actions.
I haven’t actually used harsh language with anyone so I’m not sure what your point is. I have been on HN long enough to know that expressions of strong negative emotion are punished here. That says absolutely nothing about the effectiveness of different methods of influence within an organization.
I think if people are rallying to defend GitHub due to some language that ruffled their feathers and not objective technical merit then they have completely lost the plot as engineers.
As far as Andrew’s goals, I think he has been pretty successful within the framework of the attention economy.
I'm talking about the ideas, threads and conversations that are occupying the head space of others.
> then they have completely lost the plot as engineers.
I think most people who would call themselves software engineers have lost the plot of engineering.
That applies equally to those who are blind to the fact that engineering only exists to create stuff for humans. Most engineers are ignorant to the ability to consider the humans they're supposedly build for.
The point is to make shit better, not worse, and not more inhuman.
It can be true, that a person needs a wake-up call, but it can also be true that the person(s) doing the "shocking" are sadistic, abusive, or psychopaths.
You’re not mining coal, get real. Either use efficient techniques to make people do the intellectual work necessary to achieve whatever goal you have in mind, or you’re just deluding yourself thinking you’re some kind of “reality expert” while being an asshole, meaning they might still do it, but it would be despite your leadership, not because of it.
Intellectual work requires a bit of creativity (across all the domains I can think of), abuse, of any kind increases stress, stress decreases creativity, ability to problem solve, and resilience (or the ability to endure the difficulty of solving hard problems).
But even if that wasn't true. There's a significant difference between confronting the harshness of reality. And behaving in a way that makes reality suck more. Every human deserves to be treated with dignity, and a base level of respect.
Suggesting that someone is fragile and weak, because they object to being insulted, or object to the careless and needless stripping of dignity and humanity from people is a wild take.
I started working on srctree 2 years ago because of how awful github has become. I don't think there's much creativity in this trend line... But the question was; "why is insulting people doing intellectual work bad". Not, "do you think the changes at github are creative", but I do think that the changes require a bit of intellectual work, and that no matter how shitty github has become, it's unreasonable to attack people when unprovoked.
Ok, but that’s still not effective as a leadership course of action. Calling people names might make you feel like a big man inside, but that’s it, it won’t accomplish anything, that’s only for your personal benefit, not the project, not the product and definitely not the team.
Actually if you completely rule out the possibility of harshness then you are giving license to let yourself be walked over and for standards to drop to zero. It might make you feel like a big enlightened man inside to do so, but the proper application of firmness and pressure is absolutely effective in leadership.
The assumption is that the stock picks come from insider knowledge gleaned from congressional duties like sitting on committees. Another possibility is that they are a form of off-the-books campaign donation or bribe, and the knowledge comes straight from an insider who wants to influence congressional decision making.
Its almost as if private encrypted chat networks are a thing. Oh, look at that, Mets owner, Steve Cohen paid record fine for insider trading using just that.
I'm not here to shill for Steve Cohen, but I believe that many long/short (fundamental) hedge funds use an "onion strategy" to share insider information from analyst to trader. It's probably defamation to write this, but I do think Steve Cohen has seen plenty of insider information in his trading career provided by analysts that work his fund. That said, he was never found guilty of insider trading. Look it up. He paid a huge fine, but did not admit fault and was not found guilty. Now, there are numerous people around him who were found guilty, but not Teflon Steve!
> * Energy physics puts an upper bound on material wealth
Sure, but that's such a high upper bound that it may as well be false from our perspective in 2025. We use a miniscule fraction of the energy we receive from the sun.
We directly use a miniscule fraction, indirect use is quite a bit higher since that is used delivering ecosystem services we depend on.
Then there is the question of how much of that potential we want to turn into waste heat inside the atmosphere, which is more governed by how much radiative cooling we have rather than how much energy is incident or available on the earth.
I think that humanity would be limited by pollution and ecosystem destruction before energy for most human scale material wealth. The bit where it becomes tricky is energy does change what how easily and fast you can do things, which may place enough of a real world limit.
It would seem you are still just thinking about the human controlled portions of the ecosystem and not including all the energy used to drive to water cycle etc.
"I know why you did it. I know you were afraid. Who wouldn't be? War. Terror.
Disease. There were a myriad of problems which conspired to corrupt
your reason and rob you of your common sense. Fear got the best of
you and in your panic, you turned to the now High Chancellor Keir Starmer. He promised you order. He promised you peace. And all he
demanded in return was your silent, obedient consent."
Not OP but while I don't seek "punishment", I do seek accountability. I know that might seem like a flowery synonym at best, or an amorphous piece of jargon at worst, but if we are to treat online spaces as public forums, we need to structure these spaces like public forums, which means having consequences for abject lies. The "but who decides" response is a thought-terminating cliche that we need to collectively move past. Until we stop letting the perfect get in the way of the good enough, we will continue to let bad actors dictate the public understanding of technological issues, and of issues more generally (eg: antivax).
The trump administration in the US also frames its crackdown on civil society in terms of "accountability for lies". But I guess its fine when your side does it.
I don't see Trump doing this or his Administration. For the first time in years I'm actually not worried about the FBI and what dastardly political maneuverings they are up to. The CIA is still probably pretty bad. Yes, there are a lot of Republicans who are neo-authoritarians who need to be shut down before they ruin open and free society for a pipe dream. It's like you can't win no matter which party is running things because there are always the freaky lunatics who want to limit your freedoms, expand government, and cover for their own horrible misdeeds.
> I don't see Trump doing this or his Administration.
It's been a hallmark of his Administration, so you not seeing it is...interesting.
> For the first time in years I'm actually not worried about the FBI and what dastardly political maneuverings they are up to.
In the sense of it not being a mystery because it is more naked in both the direction and the specific approach to partisan political abuse, I guess I could see that, but in terms of not being concerned, the only explanation for that is GP’s “But I guess its fine when your side does it.”
Most claims of 'the other side' is lying are themselves lies. It's mostly people just spinning things to suit their own personal biases (without necessarily even realizing that's what they're doing). For instance the vaccine topic is one I did a deep dive on not too long ago when deciding which vaccines to approve for my children. This [1] is essentially the bible of vaccines - it's a massive study across a large sampling of evidence for all major vaccines, carried out by the National Academies of Science. I'll quote them:
----
The vast majority of causality conclusions in the report are that the evidence was inadequate to accept or reject a causal relationship. Some might interpret that to mean either of the following statements:
- Because the committee did not find convincing evidence that the vaccine does cause the adverse event, the vaccine is safe.
- Because the committee did not find convincing evidence that the vaccine does not cause the adverse event, the vaccine is unsafe.
Neither of these interpretations is correct. “Inadequate to accept or reject” means just that—inadequate. If there is evidence in either direction that is suggestive but not sufficiently strong about the causal relationship, it will be reflected in the weight-of-evidence assessments of the epidemiologic or the mechanistic data. However suggestive those assessments might be, in the end the committee concluded that the evidence was inadequate to accept or reject a causal association.
----
The overwhelming majority of the rhetoric around vaccines, including from governmental figures, is doing exactly what they warn against. There's simply a lot of nuance on most of every issue worth discussing, that people often don't want to acknowledge.
If you want to talk about Covid “Two weeks to slow the spread” was the foundational lie that they told that did more damage than almost any lie I can remember. That is solid truth right there.
> but if we are to treat online spaces as public forums, we need to structure these spaces like public forums, which means having consequences for abject lies. The "but who decides" response is a thought-terminating cliche that we need to collectively move past.
In order to "move past" that, you have to find a way to address official lies and cases where the majority is wrong.
.
For example the official denial of the fact that the Wuhan lab was researching things similar to covid-19. (Doesn't matter whether it actually came from there.)
Or the official lies about mask effectiveness. (Regardless of whether they're effective or not, the government told people things that it believed at the time were false.)
Or the lies about the world's best anti-parasite medication (that just isn't an antiviral) being dangerous horse-paste.
Or the lies about Hunter Biden's laptop being Russian disinformation.
Or that still-ongoing culture war topic where both sides claim the other is lying.
It'll be alright. We've dealt with manic authoritarians who dream of planetary control before. Just another quick world war and the development of an even more sinister superweapon and we'll be right back to thinking in sane, evenhanded terms. Or dead.
Or, you know, we could huck our failed systems out with the trash instead. Reinvent democracy to be more direct and flexible. Could be nice.
That's not exactly true. Social engineering at scale is becoming better and better. You don't need to remove dangerous opinions, you simply need to make sure nobody cares about them. And the fun thing is, most people say that they support freedom of speech, but when they see an opinion they dislike, they say the opinion should be blocked. This is why all the laws restricting freedom of speech pass without major issues.
IBM and Nvidia speech to text models are also SOTA (according to HF leaderboard) and relatively lightweight. Replicate hosts those too, although some (like Parakeet) run easily on consumer GPU.
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