adwhit

5 ms·

1.
by adwhit 8y ago
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
2.
by adwhit 8y ago
Wolfram talking about Wolfram for 14,000 words. The most Wolfram thing imaginable. Wolfram!
3.
by adwhit 8y ago
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
4.
by adwhit 8y ago
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
5.
by adwhit 8y ago
> 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.
6.
by adwhit 8y ago
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.
7.
by adwhit 8y ago
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.
8.
by adwhit 8y ago
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.
9.
by adwhit 8y ago
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&#
10.
by adwhit 8y ago
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!
11.
by adwhit 8y ago
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 st
12.
by adwhit 8y ago
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’
13.
by adwhit 8y ago
The implication that “actually, it’s all the lib’s fault” is absurd.
14.
by adwhit 8y ago
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 e
15.
by adwhit 8y ago
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. Agita
16.
by adwhit 8y ago
> 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
17.
by adwhit 8y ago
> 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
18.
by adwhit 8y ago
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 he
19.
by adwhit 8y ago
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. C
20.
by adwhit 8y ago
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
21.
by adwhit 8y ago
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.
22.
by adwhit 8y ago
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.
23.
by adwhit 8y ago
It's pretty clear from context that I meant things will change catastrophically for the worse. Extinction unlikely within 60 years, though.
24.
by adwhit 8y ago
Well that's OK then (???)
25.
by adwhit 8y ago
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
26.
by adwhit 8y ago
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...
27.
by adwhit 8y ago
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!
28.
by adwhit 8y ago
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
29.
by adwhit 8y ago
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,
30.
by adwhit 8y ago
"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 req

More ›