thagsimmons

6 ms·

1.
by thagsimmons 3y ago
Reading Windschuttle's "Fabrication of Aboriginal History" along with the heavily critical responses in "Whitewash" was a fascinating intellectual exercise. I went in quite neutral on the issue and came out convince
2.
by thagsimmons 3y ago
C2 was an incredible place at its peak - I was lucky to have started my career while the community was still (only just) functional. Looking back, it's hard to over-state how formative my time on C2 was - not only did I learn a lot abo
3.
by thagsimmons 3y ago
I had never heard of her, but decided to take a look at her content to try to tease together some part of her story. I sensed from the coverage that something was being elided here, and I was right. It's clear she struggled with depres
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by thagsimmons 3y ago
We chose sqlx for a SQLite based project because it provides a reasonable async interface, and our experience has not been great. Development momentum has been poor, PRs and issue reports are languishing, the developer is unresponsive to er
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by thagsimmons 4y ago
I'm not talking about free speech absolutism. What I'm describing here is a specific US-centered cultural phenomenon - thin-skinned, hypocritical tribalism that has turned people against each other, where every conversation that s
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by thagsimmons 4y ago
The US constitution protects controversial speech, in the sense that government punishment is not meted out to people who step out of line. The limits of this are immediately apparent when you ask if people functionally have the ability to
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by thagsimmons 4y ago
Oh? How successful do you think the US constitutional mechanism has really been in protecting free speech? And by "free speech" here, I mean exactly the broader sense, not constrained by a narrow constitutionalist view. To take on
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by thagsimmons 4y ago
Sorry, but this is just the kind of narrow parochialism I'm complaining about. I said "the vast majority of the world", and I stand by that - the idea that ordinary people in China, India, Africa, the Pacific and so on give o
9.
by thagsimmons 4y ago
My heart sinks when I see this sort of parochial US-centric definition of free speech. The vast majority of the world is not protected by and has no interest in US constitutional rights. The principles of free speech are universal, much mor
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by thagsimmons 4y ago
This is a bit of a "how long is a piece of string" question. It depends on the developer workstation, which file they're currently working on, etc. That said, we're talking about incremental compile times here, not total
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by thagsimmons 4y ago
While there was some stink around his departure, he's not one of the contributors I'm concerned about here. I'm thinking more of people working on deep technical issues around the language and type system.
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by thagsimmons 4y ago
I don't want to list specific contributors here. We often have no information on why people left the project - there might be all sorts of personal factors. I will say that my broader sentiment - that Rust's momentum has slowed, t
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by thagsimmons 4y ago
This is absolutely a pain point for us, working on a very large Rust project. In particular, incremental compile times are absolutely critical for developer comfort, and by far the most common complaint working on our codebase is that devel
14.
by thagsimmons 4y ago
This sounds great, but I don't think Rust has the complement of highly skilled core developers needed to tackle something this ambitious. I'm a close observer of the Rust project, and my impression is that Rust's core develop
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by thagsimmons 4y ago
I'm very interested in this area, but I've never been able to get a handle on what's going on in this particular project. There's no coherent explanation of the technical aspects, no documentation, hours and hours of ram
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by thagsimmons 4y ago
The more interesting question is how long it will be until we have open, freely available models that are competitive with closed models. It's now clear that everything is going to be disrupted by generative AI - we haven't even b
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by thagsimmons 4y ago
I followed the stoush between DeLong and Graeber closely, and my strong impression is that Graeber was thin-skinned, vengeful, often inaccurate and unable to stand criticism. DeLong was a bit trolly, but nothing a competent, stable writer s
18.
by thagsimmons 4y ago
Obviously people need to make up their own mind, but I do hope that they'd read what Singal actually writes and not base their opinion on a mean-spirited, vengeful hit-piece like this.
19.
by thagsimmons 4y ago
In the interest of fairness, here is Singal's response to that page: https://jessesingal.substack.com/p/glaad-took-false-previous... For what it's worth, I'm 100% with Singal here.
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by thagsimmons 4y ago
Almost nobody who reads this but doesn't already know who Jesse Singal is will bother to do the mountains of reading needed to figure out the reality, so I feel that I need to provide a counterpoint. I'm quite familiar with Singal
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by thagsimmons 4y ago
This is too simplistic a critique. One species colonizing everything is perfectly compatible with the model in the broad. The complication is that we ourselves exist, are not colonized, and can look out into space and don't see any ali
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by thagsimmons 4y ago
Very few things are impossible to work around. In this case, you can detect that the service worker is no longer controlling the page, and do something about it: re-register the worker, soft reload the page, etc. I've also seen people
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by thagsimmons 4y ago
I don't think this is significantly different from what I said ("if your functionality justifies it..."). That is, evaluate service workers in the same way that you would any other complicated additional requirement or featur
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by thagsimmons 4y ago
Again, this is much too sweeping and categorical. The forced reload problem with service workers is well known and easy to work around. The Firefox private browsing example is neither here nor there - an implementation weakness that has no
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by thagsimmons 4y ago
This is too negative - it's fine to require service workers if it's justified. Service workers work in private browsing mode in Safari, Chrome and Brave, and is only unimplemented in Firefox because it "hasn't been a pri