Perhaps we just need some good old-fashioned manual pruning of all those databases. Go through them, and remove anything that is not, in fact, in any way contributing to any further understanding.
Yes, manual work is costly and hard... But it would make such databases massively more valuable as well.
I believe people are becoming ruder because our sense of community is being eroded. There is no "us" anymore, no sense of belonging together (or belonging anywhere). This is the sad legacy of globalism.
I visited Croatia the other day. There was a display of photos somewhere, and the corresponding descriptions showed a great deal of nationalistic pride. It felt like a breath of fresh air: people actually proud of what they were, and what they did. For one moment I felt that sense of belonging somewhere - and I'm not even Croatian...
While it is a fairly common problem on tech forums, it might have something to do with the large number of people that we get to deal with who have no interest in learning, want us to solve all of their problems, and (very important) consider us to be sub-humans incapable of human interaction or emotion for the rest of their time. Technical people get to deal with lots of non-technical people who have technical problems, and who have zero appreciation for our efforts or our very existence other than as a way to solve their probems. This is definitely different from gardening or pets: the people asking questions there are already part of the community themselves, and don't look down on the people they expect to solve their problems.
There are other problems too: far too many students asking for help with homework (and always the same homework too! "Implement a linked list", how original). Too many people apparently completely unaware of how to use the search function of the forum. Too many people who just cannot bother to read. Too many people who get the help they want, but completely forget to post a "thank you" (or accept your answer, in the case of Stackoverflow).
Having said all that, yes, tech forums tend to be toxic. Entirely too many postings start or end with a sneer ("Are you a moron?", or "You must be Trump", for example). It doesn't add anything, it only increases hostility, so why add it?
As for Stackoverflow(/Stackexchange), it's no exception, really. I tried to help people in the C++ forum for a while - until I had a few of my answers modded to -5 (really bad) and then saw the same answer posted verbatim by another poster with a score a hundred times mine, who promptly received +30 or more for it. Suffice it to say, I stopped posting there.
That already happened; apparently some people now feel inheritance is bad. I've seen a few of their arguments (rants, really), and it seems to boil down to "you can get confused", "some inheritance trees are too deep", and a whole bunch of irrational ranting besides.
I do agree that we've(*) suffered from an overload of policy factory manager producer singletons (which seems to be an important part of many of those rants), but actually inheritance is a tool that serves me well in many, many cases. It's certainly way better than having type-specific switch statements all over the place...
(*) I say "we", but actually it seems like a fairly typical Java affliction, more than a general OO thing...
I believe you are missing the greater-than character, which also looks a bit like a letter "V" with the point facing to the right. Here's one now: >
Oh, and the last time I worked with an 80-column screen was probably 30 years ago. My current screen comfortably displays at least double that number. I really don't see why we stick with that tired old convention.
Just like Linus, you seem to fail to understand the problem. Dijkstra argued against *unstructured* jumping around, since this made programs very hard to understand (look up some source from that era to get an idea of what he was arguing against. It wasn't just a single goto here or there, it was 'using goto for everything we now use structured constructs for, like loops, switch-statements, etc.). Dijkstra argued for replacing those goto's with structured jumps as much as possible. And guess what? By and large, the software world has done so, and become much better for it.
I very much doubt he meant for his statement to become dogma in the way it has, and he certainly wasn't arguing for the complete removal of all forms of flow control, structured or not (as you and Linus seem to think). Goto, like everything else, is a tool. It has its place. You should not use it if a better tool is available, but you should also feel free to use it if it is the best you have. And the fact that assembly _only_ has goto is immaterial. The whole point is to allow reasoning over the language in the language itself.
Dijkstra always struck me as a sensible, practical man. He wrote about an argument he had about driving printers. In his era, printers could only accept a character once every so often (because they were slow, mechanical beasts, without much in the way of buffering), so his colleagues wanted to intersperse printing code with other processing. Dijkstra didn't like this, and wanted to print using an interrupt that would signal when the printer needed a new character. His colleagues fought against that: not only were interrupts more costly than just interleaving printer output with normal code, but Dijkstra was 'throwing away' valuable information about printer timing that could be used to improve efficiency!
His colleagues were, of course, completely right - right up until the moment when the hardware changed, and their programs no longer worked, that is...
Actually you are saying that. Try learning reasoning skills some time.
"One hundred years ago sea level rise began to accelerate sharply" -> "the circumstances one hundred years ago were such that sea levels began to rise sharply". Assuming you believe in AGW, it was the sum of human activities one hundred years ago that caused sea levels to begin rising sharply. So are you arguing against AGW, then? Or does it bother you to consider the fact that you might end up living up in considerably poorer circumstances than your great-great-grandparents?
I suspect it's the last. I find that the group that consistently argues in favor of AGW reacts like a hornet nest every time you ask them to consider the alternatives, which is to massively reduce either the population, its standard of living, or both. You need to either invest in nuclear (unacceptable to AGW proponents!), or accept a massive reduction in the amount of energy we use as well as our choice of when to use it (since it might not always be available when we need it), which translates into a massive reduction in living standards. That is the truth nobody wants to see.
Sea level rise has sharply accelerated in past 100 years compared to the centuries before that.
So you're saying, even returning to the standards of living of 1917, with a population the same size as 1917, will not be enough. How can we achieve that without the help of WW3?
It's kinda redundant, isn't it? The economic suicide is sure to follow once they adopt sharia law. Which will happen before 2045, at their current rate, so the whole point is moot anyway...
future governments are only required to enact policies designed to get there and can be sued if they don't.
Future governments can simply withdraw the plan. It is not within the power of the current government to govern beyond the four years of their mandate.
This particular quote was accepted by the world as fact for at least two, possibly three decades. And then all of a sudden, a few years ago, we were told it wasn't true anymore. I don't believe it. This is just whitewashing, an attempt to rewrite history so Gates didn't say something that wasn't even all that stupid in the context of the era in which it was said.
We've been told the major reason that 3D failed is because people have to wear glasses. Now you're telling me that a technology requiring a much larger, heavier headset is going to succeed. Somehow I doubt it.
It's called "alphabet" in an open and blatant reference to "alphabet agencies". It's for the people who didn't realize Google is an extension of the CIA, NSA, etc.
And that's entirely correct. Developers develop. Managers decide. After they make their decision they inform the developers what to do. The developers will then either do that, or get fired. Would you really want to get fired over a single button?
The owner of the vehicle is responsible for ensuring his vehicle is safe to use. If he modifies it, by installing some untested software, he is most certainly responsible for the consequences if he then injures someone. And if the disclaimers are clear enough, his chances of successfully suing the software developer are slim.
The sad thing is that, as with the Tesla, you know some idiots will install this and go on to kill people - hopefully just themselves. After that I wouldn't be surprised to see the software developer sued claiming the warnings on the software were just not clear enough. Or even the car manufacturer, for allowing the vehicle to be so modified in the first place...
So are we to understand there is just a single backup which, when running, overwrites the previous backup? So if you backup at the wrong moment, everything is gone? That is extremely, extremely incompetent...
I can understand losing maybe a few days of work, but beyond that point, an older backup should be recoverable. Why wasn't it?
Their definition of democracy is not "the citizens themselves vote on every issue". Not even the Swiss have that much democracy (they only hold referendums on key issues). Thus, thanks for erecting a straw man and then obliterating it, but what they label democracy is really a democratic republic. It's an understandable mistake; the US itself has constantly referred to its wars as "bringing democracy", rather than "bringing democratic republicanism".
Having cleared that up, would you describe the US as a full democratic republic, or a flawed democratic republic? If the last, what could the flaw be and how could it be improved?
There's a rather big difference between someone successfully building an industry and the government then simply stealing it from him (i.e. nationalization), and the government setting up its own industry, especially since in the case of Norway where said industry ensures that the natural wealth of Norway benefits everyone in the country, instead of just a handful of very rich people.
My country (the Netherlands) could have done the same thing with our natural gas supplies. Instead our government of that time convinced everyone that gas would soon be worthless, since everyone would be moving to nuclear (it's a while ago), so we should sell it as cheaply as we can and buy ourselves some nice gifts instead of investing the money wisely. These days we have towering national debt, and are importing gas from Russia (and not at the cheapest they can sell it!). And yet, I suspect the Netherlands ranks fairly high on the anti-corruption index...
So far I see a lot of comments from people who don't seem to like modern interfaces much. Does anyone think they are an improvement over what we had before (and I don't mean the bad examples of what we had before, of course)?
As for the question at hand, I blame smartphones. Their tiny screens means information had to be greatly condensed. Everything that could be removed was removed, and placed in hard to discover locations (like swipes and hamburger menus).
And then, for some unfathomable reason, the largest software company in the world (or second largest or whatever, but surely large enough to support two teams, one for mobile and one for desktop) decided that it wanted the exact same user interface for mobile phones and for the desktop. Not that anybody out there actually writes applications that work on both, but that didn't stop them. So now desktop users also have to deal with missing menu bars (which are absolutely essential to learning a new application, and didn't take up that much space), tiny monochrome icons, lousy contrast, constant pointless animation, and all that other crap. Makes you wonder when someone will inflict the "three button mouse swipe" on us... I actually worry that, after posting it here, someone will think of it as a cool idea and actually implement it:-(
Well, either you stop reading those sites, or you wait for adblocking to catch up. This is an arms race, and I am not about to give total control over my computer and my internet connection to an industry that has such a bad track record. A few articles are just not worth the annoyance and risk.
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps we just need some good old-fashioned manual pruning of all those databases. Go through them, and remove anything that is not, in fact, in any way contributing to any further understanding.
Yes, manual work is costly and hard... But it would make such databases massively more valuable as well.
I believe people are becoming ruder because our sense of community is being eroded. There is no "us" anymore, no sense of belonging together (or belonging anywhere). This is the sad legacy of globalism.
I visited Croatia the other day. There was a display of photos somewhere, and the corresponding descriptions showed a great deal of nationalistic pride. It felt like a breath of fresh air: people actually proud of what they were, and what they did. For one moment I felt that sense of belonging somewhere - and I'm not even Croatian...
Why such cynicism? Why not believe that quite a substantial number of people live within their means, and have no debt whatsoever?
They don't give a fuck if someone else owns a few pointless items more. They may live a little bit more modest, but they sleep better at night.
While it is a fairly common problem on tech forums, it might have something to do with the large number of people that we get to deal with who have no interest in learning, want us to solve all of their problems, and (very important) consider us to be sub-humans incapable of human interaction or emotion for the rest of their time. Technical people get to deal with lots of non-technical people who have technical problems, and who have zero appreciation for our efforts or our very existence other than as a way to solve their probems. This is definitely different from gardening or pets: the people asking questions there are already part of the community themselves, and don't look down on the people they expect to solve their problems.
There are other problems too: far too many students asking for help with homework (and always the same homework too! "Implement a linked list", how original). Too many people apparently completely unaware of how to use the search function of the forum. Too many people who just cannot bother to read. Too many people who get the help they want, but completely forget to post a "thank you" (or accept your answer, in the case of Stackoverflow).
Having said all that, yes, tech forums tend to be toxic. Entirely too many postings start or end with a sneer ("Are you a moron?", or "You must be Trump", for example). It doesn't add anything, it only increases hostility, so why add it?
As for Stackoverflow(/Stackexchange), it's no exception, really. I tried to help people in the C++ forum for a while - until I had a few of my answers modded to -5 (really bad) and then saw the same answer posted verbatim by another poster with a score a hundred times mine, who promptly received +30 or more for it. Suffice it to say, I stopped posting there.
That already happened; apparently some people now feel inheritance is bad. I've seen a few of their arguments (rants, really), and it seems to boil down to "you can get confused", "some inheritance trees are too deep", and a whole bunch of irrational ranting besides.
I do agree that we've(*) suffered from an overload of policy factory manager producer singletons (which seems to be an important part of many of those rants), but actually inheritance is a tool that serves me well in many, many cases. It's certainly way better than having type-specific switch statements all over the place...
(*) I say "we", but actually it seems like a fairly typical Java affliction, more than a general OO thing...
I believe you are missing the greater-than character, which also looks a bit like a letter "V" with the point facing to the right. Here's one now: >
Oh, and the last time I worked with an 80-column screen was probably 30 years ago. My current screen comfortably displays at least double that number. I really don't see why we stick with that tired old convention.
Just like Linus, you seem to fail to understand the problem. Dijkstra argued against *unstructured* jumping around, since this made programs very hard to understand (look up some source from that era to get an idea of what he was arguing against. It wasn't just a single goto here or there, it was 'using goto for everything we now use structured constructs for, like loops, switch-statements, etc.). Dijkstra argued for replacing those goto's with structured jumps as much as possible. And guess what? By and large, the software world has done so, and become much better for it.
I very much doubt he meant for his statement to become dogma in the way it has, and he certainly wasn't arguing for the complete removal of all forms of flow control, structured or not (as you and Linus seem to think). Goto, like everything else, is a tool. It has its place. You should not use it if a better tool is available, but you should also feel free to use it if it is the best you have. And the fact that assembly _only_ has goto is immaterial. The whole point is to allow reasoning over the language in the language itself.
Dijkstra always struck me as a sensible, practical man. He wrote about an argument he had about driving printers. In his era, printers could only accept a character once every so often (because they were slow, mechanical beasts, without much in the way of buffering), so his colleagues wanted to intersperse printing code with other processing. Dijkstra didn't like this, and wanted to print using an interrupt that would signal when the printer needed a new character. His colleagues fought against that: not only were interrupts more costly than just interleaving printer output with normal code, but Dijkstra was 'throwing away' valuable information about printer timing that could be used to improve efficiency!
His colleagues were, of course, completely right - right up until the moment when the hardware changed, and their programs no longer worked, that is...
Actually you are saying that. Try learning reasoning skills some time.
"One hundred years ago sea level rise began to accelerate sharply" -> "the circumstances one hundred years ago were such that sea levels began to rise sharply". Assuming you believe in AGW, it was the sum of human activities one hundred years ago that caused sea levels to begin rising sharply. So are you arguing against AGW, then? Or does it bother you to consider the fact that you might end up living up in considerably poorer circumstances than your great-great-grandparents?
I suspect it's the last. I find that the group that consistently argues in favor of AGW reacts like a hornet nest every time you ask them to consider the alternatives, which is to massively reduce either the population, its standard of living, or both. You need to either invest in nuclear (unacceptable to AGW proponents!), or accept a massive reduction in the amount of energy we use as well as our choice of when to use it (since it might not always be available when we need it), which translates into a massive reduction in living standards. That is the truth nobody wants to see.
Sea level rise has sharply accelerated in past 100 years compared to the centuries before that.
So you're saying, even returning to the standards of living of 1917, with a population the same size as 1917, will not be enough. How can we achieve that without the help of WW3?
It's kinda redundant, isn't it? The economic suicide is sure to follow once they adopt sharia law. Which will happen before 2045, at their current rate, so the whole point is moot anyway...
future governments are only required to enact policies designed to get there and can be sued if they don't.
Future governments can simply withdraw the plan. It is not within the power of the current government to govern beyond the four years of their mandate.
There's no such thing. Although the local village theatre occasionally finds itself with enough subsidy for a camera...
Why does this get an 'informative'? It's plain wrong: consumer electronics are also required to be tolerant against electromagnetic interference.
This particular quote was accepted by the world as fact for at least two, possibly three decades. And then all of a sudden, a few years ago, we were told it wasn't true anymore. I don't believe it. This is just whitewashing, an attempt to rewrite history so Gates didn't say something that wasn't even all that stupid in the context of the era in which it was said.
We've been told the major reason that 3D failed is because people have to wear glasses. Now you're telling me that a technology requiring a much larger, heavier headset is going to succeed. Somehow I doubt it.
It's called "alphabet" in an open and blatant reference to "alphabet agencies". It's for the people who didn't realize Google is an extension of the CIA, NSA, etc.
And that's entirely correct. Developers develop. Managers decide. After they make their decision they inform the developers what to do. The developers will then either do that, or get fired. Would you really want to get fired over a single button?
The owner of the vehicle is responsible for ensuring his vehicle is safe to use. If he modifies it, by installing some untested software, he is most certainly responsible for the consequences if he then injures someone. And if the disclaimers are clear enough, his chances of successfully suing the software developer are slim.
The sad thing is that, as with the Tesla, you know some idiots will install this and go on to kill people - hopefully just themselves. After that I wouldn't be surprised to see the software developer sued claiming the warnings on the software were just not clear enough. Or even the car manufacturer, for allowing the vehicle to be so modified in the first place...
So are we to understand there is just a single backup which, when running, overwrites the previous backup? So if you backup at the wrong moment, everything is gone? That is extremely, extremely incompetent...
I can understand losing maybe a few days of work, but beyond that point, an older backup should be recoverable. Why wasn't it?
Their definition of democracy is not "the citizens themselves vote on every issue". Not even the Swiss have that much democracy (they only hold referendums on key issues). Thus, thanks for erecting a straw man and then obliterating it, but what they label democracy is really a democratic republic. It's an understandable mistake; the US itself has constantly referred to its wars as "bringing democracy", rather than "bringing democratic republicanism".
Having cleared that up, would you describe the US as a full democratic republic, or a flawed democratic republic? If the last, what could the flaw be and how could it be improved?
There's a rather big difference between someone successfully building an industry and the government then simply stealing it from him (i.e. nationalization), and the government setting up its own industry, especially since in the case of Norway where said industry ensures that the natural wealth of Norway benefits everyone in the country, instead of just a handful of very rich people.
My country (the Netherlands) could have done the same thing with our natural gas supplies. Instead our government of that time convinced everyone that gas would soon be worthless, since everyone would be moving to nuclear (it's a while ago), so we should sell it as cheaply as we can and buy ourselves some nice gifts instead of investing the money wisely. These days we have towering national debt, and are importing gas from Russia (and not at the cheapest they can sell it!). And yet, I suspect the Netherlands ranks fairly high on the anti-corruption index...
So far I see a lot of comments from people who don't seem to like modern interfaces much. Does anyone think they are an improvement over what we had before (and I don't mean the bad examples of what we had before, of course)?
As for the question at hand, I blame smartphones. Their tiny screens means information had to be greatly condensed. Everything that could be removed was removed, and placed in hard to discover locations (like swipes and hamburger menus).
And then, for some unfathomable reason, the largest software company in the world (or second largest or whatever, but surely large enough to support two teams, one for mobile and one for desktop) decided that it wanted the exact same user interface for mobile phones and for the desktop. Not that anybody out there actually writes applications that work on both, but that didn't stop them. So now desktop users also have to deal with missing menu bars (which are absolutely essential to learning a new application, and didn't take up that much space), tiny monochrome icons, lousy contrast, constant pointless animation, and all that other crap. Makes you wonder when someone will inflict the "three button mouse swipe" on us... I actually worry that, after posting it here, someone will think of it as a cool idea and actually implement it :-(
"YOU'RE KILLING THE INTERNET!"
The internet was built to withstand a nuclear attack. I'm sure it can survive the loss of ad revenue.
Well, either you stop reading those sites, or you wait for adblocking to catch up. This is an arms race, and I am not about to give total control over my computer and my internet connection to an industry that has such a bad track record. A few articles are just not worth the annoyance and risk.
If you actually cared about your arguments you'd post them here instead of just using them as a reason to whore your channel.