The dangers they are outlining don't need thinking systems. This is about a quantum leap in what we could do with computers until now (and with what costs) - effortlessly creating fake videos, photos, voice recordings and twitter posts, more troublesome botnets etc. These don't need sentience, but it is chaos all the same. They are not talking about computer overlords taking over, but about what malicious human actors can do with the new tools. For instance, bots that do more precise sentiment analysis and classification to push posts that favor a government's position - we are all effected at some level by what we consider to be the public consensus, especially it is an issue we don't have a deep understanding of.
When Internet first began, security concerns were minimal. Only the technical and academic elite cared and were largely well-behaved in their communities. As it became democratized, it became necessary to be cautious about everything. Who needed a firewall or a spam filter in the beginning? People trusted any executable they downloaded. A consumer was not worried about patching their systems regularly.
Same thing now. So far, AI (let's just call it advanced statistical learning, if you are finicky about the term AI) has been largely used for benevolent and creative purposes. As the use grows, that won't be the only way it will be applied.
It isn't using my GPU, just the CPU. That should be an awfully inefficient way to mine Bitcoin. I block ads because they insult my intelligence, often are outright fraudulent, if not just manipulative and track me across domains. I don't mind web sites monetizing some other way with informed consent, but really, other than as an experiment, I don't see this working out since people browse on underpowered ARM devices these days. Still, I would like to see the numbers on the economics if anyone has them.
I am most annoyed by Google's choices in the Permission System. It is defective by design. What did they expect? It is now the choice malware target. Sure, it is an improvement since the earlier versions since we can revoke permissions now. The system is far less leaky on iOS (at least it was, I have not owned an iOS device in a while). I really wish I could set up virtual/shadow address books and file systems. The current system is just playing whack-a-mole. There should be a setting where apps will not have access to any of my private information by default, but still not fail when denied. Or a means to have two profiles, a trusted and a sandbox profile.. and it should be trivial for the user to switch between them, while providing good feedback on which one is active.
While all that is true, I would welcome a lot more advancement in visualization tools for deep learning.
The current tools are inadequate to easily understand why the network is doing poorly, when it is.
We need way more than the current tensorboard. If anyone knows of any practical visualization tools (not academic demos) that they use for their work, please share.
Yes, beans/lentils and rice, peanut butter and bread, pita and hummus and so on are complete protein combinations. But as I said, too much of beans and lentils can bloat one up when one is trying to get over a third of my calories from protein. Soy is complete and agrees better with me. But I am puzzled why in US, something as basic as soy powder (for blending) costs more than whey, which is arguably more expensive to produce. I get whey at $4.5 a pound. Currently, Like most people, I supplement my plant protein sources with meat and diary extracts.
I for one eat animal products because they provide complete proteins more readily and make it easy to consume lower calories. My focus is on protein intake and convenience. If there is a plant substitute, I would be all for it. I understand that I am in the minority though. I am one of those that are not wired to get a lot of excitement out of food. If it is cheap, nutritious and is versatile - I would take it. Meat should be an occasional indulgence, rather than staple.
Trouble is, things like this should cost little, but they often don't (I understand they don't have mass production advantages yet). I am puzzled on why plant based protein powders cost more than whey. I am also curious on how the gut flora react to these alternatives. My flora seem to do better on animal protein than plant protein.
You did not seem to RTFA and are simply providing routine arguments - routine enough to have an XKCD - https://www.xkcd.com/605/ Neither did I, but at least I glanced at the charts. The article seemed to take that fallacy into account adequately. The charts provided are over 5 years. The growth patterns are quite anomalous, especially since Python is quite old now. If this was about something like say Elm, then your arguments would make sense since it would be starting from nothing.
> Go on youtube and look for videos to see what train rides in India are like for commuters.
Which states are they from? And what is the state in question?
Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu are states that send a good chunk of the engineers to US. Most of videos of chaos you see are from middle and North of India. The southern states produce engineers, launch record breaking space missions etc. The state of Andhra Pradesh (the one in the article) has an airport that is more modern and more stylish than any US airport. Trump wasn't kidding.
India is better viewed as an EU of sorts, except by developing country standards, rather than a single country. There are a variety of states, with their own languages, cultures and politics, but with a common monetary system and a higher governance structure. They are all at different stages of development.
Most Americans have no clue about India. They cannot name any states or languages. They see it as an amorphous country, only barely thinking of it when some spectacle that is hardly representative of the country is highlighted in news. Same with China, Iran etc.
For a country the size of India, you can find instances of just about any kind of chaos and just about any kind of hope. When the sample size is massive, don't make a case out of anecdotes and worse, conjectures. Rather ask, what percent of trains travel like the way you describe. Rather few, I would say. Of course, only the spectacles make the news and views. But that isn't a balanced view of the country.
I have traveled in India. I have traveled in buses where I could place just one foot inside and I have traveled in luxury buses that would match US offerings. I have traveled in trains like you imagine and in comfortable air-conditioned coaches with meal services. Hyperloop, if it comes to fruition, would be a luxury offering and would be run well enough. My doubts are different. Plans are prematurely advertised in India. I would not pay too much stock in any early announcement.
The state of Andhra Pradesh recently split and will be needing a new capital in a few years. The government's vision is to build a capital on modern principles, from ground up. Nearly all Indian cities organically grew over centuries making it hard to inject modern infrastructure. This is seen as a unique opportunity. The state has partnered with Japan to build the city out of nothing.
I'd say you don't understand India much at all. Also, you admit you have not been in India in decades. Do you have any idea how much India and China have advanced in the last few decades? You would not recognize the cities much today.
> I don't think I've ever seen anyone say, "I just tried out this Java thing and I'm never going back to C again!"
Plenty of people who knew just C++ found Java to be a relief for business programming when Java first came out. Those of us who used other languages outside C/C++ wondered what the fuss was all about. But a lot of C++-only people found Java to be much simpler. That was how it became popular, not because of applets. Of course, a lot of people also thought it was terrible for a variety of reasons. For many years, it was also fashionable to criticize Java and Java in fact deserved a good deal of that criticism in its early days - it simplified some things that needed to be simplified and complicated other things that never needed the complexity.
Are there any good open-source contacts and email apps for android that are reasonably good? I am tired of turning off contacts access as a ritual after every other app install. I just want the OS level contact list to be empty or be a dummy list. I want a phone app that maintains its own contacts internally... or a separate contacts app that can launch the phone. I really don't need the convenience of invoking contacts from third party apps and find their propensity to download my entire address book creepy. I would like an open source email client I can trust, which does not "integrate" my address book again. This whole personal data interoperability and integration functionality is unnecessary for me and is more of an annoyance than a convenience.
All of these blocks in India are rapidly reversed. Most of these come from either some incompetent bureaucrat broadly reading some vaguely written laws (as is the case in any developing country) or responding to some silly complaint of some vested party, without knowing anything about what the Way Back Machine is. People in India complain, they tweet about it, media writes about it and the rules are often rapidly reversed (with quiet embarrassment, yet no one seems to learn anything from it).
There is no censorship similar to China in India. These are banal events, not harbingers of a totalitarian state. I am not excluding the possibility of occasional mischief, but India has a strong enough independent judiciary that would not let any group or party to dominate and skew the information space.
"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity".
- Murphy's Law Book Two
I was looking at app development frameworks a couple of years ago. What struck me was the sad logic of framework choice. If you wanted a cross platform app, the choice was a HTML based framework. HTML apps can be as tiny as web pages. Except the problem was, not all system browsers (across OS versions, across platforms) behaved the same way. So the devs are encouraged to bundle an entire browser runtime with even the simplest app. Modern browsers are very large applications.
Another problem here is that mobile operating systems do not have really have package management. So every app keeps repeating some very large runtimes.
It used to be that in 2003, when I wrote mobile apps, one considered desktop apps as resource free-for-alls and mobile apps as something where you carefully optimized for size, memory, performance etc. Mobile devices are much more powerful now, but they are still meant for efficient programming since the battery life is not a solved problem. Other resources are not that cheap either. I am always strapped for space on devices where a microsd expansion slot is not available. Yet, we are now behaving as if these problems have disappeared.
Python and Perl would have never made it, if people filtered by that logic.
Programming languages don't need a huge company backing them up, as long as there is enough of a community. If Rust folks are as zealous as the Ruby folks were during the Rails era, we will have a neat C++ replacement.
I have not used Rust yet and have even been critical (as in, just add those semantics to C++ somehow and don't create a whole new replacement) of it. But the community does seem to be building momentum.
A peek at module counts http://www.modulecounts.com/ shows that the Rust community is quite active. They are not merely evangelizing it, but rapidly building value. It does not look like Mozilla is significantly driving it on the module front. It only has half the modules as Go (which is impressive for a zero-cost abstraction language compared to a language that is high level application language), but the modules seem to be accumulating at more than twice the speed now. Modules make the language.
I wish Nim had that kind of momentum though. That is a language better aligned for my purposes.
I use an Android phone. Aside from some small, personal apps I wrote for myself a while ago, I am not really an app developer and don't have an in-depth understanding of the issues.
But my annoyance is this: there are apps that I only use once a month and others not even that. I definitely don't need them running in any form, even with the lightest footprint and some of them are consuming power. They keep coming back the instant I killed them. Why do the modern OS vendors assume they know best? I would like to have control over the execution policy, not the app developer. In Windows, I could remove entries from the startup, task scheduler etc. In Unix, I have full control. Why can't I do that in modern operating systems? Yes, I am aware there are startup editors in Android. I found them unreliable or inadequate.
I as the user, have much better context information on how my apps need to run. Sure, people can shoot themselves in the foot, but provide a means to restore defaults when custom configurations aren't working, but don't take away control altogether.
Every commercial app developer wants his app to be ready to go. In Windows that meant far too many developers would add their apps to system startup. With enough such entries, it made a large proportion of consumer machines to go sluggish by swapping and many systems were upgraded just because the users did not know how to clean up their startup items. Sure, the modern systems prevent all that, but that does not mean I should not have any control. The lesson here is that developers cannot be trusted to be respectful of shared system resources (and so the OS takes over more control), not that the users cannot be trusted. At least, let the apps be better controlled in developer mode. It took what 5 or 6 versions before Google started allowing users to rescind permissions? I want more permissions (and with better granularity) to rescind.
Well, that was my rant. If I missed any obvious solutions, enlighten me.
- The new service must have bureaus and fully paid journalists on the field. - News must heavily outweigh opinion. When opinion is presented, it must be backed by quantitative analyses, not mere rhetoric. - Must regularly publish original studies, analyses and visualizations. - The opinions they present must be from well-known experts in their fields - well-known, not because they often bloviate, but regarded well by their scholarly peers. - Entertainment sections and cute stories must be at an absolute minimum. No click baits. Focus on serious issues that impact the world - economy, science, wars.
This generally means I gravitate towards big media in print. No outlet is perfect in everything, all have their biases - a combination can smooth things out.
I am not defending any "hypocrisy from authority" from a semi-totalitarian state nor am I suggesting perfect equivalence between anything - analogies, after all, can only go so far.
From what I recall from several decades ago, persecution started when Falun Gong did a large scale demonstration in the public spaces. This was seen as a flexing of muscle and the one-party establishment immediately recognized their potential for political organization and was alarmed, especially when it was jittery in the wake of the Tiananmen Square protests. Such level of organization was probably seen as a precursor to an incredibly chaotic time.... for them, in light of the Taiping Rebellion, this is probably a precursor to a very bloody act of sedition (obviously, mere precursors are not acceptable standards in our societies, nor is repression of any kind, but this isn't our society and their historical experiences are not ours). So in that sense, it was Falun Gong which issued the first challenge.
Is CCP free speech oriented? Obviously not. Neither is Falun Gong (all cults talk free speech only when it suits them - I think you would agree with me on that. No one can criticize even one or two actions of a cult leader and still expect to stay in it without being cowered to submission). Their flexing of muscle was in part to muzzle a physicist who just wrote an article in a university magazine on the superstitious nature of Falun Gong.
On Falun Gong, it will say it is a cult.... because it is. Excuse China for having a low tolerance for cults.
The last time they let a cult go out of control (when a dude claimed he was Jesus reincarnate), it resulted in more deaths than any war in human history until that point (around the time of US civil war, only 20-30 times the deaths). If US had a cult based civil war of this magnitude, it would have shaped its world view as well.
Cults are to China as Fascism is to the West. It polices cults as the West monitors neo-nazi groups to keep them in check. If Europe can police antisemitic groups, China can police cults. They both have their historical wounds and different standards for reactions.
All programming paradigms have useful abstractions to offer. Eventually, they will all come together. Object orientation is great, until one overdoes it in design pattern hell. Likewise with functional programming. There are great many ideas in academic programming languages that will be made more accessible and integrated into mainstream programming languages. Functional programming is a dead end only in the sense SmallTalk was a dead end. People may not use SmallTalk much today, but its ideas live on in nearly every language we use today. Functional programming is here to stay. It won't replace imperative and object-oriented programming, but will add to them.
First and foremost, programming languages are for people, not computers. So if regular programmers who form the bulk of the workforce can't grok them, the languages need to be fixed, not people. Haskell is too hard for most. But it has many wonderful ideas that can be distilled into simpler forms and adopted and integrated elsewhere. Python got list comprehensions from it and perhaps the indentation.
C# is absorbing some features and Java is doing that less elegantly. Scala is a good balance and has already established itself. But people still find the type system complicated. So there are attempts to bring forth a simpler Scala - Kotlin, Ceylon etc.
We all agree that things like compact syntax, first order functions, lambdas, streams, type inference etc that functional languages pioneered, belong in every language. We still haven't sorted out how to make more advanced type systems, provability, strict programming without side effects etc more approachable. We should not need to have this much trouble explaining what a monad is or isn't. We'll get there, eventually.
There is a good reason to have that code at the database tier and not in the "real application tier" aka client client tier. And this reason is partly the same reason as why we do stored procedures. We want the data to be resolved and reduced before it leaves the database tier, not sorted out in the client tier. This also allows for centralizing business logic rather than have it spread out among various client implementations. And the non-standardness is no different than doing non-standard stuff that we already do in stored procedures.
How exactly? That makes no sense. They embedded an open source language. Previously, the extensions were via CLR. If you mean it is non-standard SQL, nearly every major database today supports non-standard extensions - both proprietary and open source.
Postgres, since a long time, like SQL Server now, allows *embedding* Python in the database run stored procedures.
The MySQL and DB2 links you provided are not the same. They are simply about calling stored procedures from Python clients. Pretty much every relational database and programing language can do the latter.
Embedding within the database, on the hand, is a more exotic and a very useful feature.
> I do not know why anybody would even think of using a programming language without static typing.
- Dynamically typed programming languages are more productive when writing smaller quantities of rapidly evolving code.
- It is mainly a library and an ecosystem issue. Python tends to have all the modules I need, while Haskell, OCaml and Scala often don't... and they often seem to be much easier to pick up and use.
For example, Pandas equivalents are much less mature in other ecosystems. On language merits alone, I should be using Scala more than Python, but in practice, Python modules win me over.
I wanted to memoise a function. To look up a module and put in the couple of lines (an import and a decorator) needed to achieve that probably took a couple of minutes in Python, and I was back to the real meat of my code. I would have spent much longer in Java.
Slashdot Mirror
Did you read the summary?
The dangers they are outlining don't need thinking systems. This is about a quantum leap in what we could do with computers until now (and with what costs) - effortlessly creating fake videos, photos, voice recordings and twitter posts, more troublesome botnets etc. These don't need sentience, but it is chaos all the same. They are not talking about computer overlords taking over, but about what malicious human actors can do with the new tools. For instance, bots that do more precise sentiment analysis and classification to push posts that favor a government's position - we are all effected at some level by what we consider to be the public consensus, especially it is an issue we don't have a deep understanding of.
When Internet first began, security concerns were minimal. Only the technical and academic elite cared and were largely well-behaved in their communities. As it became democratized, it became necessary to be cautious about everything. Who needed a firewall or a spam filter in the beginning? People trusted any executable they downloaded. A consumer was not worried about patching their systems regularly.
Same thing now. So far, AI (let's just call it advanced statistical learning, if you are finicky about the term AI) has been largely used for benevolent and creative purposes. As the use grows, that won't be the only way it will be applied.
It isn't using my GPU, just the CPU.
That should be an awfully inefficient way to mine Bitcoin.
I block ads because they insult my intelligence, often are outright fraudulent, if not just manipulative and track me across domains. I don't mind web sites monetizing some other way with informed consent, but really, other than as an experiment, I don't see this working out since people browse on underpowered ARM devices these days. Still, I would like to see the numbers on the economics if anyone has them.
I am most annoyed by Google's choices in the Permission System. It is defective by design. What did they expect? It is now the choice malware target. Sure, it is an improvement since the earlier versions since we can revoke permissions now. The system is far less leaky on iOS (at least it was, I have not owned an iOS device in a while). I really wish I could set up virtual/shadow address books and file systems. The current system is just playing whack-a-mole. There should be a setting where apps will not have access to any of my private information by default, but still not fail when denied. Or a means to have two profiles, a trusted and a sandbox profile.. and it should be trivial for the user to switch between them, while providing good feedback on which one is active.
While all that is true, I would welcome a lot more advancement in visualization tools for deep learning.
The current tools are inadequate to easily understand why the network is doing poorly, when it is.
We need way more than the current tensorboard. If anyone knows of any practical visualization tools (not academic demos) that they use for their work, please share.
Yes, beans/lentils and rice, peanut butter and bread, pita and hummus and so on are complete protein combinations. But as I said, too much of beans and lentils can bloat one up when one is trying to get over a third of my calories from protein. Soy is complete and agrees better with me. But I am puzzled why in US, something as basic as soy powder (for blending) costs more than whey, which is arguably more expensive to produce. I get whey at $4.5 a pound. Currently, Like most people, I supplement my plant protein sources with meat and diary extracts.
I for one eat animal products because they provide complete proteins more readily and make it easy to consume lower calories. My focus is on protein intake and convenience. If there is a plant substitute, I would be all for it. I understand that I am in the minority though. I am one of those that are not wired to get a lot of excitement out of food. If it is cheap, nutritious and is versatile - I would take it. Meat should be an occasional indulgence, rather than staple.
Trouble is, things like this should cost little, but they often don't (I understand they don't have mass production advantages yet). I am puzzled on why plant based protein powders cost more than whey. I am also curious on how the gut flora react to these alternatives. My flora seem to do better on animal protein than plant protein.
Looks a lot better than the earlier version.
Takes a whopping 1 GB of RAM.
I remember when it used to consume 30-40 MB.
Reminds me of MS VS Code in that sense. Very functional, but consumes more RAM than it should for that functionality.
You did not seem to RTFA and are simply providing routine arguments - routine enough to have an XKCD - https://www.xkcd.com/605/
Neither did I, but at least I glanced at the charts.
The article seemed to take that fallacy into account adequately.
The charts provided are over 5 years. The growth patterns are quite anomalous, especially since Python is quite old now.
If this was about something like say Elm, then your arguments would make sense since it would be starting from nothing.
Who the heck modded the parent up?
> Go on youtube and look for videos to see what train rides in India are like for commuters.
Which states are they from? And what is the state in question?
Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu are states that send a good chunk of the engineers to US. Most of videos of chaos you see are from middle and North of India. The southern states produce engineers, launch record breaking space missions etc. The state of Andhra Pradesh (the one in the article) has an airport that is more modern and more stylish than any US airport. Trump wasn't kidding.
India is better viewed as an EU of sorts, except by developing country standards, rather than a single country. There are a variety of states, with their own languages, cultures and politics, but with a common monetary system and a higher governance structure. They are all at different stages of development.
Most Americans have no clue about India. They cannot name any states or languages. They see it as an amorphous country, only barely thinking of it when some spectacle that is hardly representative of the country is highlighted in news. Same with China, Iran etc.
For a country the size of India, you can find instances of just about any kind of chaos and just about any kind of hope. When the sample size is massive, don't make a case out of anecdotes and worse, conjectures. Rather ask, what percent of trains travel like the way you describe. Rather few, I would say. Of course, only the spectacles make the news and views. But that isn't a balanced view of the country.
I have traveled in India. I have traveled in buses where I could place just one foot inside and I have traveled in luxury buses that would match US offerings. I have traveled in trains like you imagine and in comfortable air-conditioned coaches with meal services. Hyperloop, if it comes to fruition, would be a luxury offering and would be run well enough. My doubts are different. Plans are prematurely advertised in India. I would not pay too much stock in any early announcement.
The state of Andhra Pradesh recently split and will be needing a new capital in a few years. The government's vision is to build a capital on modern principles, from ground up. Nearly all Indian cities organically grew over centuries making it hard to inject modern infrastructure. This is seen as a unique opportunity. The state has partnered with Japan to build the city out of nothing.
I'd say you don't understand India much at all. Also, you admit you have not been in India in decades. Do you have any idea how much India and China have advanced in the last few decades? You would not recognize the cities much today.
> I don't think I've ever seen anyone say, "I just tried out this Java thing and I'm never going back to C again!"
Plenty of people who knew just C++ found Java to be a relief for business programming when Java first came out. Those of us who used other languages outside C/C++ wondered what the fuss was all about. But a lot of C++-only people found Java to be much simpler. That was how it became popular, not because of applets. Of course, a lot of people also thought it was terrible for a variety of reasons. For many years, it was also fashionable to criticize Java and Java in fact deserved a good deal of that criticism in its early days - it simplified some things that needed to be simplified and complicated other things that never needed the complexity.
Are there any good open-source contacts and email apps for android that are reasonably good?
I am tired of turning off contacts access as a ritual after every other app install. I just want the OS level contact list to be empty or be a dummy list.
I want a phone app that maintains its own contacts internally... or a separate contacts app that can launch the phone. I really don't need the convenience of invoking contacts from third party apps and find their propensity to download my entire address book creepy.
I would like an open source email client I can trust, which does not "integrate" my address book again. This whole personal data interoperability and integration functionality is unnecessary for me and is more of an annoyance than a convenience.
All of these blocks in India are rapidly reversed. Most of these come from either some incompetent bureaucrat broadly reading some vaguely written laws (as is the case in any developing country) or responding to some silly complaint of some vested party, without knowing anything about what the Way Back Machine is. People in India complain, they tweet about it, media writes about it and the rules are often rapidly reversed (with quiet embarrassment, yet no one seems to learn anything from it).
There is no censorship similar to China in India. These are banal events, not harbingers of a totalitarian state. I am not excluding the possibility of occasional mischief, but India has a strong enough independent judiciary that would not let any group or party to dominate and skew the information space.
"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity".
- Murphy's Law Book Two
I was looking at app development frameworks a couple of years ago. What struck me was the sad logic of framework choice. If you wanted a cross platform app, the choice was a HTML based framework. HTML apps can be as tiny as web pages. Except the problem was, not all system browsers (across OS versions, across platforms) behaved the same way. So the devs are encouraged to bundle an entire browser runtime with even the simplest app. Modern browsers are very large applications.
Another problem here is that mobile operating systems do not have really have package management. So every app keeps repeating some very large runtimes.
It used to be that in 2003, when I wrote mobile apps, one considered desktop apps as resource free-for-alls and mobile apps as something where you carefully optimized for size, memory, performance etc. Mobile devices are much more powerful now, but they are still meant for efficient programming since the battery life is not a solved problem. Other resources are not that cheap either. I am always strapped for space on devices where a microsd expansion slot is not available. Yet, we are now behaving as if these problems have disappeared.
Python and Perl would have never made it, if people filtered by that logic.
Programming languages don't need a huge company backing them up, as long as there is enough of a community. If Rust folks are as zealous as the Ruby folks were during the Rails era, we will have a neat C++ replacement.
I have not used Rust yet and have even been critical (as in, just add those semantics to C++ somehow and don't create a whole new replacement) of it. But the community does seem to be building momentum.
A peek at module counts
http://www.modulecounts.com/
shows that the Rust community is quite active. They are not merely evangelizing it, but rapidly building value. It does not look like Mozilla is significantly driving it on the module front. It only has half the modules as Go (which is impressive for a zero-cost abstraction language compared to a language that is high level application language), but the modules seem to be accumulating at more than twice the speed now. Modules make the language.
I wish Nim had that kind of momentum though. That is a language better aligned for my purposes.
I use an Android phone. Aside from some small, personal apps I wrote for myself a while ago, I am not really an app developer and don't have an in-depth understanding of the issues.
But my annoyance is this: there are apps that I only use once a month and others not even that. I definitely don't need them running in any form, even with the lightest footprint and some of them are consuming power. They keep coming back the instant I killed them. Why do the modern OS vendors assume they know best? I would like to have control over the execution policy, not the app developer. In Windows, I could remove entries from the startup, task scheduler etc. In Unix, I have full control. Why can't I do that in modern operating systems? Yes, I am aware there are startup editors in Android. I found them unreliable or inadequate.
I as the user, have much better context information on how my apps need to run. Sure, people can shoot themselves in the foot, but provide a means to restore defaults when custom configurations aren't working, but don't take away control altogether.
Every commercial app developer wants his app to be ready to go. In Windows that meant far too many developers would add their apps to system startup. With enough such entries, it made a large proportion of consumer machines to go sluggish by swapping and many systems were upgraded just because the users did not know how to clean up their startup items. Sure, the modern systems prevent all that, but that does not mean I should not have any control. The lesson here is that developers cannot be trusted to be respectful of shared system resources (and so the OS takes over more control), not that the users cannot be trusted. At least, let the apps be better controlled in developer mode. It took what 5 or 6 versions before Google started allowing users to rescind permissions? I want more permissions (and with better granularity) to rescind.
Well, that was my rant. If I missed any obvious solutions, enlighten me.
Emacs wasn't bloated enough.
So we had to make VS Code that takes 500 MB on starting with a few files.
- The new service must have bureaus and fully paid journalists on the field.
- News must heavily outweigh opinion. When opinion is presented, it must be backed by quantitative analyses, not mere rhetoric.
- Must regularly publish original studies, analyses and visualizations.
- The opinions they present must be from well-known experts in their fields - well-known, not because they often bloviate, but regarded well by their scholarly peers.
- Entertainment sections and cute stories must be at an absolute minimum. No click baits. Focus on serious issues that impact the world - economy, science, wars.
This generally means I gravitate towards big media in print. No outlet is perfect in everything, all have their biases - a combination can smooth things out.
I am not defending any "hypocrisy from authority" from a semi-totalitarian state nor am I suggesting perfect equivalence between anything - analogies, after all, can only go so far.
From what I recall from several decades ago, persecution started when Falun Gong did a large scale demonstration in the public spaces. This was seen as a flexing of muscle and the one-party establishment immediately recognized their potential for political organization and was alarmed, especially when it was jittery in the wake of the Tiananmen Square protests. Such level of organization was probably seen as a precursor to an incredibly chaotic time.... for them, in light of the Taiping Rebellion, this is probably a precursor to a very bloody act of sedition (obviously, mere precursors are not acceptable standards in our societies, nor is repression of any kind, but this isn't our society and their historical experiences are not ours). So in that sense, it was Falun Gong which issued the first challenge.
Is CCP free speech oriented? Obviously not. Neither is Falun Gong (all cults talk free speech only when it suits them - I think you would agree with me on that. No one can criticize even one or two actions of a cult leader and still expect to stay in it without being cowered to submission). Their flexing of muscle was in part to muzzle a physicist who just wrote an article in a university magazine on the superstitious nature of Falun Gong.
On Falun Gong, it will say it is a cult.... because it is. Excuse China for having a low tolerance for cults.
The last time they let a cult go out of control (when a dude claimed he was Jesus reincarnate), it resulted in more deaths than any war in human history until that point (around the time of US civil war, only 20-30 times the deaths). If US had a cult based civil war of this magnitude, it would have shaped its world view as well.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Cults are to China as Fascism is to the West. It polices cults as the West monitors neo-nazi groups to keep them in check. If Europe can police antisemitic groups, China can police cults. They both have their historical wounds and different standards for reactions.
All programming paradigms have useful abstractions to offer. Eventually, they will all come together. Object orientation is great, until one overdoes it in design pattern hell. Likewise with functional programming. There are great many ideas in academic programming languages that will be made more accessible and integrated into mainstream programming languages. Functional programming is a dead end only in the sense SmallTalk was a dead end. People may not use SmallTalk much today, but its ideas live on in nearly every language we use today. Functional programming is here to stay. It won't replace imperative and object-oriented programming, but will add to them.
First and foremost, programming languages are for people, not computers. So if regular programmers who form the bulk of the workforce can't grok them, the languages need to be fixed, not people. Haskell is too hard for most. But it has many wonderful ideas that can be distilled into simpler forms and adopted and integrated elsewhere. Python got list comprehensions from it and perhaps the indentation.
C# is absorbing some features and Java is doing that less elegantly. Scala is a good balance and has already established itself. But people still find the type system complicated. So there are attempts to bring forth a simpler Scala - Kotlin, Ceylon etc.
We all agree that things like compact syntax, first order functions, lambdas, streams, type inference etc that functional languages pioneered, belong in every language. We still haven't sorted out how to make more advanced type systems, provability, strict programming without side effects etc more approachable. We should not need to have this much trouble explaining what a monad is or isn't. We'll get there, eventually.
There is a good reason to have that code at the database tier and not in the "real application tier" aka client client tier. And this reason is partly the same reason as why we do stored procedures. We want the data to be resolved and reduced before it leaves the database tier, not sorted out in the client tier. This also allows for centralizing business logic rather than have it spread out among various client implementations. And the non-standardness is no different than doing non-standard stuff that we already do in stored procedures.
> For licensing and vendor lock-in.
How exactly? That makes no sense.
They embedded an open source language. Previously, the extensions were via CLR.
If you mean it is non-standard SQL, nearly every major database today supports non-standard extensions - both proprietary and open source.
Postgres, since a long time, like SQL Server now, allows *embedding* Python in the database run stored procedures.
The MySQL and DB2 links you provided are not the same. They are simply about calling stored procedures from Python clients. Pretty much every relational database and programing language can do the latter.
Embedding within the database, on the hand, is a more exotic and a very useful feature.
Wonder how this fits into that.
Nitpicking, buy it was JPython in 1997
It has been Jython since 1999
https://wiki.python.org/jython...
> I do not know why anybody would even think of using a programming language without static typing.
- Dynamically typed programming languages are more productive when writing smaller quantities of rapidly evolving code.
- It is mainly a library and an ecosystem issue. Python tends to have all the modules I need, while Haskell, OCaml and Scala often don't... and they often seem to be much easier to pick up and use.
For example, Pandas equivalents are much less mature in other ecosystems. On language merits alone, I should be using Scala more than Python, but in practice, Python modules win me over.
I wanted to memoise a function. To look up a module and put in the couple of lines (an import and a decorator) needed to achieve that probably took a couple of minutes in Python, and I was back to the real meat of my code. I would have spent much longer in Java.