WalterBright

I miss cranky geeks

Read my cranky posts about what an abomination Unicode has become!

I wonder how the future will judge you and I.

I've lived long enough to see a distinct shift in what people consider moral and immoral. Are you certain in your moral rectitude? (I am, even though I fall short of it, and change my mind now and then.)

these men were judged by the morality of their times

Half the colonies considered slavery to be moral in their time. So much so that, a few years later, fought and died in a terrible war to defend it.

What is moral and what isn't changes with the times. For example, blaspheming could get you murdered by the state in medieval times. The colonies had different views of morality, especially religious morality. It was immoral to work on the Sabbath. It was immoral to have sex before marriage.

The Founders saw fit to abolish the nobility, and disassociated religion from government. We've forgotten what an enormous leap both of those were (each of the colonies had an establishment of religion). I've seen endless documentaries on the founding of the country, and there's no mention of either of these.

Half of the colonies did abolish slavery. But, again, if it was demanded of the other half, the Union would never have happened.

Jefferson, Franklin, and Washington all held slaves.

I am certainly not advocating slavery. I'm merely pointing out that people should be judged on the morality of their times, not today's morality. If we judged past people by our modern standards, they would all be condemned.

I understand that. I also know that half the country thought slavery was ok, and made it clear they would not join the union if it was abolished.

I consider freedom to include the free market. Norway has a mixed economy, due to its extensive regulation.

While it operates as a free-market country, the Norwegian government holds large ownership stakes in strategic industries, including petroleum, hydroelectric power, telecommunications, and banking.

Experts often characterize the Norwegian economy as a blend of private enterprise, state ownership, and social welfare that provides high standards of living.

(Cribbed from google)

People are better judged by the mores of their time, not our time.

Besides, without Franklin, there would be no United States, the free-est country in history.

The only radio show I ever particularly liked was Jeff Gilbert's "Brain Pain" in the late 80s, on KCMU 90.3. He played metal music, particularly from the local Seattle bands.

What was fun about it was his irreverent sense of humor, the silly contests he'd run, the ads that made no sense, and all the drugged out band members he'd invite to the station.

I still have several cassettes of Brain Pain. Lost treasures, I presume. I wound up buying many of the albums he spun.

Lots of people have erratic income, such as anyone who owns a business. The options are:

1. buy a Lambo, then get it reposessed

2. save/invest on the peaks

Yes one of my very favorite albums! I'd put it in my top 10 easy, and I listen to a lot of music. I still remember when a friend of mine dropped the needle and I heard it for the first time.

The Thriller album is more popular, but I like Off The Wall better.

Michael Jackson was smart enough to hire Quincy Jones to produce his albums, and his work took a great leap forward as a result.

The tragedy is that we want artists to have reliable income

If artists create art that people are willing to pay for, great!

I don't really want to pay artists for art I don't like.

I remember when Nirvana suddenly became successful. Many in the local community called them "sellouts", which is quite unfair.

Lack of exercise results in smaller muscles, too.

“Overload set” is a term of art that seemingly arises from the reuse of overload rules across the years. Overload sets quietly power a lot of D’s generic programming, and once you understand them explicitly, a whole class of API design opens up.

Wouldn't that drive textile manufacturing out of the EU?

For printers, the cost is pretty much all in the setup. Printing 1000 copies costs about the same as printing 20.

Though the window of opinions you can express publicly has narrowed in the last decade

It's more like what was heresy earlier aligned with one's viewpoint. The change is it has shifted, not narrowed.

Interesting point. But also consider:

1. pressure may compromise the electronics

2. water pressure increases very rapidly with depth. You'd have to pressurize the data center with a liquid with the same density

3. even a small differential will produce leaks

Water under high pressure will find any weakness. (For example, the places where the wires go in and out.)

Corrosion indeed is always a problem.

Data centers submerged in the ocean

Sooner or later it's going to leak.

To clarify,

    foreach (s; vec)

    foreach (ref s; vec) s = "replacement";

If you prefer writing:

    for (auto&& [i, it] : vec | std::views::enumerate)
        println ("{}:{}", ++i, it);

    foreach (i, s; vec)
        writeln(i, ": ", s);

Some folks don't like iostreams

I thought it was ugly in 1987, and it hasn't improved with age. Then < > for templates made it worse.

Then there's formatted I/O:

    void IOS_precision()
    {
    cout << "\n--------------------------\n";
    cout << "Implementing ios::precision\n\n";
    cout << "Implementing ios::width";
    cout.setf(ios::fixed, ios::floatfield);
    cout.precision(2);
    cout<<3.1422;
    cout << "\n--------------------------\n";
    }

copied even if badly

Any program can be written in any language. But why suffer?

Schools should really teach the Law of Supply and Demand so adults don't need to belatedly discover it.

Thanks. Looks like it finally made C++23!

std::cout << i << ": " << v << std::endl;

C++ needs to abandon iostreams. Didn't the C++ community acknowledge that it was a bad idea? In the early days of D, people did want to do a version of it for D, but I objected and currently nobody wants it.

D has several usages for `foreach` depending on the number and type of its arguments. In this case, it sees that `vec` is an array, and so constructs a loop over the array. If `vec` was a range, the loop will be constructed as a loop over the array.

It's nice because it makes the syntax for arrays and ranges interchangeable, making for easy refactoring.

Although D is a strongly typed language, it is very good at type inference. The `s` is inferred as `string`, and `i` as `size_t`.

C++ should copy D's elegance:

    import std.stdio;

    string[9] vec = [ 
      "the", "quick", "brown", "fox", 
      "jumped", "over", "the", "lazy", "dog" 
    ];

    void main()
    {
      foreach (i, s; vec)
        writeln(i, ": ", s);
    }

yes as in ... ?

66% of Federal spending is on entitlements.