coutego

Hmmm, being from Europe and having driven on a holiday in the US, I'd say that people are more careful and respect rules better in the US than in Europe (certainly than Southern Europe, but even in parts of the North). Driving in US reminded me of driving in the UK.

Of course, US is a big country and my perception could be not very typical. Extrapolating from one data point is dangerous. It's like comparing driving in Naples and Amsterdam. Both are Europe, but the driving experience is fairly dissimilar.

Just another data point: walking to work takes 15 minutes for me. Same time by metro. Driving is 45-60 minutes.

many Spanish speakers use "Americano" to refer to inhabitants of the Americas, and since that word looks like "American" in English, many of these Spanish speakers believe English speakers should modify the meaning of "American" to mirror their "Americano"

Spanish speakers, or, rather, the Crown of Castille created the word "America" and "americanos" to refer to the new continent and their people. English speakers adopted the same word, but with a different meaning.

Not saying that it's wrong for US people to refer to their country by anh word that they chose. They are free to do so. But it is useful, I think, to understand that people for other countries of America, who call themselves "americanos" because that's what they are, can be surprised to be told they are not "Americans", even though they are "americanos". I guess it's confusing for them, at the very least.

Just imagine that Colombians started to call their country "America" and when you went there they would insist that you are not American ("americano"). I guess you would not be amused. I don't know.

I'm not "americano", but European, so it doesn't really affect me. Just trying to give some context to better understand others. Peace! :-)

That's what I wrote, that in English speaking countries you refer to the whole continent as "the Americas".

The name "America", though, was given to the whole "New World", which is what we now call "America", the continent. British started using the name just for what is now the US, so in English speaking countries, the usage is different nowdays. In other countries "America" continues to be used for the whole continent (it is still considered one conti nent, not two).

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amerigo_Vespucci https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continent

Yes. America.

I know, I know. English speaking countries refer to the continent as "the Americas" rather than America, as the rest of the planet does but, then, the rest of the planet refers to the "United States of America" as the "US" and (normally) not as "America" .

Now seriously, America is a given name for the whole continent (with Noth America and South America as its two subcontinents) and was never meant to be used as the name of any one of its 35 countries.

Many in the EU are often doing the same chauvinistic thing, refering to themselves as "Europe" forgetting that there are 23 European countries that are not part of the EU. That case is slightly (just slightly) less annoying because at least is 27 EU European countries vs 23 non EU European countries, so at least they can claim to be the majority of countries. US case is one country vs. 34, so objectively even more absurd.

The pure text editing is just a tiny detail. I exclusively use vim keybindings inside Emacs, as many others do.

Emacs makes extending the editor a breeze. As a new user this just means that you have packages (like VS 'extensions' or IntelliJ 'plugins') for, well, everything. For a more advanced user it means you can automate away many things that are a pain in the ass to repeatedly do in your daily work.

I'd suggest you try Doom Emacs when you have a couple of free hours to get a taste of what a properly configured Emacs can do. And, once you are on it, just press "SPC f p", select 'init.el' and check what popular packages you can activate just by uncommenting a line and doing a 'doom sync'. Then press "SPC f p" and select 'config.el' to check how even "configuration" in Emacs is just elisp code. You are just running a piece of code you can edit and even debug from itself _while_ you are running it (although that'd require a bit more explanation of how it's done) . This should give you a taste of what Emacs is about.

Italy, like the rest of south europe is hobbled by an army of bureaucrats doing busywork and their jobs are the first to be threatened by an AI speaking fluent Italian. So it helps them to keep unemployment from getting even higher

I wonder whether there are real hard numbers supporting this statement. Not saying it's not true, just wondering whether it actually is.

I checked once for another country of South Europe and the reality was that both France and Germany had more "bureocrats" (public servants) per capita, contrary to public perception.

There are many things we all think are true that, when actually checked, turn out to be false. Sometimes it's a matter of false stereotypes and sometimes it's something that was true at some point but it's not anymore.

For example, about social mobility: USA is known as the land of the opportunities and a much more open and meritocratic place than Europe. That was certainly the case when it was founded. But the reality is that in the last decades (Western) Europe's social cohesion system created a much more favourable environment for children of poor people to prosper somewhat equal opportunities to children of medium and high earners (good and cheap/affordable public education, strong social network of public services,...), while the opposite trend took place in the USA. The results are quite outstanding:

https://www.weforum.org/reports/global-social-mobility-index...

In some countries, the word "Government" is used to refer to the Executive power, not including the Legislative and Executive branches of the State.

You are right: here in the EU we often refer to ourselves as 'Europeans', thus implicitly excluding people from the non EU part of Europe. That's inacurate (and a bit disrespecful to non-UE Europeans, if you ask me). For that reason I try to always use the expressions 'EU' and 'EU citizen' instead of 'Europe' and 'European'.

Which reminds me that USA != America, also. It would be perfect we should not have to deduce from context when 'American' refers to anyone from the whole continent, from Canada to Chile, or just someone from the US. I guess it would be more practical to use 'US' and 'US citizen', for clarity...

Exactly. Brexit long term net effect could be a few points off their GDP. That's not the end of the world, but it's certainly significant and it will make British people a poorer, which of course has an impact on public services. Whether this is worth it's up to British people to assess.

My personal suspiction is that UK citizens were mislead about the consequences of leaving but, hey, democracy is about taking decisions with incomplete information. People have spoken and their decision is sacred. I wish the UK the best luck and it's with sadness that I believe they will need a lot of it.

Euro Area inflation is significantly lower than UK, same as Germany, France, Spain, ...

In the EU as a whole it's slightly higher because of the East countries (Hungary, Romania, Latvia, Estonia, ...) where inflation is crazy high because of their dependency on Russia for energy.

UK is in the very West of Europe, not East, and not reliant on Russia as East countries are. The economic impact of Brexit has just been significant, as it was supposed to be. Everybody knew it would be. Brexit was never about economy, but mainly sovereignty. That's a legitimate trade-off, of course, and many in the UK prefer to be a bit poorer in exchange for less dependency on their neighbours. I respect that. But it's important not to fool oneself thinking that leaving the highest economy in the world (EU economy was bigger than US' before UK left) was going to be good for the UK economy. That's just nonsense.

Exactly! In fact, it would be wonderful if you had some standard way of producing different units at different scales for a given magnitude, upwards or downwards, so you could use the best in a given context. Perhaps you could even randomly chose a fixed easy multiplier to automatically produce these derived units from the fundamental unit, and then use the same factor for every magnitude. You only need to chose some base unit for every magnitude and then, boom, you get a full family of units at different scales to chose from depending on your context.

How cool would that be? I'd suggest to use a factor that is the easiest to multiply by, in order to simplify operations. I guess the optimal factor would be 10. What is easier to multiply or divide by than 10, right?

I think I need to patent this bright idea. It's amazing nobody has thought about it before.

Well, if you take population into account (even just the EU part of Europe has more population than the US) the difference between US and Europe is not that big. China though...

It depends on what you consider "biased".

If you ask chatGPT whether 2 + 2 is 4 or 5, would you consider it biased if it said that 2 + 2 = 4? If you asked it whether smoking increases or decreases the probability of developping cancer, would you consider it biased if it replied the former, rather than the latter?

Now, if some politicians of any party started saying that they think we should be open minded and don't be dogmatic insisting that 2 + 2 = 4, would that make chatGPT biased, then, if it continues giving the right answer? If they said that smoking is good for your health and increase your chances or living a longer and healthier life, would chatGPT be biased if it continued telling the truth? Are politicians the ones that decide what facts are true or false?

Scientific facts are not biased. Humans can be. Dishonest humans can easily be, for a price. But we should not change the replies of chatGPT about objective facts because of those humans, should we?

Considered far-left in any country in Western Europe? (genuine question).

I follow USA news a bit and nothing comes to my mind right now that could be considered far left around here. But of course I don't follow every political debate in USA, so I'm sure I'm missing some dividing issue... Do you have an example of something that could be considered far left in Europe, perhaps?

I understand that this means "center" as per USA standards. Given that USA leans towards the extreme individualism and quite strongly to the right (Sanders would be considered center-left in Western Europe) I guess this means that now chatGPT is right wing by European standards.

That's a bit concerning, to be honest.

It's very ironic that the meme 'meme' mutated itself to become something much less sophisticated (an image with a caption shared on the Internet) than its original (and true) meaning. Just another proof that meme natural selection favours the less sophisticated ones. But it's 2022 and we all know that.

Truth to be told, the same happens in gene natural selection. All animals are insects, other than a rounding error.

You mean that "Nobody wants to work anymore" is a successful meme, then.

If you install Doom Emacs [1] after installing Emacs itself, I think it would be a couple of days. At least if you can live with the things Doom comes with. It's just a matter of following the instructions, uncommenting the relevant modules in .doom.d/init.el, syncing the changes and off you go.

[1] https://github.com/doomemacs/doomemacs#install

Unfortunately, that doesn't solve the problem.

The issue is not which labels keys have printed on them. I don't look at my keyboards and I always remap keys for them to be in the positions I like. That's fine and works in MacOS.

The issue is that the same application (Chrome, for example, but happens with most of them) uses the same key combinations in Windows, Linux, Chrome OS and Android (I use DeX from time to time on my S7 Tab) to do something but then decides to do something different in MacOS _without giving the user the possibility to fix it_.

Chrome example: C-w closes a tab and C-TAB changes tab in the first four OSs. In MacOS, though, it's S-w and C-TAB, respectively. There is no remapping which can fix this because the correspondence between keymappings on a given modifier key is not a bijection. The only possibility would be that each program gave the user the option to "use standard keymappings". But very few do, AFAIK. Emacs is the only one that works the same on all systems. But I also need a browser ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

I'm not saying that MacOS convention is worse or better than the standard. In fact, I personally like the idea of having the CTRL-like functionality on my thumbs, rather than my pinkies, and I could migrate to this layout on all computers I use (via key remaping, in the same way that I already have remapped on all computers I use the ESC key on the place that normally CAPS is). I'm just saying that using MacOS makes me slower, both when using MacOS itself _and_ when using the other OSs, since suddenly I have to conciously decide which key combo to use. Normally this was something that just happened subconciously and didn't interrupt my flow.

I'm quite sure it's just a question of what you are used to. It is for me, anyway.

My first PC (~year 2000) came with Windows but I wanted to use some software that only existed for Unix at the time and I was used to work in Unix anyway, so I heard about Linux and installed it. Great, I got an OS I was used to and the software I needed for my project.

When finally I had to use Windows for work a couple of years later it took time to adapt and, even to this day, I just find it easier to use Linux. It's just a metter of what you are used to.

Last year I bought a MacBook, because of the M1, and I can't get used to the "weirdness" of MacOS, specially the keyboard and the window management. Every other machine I use (Linux, Windows or ChromeOS) uses the same keybindings but in MacOS the same software I use everywhere else (e.g. Chrome) has been forced to change the standard keybindings to something else and and it's even not configurable. Programs just don't implement stuff as C-c to copy and C-v to paste. Programs link that functionality to S-c and S-v, instead. WTF? This means there is no remapping of the keyboard that can fix this, since the software itself is broken.

For me, this makes the machine pretty unusable. I'm a keyboard guy and quite fast at it. But when I'm in MacOS I waste a lot of time finding the right keybindings even for switching Windows. Example: S-w to close a tab but C-TAB to switch tabs %~(

There are no comparable laptops to M[1,2] Macs, AFAIK. Linux on an M1 simply flies. It's just stupidly quick. A MacBook with Linux is the most amazing Linux machine that exists, even without the GPU acceleration.

I bought my first MacBook just because of the M1 processor and /despite/ the OS, which is ok-ish but not my cup of tea. I'm looking forward to running Linux on it as my daily driver.

I'd say that Racket makes for an easier introduction to Lisps, at least for people not familiar with the functional paradigm.

The reason for this is that Clojure intentionally discourages many common imperative idioms by not making any effort to support them. That forces you to learn how to do things "the Clojure way". Once you know it, you realise it makes sense and it's a better way to do thing in that context, but when you are coming from outside, it can be very hard to get things.

At least it was for me, after some 20 years of programming experience. Racket? Sure, I was able to do (simple) programs without too many problems in a matter of hours. Clojure? Lots of "huh?" moments for months until the "aha" moment when things makes complete sense.

I'm quite a big fan of Clojure, for full context.

We have people trying to protect Nazis from kidnapping the public conversation. Not very successful in the last ~10 years, though.

We tried free speech on the 20s and 30s. Didn't go well.

The reason Apple allows Vim and would not allow Emacs in the Store is very interesting to reflect about.

Monodevelop, I think: https://www.monodevelop.com

It wasn't a planned thing. I had recently got injured playing football, so I was stuck at home, not being able to walk or drive. I started checking the #mono IRC channel (it was 2003 and internet was something you did over a 48k modem, when your home phone line was not needed). Some guys, lead by Miguel de Icaza, the founder of Gnome, were implementing a compiler of C# and a bytecode interpreter of .NET IL, and I was very curious about it. I kept downloading, compiling and trying things out.

Then one day Miguel wrote in the channel that it would be nice to have some graphical editor and that somebody could perhaps port SharpDevelop over to Linux, by replacing Windows.Forms by calls to GTK. I said that I'd give it a shot and... well, 10 days later we had a working editor and half a dozen of contributors.

https://tirania.org/blog/archive/2008/Mar-14.html

https://github.com/coutego/version-control

Implementing it.

Once I read somewhere it is just a key - object, append only, DB then it seemed easy to implement the core of it, so I did. It's simpler that it sounds.

Spring does not need to infect your codebase. You can use the container without importing anything from Spring in other than one class (the one bootstrapping the system).

If you want to use Spring classes in the implementation of your clases then yes, you will need to import them. But this is no different than any other library.

If you just use XML configuration files (or use @Configuration) you don't (shouldn't) use @Inject, @Autowire and all other abominations. Or at least you didn't need, last time I checked a couple years ago. All your code is clear, free of any Spring code (unless you use some of the libraries) and fully reusable, testable, etc.

Why everyone moved to annotations for "dependency injection" (that crap is NOT DI!!!!!), not only in Java, but Python, Typescript, etc. I just can't understand. It can't only be the convenience of doing so by saving some keystrokes, but I just can't get it. We solved the modularity beautifully with Spring (and other DI engines) and then we proceed to throw away the solution and recreate the problem again? Get off my lawn...