d3ckard

Controversially, yes.

The right frame of comparison is not towards average Joe, but towards governments. Billionaires, for better or worse, are independent power sources, which IMO in grand scheme of things are useful.

I think the problem with modern world is not that some people have lots of money, but that we allowed money to buy pretty much everything else.

We invented those strategies when we had way less RAM. Vast majority of programs could be entirely allocated upfront those days.

I'm using almost exclusively Apple Maps in Poland and never had any issue (that I remember). Your mileage may vary and so on.

Disputable. One could argue that artificial nature of US cities (i.e. lack of centuries of accumulated decisions) were bigger driver of this than cars themselves.

No, you don’t. It only sounds nice. In practice this enables all kinds of spontaneous prosecution with any possible motive.

They very much want to have manufacturing, since it’s a requirement for war. They just don’t realize it. Plus, it is a conflict between all the extra money to spend and long term state welfare.

It's not advantage, it makes for artificial demand for your currency, which completely screws up all the relevant metrics and makes you unable to actually inflate the currency when getting less competitive.

It's resource curse on steroids.

Under normal conditions, when your economy becomes less competitive, your currency gets depreciated, increasing competitiveness.

Unless of course everybody is forced to buy your currency to get an essential resource. This causes: - the currency to maintain value better - puts you in position of other countries having to maintain a trade surplus with you so they can actually purchase said resource - the oil producers end up with great amounts of your currency, which they have to spend, getting a political foothold in your country.

Petrodollar almost certainly was devastating to US economy. And like most resource curses, it's like a drug - you need to stop taking it to get better, but it will hurt as hell.

This is particularly funny if you consider petrodollar to be a bad deal for US, not a good one. Ironically, if yuan becomes new petroleum currency, it might hurt Chinese long term.

How about not starting a war? Especially as a sudden attack during negotiations? With a country that has been historically bending backwards to find some kind of diplomatic solution?

And since when murdering the leaders repeatedly is a valid war strategy?

Not even mentioning that Chamenei was killed together with a daughter, son in law and a grandson. But who cares about accidental casualties, right? Just one more kid.

Yes, especially murdering a school full of girls during the first days seems like a perfect example of extensive planning and preparation.

Yes, Betamax is undoubtedly the future.

False dichotomy. What ICEs are or aren't has zero impact on whether BEVs are the future.

It’s very disputable whether BEVs are industry’s future and your entire thesis depends on it to be true.

The main issue IMHO is the monopolization of the industry, especially in the US. Once the giants do layoffs, the rest of the market can't absorb the people effectively, which leads to oversaturated job market.

We can of course discuss how many people got into industry during COVID heyday and whether they should have, but mostly I think it's about those behemoths having disproportionately high impact on the entire labour market.

I would argue effectiveness point.

It's certainly helpful, but has a tendency to go for very non idiomatic patterns (like using exceptions for control flow).

Plus, it has issues which I assume are the effect of reinforcement learning - it struggles with letting things crash and tends to silence things that should never fail silently.

Yes, but allocations generate ever increasing combinatorial space of possible failure modes.

Static allocation requires you to explicitly handle overflows, but also by centralizing them, you probably need not to have as many handlers.

Technically, all of this can happen as well in language with allocations. It’s just that you can’t force the behavior.

Personally, I see dynamic allocation more and more as a premature optimization and a historical wart.

We used to have very little memory, so we developed many tricks to handle it.

Now we have all the memory we need, but tricks remained. They are now more harmful than helpful.

Interestingly, embedded programming has a reputation for stability and AFAIK game development is also more and more about avoiding dynamic allocation.

Nice correction :)

It’s actually quite tricky though. The allocation still happens and it’s not limited to, so you could plausibly argue both ways.

Personally I believe static allocation has pretty huge consequences for theoretical computer science.

It’s the only kind of program that can be actually reasoned about. Also, not exactly Turing complete in classic sense.

Makes my little finitist heart get warm and fuzzy.

Problem does not lay in not declaring wealth.

Because only poor people need income. If you have enough assets, income is optional.

You don’t get it. Tax system is already very skewed to the top, as in majority of the income comes from a few.

The problem is that the top paying those taxes are not the rich people.

Eroding them is beneficial to other groups of society, not the rich.

It's like with corporations. Corporations love complex legal systems, as they are the only ones with money to deal with them. Simplification actually benefits smaller enterprises.

Generally, there are no systems that are 100% bulletproof. This applies to everything. So, the more power you have, the more likely you are to exploit the existing loops.

Who is actually affected? Those less powerful. Progressive tax system hits the middle class (actual middle class, la petite bourgeoisie, not the modern bullshit redefinition of the term) hardest, making it harder for them to make it rich and compete with actual rich people.

As the effect, rich protect inheritance by trusts and avoid taxes by not having income (plenty of tricks available with borrowing), while people like doctors, lawyers, small business owners fund the state and hit hard limits on what can they make.

Don't believe me? Check how much of the tax income comes from top brackets. You may be surprised. Pro tip: system is very skewed to the top.

Common misconception IMO.

High marginal taxes and high inheritance taxes do not affect the rich - they eliminate competition for them.

I do agree on antitrust and antimonopoly though.

Honestly, have been excited about Zig for quite a while, dabbled a bit a while back and was waiting for it getting closer to 1.0 to actually do a deep dive... but that moment doesn't seem to come.

I don't mind, it's up to the maintainers on how they want to proceed. However, I would greatly appreciate if Zig news was a bit clearer on what's happening, timelines etc.

I think it takes relatively little time to do so, but optics would be so much better.

My biggest gripe with your reasoning is a hidden assumption that everything humans do is easily encodable in what we call AI today.

I don’t think this is the case.

What can be asserted without proof, can be dismissed without proof.

The proof burden is on AI proponents.

Absolut (Swedish) is my go to vodka, as even in Poland it's widely available and good quality.

From Polish brands, black Żubrówka, Ostoya and Chopin are good. Normal Żubrówka (the one with grass) is nice as well, but it's not neutral vodka (recommend with apple juice).

And obviously Belvedere is the fancy brand.