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linspace

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Henin was placed in handcuffs because police in New Jersey thought the car was stolen. That was because, months earlier, the car had been courtesy towed in West Philly, and she reported it stolen as police advised. Henin followed up with Philadelphia police when she later found her car, but they mistakenly left it in the stolen-vehicle database.

It could be the argument for a sitcom. Not funny in real life when police is pointing a gun at you.

Refusing to compile takes the position that the compiler knows more than the developers. Or maybe are the compiler writers thinking they are the ones that know more? Maybe I'm being biased because I could consider using it in my free time and I already have enough bondage at work

Sincerity under payment has to be taken for what it is. I expect and appreciate to be treated nicely when going to a restaurant but I'm under no illusion that it's because I'm going to pay for it, otherwise I doubt all that people would be cooking, serving and cleaning afterwards with a smile in their face while I sit there saying thank you.

I think the problem is libraries implicitly affecting code outside the library. This time has been related to optimization of floating point operations, next time it will be other thing. Why bother having lexically scoped languages if the real behavior is dinamical? Debugging this kind of error is very hard

Also, it is interesting that outside of SV and HN crowd, we thought MATLAB is awesome. We had all the toolboxes, there is a gazillion of them. Even obscure RF related stuff. You just can't find a library for something like a phased array analysis. May be you can, but it won't be as high quality and industry proven as this: https://www.mathworks.com/products/phased-array.html

As a matter of fact I find most comments about Matlab here supportive. I actually do find Matlab to be a polished product, specially in the IDE and documentation part. In the end you use whatever saves you time, that's why most people that use Python have chosen Python: because of the libraries. I have personally found Matlab toolboxes quite simplistic for my own purposes. Most people, myself included, actually trust more that SW is used and deployed in the millions than any kind of support.

flooding market with free money called quantitative easing isn’t anymore putting selective pressure on efficiency of company

On the contrary I think that selective pressure is brutal. That's why everyone is trying to predict the future, because everyone knows that whatever they are doing today it's not gonna be valid in 20 years. Companies are constantly reinventing themselves, changing the way they do business. Internet has swallowed whole sectors of the economy and changed even the most traditional ones in what, 20 years?. Nobody would call you crazy if you said that in another twenty years Apple or Google have disappeared or are irrelevant.

Your comment cheers me up, but you are assigning to much blame to individuals.

Everybody notices that companies could function (even better actually) with something like 1/3 or less of their workforce. The other 2/3 are just doing BS work. Why? As with evolution there is really no objective, just some causes with an outcome. One of them is that companies don't know what to do with the money. They have all this people trying to figure out what to do next. Hence the hiring freezes in some companies right now with the economic downturn.

Should I Switch From Turbo Pascal to Turbo Modula-2?

The million dollar question.

More seriously, I love Pascal and similar. My first two books were Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs (Pascal) and Algorithms and Data Structures (Modula 2), both by Nicklaus Wirth.

I was expecting something about (paper) page grammage. I suppose disambiguating by adding _web_ page is out of the question given the audience.

General-purpose computing is just too economically valuable to be gotten rid of.

General-purpose computing is a just a local optimum for profit extraction. Nevertheless it feels like guessing the correct answer for the wrong reasons. I welcome and embrace the FUD.

Good times create weak men

They give you strong science, economy and as a byproduct strong military.

You often see a growing discontent among wealthy societies where everything is taken care of.

Like in Sri-Lanka, what a decadent society.

We are terrible at maintaining 100% concentration over extended periods of time while nothing is happening. People fall asleep driving. The mind starts to wander. We get distracted by our children.

I don't think it's about believing the hype. It's about having a system put in place which encourages you to stop paying attention.

I do think there have been great improvements in car safety thanks to AI. My car self brakes if it detects a pedestrian while I'm in reverse. It flashes lights in my side mirrors if another vehicle passes by. I think those systems are safety first and if you buy a car they are the responsibility of the car maker and not the buyer. I don't think you would expect people checking the airplane model when taking a flight. It's the responsibility of the airline and the manufacturer.

On the other hand: are humans really able to explain their inner workings of the brain, or aren’t we as well describing what kind of input features motivated our decisions?

That's really an interesting question. Even mathematical proofs are not really 100% rigorous. They are really about convincing others and it's really dependent on the others knowledge. As an engineer I would require much more detailed steps than a mathematician to accept a proof (if we engineers cared about that, of course).

So, to summarize, an explanation is really an ill defined concept.

There is no money in interface innovation. Certainly not for keyboards, over which only programmers obsses (me included). Most people is interested in how it looks at best, not in how effective it's going to be for typing or if they will be better to stay in the zone. We represent 0.1% of users (number totally fake).

I don't want to do all development-related tasks in my web browser

You don't need to use a browser to do remote development. Emacs has been able to remote dev through SSH for ages. Not only opening files, but also launching processes. VSCode also has this feature via an extension that works automatically.

I want to be able to experiment with the software in various local setups

Precisely. Not everyone has a suitable local machine, maybe because of security, maybe because access to data or maybe because needed hardware.

Are people really clamoring for this feature?

Absolutely. I think it's truly part of the success of jupyter notebooks, to put an example.

I think the quality of content is not related to whether is for or against some part of the population. As a matter of fact I find it quite dull and artificial when is so obsessively centered on some aspects like race or sexuality.

It reminds me of Don Quixote: it's a masterpiece of literature but I find different parts of varying quality. Some parts are eternal and you can relate to the glories and miseries of people from 500 years ago. Other parts, like when Don Quixote starts to ramble about honor, what is honorable or not, and so on and on, are quite boring. Not because honor is not important, we have laws nowadays about defamation after all, but you cannot make it the center of your life.

Making your content either offensive to some part of the population or making it all about some political agenda results in low quality content, IMHO.

It's a completely different thing to produce something of value and to get paid for it. There are plenty of examples. Immediately come to mind operating systems or compilers. Or a lot of completely underfunded but fundamental open source tools that everybody uses but nobody pays.

I can't wrap my head around this "the assets but not the liabilities" argument

Because it's impossible. Take a loan, acquire the money and not the debt, repeat. It's a mental bomb planted by corporate drones to melt your mind. Because if Chewbacca is not a wookie why is he living in Endor? It makes no sense.