room271

'as much as anyone' = they don't like it

As a former software developer, now turned student (studying theology while I train to become a pastor), Typst has been great for writing my dissertation with one notable exception: it really doesn't handle footnotes well. Specifically, see:

https://github.com/typst/typst/pull/8147

Discursive footnotes do not really work when including bibliography references. I've also hit other issues, like footnotes appearing a page before the text they are linked from.

It's a real shame, as otherwise it's great software. I suspect footnotes are currently buggy because most users are currently from the science world and use inline referencing instead.

I'm really hoping this is fixed soon. (And once I hit my current deadline this week, I'll take a look at it myself.)

But at the moment, a big caveat for anyone working in the humanities / who uses e.g. Chicago-style footnotes.

Goroutines are green threads.

Rust needs to be careful that it doesn't invite the type-programming crowd in too much. Even if individual features are helpful, the cultural effect on the programming language in terms of the community (i.e. libraries and idioms) can really fragment and destroy a language. Scala, which I programmed in for many years, is a good example -- lots of great features but ultimately overwhelmed by typesafe abstractions that held theoretical appeal but hampered readability and fragmented the community. (Lack of backwards compatibility and poor tooling also hurt Scala no doubt about it, just as slow compile times hurt Rust.)

Thanks too for the detailed reply. You've made a good case and persuaded me to take a closer look at their reporting in the future!

I completely agree with criticism of expansion of government powers in some contexts but my original point was about gaining perspective and avoiding sensationalism, which I argue the article and many comments here fall into.

Why does it matter if they are a anarchist organisation or not?

'Freedom' and government authority coexist to some extent (tax is an imposition for example, but funds a military which should ensure ongoing freedom, etc.). The article needs to be read on its own merits of course but the organisation who provide it adhere to a different value judgement about where the balance of authority and anarchy should lie in society than most would agree with. That's a helpful data point I think, even if only a small part of the story.

I do care about the OSA, I do care about Digital ID, I do care about the expansion of government powers that I believe are unjustified.

You'll be relieved to see that the compulsory element of Digital ID (for work) has been removed at least (reported widely in press outlets yesterday evening).

Thanks for your considered reply, and I do appreciate my initial post was somewhat exaggerated and done in frustration.

Your own evidence, however -- albeit expressed less polemically -- seems indeed to support my conclusion, namely that on a range of measures the UK is indeed more 'free' than the US. Moreover, it is somewhat a large sleight of hand for you to say 'Trump and his oligarchs aside' when Trump is the President and Congress does not seem interested in curtailing his executive power.

Re inequality, I completely agree that the UK does poorly on inequality measures but the data is somewhat ambiguous here. E.g. the OECD picture is closer to what you describe, but the World Bank (which uses the Luxembourg Income Study) paints a different picture:

France: 31.8 Germany: 32.4 UK: 32.4 USA: 41.4

(https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SI.POV.GINI)

By this measure, the UK is not at all an outlier among the largest EU economies, while the USA is. Moreover, inequality is falling in the UK but rising in the USA so the trend further excacerbates the difference. You can explore many other inequality measures across the USA/UK at https://pip.worldbank.org/# and the picture is very consistent: the USA is less 'equal' across all measures.

I would have to dive into things more to attempt to explain the discrepancy in the two data sources. The Parliamentary report you cite does hint at a partial explanation; the family survey they use doesn't correct for many benefits, which results in an overstatement of inequality. It may also be that the World Bank is total income rather than disposable income but it's not easy to determine their precise methodology (though see https://datanalytics.worldbank.org/PIP-Methodology/surveyest...).

Re so-called pre-crime. All police organisations monitor high risk individuals through increased patrols in hotspots, targeted surveillance, etc. My point I guess is that there is not some binary scale between Minority-Report style precrime units and an hypothesised modern police form that is indifferent to risk factors. It is a scale. The 'precrime' project referred to in the article does not facilitate pre-emptive arrest but appears to provide additional risk data when allocating police resources (and probably helps with parole and rehabilitation strategies too). A touch of suspicion towards the rhetoric of the article is warranted too given the source. In any case, the UK has a long tradition of policing by consent and while there have been some regressions on policing of protest (which I deeply oppose) in general policing in the UK is good and crime is falling.

100%. Unfortunately, rather than rebut the substance of your argument, people are voting you down (and the same for my own similar comment). It is convenient for certain parts of the US right (Fox and also Musk come to mind) to present a narrative about the UK which distracts from the actual hard realities of recent events in the US itself.

As a Brit, I find it very hard to believe that the majority of comments in this thread are not either written out of ignorance or are bots.

The article is from an anarchist organisation and sensationalist. 'Precrime' in the sense described is performed routinely by all intelligence agencies and police networks in the West.

Criticisms from across the pond reflect a spectacular lack of perspective. The UK is far more free than the US - a country with a fascist leader, ICE thugs who go about masked with guns and shoot to kill US citizens apparently with the full endorsement of the US President, a weaponised justice system that can target the chairman of the federal bank and strip a military Senator of his pension and rank simply for what he says (so much for 'free speech!'), and levels of inequality and centralised wealth and political funding that undermine democracy.

Just to correct slightly, I suspect most people who write Go WebAssembly are using https://tinygo.org/, which also achieves starting binaries in the 10kb range.

The brigades are out, but most people in the UK have a high level of trust in the BBC (https://yougov.co.uk/politics/articles/45744-which-media-out...). This whole incident is a storm in a teacup; yes the program was edited badly, but it is a single incident. It is ridiculous that the DG and News CEO have resigned.

The problem is that people are frequently using SPA JS frameworks for things that are clearly not gmail of figma -- i.e. news websites and other sites with minimal interactivity or dynamic behaviour. If you are genuinely building an 'app'-like thing, then of course you need some kind of JS SPA framework, but too often people are reaching for these tools for non-app use cases.

AMP is both a Javascript framework, and a wider page contract that facilitates CDN inclusion.

I believe the parent is referring to the Javascript framework, which itself has many nice properties for interactivity and performance.

While I agree with this article's conclusion, I think it conflates political/market objections to AMP (i.e. abuse of monopoly power) with technical concerns.

For a time, I tech-led the creation of the AMP site for a major news publisher. The technical choices of AMP, excluding the CDN-aspect, are I think a great fit for publishing websites with tens-hundreds of developers who are all tempted to write bespoke JS and in so doing create performance and maintenance hell. In many respects, philosophically, I think AMP was not far of HTMX. In AMP, developers are able to construct relatively sophisticated dynamic/interactive features using simple markup (and pre-built JS components). The page is managed through a single JS runtime which helps manage performance issues. As components have a standard HTML interface, it is possible to migrate the backend to different rendering technologies partially over time unlike (for example), isomorphic JS which forces a large-scale rewrite down the line.

I tried to advocate for an in-house AMP-like solution for our main website, but it was ultimately re-written in React -- a process which took several years and resulted in a codebase of much greater complexity. (Performance was better than the old website but I'm not sure React really contributed to the gains here.)

While AMP is rightly dead, I think the technical choices it made live on (or at least, they should).

You are correct, I meant John Mark :(.

The article is polemical, which I don't mean as a criticism but simply as genre description. There is no attempt to engage with the scholarly consensus (or indeed any of biblical scholarship beyond the named author). The piece wants to explain why religion persists but even on this lens it is heavy on words but lacking in depth. A lot is asserted.

You are overstating the case on authorship (we don't know who wrote Matthew and John) but otherwise you are wholly correct -- the article misrepresents the scholarly consensus. I.e. as you say, Greek was pervasive and Jesus almost certainly spoke it (along with Aramaic) and it is quite possible that gospel accounts are either written by eyewitnesses or contain the direct testimony of those who were. The historical timeline allows for this and we simply lack historical evidence to make a wholly conclusive case either way (though many attempt to do so on each side).

It is not correct to assert this. More precise is to say: it is unlikely that all of the gospels were written by the names we now associate with them -- at least not insofar as these names relate to the 12 disciples.

The truth is we don't know who wrote the gospels. The evidence is that they are quite early (i.e. for Mark, consensus is late 60s so perhaps 30-40 years after Jesus' death). In fact, many scholars think 'Mark' was written by 'Mark Antony' who is mentioned in Acts. And John may have been written by a 'John the Elder' who is mentioned elsewhere. These are educated guesses though -- the evidence is circumstantial.

This is not correct. Secular academics disagree quite a lot about the specifics as we lack sufficient historical data but it is very widely accepted that:

* the gospels were written in the 1st century

It is therefore entirely possible that they were written by eyewitnesses, even though many do not think they were written by some of the 12 disciples. The topic of 'eyewitnesses' is however hotly debated. See e.g. https://www.amazon.co.uk/Jesus-Eyewitnesses-Gospels-Eyewitne... which is pro this view but also plenty against.

Even John's gospel, which is often thought of as the latest, may well have been written very early; arguments for a late dating are almost wholly made in relation to the text itself (i.e. it has a 'higher' Christology) and not wider historical data.

Source: I am studying theology at Cambridge University in the UK and have heard several professors here debate these topics, plus I am familiar with the literature.

I think your thinking is short-termist and naive. Naive because:

* Putin will use any pause in fighting that doesn't come with credible security guarantees to rearm and continue (he basically always breaks ceasefires he agrees)

Short-termist because:

* a resurgent Russia and weakened (and alienated) EU will only strengthen China and strategically weaken the US

The USA is powerful but that doesn't mean it can be indifferent to global affairs.

The only plausible rationale for Trump's behaviour is that he doesn't care about liberal democracy, either around the world or at home. If you are a US citizen who doesn't care about their own democracy perhaps that's fine, but if you do believe in the constitution, his behaviour should worry you.

No, that is too cynical a take. The UK gives a lot of resources to Ukraine, has offered 'boots on the ground' as part of a peace deal, and is increasing its defence going forward.

The problem is, Putin will not stop at Ukraine if he is allowed to take it. His worldview is that the fall of the USSR is the greatest wrong of the last century, and he is determined to recreate it.

And Europe will suffer greatly if a resurgent USSR is allowed to grow unchecked next to it. (Not even speaking of the millions of people who will suffer under its authoritarian rule.)

I have no beef with Rust, but objectively I think it's dependency management, general tooling, and standard library are significantly worse than Go's. The language, as you say, has a quite different philosophy from Go which many favour - but that is only part of the story.

Could you elucidate which of the 'mentioned issues' you think are present for Go (in relation to tooling) that do not apply to Rust/cargo? Is your critique based solely on the new `go tool` command or more widespread? And are you aware that the parent criticism is at least partially misguided given it is possible to store tooling in a separate .mod file or simply ignore this feature altogether?

Haha perhaps - though I think you'll find that (with the exception of Scala) these are some of the most popular programming languages.

Having sad that, I don't really know anyone with significant Go experience who dislikes its dependency management - most critiques are now quite out of date/predate current solutions by several years.

Finally, I'm not really sure which language you are proposing has better dependency management than Go - whether in relation to security, avoiding the 'diamond' problem, simplicity, etc. Rustaceans like to critique Go (no idea if you are one but my experience is that criticism is often from this crown) but I'm not sure how, from my own Rust experience/knowledge, it is actually better. In fact, I think there are several grounds to think that it is worse (even if still very solid compared to some of the aforementioned languages).

Your reply is polemical and somewhat detached from the experience of working with Go.

From my experience, Go's dependency management is far better than anything else I've worked with (across languages including Java, Scala, Javascript/Typescript, Python).

Your criticism is perhaps relevant in relation to language features (though I would disagree with your position) but has no basis in relation to tooling and the standard library, both of which are best in class.

Graham's article is persuasive on describing societal shifts around 'wokeness'. However, I'd like to see a bit more introspection on what constitute non-'religious' (to borrow his term), or foundational, principles of Western liberal democracy. There are some grounds to prohibit speech in society and also practice - much of wokeness is about practice as much as speech, which he doesn't really explore. At the edges societal norms inevitably become messy, but he doesn't acknowledge this fact. Nor that the edges move over time and, on balance, this has often been a good thing (think of civil rights for example).

In this way, and similar to a lot of simplistic economic analysis (i.e. the sort that blanketly insists free markets solve everything - ignoring the realities of imperfect information, natural monopolies, externalities, etc., and also ubiquitous government intervention even in the US), the argument lacks depth. If we take his piece as a polemic then perhaps this is intentional and not necessarily a bad thing, but I'm not sure he presents it that way.

'Most' is important to recognise here. I'm studying theology at Cambridge University and at least one current professor (in a small faculty) advocates strongly for an early dating of John (i.e. pre-70). It is important to note that a lot of the rationale behind dating, as with Q itself, is supposition/educated-guesswork. To take the example of John, arguments for a later dating, which is the mainstream perspective, is based on the idea that the theology is too developed for it to be early rather than direct historical evidence. Paul's epistles, which are early arguably display a very high christology, suggesting John is not such an outlier here.

Another voice here of someone (in my 30s) who played conkers growing up. Was great fun!

Russell Cox consistently produces excellent technical blogs and proposals (and work). If you want to improve the clarity of your writing and thinking, he is a great place to start.

Poor GDP is a complex question to answer but lowering the heating by a degree doesn't seem like the best attempt at exploring it(!).

Transport might be a better part of the explanation, but more because of the lack of investment in decent transportation beyond London (the recent HS2 cancellation being one example).

For me, I suspect poor GDP performance is due to a lack of investment/success in manufacturing and science, in part because of an over-emphasis on the city/finance and other (in-part) rent-seeking activities which has sucked in talent and energy, but also because of a general incompetence of government over the last 20 years.