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Interesting how when it was top-voted comment it read more as the light-hearted poking of fun which I intended (I really have no problem with Wolfram, I think he's funny). But now it has been demoted to the bottom of the thread it has started getting lots of downvotes and somehow reads (even to me) as being mean and bitter.

Curious example of how the thread position/reaction of others really primes how we receive a comment.

Wolfram talking about Wolfram for 14,000 words. The most Wolfram thing imaginable. Wolfram!

How can I bring a child into the world when it appears likely that the child will suffer greatly?

The West hasn't really grappled with this question yet, but give it 15 years - when climate breakdown starts seriously affecting quality of life - and I expect the birthrate to crash.

I did specifically mention "normal code". `unsafe` is not normal code. Obviously if there is a segfault, I'd fire up a debugger - GDB is just fine for such purposes.

The comparison with Java is interesting. With Java, I have often found that errors occur in a rather non-local fashion, due to dynamic code loading, confusing inheritance trees, and ubiquitous mutations and what have you. Maybe I'm not actually calling the function I thought I was, maybe because I have actually received a subclass of my expected class. Print-debugging is often too narrow to highlight the cause. In such a situation, I would fire up the debugger and inspect the general state of the application (which Java makes relatively easy to do).

In contrast, in Rust things tend to happen in a very constrained fashion. You can't randomly mutate things, you can't (without considerable effort) make complicated graph structures where everything can touch everything else. With the occasional exception of highly generic code, your call sites and function arguments are exactly what you expect. So I can rely on print-debugging to quickly find the cause of my problem.

Incidentally the same is true with Haskell, moreso even, except due to laziness the evaluation order can be harder to ascertain - debug statements can appear in a strange order (or not at all).

The left regularly address each other as "comrade", albeit sometimes a little tongue-in-cheek. Solidarity is an important and necessary part of the culture, given the odds are heavily stacked against them.

I had to do a double-take here, I was thinking "I don't think Bernie is all that radical, but I wouldn't describe him as center-right". But of course the US gets the colors backwards.

I’m sold, let’s get rid of the part of the government that costs the most and delivers the least. I’m talking about the military, of course.

Cars must surely be the main cause. There is an interesting phenomenon known as "shifting baseline syndrome" where we tend to compare our environment to what we recall as a child and inevitably conclude that is has gotten nosier/busier/more polluted, not realizing that environment of our childhoods were already heavily degraded.

The world in which we evolved would have been almost silent, almost all of the time, apart from the sounds of birds and insects. And there would have been very little to 'look' at (no text/decor/branding, few hard surfaces, few straight lines, little color and texture variation). And of course no pollution, and very little to 'do'! So it shouldn't be a surprise to find that the sheer sensory intensity of modern living contributes towards depression and schizophrenia [1].

What is the endgame here?

[1] eg https://www.gwern.net/docs/nature/2010-peen.pdf

We use this is production. It is fast, looks good, decent API. The kind of thing that makes the web go round. Thanks, whoever made it!

You can be almost certain that LinkedIn knew it was illegal when they did it, and accurately calculated that the fine they would receive (if any) would be much lower than the value derived from increased membership. In fact they would be stupid not to in winner-takes-all markets like social media.

Silicon Valley has a phrase for such flagrantly unethical practice, it is called "growth hacking".

Would you give up more to ensure your children don’t grow up in a dystopian nightmare? What if the necessary amount is 60% of your income? 90%? What if our only hope is to go back to a 18C standard of living? Unfortunately the planet doesn’t care if you have enough cash to pay rent once you account for your environmental externalities.

The implication that “actually, it’s all the lib’s fault” is absurd.

Don’t let the language of capitalism mystify you. These companies have shareholders and management. The profits they make go directly to these people. They are the ones getting rich at the expense of everyone else, not some abstract legal entity.

I agree this article isn't as terrible as average. Going vegetarian and cycling to work once a week might make you feel good but it ain't gonna make a difference. It's a political problem. It needs a political solution.

Agitate and vote for the most left-wing party you can (that has a realistic chance of winning/influencing an election). Campaign for them to institute a ban on fossil fuels. Protest. Climb smokestacks. Make headlines. Break the law. If you work in the media, subvert their agenda as much as possible. Capitalism is crisis.

Of course, the BBC would never state these things. But given how little has been achieved in the last 40 years by playing by the rules, at this point they are obviously necessary, if not sufficient.

> Please show your evidence that global trade is a zero sum game and that the "imperial core" has reaped all the benefits.

I didn't say it was zero sum. Poorer nations have experienced some growth, and a lot of that growth has been extracted by the West. Generally, the more a developing country has embraced globalization, the worse it has been exploited. This is not a hugely controversial statement.

If you'd really like to understand the power dynamics, you'll need to do some reading. Former World Bank chief economist Joseph Stiglitz's "Globalization and its Discontents" is a good start, though a little dated now.

See you on the picket lines, comrade!

> But Facebook only earns a few dollars per user per year, who in their right mind would turn off their adblocker for a few dollars?

This is a good point and it is interesting to think about the economic logic of advertising. It seems to me the burden it places on it's viewers is far greater than the (often questionable) value it brings to the advertiser. A huge unaccounted-for externality.

In fact, when you consider the huge psychological weight that a consumerist society places on it's citizens, and the attendant healthcare costs, you could easily make the case that even strictly in economic terms, advertising is a huge net negative, before even considering the social costs.

How much does my city make from all the billboards everywhere? It can't be more than a few dollars per person. I'd happily pay that much more in tax to have them all removed.

This is true. Nothing to do with what I said, but, it is true.

It isn't what happens at the moment. Every dollar of growth worldwide is subtracted many times over from our environmental commons. At the moment the global economy is a heavily negative-sum game.

Globalization is a hegemonic project of the West, best understood as a means to transfer capital from the economic peripheries to the imperial core, and has tended to wreak havoc on developing countries that have exposed themselves to it. China has been very sensible to ignore the dogma about free trade and to exploit weaknesses and loopholes in trade treaties when they find them.

Are electric cars genuinely seen as part of the solution to climate change? Surely there is no place for cars in our utopian green future, they are terribly inefficient means of transportation and completely anti-social and anti-urban. The future is in advanced metro systems, high speed rail, cycling etc. In this future, cars would become decided niche.

I had never thought of Tesla being one of the 'good guys', especially with Musk's backward - even reactionary - views on public transport.[1] It hadn't occurred to me that this might not be mainstream thought.

https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-awkward-dislike-mass-t...

I was actually just amused to see climate change used in a throwaway manner to justify some kind of AI whatever. The topic of climate change deserves to be talked about seriously or not at all.

As a creature capable of empathy, I am quite upset at the thought of incalculable suffering we are condemning future generations to just because we can't be bothered not to.

It's pretty clear from context that I meant things will change catastrophically for the worse. Extinction unlikely within 60 years, though.

Well that's OK then (???)

I always find it strange to hear people talk about climate change as if it is some sort of tricky challenge we need to solve, like improving education or curing cancer. It is a 'problem' of completely different magnitude. It is on track to end civilization as we know it within two generations. A rational society would think about nothing else.

Our children will be astonished and mystified - and furious - to see all the things we got up to instead of dealing with this thing that is the only thing that matters.

Should people be encouraged to hang around near an intersection? Surely the pollution is off the charts. How about just banning cars 1 day a week? Then 2, then 3...

The AW block is tiny but has so many great talks. All the queues end up merging with each other and jutting out into the foyer. Chaos!

Such a thing is not possible, because news is not neutral. Specifically, the decision of what is newsworthy is not neutral. I understand that certain US papers - NYT? - are considered mostly value-free in their reporting, but from my (left wing) perspective they appear highly ideological.

I have some sympathy for UK newspaper attitudes that "we have a point of view and we're proud of it". The fact that they are all terrible rags written by the worst kind of hacks is a separate problem.

As for sibling argument that the FT have no agenda, well, the clue is in the name. It's written for upper management. The fact that such people don't need or want their news as heavily filtered as their underlings is more an expression of the requirements of capital that anything else. Upper management can't afford ideological flights of fancy when they need to keep the system running.

The astonishing amount of time, money and effort that has been put into cryptocurrencies is a sociological marvel. Every emotion, every cognitive bias, every aspect of the human experience is on display. And it's all fully documented, in real time. Mass delusion in Big Data. A thousand sociology PhDs could be written about reddit's /r/cryptocurrency alone. A joyous, despairing, dissonant, gloating, brooding, witty, witless, confusing, euphoric mass.

This article is part of a curious subgenre of cryptocurrency literature, that of an advocate of one cryptocurrency (Ethereum) holding forth against a different cryptocurrency (EOS). Do the words have any meaning beyond the confines of the beautifully elaborate internal world in which they reside? Perhaps, in a strictly metaphysical sense. I can't appreciate it, or even comprehend it, but I can sit back an delight that such a thing exists at all.

"I drew an upward sloping curve and a downward sloping curve that meet in the middle, and therefore socialism cannot work."

The 2008 crash called for a massive reassessment of the political and cultural status of economics. It required honest economists to recognize their profession not as a neutral description of the world but as a tool for the powerful to exercise dominion over the rest of us. But "cognitive dissonance doesn't work like that", especially when doing so would mean giving up prestige, lucrative consulting opportunities, the ear of the government. For some reason, those other social sciences don't seem to get invited to nearly such lavish parties...

Of course, many people within and without the profession have been making this argument for decades, since way before 2008. But funny thing, the way power works is - those sort of people are never listened to. Why would that change now?

Edit: For a nice overview of these arguments I recommend the book "Economists and the Powerful" from 2012.

Rust hasn't really got 'faster' in that time, barring the odd optimizer improvement as noted in sibling. Much more likely that whatever benchmark you refer to has been rewritten for better performance.