ciconia

This is not only about the rising cost of living. The protests are lead by high school and university students demanding better school infrastructure, more teachers and shorter days (French high-schoolers regularly spend 10 hours per day at school, 4.5 days per week).

It is important to note that this is not an isolated incident, and this story has only reached the news because the victims are European dignitaries. Those pogroms (there's no better word to describe those incidents) are happening on a daily basis, and the scale (multiple attacks per day) makes it apparent that this not just random violence, but a coordinated campaign to ethnically cleanse the rural Palestinian population of the West bank.

Edit: language.

I'd say you're projecting. Reading the parent comment I understood it to simply mean "reactionaries", nothing more.

I find the accelerationist mindset utterly ridiculous. All that busywork and for what exactly? What effect has all this overproduction of LOC had on the physical world and on our existence (beyond the externality of erecting huge data centers in every corner of the globe and the consequent ecological impact)? Is software getting better (in terms of quality, security, efficiency)? Are we getting better government services? Are we getting better food? A better environment (silly question)? Are we working less, as tech titans keep promising us? Are we getting anything better? Not to mention all the negative aspects of this technology and the financial apparatus driving it.

> “It just kind of hit me,” Bell said. “We’re the blue-collar guys cooking this food, hustling to make this work for these young kids making like six figures, and this entity that has a trillion dollars, can’t pay us?”

Welcome to tech bro utopia, where humanity in its entirety must grovel and worship and lick the boots of those who in their magnanimity allow us merit-less wretches to work for them for pennies, or, as in this case, for free. Oh what a wonderful future these guys have in store for us!

Misses 2024 in the title

> they aren't substantially more difficult than other Jazz changes

IMO it's not only the tempo. It's also the fact those changes kind of subvert any feeling of tonality, so you can't really rely on tonal formulas (i.e. cadences) when improvising, so you need to come up with other ways to structure your improv, while constantly shifting between modes/scales/patterns. Becoming fluent in this kind of context is a huge challenge, even in slow tempos.

I've been saying it for quite a while now: any sufficiently advanced AI technology is indistinguishable from bullshit.

Why spend money on healthcare when you can spend it on being able to annihilate any country on earth?

> terrifying how violent they are compared to modern standards.

Oh you mean October 7th Hamas standards or the Israeli Gaza genocide standards, or maybe the US in Vietnam standards?

It's not clear that Western armies are better either, as we've seen time and again in Iran, Afghanistan and Syria.

Who in their right mind would want to travel to a country where any random encounter with government thugs can get you thrown in a cage?

26 years ago I was a post-graduate student in the US, I arrived a couple months before the 9/11 attacks. The current US government, beyond its idiocy and incompetence, is just so hostile, not only to immigrants but also to its own citizens, so it seems. If I were to go study in another country today, the US would simply not be an option.

FWIW France has it right: there's no tipping, service is always included.

We still need more trees! Trees do not only act as carbon storage, potentially offsetting CO2 emissions. They also provide shade, which helps mitigate the effects of global warming. Through evapotranspiration they also participate in the water cycle and help carry humidity further inland. We need more trees in our cities, we need more trees in our villages, we need more trees in our agricultural systems. Plant more trees!

A while ago I took under my wing so to speak the neighbor's kid who plays the clarinet at the local music school, but apparently has listened to very little music (at music school he only gets instrument lessons and some music theory.) I had him listen to a wide range of classical music, just to give him a taste, and see what interests him. I told him: a musician who doesn't listen to music is like a writer who doesn't read books. It's not only the craft, it's also the culture that those works embody, and the feeling of belonging to a tradition.

> How many lines of (effective) code do you write, and how has that changed with AI?

I don't measure my productivity in loc. I also don't use ai to generate code. To me a productive day at work consists of letting my brain digest a given problem over a coffee or two, then write the necessary code in one go over a couple of hours.

I think this whole thing is a silly notion. Since when is loc/day an indication of anything?

EventMachine provided a event-reactor based concurrency model, but its API was so different and imposed a different style of programming (namely, callback-based) that it didn't really mesh with the "Ruby way" and most importantly was incompatible with most of the Ruby ecosystem (and especially Rails).