I’m not trying to shill for Google but I really think it would be a mistake to break up Google without breaking up Microsoft simultaneously if not first. If they actually manage to crack open Google’s search and browser monopoly, who do they really think is going to start filling in that void? Local mom and pop search engines…? No it’s primarily going to be Microsoft with Bing and Edge, and I’m absolutely certain that whatever people don’t like about Google having its monopolies is going to be orders of magnitude worse if Microsoft gains ground there.

I’m not convinced he really believes that OpenAI is going to roll out AGI in the next ten years, but I’m completely sure he’s determined that it’s a good marketing strategy to make people believe that he believes it.

These graphs only cover the demographic of 18-29 year olds, which historically do lean heavily towards progressive.

Google is an enormous company which operates flatter than you’d expect for an organization of its size. It’s entirely possible that someone from Google was involved in organizing this (i.e. booking the venue) without having buy-in from leadership. Once leadership became aware after being asked about it, they may have shut the whole thing down because they knew the optics would be bad.

Speaking as an annoying Rust user, you’re being bigoted. I’m annoying, but the vast majority of Rust users are normal people who you wouldn’t even know are using Rust.

Don’t lump all the others in with me, they don’t deserve that.

How exactly is an individual supposed to determine which cops will be good and which will abuse their power?

Just as we can’t make a general statement that all cops are definitely bad, you can’t make a general statement that all cops in any particular country or town will be good.

From a basic risk management viewpoint, it doesn’t make sense for anyone to accept the risk that any given cop won’t abuse their position, even if we were willing to accept that very few would actually do so.

Cops have an extremely privileged status in society and the amount of damage that a bad one can do to an individual - on purpose or even by accident - is incalculable, including setting up an innocent person for capital punishment as we’re seeing unfold in Missouri right now.

People just don’t want to believe that China can win at capitalism because it undermines all their internal narratives around the innovation power of liberalism. I say this as someone who does not personally like China and its authoritarianism.

The fact of the matter is with a population of nearly 1.5 billion people, you’re statistically guaranteed to have enormous pools of talent to draw on. Even a relatively modest per capita investment in education, focused on key objectives and funneled into the portion of the talent pool that they’ve managed to identify, will be able to yield massive innovation.

A lot of people will suffer under this authoritarianism. The people from these talent pools will be exploited and burnt out at a young age. This is already happening in China. But as a nation, it will be able to position itself extremely well technologically and economically, and this is a reality the rest of the world needs to be prepared to deal with.

Which is exactly the position that the Rust for Linux devs have understood and accepted for themselves, and yet they still get yelled at (literally, in public, on recordings) by C Linux devs for existing.

Oh and they get snidely told that introducing the Rust language must be a mistake because suggestions to introduce other languages to the kernel turned out to be mistakes and obviously Rust is the same as all those other languages according to C developers who, by their own admission, have never used or learned anything about Rust beyond a superficial glance at some of its syntax (again this was recorded from a public event).

PG&E was literally the villain in the real life Erin Brockovich story.

Nothing is ever better in every conceivable way than the current state of the art.

Probabilistically, sure, but it’s not impossible that there has been some piece of knowledge or understanding that’s been missing, and that massive breakthroughs are possible once the process is figured out.

I think a fair modern example is LED light bulbs. They are better in every conceivable way than incandescent or fluorescent lightbulbs: they last longer, use less energy, shine brighter, use less toxic materials, and are easy to mass produce. But there were several decades where much of the industry believed that LEDs would never be very useful as a light source because we could only produce red and green, and it was generally believed that a blue LED would be impossible to produce.

Then one guy decided it would be his life mission to invent the blue LED, and the sonuvabitch did it. Now LEDs are the only sensible thing to use to produce light.

It’s always possible for this kind of breakthrough to happen, especially in material science where the complexity of how molecules interplay is nearly incomprehensible.

Rust makes sense though.

Yeah the only way it would be that high is if it lumps C and C++ together. But at that point it may be an underestimate.

A better language wouldn’t have any need to use POSIX signals in this way.

I really don’t think that there is any perfect programming language.

You’d be wrong 🦀🦀🦀🦀🦀

I think a long time ago a vicious cycle began in the advertising space where predatory ads had more incentive to pay for ad space, so sensible people start to perceive ads in general as predatory. Now no sensible advertiser that’s trying to promote a legitimate product for legitimate reasons will do so by buying ad space, thus reinforcing the increasingly accurate perception that all ads are predatory.

I think it’s specifically meant to debunk the idea that meat is the only affordable source of protein-dense food, when in reality there are vegan protein-dense foods that are even more affordable.

That doesn’t conflict with the fact that a well balanced diet is important; it’s just addressing one sticking point that tends to come up in these conversations.

Still much better than C++ templates, and I say that as someone who used to genuinely love C++ template metaprogramming. Admittedly Rust traits+generics are far more limited than C++ templates, but very often I find that to be a positive. The list of things that I feel traits+generics are missing is small and rapidly shrinking.

A good enough compiler would prevent them from happening 🦀

Sorry to be pedantic but Rust only guarantees no data races can happen. It does not prevent race conditions more generally.

Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely love the language for sparing me from the hell that is data races, but the language alone won’t solve race conditions for you.

🦀🦀🦀🦀🦀🦀🦀🦀