> I find it pretty irritating to go back to Python (my long-ago favorite) but many people are in the exact opposite frame of mind.
As someone who works exclusively in typed languages for formal methods, what is it you find lacking about modern Python + PyLance? IMO there's still a tiny verbosity issue, and there's no real replacement for fancier polymorphism or (G)ADTs, but I'm very satisfied with it for most things. In particular, null checks are trivial.
It has been about 10 years since Python was a daily driver for me and at that time I wrote it the old fashioned way with no type hints and no static checking, just like grandma used to make. The times I have needed to dig back into it have involved working on old code, so I haven't kept up with modern tooling.
However, in principle any dynamically typed language can be tolerable to me if it can be turned into a statically typed language ;)
But I think I'd still prefer the ergonomics of a language designed that way from the start vs having bolt-ons. My favorite language for the past several years has been F# and I think ML-family languages in general strike a great balance of being able to write terse code when you want to, and being able to model a domain really well with types when you want to.
> Typing generally slows down languages, not speed them up because of all the additional checks that must be done.
Source? You seem to be talking about compile-time versus runtime, and I've not even heard of compile times being significantly slowed by type checking.
> The dynamic stuff is part of what slows down languages like Python and makes them tricky to optimize.
That seems to harm rather than help your previous claim. In untyped languages, in principle every object has to be treated as dynamic.
> You seem to be talking about compile-time versus runtime
Yes 100%! I was talking runtime in reference to Ruby and later Python.
> That seems to harm rather than help your previous claim. In untyped languages, in principle every object has to be treated as dynamic.
It is rather confusing and even counterintuitive, but being dynamic does not mean a language must also be untyped. For example, Python is both strongly typed and dynamically typed at once. [1] It's objects have a definitive type, but you can swap out objects of any type out at any time (a=1 ... a="foo") using the same variable. That makes optimization rather tricky as you can imagine.
Independent of whether it has any meaning (because the entire paper might be a bit iffy), I find it curious that Instructors 3 and 8 have the lowest harmfulness rates, quite a bit lower than even the LLMs, but not the highest preference rates. Harmfulness anticorrelates with preference, but not perfectly. Some amount of charisma appears to be a factor even in selections by professionals?
Even "either time works" is only half-valid! If the other party has already declared their openness to either option, proper etiquette is to just select one so you can both move on with your lives.
I can't tell if it's a feature or a flaw of academia that some topics can so be thoroughly proven/disproven, and yet so many researchers continue to devote their careers to it. Should more effort be given to enforcing existing knowledge and consensus, or is preserving intellectual freedom more important? Granted, I understand Blue Zone stuff is mostly due to marketing incentives...
It seems like Buettner in particular had a bunch of for-profit business ventures tied up in blue zone marketing bullshit, so that is a sort of non-academic motivation to keep the music going.
It depends on how you think the limited resources to perform research should best be allocated, and whether scientists should become more like doctors or lawyers so far as centralization of credentialing and professional gatekeeping goes. Doctors and lawyers have boards that can actually revoke your ability to practice for falling outside accepted standards. Science deliberately doesn't. Is that good or bad?
They should be allocated towards intellectual freedom biased towards randomness.
Existing knowledge is preserved implicitly and be the public, and well-trodden ideas are furthered by industry. Academia is the best place for experiments, which are necessary to avoid stagnation, because there’s only so much obvious (low-hanging) research which isn’t experimental.
My point is that the scientific establishment is already basically like those boards that can limit your ability to do research unless you have a license.
The "license" is a PhD (from a reputable institution) and publications in a select list of high profile journals.
> The "license" is a PhD (from a reputable institution)
Maybe I'm biased as someone who has attained a PhD, but a PhD or master's is definitively not a license. It's almost necessary to have an advanced degree to be taken seriously, but that's not for reasons of normativity, but rather basic competence and a signal of investment. Your degree will not be revoked for the same reasons a doctor's or lawyer's license may be revoked (Francesca Gino lost her tenure, but not her degree). And IMO, your alma mater matters only as a proxy for your academic network; few in the academic world care if you went to MIT per se, but for the connections you made there.
I don't think there's an argument that the scientific establishment rejects many high-value contributions from uncredentialed/undercredentialed individuals.
> publications in a select list of high profile journals
Yeah, this is a serious issue. Although I don't know what it has to do with the question of whether the body of scientists proper should deliberate to establish consensus and distribute resources and prestige. If anything, Elsevier et al. have demonstrated that it can't be worse than letting the free market insert itself so insidiously.
Independent research by non PhD’s does occasionally get published, but it’s really difficult to meet the appropriate standards without a lot of very specific training.
There’s many objects discovered by amateur astronomers for example.
For too many seconds I really did think this was an initiative using the metaphor of good/bad mosquitos to make the case that they were going to release "good" malware (bonware?) into the internet ecosystem in order to disable bad malware or install security patches, or something.
Will anyone who downvoted indicate why they've done so? I've never heard of Nostr, but this seems like a valid suggestion and point to be made, albeit at the expense of others' recommendations.
Nostr is like a decentralized message queue/database with cryptographic identities. It has been funded by Jack Dorsey. Its most common usages are a decentralized Twitter clone, a tailscale clone without any registration needed called NostrVPN, and diVine, a revival of the classic Vine service. But there's also very interesting stuff like this, a completely decentralized git that uses public relays and cryptographic identities to control ownership.
Not very likely, imo, that they did it specifically for the flight. More likely they named it weeks or months ago and just now boarded an airplane.
> Does naming WiFi hotspot to reflect one’s political views achieve anything?
Does action-less speech achieve anything? Advertising, PSAs, political campaigning, etc. all indicate its value in attaining mindshare. Moreover, freedom of expression is liberating for people.
I assume you're actually a gamer, and not just an economist speculating on a market you're not exposed to? Because I don't know how to reconcile your comment with my reality. There are tons of live-service single-purchase games, I would even say they the overwhelmingly default model in 2026 compared to WoW-style subscription games.
If you want an answer to your "continuous cost without continuous revenue" riddle, the answer is in-game purchases, DLC, attracting new accounts over time, and the unspoken unadvertised promise "we can cut our losses at any time and shut down servers." This lattermost incentive is what is unhealthy for the market and what should be regulated to no longer be an incentive (short of having peer- or community-hosted servers, at least).
There are a bunch of these, and they are silly/unviable. I see a lot more free-to-play than single-purchase live service games, but the latter is a fun additional exploit in that they get you to pay up front for something that they never have any intention to survive long-term.
Currently I'm heavily playing both a free-to-play with microtransactions title (Heroes of the Storm) and a subscription title (EVE Online), both of which are live service games which would be exempt from this bill by definition, but are both games I would meaningfully like to play even if the companies decided they didn't want to run them anymore. (Yes, I'm aware both games I am playing regularly are old as time itself.)
Meanwhile, yes, there are single purchase games with an online model, and they fail and get shut down because they were never sustainable to begin with. The bill would arguably cover something like the FPS-of-the-years which are intended to grab everyone's attention for a few months and then die off when the company needs you to buy the next version of the title because they get no recurring revenue from you continuing to play the current one. (See Call of Duty, Battlefield, etc.)
Ah, I see your point better now. I agree that free-to-play and single-purchase live service games are essentially the same breed, that free-to-plays are similarly widespread, and would indeed like microtransaction-funded titles to be subjected to the same stipulations in the bill.
> there are single purchase games with an online model, and they fail and get shut down because they were never sustainable to begin with
I still don't think I agree with this (it's the exact same business model, just with an onboarding cost to e.g. be less dependent on MTX, or to cultivate a smaller but more dedicated fanbase, or to shut out bots), but that's beside the above points.
> Currently I'm heavily playing both a free-to-play with microtransactions title (Heroes of the Storm) and a subscription title (EVE Online), both of which are live service games which would be exempt from this bill by definition, but are both games I would meaningfully like to play even if the companies decided they didn't want to run them anymore. (Yes, I'm aware both games I am playing regularly are old as time itself.)
[emphasis mine]
AFAICT, the MTX would make HOTS not be eligible for the "no monetary considerations" carveout.
Edit, didn't realize you were the same person I replied to on another comment, sorry for repeating myself.
As someone who works exclusively in typed languages for formal methods, what is it you find lacking about modern Python + PyLance? IMO there's still a tiny verbosity issue, and there's no real replacement for fancier polymorphism or (G)ADTs, but I'm very satisfied with it for most things. In particular, null checks are trivial.
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