> That writing is the only way to do deep, clear, thinking simply isn't true.
You're correct here.
> Stephen Hawking is the first example that comes to mind.
The post is obviously speaking of the general population or at best average professional, and in my opinion choosing one of the most brilliant exceptional scientific minds of our lifetimes is not a good counterargument for a piece that speaks of a potential problem with society at large.
As someone who teaches PhD students who are quite far beyond "average professional", I concur completely with PG on this one. Writing forces you to make very clear and concrete ideas that feel like they make sense but are still fuzzy. It's certainly not the only way, but it's the most common and easy way.
I don't disagree, just want to mention that as someone married to someone who supervises Phd students, they're not by any means "far beyond average professional"... but perhaps you're on a exceptionally highly regarded faculty where that may be the case.
To use an overextended computer metaphor: serializing data structures to a wire format forces lazy evaluation, turning up any errors that were previously hidden by laziness.
If you enjoyed this post, you might also like these books that expand on the same concept:
* _Hyperculture: The Human Cost of Speed_ by Stephen Bertman
* _How to Do Nothing_ by Jenny Odell
The first book more than the 2nd, but the 2nd book is still a lovely read that may help you figure out for yourself how to practically deal with the pacing of modern life.
Imagine a scenario, your service is a low traffic, but service which embeds you as a library is a high traffic with many instances and always opens DB connection.
Why should you optimize your Database for high traffic use case, when your use case is really a low traffic?
And then repeat this for 10 other libraries and library owners. Everyone is optimizing for nothing.
make it even more difficult, 100 different types of services with different traffic patterns are embedding your library with different behaviours when it comes to managing DB connection state
Scenario: your service is accessing a service which exposes PII data and you only process them.
Service which embeds your service enabled audit logs of network requests and made it visible to everyone in the company. You have created a risk unintentionally
It's not the shot itself, it's the injection/getting stabbed. I think I fainted four or five times in my life due to injections/blood draws. I have to lay down look away and control my breathing otherwise I'm gone. It is a pain in the ass and I get light anxiety from it.
I’m curious if there’s a refractory period. (I.e. if you faint and come to after the first needle goes in, then maybe you’re “past it”, and the rest won’t bother you?)
Normal maybe isn't the right word, but it's an expected possibility, the FDA has a page about it [1], and that's one reason FDA recommends patients be observed for 15 minutes after a vaccination, especially for types they haven't had before.
In my school, they started taking blood tests during annual medical checkup. (certified doctors & parents permission).
100 students participated in the blood tests out of which I think atleast 4 fainted. The test was done by just piercing a small needle, & not the actual extraction of large amount of blood.
The analogy is slightly different than a vaccine shot, but nonetheless the setup is same by using needle.
I like lisps syntactically. The only thing stopping me from using it more frequently is the lack of static typing. I wasn't always a stickler for static typing, but I've spent a lot of time working with Scala and TS and the main advantage for me is ease of refactoring and avoiding NPEs.
EDIT: What I'm continuously evaluating for myself is Clojure specifically
Clojure is head and shoulders above other lisps. Watch Rich Hickey's Sermons From the Mount in the years following Clojure's release and you may never be the same again. At least that was my experience. David Nolen's Clojurescript videos are similarly riveting.
Clojure also has far more reach than any other lisp with implementations for JS, JVM, .Net and recently Dart/Flutter. It also has a library - libpython - for easily importing Python libraries.
Clojure makes simple code easy to write and maintain. It is more practical than most other Lisps by wisely choosing on which giants should to stand. E.g.
- make immutability the normal case, yet it is sufficiently performing that one rarely has to go back to mutability
- minimal syntax, uniformity, dynamic typing, macro-system, symbols from Lisp
- it extends Lisp with namespaces, even symbols get namespace
- access to the whole ecosystem of the JVM, of Javascript and mostly to Python's ecosystem
The price for accessing those ecosystems was omitting first class continuations. Which one is more valuable depends on your use case, but for many use cases I am considering that was the right choice.
I would probably say that It is opinionated in a way that makes it good to write services in and it integrates well with the JVM.
CL has packages and most implementations have PLN so you get most (all?) of what the clojure namespaces offer.
I think that if anyone was rethinking scheme the would steal the immutability things from clojure (something like HAMTs and RRB trees or the scala finger tree vectors are more exciting I would say).
I don't think clojure brought anything new, per se. It took some nice parts from common lisp and scheme and added an immutability first paradigm. Nothing new, but getting people to understand how nice immutability is probably involves making the happy path immutable from day 1.
It is not true that "any mutation" causes issues. In fact, most idiomatic usage of mutation is problem-free and completely sound.
One can find out more about polymorphic mutation as a "counterexample" to Hindley-Milner type inference on Wikipedia [1]. It's a well-studied problem with space of solutions. Purity, weak references, the value restriction, etc. are all ways of dealing with this shortcoming of Hindley-Milner.
Interestingly, one of the first proposed solutions to this problem was suggested by Wright in the journal "LISP and Symbolic Computation" [2].
> The main benefit of knowing multiple languages is eavesdropping on people in the street speaking their language, but that's about it.
Hah, that's the least of benefits IMO. I'm not sure if you have no interest in the following or just forgot them, but these are things I enjoy: literature in the native language, comparing words and idioms and understanding how different languages influence each other and also how different cultures led to the creation of certain idioms. Conversations with people in their native tongue when I travel and the stories, adventures, and knowledge that unlocks.
To anyone reading this who only speaks English, while I agree with this person and the study that I don't necessarily feel smarter, learning another language is absolutely worth it for the advantages I stated above. My life is more rich because of it.
Yup, Plex is the way to go for me too. I use plexamp as my client and it's been a wonderful experience. Really love the sonic analysis features, especially the guest DJs.
You're correct here.
> Stephen Hawking is the first example that comes to mind.
The post is obviously speaking of the general population or at best average professional, and in my opinion choosing one of the most brilliant exceptional scientific minds of our lifetimes is not a good counterargument for a piece that speaks of a potential problem with society at large.
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