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Especially with duck-typing, you might also assume that a function that previously returned true-false will work if it now returns a String or nil. Semantically they’re similar, but String conveys more information (did something, here’s details vs did(n’t) do something).

But if someone is actually relying on literal true/false instead of truthiness, you now have a bug.

I say this as a Ruby evangelist and apologist, who deeply loves the language and who’s used it professionally and still uses it for virtually all of my personal projects.


The way I think about it is that no system can survive unchecked bad-faith internal actors.

Obviously there are people who do genuinely prefer it having experience with a variety of platforms, but the ones who seem the most convinced of how superior Windows is always do seem to be the ones who’ve never actually spent time with anything else.

I’ll grant that a cheap Windows laptop was the right call up until recently if price—not ease of use and maintenance—was the overwhelmingly dominant factor and a laptop was absolutely necessary. But the answer for a cheap device for a non-technical person with aspecific needs (email, browsing, media consumption) has been an iPad for a long time at this point.


Once upon a time you could live in a world of Windows apps designed like Notepad++. Launchy or other apps gave you the spotlight style of opening apps fast from the keyboard, and the start menu was for edge cases... and life in windows was good!

Now... I'm glad I got a Mac.


The point is that continuing to enjoy your existence is inflicting a massive toll of suffering around the world, to both others humans as well as non-humans.

I’m not saying I’d be one to push the button, but I think it’s worth trying to understand the mindset of someone who would. It’s very arguable that pushing it would be the ethical thing to do.


Not entirely convinced that outside the torment nexuses used in industrial meat farming, natural suffering is any lesser sans humanity.

Estimated scale of the torment nexuses: https://considerveganism.com/counter/

The fish counter is horrifying, I had no idea.

The fish counter comes from here https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/animal-welfare/artic...

One could argue there's a double count: about one-fifth of fish are caught to feed other animals (mainly fish, but also terrestrial animals). But I don't think one kill offsets another.

> around half of wild-caught finfish numbers are destined for reduction to fishmeal and oil, of which, respectively, 70 and 73% are used for aquaculture feeds


That’s an interesting point, but the degree to which enjoying my existence inflicts “a massive toll of suffering around the world” seems negligible, how much harm could I as an individual really be doing?

I’m a very small drop in a very big bucket, and in the already tragically short time I am allotted on this earth, I would like to enjoy myself, thank you very much. I would not dream of asking others to kill themselves so that my existence might be marginally improved.


What if the suffering is the point?

It is, because you can't have pleasure without suffering but I think these conversations should focus on the amount (maybe as a percentage) of suffering that someone/something experiences.

If you were locked in a room and being tortured, would you think it'd be appropriate for me to go: "they feed you at the end of each torture session, isn't it worth it to keep going for that?"


> you can't have pleasure without suffering

That's not true, though. There's no physical law that states that an X amount of suffering is required for an Y amount of pleasure. Nothing prevents you from taking a brain that's feeling pleasure and keeping it in that state. We don't have the technology, but it's not impossible theoretically. It's a configuration of neurons that somehow gives rise to qualia. Maybe in the evolutionary or day-to-day psychological sense we "need" suffering to overcome adversity and get stronger or not to become too content with what we have and lose it, but that's very far from a law of nature or a necessity in the real sense. And obviously some animals live their whole lives in bliss, others in agony. So it's not like there aren't any real life counterexamples.


[flagged]


Here's a tip for you: describe what you find questionable and why, otherwise reader will understand: "I don't like that, you're [loser / mentally hill / nihilist]".

I you don't like the conversation you're also free to ignore it.


[flagged]


You really have nothing productive to say in this thread, you sound irrationally angry. This is a pretty milquetoast philosophical question. If someone asks whether humanity is a net negative environmentally and your only response is to call them whiny losers, maybe you'd be better off on Twitter.

I mean I know you understand what an abstract argument, is but you've chosen to interpret it in the laziest way possible for maximum rage. There are better ways to spend your time.

Extra points for calling yourself a vegan atheist to appeal to credibility.


I'm not angry, just disdainful. Some abstract philosophical positions are unworthy of respect.

The only people who find the question of erasing humanity milquetoast are terminally online losers.

Humanity did not introduce evil, but we have absolutely industrialized and massively scaled it.

There probably are reasonable methods of estimation that would say suffering associated with factory farms currently outweighs suffering occurring in the wild, though I don't know if I agree. However, factory farms are both relatively recent and temporary. It's hard to defend the position that humanity vanishing tomorrow would reduce net suffering in the long run. If nothing else, another industrial species will eventually replace us, and there's little reason to believe they'll be any better.

Of course, I personally have higher hopes for intelligent life than merely not causing massive suffering. That brings me to another tangent: Are you vegan?

I am. You might be, but I'm estimating you probably aren't. You can go vegan, it's easier than you think, and if you don't think you can commit, being 90% vegan is 90% as good as being 100% vegan. All thought experiments aside, you can be a part of making a better world, right now.

You can also make donations: https://funds.effectivealtruism.org/funds/animal-welfare


I think humanity did introduce evil.

It requires a sense of morality to divide good from evil, and I don't think that existed on Earth before humans. Digging into the Hominid tree might add some qualifications, but I don't see that as a meaningful distinction.


Caches are automatically released by the OS when demand for memory increases.

You eventually run out of caches to evict.

That is completely irrelevant to this discussion about using the RAM you’ve paid for.

At that point you can still fall back onto swap on NVME.

Doesn’t Apple use pretty damn quick NVME? I wonder how much of a performance drop it actually is. Certainly not as bad as running a swap file on a 5400 rpm HDD…

Isn't that NVME also very expensive to replace because it's tied to hardware identifiers? If you keep swapping all the time, surely NVME would be the first part to fail

This was heavily debated in the 11.4 timeframe because there was risk that this version of the OS could excessively wear NVME.

https://appleinsider.com/articles/21/06/04/apple-resolves-m1...

The issue was subsequently resolved but the consensus was with modern wear leveling this isn't so much a thing.

I have a 2021 MacBook Pro with the original drive. I use it heavily for development practically every day and just dumped the SMART data.

Model Number: APPLE SSD AP1024R

=== START OF SMART DATA SECTION ===

SMART overall-health self-assessment test result: PASSED

Available Spare: 100%

Available Spare Threshold: 99%

As always, YMMV


People here are suggesting limiting your battery charge as a proactive measure to prevent degradation but an M3 is far too new for you to be getting so poor battery life from use, even if you spent all day every day charging and discharging it.

The only plausible answers are either: something you’re running is eating CPU/GPU cycles like crazy (browser tabs gone amok, background processes) or you have a defective battery. Use Activity Monitor to look for energy usage and that will give you a pretty good idea.


This. The issue is not your battery but something running in the background.

Maybe just once we can not bias literally everything in life towards morning people and throw night owls a bone?

That is literally what permanent DST is— benefitting people who like to wake up before sunrise. Night owls want to wake up after it's been light already.

Yes, and GP is arguing that it should be optimized for morning people instead. Hence my comment.

I think very nearly every assertion in this statement is demonstrably untrue.

It's not, especially the part about it being actively changed to adapt to Linux. I've heard several complaints about this already. I may have been a little harsh on the stability concerns but I stand by my assertions in general.

They’re not changing the language, they’re stabilizing new capabilities to it. Golang is stabilizing new features too in every release.

I think the relevant problem of rust to this thread is not that it's unstable (it isn't unstable!) but it can be argued that it's a moving target

> I think the decision was made because the people making this decision at Anthropic are well-intentioned, driven by values, and motivated by trying to make the transition to powerful AI to go well.

The entire problem is that this lasts as long as those people are in charge. Every incentive is aligned with eventually replacing them with people who don’t share those values, or eventually Anthropic will be out-competed by people who have no hesitation to put profit before principle.


I mean, yah. How else could it be? Xerox, GE, IBM (1990 Gerstner) and a zillions of other rock stars fell hard. And had to be over hauled. Thats why continuous improvement is a thing, and why a platonic take on the world was never a thing.


I found it funny because the opposite direction, people accused Tesla of naming “autopilot” misleadingly, because it gave them the impression of fully unattended self-driving.

In aviation, autopilot features were until recently (and still for GA pilots) essentially just cruise control: maintain this speed and heading, maintain this climb rate and heading, maintain this bank angle, etc.


Because Tesla was claiming in 2016 that "next year" it would be able to drive across the Unted Sttes without any inputs.


Well, okay, but that’s like 95% of flying.


It’s the other 5% that takes 90% of effort :)


Though by the 0.1% highly qualified and extensively trained, so that the chances of misunderstanding by a pilot is like 0.00001% or less.


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