I don't think Andrew Yang's meme received much propagation to come under the types of memes the article is referring to.
One more property I think is very relevant to the types of memes referred to by the article is that these memes want to spread at the exclusion of all others or any variation.
What stood out to me with respect to that event is that while many memes were thrown about, some memes had to be clarified to death without having any effect on the outrage while others continued to be thrown about without requiring any clarification despite being dog whistles for things significantly worse than their seemingly innocuous wording.
I am mostly ambivalent towards this. The change seems to be in response to what a vocal proportion of twitch's users want which makes this a logical step for twitch to take.
Though I am worried that the mentioned "ally" tag will just enable cheap and pointless virtue signalling. I would prefer that the tags have the restriction that they be based on some verifiable categorisation such as nationality, physically identifiable race or similar.
I don't know much about UK politics, but it is good to see Animal rights being taken more seriously. But I am uncomfortable with the usage of the word sentient here since the word implies a lot more than stopping mistreatment which seems to be the actual intent here.
Taken to its logical conclusion, "Animals to be formally recognised as sentient beings" should outlaw their slaughter for food or other products and much more essentially including whatever rights humans have.
I personally feel words with strong meaning are thrown around too carelessly these days (maybe longer but I wasn't alive then) weakening their meaning and making it more difficult to capture nuance or clarity in conversation or writing.
Sentience just means the ability to perceive and feel things. It implies consciousness, but that's debated. You may be thinking of sapience, which is usually considered to comprise of a higher range of cognitive functions such as reasoning, self-awareness and perhaps theory of mind although some animals seem to have that last one too.
Fundamentally what this does is further recognise in law that some animals are able to suffer, and that we have some sort of responsibility to avoid inflicting unnecessary suffering such as for entertainment or through neglect.
Thanks for pointing this out!
Until now I had been under the impression that sapient and sentient mean very similar things with a very fuzzy boundary. This does clarify a few things regarding their usage.
> Taken to its logical conclusion, "Animals to be formally recognised as sentient beings" should outlaw their slaughter for food or other products and much more essentially including whatever rights humans have.
If I understand the article correctly the new law recognises (some) animals as sentient, not as humans. I can't see how "sentient" automatically means "has human rights".
In any case, I bet UK laws, those that are actually written down anyway, are written so as to grant rights to categories more strict than "sentient". For example, wikipedia says that in Common English Law, "murder" is the killing of one "person" by another:
> Murder is an offence under the common law of England and Wales. It is considered the most serious form of homicide, in which one person kills another with the intention to cause either death or serious injury unlawfully.
In fact, from this definition it seems like "murder" is a kind of "homicide". So it seems that not only the perpetrator and the victim must be "person"s, they also must be "human" (species homo?).
tl;dr, I don't think "sentient beings" are currently extended the same protections in law as "humans" or "person"s and so slaughtering them for food is not prohibited by any laws (and therefore, is allowed).
I haven't looked at the benchmark implementations but one particular area I've heard other languages to lag behind java is cost of allocation.
Since openjdk has had to cope with lack of (user defined) value types and the garbage heavy ecosystem it has a very well optimised GC for handling heap allocations.
I wonder if the results will be different if other language benchmarks (C++ or rust) use different allocators (eg: bump allocator, per request collectors) for cheaper allocation.
Most of the compared languages (except C#) are likely to lag behind Java on many things, performance included, since Java has been around since 1996, Golang only been around since 2009 and Rust 2010. More time = more engineering time to optimize.
While this _could_ be correct if we are just talking about Go, which has its own backend and optimizer, it is definitely not the case for Rust, which uses LLVM. The differences seen in these benchmarks are all about the gRPC implementation used; languages are irrelevant. C++, Rust, Go and Java all have their own standalone implementation written from scratch, so it's kind of an apples and oranges situation here. You can write good or crummy code in any language for what it's worth.
This comparison is more about the different gRPC implementations rather than the languages. There is no inherent reason why Java (as a language) should be faster than C++ or Rust in a benchmark like this. A lot of time and money have been spent optimizing Java (or HotSpot), but only because Java is really hard to optimize compared to GC-less low level languages.
I don't know, is it though? Properly done reference counting AFAIK requires using atomic increase/decrease in order to be safe, and that creates a bit of overhead every time you assign a reference, while assignment to a reference with a precise GC is basically a pointer assignment. It's much better for latency though, given that the overhead from rc is deterministic. It has been a few years though since I've looked into garbage collection techniques, so I could be a bit rusty about the current state of the art.
You only need atomic reference counting if you're sharing objects between multiple threads, but if you use an object from one thread at a time then non-atomic inc/dec is enough. Rust allows you to make the choice between the two kinds and the compiler can infer which kind you need to use.
Yeah - Rust can, because it also ensures you can't exchange data unsafely between threads, but C++ can't. That's why `std::shared_ptr` has to be thread-safe.
Google search is definitely not dying since for many people what you can find on google is _the internet_. But I personally no longer find google search as useful as I used to find it before. I use plain google mostly to get quick answers for programming problems.
Anything else I search for gets a quick "site:<authoritative_website>" to filter out the cruft. For random subjective topics "site:reddit.com".
This looks like a good gesture from Moderna, but I do not think it will be of much help for most the developing world since the low temperatures needed for the storage of the vaccine are not feasible for the distribution infrastructure of these countries.
I just tried out tsdx. The node_modules folder took ~180MB of space in a fresh project. I don't know if I am doing or judging things wrong, but this seems to be way too much if someone just wants to write some hobby project exploratory code.
I am probably not the target demographic for tsdx or other bootstrap libraries in the ecosystem but I would love to have something "simple" with good defaults which I can debug if something breaks to make CLI scripts to familiarise myself with the language and ecosystem.
Currently the best option for me is to manually setup the directory structure and build commands which is not fun for mostly simple throwaway code.
golang and rust seem to have things right in this regard though rust build artifacts can get quite big.
One more property I think is very relevant to the types of memes referred to by the article is that these memes want to spread at the exclusion of all others or any variation.
What stood out to me with respect to that event is that while many memes were thrown about, some memes had to be clarified to death without having any effect on the outrage while others continued to be thrown about without requiring any clarification despite being dog whistles for things significantly worse than their seemingly innocuous wording.