This is more than just trivially true for Python in a scripting context, too, because it doesn’t do things like type coercion that some other scripting languages do. If you want to concat an int with a string you’ll need to cast the int first, for example. It also has a bunch of list-ish and dict-ish built in types that aren’t interchangeable. You have to “worry about types” more in Python than in some of its competitors in the scripting-language space.
1) Modern games are enormous and as long as services like GOG let me re-download my library it frees up literally terabytes of space on my disk array for pirated movies and other things that benefit far more from piracy than games do.
2) I don’t want viruses. I don’t want viruses more than I want to avoid paying $1-$20 for a game (as if I’m anywhere near caught up enough on my backlog of games from the last 40ish years for buying games at full launch-week price to ever make sense, lol, I do that like… once every several years, all the rest are very cheap)
The generous assignment of motivation is realpolitik anti-Russia + China stuff.
Less generous but probably true as at least part of the motivation, there’s the usual factor of US companies wanting to “invest” in a foreign country to extract natural resources.
One may guess at other, more-personal motivations for parties involved.
It, transparently, has dick-all to do with drugs.
[edit] ok technically the drug connection is the admin continuing to use that as an obviously-bullshit excuse to use powers they couldn’t ordinarily, and daring the courts to do anything about it. Same as justifying using emergency tariff powers against Canada over fentanyl. They’re counting on the courts to abdicate their power and responsibility to call bullshit on the admin’s lies when it comes to application of existing laws.
The DoD, which outlives any presidential term, is preparing for multipolarity. It wants to maintain power over the Western hemisphere while continuing to mind after its interests in Asia and Europe as best as it can. If America can maintain hegemony in the whole of the Western hemisphere, it's largely shielded from whatever happens in Asia, especially if future administrations continue to double down on isolationism.
Venezuela and even the posturing on Greenland are the DoD war gaming out a firewall from Chinese and Russian influence. They want to stop South American trade with our rivals, and especially prevent basing of foreign troops.
Greenland becomes a strategic part of this once global warming opens the North Sea to large volumes of shipping. It will become the major shipping corridor, and America wants complete control over it.
Not to mention all of the oil and gas exploration both of these countries provide.
Trump isn't thinking 30 years ahead. This is the DoD through and through. They think in terms of decades and centuries.
> Replaces the standard Go runtime with one designed for the Dreamcast's constraints: memory 16MB RAM, CPU single-core SH-4, no operating system.
24 total megabytes, with an M, of memory between system and video (another 8 there), single core 200mhz CPU, graphics chip runs at 100mhz. Shenmue runs on it.
Could implement a custom Teams client on top of that. My biggest concern would be TLS and media decoding, but could just proxy the traffic and roll a text only client.
I mucked about with Microsoft Graph a bit before, didn't seem too bad.
It runs fine. It is perhaps a bit pricey for a 200MHz system, I'd certainly focus on having only a few of them and doing most of my work by looping over some sort of user-defined tasklet (or, in other words, "standard game architecture"), but it's not like Go requires multiple CPUs to work at all.
I didn't say it would not run and I am happy that Go is being used in gaming like this. But it's like buying a Koenigsegg and using to to drive into your near by grocery store as concurrency is at the heart of Go and having it run on a single core, or rather, i assume, thread, is not the best use case for it.
I'm actually not a big fan of people who recite "concurrency is not the same as parallelism" like a mantra because I don't think it's anywhere near as orthogonal as those people think. But then, that's also largely because multicore is the norm now, rather than some bizarre exception. In a single core case, it is still true. Goroutines are just a different way of achieving async functionality, in a way probably a lot more convenient than the actual code of the time had, albeit at a bit of a performance penalty.
There was a period of time towards the beginning of Go when you could get some small performance advantages for certain tasks by locking the runtime to one goroutine at a time. They've long since addressed that, but there was a time when there were people writing Go code and deliberately limiting it to one execution context at a time.
"concurrency is not the same as parallelism" is a "mantra" exactly because most people are unable to distinguish between them and/or understand the meaning. maybe not nowadays, but go back a decade and that was definitely the case.
Both of these two contests were really weird. Trump is an extremely unusual Republican. Hillary was someone Republican mouthpieces had been priming the electorate to vote against for the prior 20+ years. Kamala moved to the top of the ticket late in the race, in an odd move, replacing a candidate whose approval ratings had been in (historically speaking) “you will definitely lose” territory for months already.
Both races were pretty close despite this.
Also, I can tell you first hand that heartland, salt of the earth, common clay of the new west Republicans, the worst of the worst from democrats’ perspectives, loved Palin. Looooved her. She’d have done better among them than McCain. That’s among hardcore republicans. How the shit am I supposed to believe Hillary and Kamala being women is the reason they lost, given that?
I think the “lesson” of “well a woman just can’t win yet” is simply ignorant. It doesn’t fit what we’ve actually seen.
You're correct. That woman (Clinton) had no chance in winning, because Republicans had spent years hammering her in anticipation of her inevitable run, and many Democrats felt she was chosen before the primary, leading to much apathy. Had Harris had more time, she could've taken it.
Or, as you said, had the Republicans put up Palin, I think the world would look veery different today. I don't think there would've been as much of an appetite for the populist trump nonsense today.
> and many Democrats felt she was chosen before the primary, leading to much apathy
Well, they would have a good reason to feel that, because Debbie Wasserman Schulz basically engineered it that way as head of the DNC, and what do you know, less than 24 hours after leaving that position was the head of Clinton's campaign.
There was no way the DNC leadership was going with Bernie, and leaked emails later confirmed that - they just said fuck you to their membership's preferences.
> Had Harris had more time
Not coincidentally, number one Google search on Election Day?
And Hillary Clinton did get more of the popular vote—not that it actually matters in America's cockamamie system: not enough votes were in the "correct" places.
My gut feel has always been that removing the electoral college would hurt the blue team and help the red team. Logic:
The popular vote is basically split evenly today (the usual talking point, 2016, was 62,984,828 Trump, 65,853,514 Clinton). 2020 and 2024 had similarly small-ish margins.
So take 2016: if we’d had a normal election cycle, and then the day after voting said “hey guys let’s do this based on the popular vote!”, Clinton would have won. But that’s not how it would be; both sides would know of this change for at least the full election cycle.
So now you start with a roughly 50/50 split voting base, with many Democrat votes coming from big cities and many Republican votes from Middle Of Nowhere, Kansas.
You win the upcoming election by gaining votes.
Republicans go energize the voters in New York, LA, SF, Seattle, Austin, etc, who are not voting today because they (correctly) know their vote doesn’t matter. They maybe change some bit of their platform to appeal more the big city voters. They can pick up millions of votes in relatively few places.
Democrats have to go win votes from Middle Of Nowhere, Kansas. Or more accurately, 500 small towns in Kansas, to pick up a few hundred thousand votes. There isn’t nearly as much of a depressed Dem vote in red states, simply because red states have small populations (see “land doesn’t vote!”). It’s an exponentially harder problem. While Democrats are trying to convince Uncle Rupert that FOX is lying to him, Republicans are filling Madison Square Garden in NYC with closeted Republicans and telling them their vote will count for the first time ever.
I just don’t see how abolishing the electoral college doesn’t backfire on Democrats. How wrong am I?
Today, people probably stay home in safe states - if you vote Democrat or Republican in California - you already know how the state is going to be called. Same can be said for Alabama. Why waste your time for a sure thing?
Some 65% of the population voted last time. Last cycle, there were some jokes about how only votes in the handful of battleground states mattered. A popular vote policy could activate a lot of non-voters who suddenly felt like their voice could have an impact on the result. How that would shake up, I am not sure. I have heard that most republican voters are already participating, there are significantly more democrats who stay home.
The Electoral College strengthens democracy by enabling local-election-observation to be a highly effective safeguard against fraud and voter demoralization.
At my neighborhood polling place, poll watchers (including local professors, blue collar neighbors, and even occasional UN election observers) volunteer to quietly monitor the election process, verifying that no registered voter is rejected or harassed. With a day off work, any citizen can audit their precinct to verify that end-of-day machine totals match the state's certified results, and could alert the news of any discrepancy. Any motivated citizen can trace their vote's impact up to the state level.
This matters because the Electoral College locks in your vote at the state level by using it to secure electoral college votes. Should fraud occur in some far away state, the Electoral College prevents it from numerically overturning the electoral college votes your state has secured. This federated system is more resilient against local failures.
By contrast, adopting a nationwide popular vote means that votes don't count until they're tallied at the national level. At the national level, a firmware flaw in a poll machine in Hawaii, or a lazy Secretary of State in Arkansas can cause the system to accept fraudulent votes that numerically overwhelm the national tally without ever presenting itself in a way I could observe or report. Without the Electoral College, Democracy loses a lot of its "go see for yourself" and becomes too much "just trust us."
> The Electoral College strengthens democracy by enabling local-election-observation to be a highly effective safeguard against fraud and voter demoralization.
The Electoral College is a bigger source of voter demoralization than anything that exists in any modern representative democracy which doesn't have the Electoral College. (FPTP by itself is bad, but even other systems have FPTP, don't have nearly the degree and persistence of voter demoralization seen in the US.)
Like, I can see how one might utter this sentence in an alternate universe where the US was the only approximation of representative democracy that ever existed and where every commentary was purely theoretical with no concrete comparisons to make, but in the actual world we live in, where there are plenty of concrete alternatives and whole bodies of comparative study, it is beyond ridiculous.
You are correct, because the current implementation of the electoral college is currently synonymous with "winner takes all" in all but two states - ensuring no opposing party turnout in states that are a foregone conclusion. If the winner-takes-all system were removed but the electoral college were still intact, Democrats would never win another election.
I don't think that can be right. The Democrats have recently won both the House and the Senate. In such an election, if "winner take all" is abolished, how would they not win the presidency?
Because in states like California, Colorado, etc., vast swathes of Republicans do not bother to vote because their vote is overridden. The numbers don't work in reverse.
Just look at the county maps within blue states: these elections you speak of relied on those folks being entirely disenfranchised.
Of course it works in reverse. Plenty of Democrats are not going to bother to waste their time in California when the current electoral outcome is a foregone conclusion. Similar with Republicans in Mississippi.
If the rules changed to a popular vote where even "safe" states were up for grabs, I think there would be lots of previously uncounted "dark matter" voters who would activate and would significantly impact the outcome.
This math doesn't work in reverse because there aren't as many applicable people or relevant districts in the rest of the states.
Mississippi has far fewer total disenfranchised Democrats (in both absolute number, district count, etc.) than California has disenfranchised Republicans.
Without extreme gerrymandering, there simply aren't enough eligible-to-be-swung electoral votes to meaningfully benefit Democrats in rural states.
You do not need disenfranchisement, just apathetic voters who do not currently contribute. Right now there are ~23 million voters registered in California. 45% registered D, 25 %R, giving absolute numbers of 10 million D, and ~6 million R. Which you can handwave is 4 million Ds who know they do not need to contribute - their neighbor has their back to secure the state electoral votes.
Looking at the US as a whole, there are 44 million registered D with 37 million R. If you could round up all affiliated voters, Dems win the presidency every election if going by popular vote[0].
99.9% of people would be better voters if they put five hours a week toward reading about and better understanding shit from an undergrad liberal arts program (history, political philosophy, statistics, media studies, basic physical science, economics) and five hours a year into catching up on the news, than vice versa.
I’ve been using iOS since 2013 or so, and even spent five or so years off-and-on developing for the platform.
I never use the multitasking stuff. Too confusing. I regard the loss of the single physical home button as a tragedy. One of the best UI elements ever created. Not joking. So simple, imposible to confuse because there’s just one, basically nothing about it that requires training, and it acted as the perfect “oh shit, get me back to something normal!” button for the tech-unsavvy, which is one of the things they most-need in a UI. So good.
I can tell you that everyone I’ve met whose job it has been to communicate with and guide C-suiters across many companies has regarded them as basically super-powerful young children, as far as their reasoning capacity, ability to understand things, and ability to focus. Never met more cynical people about the c-suite than the ones who spend a lot of time around lots of them, without being one of them or trying to become one of them (any time soon, anyway). Like they truly talk about them like they’re kindergarteners, and insist that if you want to reach them and be understood you have to do the same.
A lot of very cosplay/play-pretend (and sometimes expensive!) tactics I’ve seen in high level enterprise sales made a lot more sense after being exposed to these views. Lots of money spent on entire rooms that are basically playsets for high level execs to feel cool and serve no other purpose. Entire software projects executed for that purpose. I didn’t get it until those folks clued me in.
There's exceptions to this. Usuallly founders who've made it past many mergers and kept a central role in the company. Insulting their intelligence will bite you back very quick.
But otherwise I think it's spot on. Especially for Cxx specialized in keeping the ball running, they'll have no interest in understanding most of the business in the first place, they seem themselves as fixers who just need to say yay or nay based on their gut feelings.
> Like they truly talk about them like they’re kindergarteners
Well, a bunch of them are. From what one can hear about Elon Musk for example, at each of his companies there is an "Elon handler" team making sure that his bullshit doesn't endanger the mission and stuff keeps running [1], Steve Jobs was particularly infamous among employees [2] and family [3], Bill Gates has a host of allegations [4] even before getting into the Epstein allegations [5], and Trump... well, I don't think the infamous toddler blimp is too far off of reality.
> and insist that if you want to reach them and be understood you have to do the same.
That makes sense even for those who aren't emotional toddlers. At large companies it is simply impossible for any human to dive deep into technical details, so decisions have to be thoroughly researched and dumbed down - and it's the same in the military. The fact that people are allowed to hold positions across multiple companies makes this even worse - how is a board of directors supposed to protect the interests of the shareholders when each board member has ten, twenty or more other companies to "control"?
IMHO, companies should simply be broken up when they get too large. Corporate inertia, "too big to fail", impossibility to compete against virtually infinite cash coffers and lawyers - too large companies are a fundamental threat against our societies.
reply