Exactly! It’s choosing not to do so which makes some companies special!

I never said “our” Government wouldn’t lie to us (unless you’re Chinese, in which case they definitely will). I just said that the Chinese government constantly lies, which is easily seen by anyone with eyes.

China: Spews blatant and obvious lies about everything that does or does not cast a shadow. Heavily censors any source.

Some guy: I don’t trust information coming from China.

China (and shills): That’s sinophobic!!

At this point I have a hard time believing that anyone can buy a Chinese product and then talk about there being a “secret backdoor” in seriousness.

Come on: We all should know by now that if it’s Chinese, there is more likely than not some way for Xi to use it for something other than what you want the product to do. There’s nothing “secret” or “back” about this door. It’s more like an open front gate with landing strips and a “welcome home Pooh bear” sign.

Completely unrelated to the meme: Whenever I see this picture I just can’t help thinking about how it must have felt to be literally Elvis in that moment. It’s honestly an awesome photo in the way you can tell that this guy feels like the king of the world right there.

Which is a comparison that makes complete sense. When you say that someone is leading the way, you are clearly referring to them being at the forefront at the time when they were leading the way. Any system that was a trail blazer 100+ years ago should be outdated by now, unless progress stopped or went backwards in the meantime.

Norwegian here: Yes. There are definitely some people that look very stereotypically Danish or Swedish, to the point where I feel like I know where they’re from before they say anything. Once they start talking, any doubts are of course out the window.

Exactly this… I’ve been called out before for saying that someone (who was french) “looked french”, with the implication that it was racist of me to imply that people from different countries typically have subtly different features.

Of course, you can’t always tell where someone is from based on how they look, act, or speak, but pretending that there aren’t certain phenotypes that are more common some places than others is just ignoring what we can observe. It’s not always easy to pinpoint exactly what it is, but people generally have an idea of what a “typical southern/western/eastern/northern european”, looks like (or any other area of the world for that matter), and often that intuition will be correct. This is not racism, it’s simply the fact that after seeing a bunch of people from some country or region, you build a pattern for what phenotypes are typical in that region. Racism is when you decide to assign more worth to some phenotype or ethnicity than another, which is a whole different thing.

Basically, recognising that people are in fact different is not racism. Determining someones worth or quality of character based on differences in phenotype is.

For anything mathematical, the fact that Fortran has integrated support for doing math on arrays is absolutely fantastic

Looking at the general quality of YouTube videos, and the expected demographic of people that would select this option, this looks like a recipe for creating the most conspiracy-theory-oriented AI ever created.

Watch me: My void* doesn’t give a shit about your const!

I have to be honest in that, while I think duck typing should be embraced, I have a hard time seeing how people are actually able to deal with large-scale pure Python projects, just because of the dynamic typing. To me, it makes reading code so much more difficult when I can’t just look at a function and immediately see the types involved.

Because of this, I also have a small hangup with examples in some C++ libraries that use auto. Like sure, I’m happy to use auto when writing code, but when reading an example I would very much like to immediately be able to know what the return type of a function is. In general, I think the use of auto should be restricted to cases where it increases readability, and not used as a lazy way out of writing out the types, which I think is one of the benefits of C++ vs. Python in large projects.

The amount of people I’ve been helping out that have copied some code from somewhere and say “it doesn’t work”, and who are dumbfounded when I ask them to read the surrounding text aloud for me…

Along the same line: When something crashes, and all I have to do is tell people to read the error message aloud, and ask them what that means. It’s like so many people expect to be spoon-fed solutions, to the point where they don’t even stop to think about the problem if something doesn’t immediately work.

While I do agree with most of what is said here, I have a hangup on one of the points: Thinking that “docstrings and variable names” are a trustworthy way to indicate types. Python is not a statically typed language - never will be. You can have as much type hinting as you want, but you will never have a guarantee that some variable holds the type you think it does, short of checking the type at runtime. Also, code logic can change over time, and there is no guarantee that comments, docstrings and variable names will always be up to date.

By all means, having good docstrings, variable names, and type hinting is important, but none of them should be treated as some kind of silver bullet that gets you around the fact that I can access __globals__ at any time and change any variable to whatever I want if I’m so inclined.

This doesn’t have to be a bad thing though. I use both Python and C++ daily, and think that the proper way to use Python is to fully embrace duck typing. However that also means my code should be written in such a way that it will work as long as whatever input to it conforms loosely to whatever type I’m expecting to receive.

Well if you need something to work with Fortran…

Sorry, but I honestly don’t get it. I I were to point out the crown jewel of open source, it’s gcc. gcc is the backbone and survival condition for so much modern industry that it’s not even remotely funny.

Take away gcc, and the world will likely burn for a substantial amount of time until people start making in-house or proprietary alternatives.

Don’t do that in Norway either - just bad luck if the holidays happen to land on a weekend. On the other hand, we have five weeks of paid vacation, and holidays are not counted into those, I’m not sure how that’s done in other countries?

I never understood that. Apparently they use it as a primary way of messaging each other? At least that’s what younger relatives have told me. I’ve tried to have them explain what makes the app designed to hide/delete stuff after it’s been read better for communication, but so far haven’t gotten an explanation I could make any sense of.

“Enshittification will continue until revenue improves”

I’ve found that regex is maybe the programming-related thing GPT is best at, which makes sense given that it’s a language model, and regex is just a compact language with weird syntax for describing patterns. Translating between a description of a pattern in English and Regex shouldn’t be harder for that kind of model than any other translation so to speak.