The same frustration due to the same bad habit led me to look into implementing lazy loading in SumatraPDF, but unfortunately the code is structured in such a way as to make it a very non-trivial change.
Reminds me of the quotation attributed to Edgar Degas, who it is said was in a conversation with Jean-Louis Forain that was interrupted by the state-of-the-art technology that the latter had had installed in his home: "So that's what the telephone is? Someone rings a bell and you hurriedly attend to it like a servant?"
"In my parents' house, there were a lot of books: all the great authors of the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, translated foreign authors. I spent my youth, and still today I spend most of my time, reading literary works, and particularly those of French literature."
That passage reminded me of a remark by the 2002 French Fields Medalist Laurent Lafforgue:
"My specificity today among French mathematicians is not to know more mathematics than others, I can even admit that I know less mathematics than most French and foreign mathematicians. It's not about being 'great' either, I'm not great at all, on the contrary I have a rather slow mind. When I listen to a seminar, I'm probably one of those who understand the least what is being said: an idea in an hour, for me, that's already a lot. No, the only explanation for the successes that I have been able to obtain in mathematics is my being imbued by the reading of the great classics."
It tends heavily to revisit certain themes, but overall it drives home the point that regardless of the social acrimony and political polarization that dominate social media and seem to divide Americans into inexorably inimical tribes, when it comes to everyday interactions, most Americans seem to be pretty decent and kind people.
There's also more nuance than that, in that the Liberals' position changed substantially over time. Gladstone's party was one that very much believed in lowering taxes and lowering state expenditure, with the idea that the individual knew best how to allocate resources and would only be stifled by the fetters of government. This cutting back of the economic role of the state was the "Retrenchment" part of the Liberal slogan "Peace, Retrenchment and Reform". It was the New Liberals, at the turn of the 20th century, who split with the old Liberalism and turned the party into one that supported rudimentary state welfare.
Furthermore, it is not as simple either as saying that the Tories "aligned with nobility". The Whigs were a very aristocratic bunch — just look at the government that passed the Reform Act 1832.[0] In fact, the Whigs enjoyed greater support among the high aristocracy: "Among the very greatest landowners, those who held at least 10,000 acres worth at least £10,000 per year, the proportion of Liberals increases."[1] Overall, the divide between the Tories and the Whig element of the Liberals in the 19th century can be hard to nail down or understand precisely because it doesn't easily correlate with any one factor, such as religion (they were nearly all Anglican, but some had sympathy for nonconformists), social origin (they were largely drawn from landowners, but there were various ranks among them) or ideology (although things tended to be more clean-cut there — there's a reason nonconformist industrialists sided with the Whigs rather than the Tories), but seems rather to have been a combination of these things and more, including family tradition; and the Whigs themselves have been seen as a conservative element who simply had the pragmatism to enact such reform as would allow them to preserve their dominant position in society.
Note that the article is talking about the Commons, not the Lords.
Still, it fails to mention the Reform Act 1867, passed by a traditionally landed Parliament and which substantially increased the franchise; it is this change that can be thought to have had at least some causal role in decreasing the proportion of members of great landowning or squire families among Members of Parliament from nearly 66% in 1866 to 58% following the 1868 general election;[0] the Commons that passed through the Education Act 1870 was thus still mostly drawn from the traditional landowning class.
Reminds me of a Udemy Unreal Engine course where the instructor would pronounce
APawn*
as "APawn star", which Udemy's subtitle generator would suitably render as "a ** star".
GP presumably meant the weapons of mass destruction Donald Rumsfeld claimed Saddam Hussein was developing in "seeking the means to strike the United States and our friends and allies",[0] not unusable pre-1991 weapons that were rusting or buried in the desert.
Was it? I recall the kuro5hin analysis of the leaked Windows 2000 source code[0] that said:
>there is nothing really surprising in this leak. Microsoft does not steal open-source code. Their older code is flaky, their modern code excellent. Their programmers are skilled and enthusiastic. Problems are generally due to a trade-off of current quality against vast hardware, software and backward compatibility.
Is Ada actually considered a legacy language in the same way COBOL is now? What languages have displaced it for new software in the safety-critical areas that it gained ascendancy in?
Similarly, the effect of media coverage can also be thought to be visible in perceptions of race relations. When polled, Americans say that their local race relations are still near the best they've ever been, but for the past few years have tended to respond more and more negatively about the quality of race relations at a national level — ie, what they perceive through the media and social media.
You are quoting critics negatively assessing a popular composer, whereas the article talks about how music now praised by critics largely fails to engage the public.
(Note that Fidelio did indeed receive an unenthusiastic reception in 1806 and only became successful when performed after a thorough revision in 1814.)
Parkinson's law in software is real. As Jon Blow often says, our computers are basically supercomputers that are astoundingly bogged down by bad software development practices. The computer I'm on is at the very least several dozen times more powerful than the one I had 20 years ago, yet a lot of functionally equivalent software probably runs at about the same speed, certainly not an order of magnitude faster let alone several dozen times faster despite not doing several times more.
The problem is that a lot of software developers don't even realize how bad their software design is because of prevailing norms, and the state of affairs can only be upended by certain developers showing that another way is possible when programming with the hardware rather than against it.
As someone who has to use Visual Studio and ReSharper professionally, I was absolutely blown away when I tried out the (still in alpha) 10x Editor and found it accomplishing in less than a second something that takes ReSharper several dozen seconds, during which it locks up the editor, or that it might even fail to do entirely, having succeeded only in making VS unresponsive (finding all usages of a widely overridden virtual function):
https://www.10xeditor.com/
(Disclaimer: I was impressed enough by the editor's performance to become a paid supporter.)
(Another VS extension I use is P4VS, which is slow, buggy garbage that will lock up VS if you look at it funny. In fact, P4V and the P4 extension for Windows Explorer are also utterly dismal, but Helix Force just don't seem to give a damn.)
Another example is Casey Muratori making a terminal several orders of magnitude faster than the Windows one simply by designing it well, without even going through an optimization process:
https://youtu.be/hxM8QmyZXtg
It's fair to say that a huge amount of modern software is at least an order of magnitude slower than it needs to be. The standards in the software development industry are frustratingly low and there is a deplorable dearth of disruptors to push them in another direction.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_chat_alphabet#Compariso...