> lack of ambition so severe it borders on criminal
I'm not sure what timeline you're thinking about, but JWST was launched pretty recently and it's pretty ambitious. But more to the point of my earlier post, NASA's "lack of ambition" is probably directly attributable to the "small government" people who penalize ambition in the public sector and praise it in the private, government contractor sector. The incentives to be ambitious in government are perverse when every "failure" is scrutinized and condemned by people who want government to fail so that they can justify taking public money and dumping it into private bank accounts.
Yeah, the anti-regulation people when NASA experiments: "look at all these failures! Cut NASA funding and give public funds to the guy who purchases elections!"
The same people when SpaceX blows up a bunch of rockets: "wow, look at the innovation, they move so fast! Cut NASA funding and give public funds to the guy who purchases elections!"
Maybe if you're in a war that actually threatens your country. In the US, the Republican Party wages wars (such as the Iran War) pretty exclusively to facilitate borrowing public money and dumping it into the pockets of the rich. What looks like waste to the taxpayer is a feature to Republicans and their paymasters (including Israel, in the case of the Iran War).
While I applaud the strides the EU is taking to decouple militarily, it's still a long ways away from replacing the security umbrella provided by the US military. The EU doesn't even have a single command and control structure (although NATO provides a lot of interoperability between European militaries). It's no knock on Europe's efforts--it's just that the dependency on US military was almost a century in the making--it's not going to be undone overnight. But Europe is moving in the right direction--I just hope Europe stays the course and continues to take it seriously.
> IMHO this mutual interdependence is actually a good thing. It stimulates maintaining peaceful relations and engaging in trade. We could use a little more of that. Isolationism didn't lead to anything good last century either.
I think interdependence is a good thing, but I think the EU is _reliant_ on the US militarily and economically and that's ... not great particularly when the US leadership is openly hostile toward Europe (and toward the US for that matter). I'm speaking as an American.
I’ve been saying this for 20 years. I care much less if the game is visually stunning than if the core game is fun. It could be a paintball themed FPS for all I care as long as the core mechanics are fun and the story is engaging, I care very little. Also, good graphics don’t have to be hardware intensive—not everything needs to seem photorealistic.
The entire premise of the conversation is that other languages allow us to write idiomatic code and get good performance, and the parent's position was that Java requires "competent developers". So yes, the parent did say that, however...
> There's no such thing as a programming language that guarantees excellent performance regardless of programming competence.
No one made any claim remotely like this. This is a very obvious straw man argument. What was argued was that you can get decent performance from other languages without additional competence beyond idiomatic code.
Am I the only one who thinks "pebkac" is a self-own? If you're blaming your users for the tool, it feels like maybe your tool is just hard to use properly. I have no doubt that there are big, fast, low latency Java systems out there, but why does it take so much extra effort to build these systems in Java compared with other languages? Maybe it would be better to have competent developers focus their attention beyond managing Java's shortcomings?
I'm not even hating on Java here--I actually like the JVM quite a bit, but blaming users feels like an implicit admission.
What does this mean “it’s the left that’s the problem”? The right’s solution to academic reform is literal pseudoscience. And I don’t mean this as whataboutism—I’m responding to the implication that some political faction other than the left has the right answer, and I don’t know who that would be.
I mean, the reason mobile data is part of the OS is because the antenna is hardware that must be shared across processes. Chat completions is just a network call like anything else—it’s already available to every app; they don’t need to pay separately (they can use the same account), they just pass their API key over the network to the completions server. What am I missing?
Somehow I feel it’s probably less satisfying if your contribution pays for a couple hours of developer time compared with the annual salary for an entire team. It’s probably more satisfying to be able to move the needle than not.
> Age old argument: money also has no intrinsic utilitarian value.
I didn't claim money had intrinsic value, I claimed that money is fiat currency--it's backed by a lot of people with a lot of guns. BTC is not.
> And yes, btc does store value, it is doing that for me now. I stored some of my value in it and it has held better value than fiat.
Currencies (BTC included) don't "store value", they are assigned value by society esp via markets. Sometimes society decides one currency is more valuable than another, or that its change in value differs from that of another, but neither currency stores value.
I'm not sure what timeline you're thinking about, but JWST was launched pretty recently and it's pretty ambitious. But more to the point of my earlier post, NASA's "lack of ambition" is probably directly attributable to the "small government" people who penalize ambition in the public sector and praise it in the private, government contractor sector. The incentives to be ambitious in government are perverse when every "failure" is scrutinized and condemned by people who want government to fail so that they can justify taking public money and dumping it into private bank accounts.