> but they can choose what part of the industry they support.
Sometimes they can, sometimes they can't, sometimes it's up to what they care and focus about.
> If many care, they can make an impact.
Sure, theoretically. Expecting any results seems like a fool's game though. Who would bother when the state is right there and perfectly capable of making rational decisions better than any individual consumer could?
> And that's the crux. Many, or most people don't give a shit. Not about climate change, not about plastic in the ocean. Not about animals living in factories without seeing the sun ever. They care about their immediate surroundings, their taxes and the money in their pocket. They don't want further problems, someone else should take care of that (unless it increases taxes).
Yea, it's almost like this is a "tragedy of the commons" issue known to be extremely difficult to impact by individual decision making. And who can blame the individual? Who could shoulder that responsibility and emerge sane? The only entity involved one might expect to make a difference is the state with their ability to override the inherent irrationality of the masses.
Christ, what are people being taught in school these days?
The reason we have bloat is it's easier to satisfy stakeholders if you don't give a damn. There's really no reason to discuss this at all once you realize this.
But of course, ranting and reading rants is satisfying in its own right. What's the problem?
I'd agree if our society had figured out any sane way to respond to crime in the first place, but that seems even worse than our barely extant resources for drug addiction in the first place. Somehow we're more willing to pay out the ass to make people feel bad than we are to make them feel better.
I was pessimistic about grapheme-based orientation towards text, deleted it to research more, and I've come to the conclusion that this is simply not a consensus opinion. Can you give me an example where grapheme-based sorting makes a critical difference from codepoint-oriented sorting on a normalized text? Full unicode composition certainly seems to provide a reasonable solution with western languages, CJK characters, and romanization of CJK characters, but that leaves a hell of a lot of scripts that I don't know about.
I mean unicode is incredibly complex, but it doesn't even seem like there's a consensus outside of swift's string implementation of what a grapheme even is.
(Granted, this might support the above concept that people can't even agree on what a string is, but unicode code points seems like a reasonable baseline to expect from a modern language. That said, rust doesn't even include unicode normalization in the standard library, although the common crate for it seems like a reasonable solution.)
> Async work is generally slow and terrible, at least for the pace that you need to achieve to succeed.
Really depends on the work that needs to get done. Sometimes it's just a matter of time and work that needs to be put in, and async work is perfectly suited to that.
Ah, I thought you were referring to the benefits of such a system as compared to zig and blithely passing the responsibility of input validation on to the programmer. Rust of course demonstrates the benefit of checking validity at initialization.
Well sure, people may colloquially refer to a lot of things as "strings"—hell, you could refer to all sequences as strings if you just wanted to argue with people—but the idea of trying to encapsulate this all in the standard library in a single implementation seems confusing semantically and of questionable value. It seems a lot easier to work with a reasonable interpretation of a string with its associated tradeoffs—which again is implied by most standard libraries.
That said, I personally would balk at willing adopting any runtime that didn't enable iterating over a sequence of unicode code points, whether they be stored as utf8 or some 16-bit form, from a string of bytes in 2024 unless I were guaranteed to avoid having to deal with text processing of free-form human input.
> And then everybody proceeds to write their own String library anyway.
Is this true? It was (is!) certainly true for C, but C has an especially emaciated expectation for string processing primitives. Any runtime developed after like 1995 that I can think of has fixed this by providing a sane string implementation people generally agree upon.
> If you're constructing invalid `str` you already have severely fucked up.
Presumably it'd be better to know this immediately on initialization of the variable rather than at some point in the program that actually expects valid utf8—god forbid you transmit or persist the data before this happens.
Seems sort of like the opposite—a lot of the regulation is done by people installed by lobbying, sort of like a privately owned and operated part of government.
Of course it's terrible for everyone but shareholders there isn't really any domestic competition.
I guess I read your comment as contradicting itself by the phrase "the power" rather than "the illusion of power", especially since the american public is so easily distracted by petty squabbling, whereas capital is emphatically not easily distracted but extremely focused on what it wants.
Anyway, I don't mean to start an argument over the power of voting, illusory or no. We all have opinions about the value of voting that we hold rather tightly given so much emphasis is placed on it as the center of the political power we do hold.