Thanks jerf for your thoughtful reply. tbh I was trolling hn for the very first time in 14 years and based on the response I have a natural talent for it. Who knew. The multi-core point is well taken, as it maps to my own professional experience in that transitional era as well.
The brief blurb about how GIL came to be, in light of Python’s success as a language and a tool, makes me question my s/e belief system. Things like this are like when good things happen to bad people and bad things happen to good people. It makes you question the meaning of it all.
Is there no great architect in the sky? Is there no software god after all, looking down, punishing sloppy engineers and granting blessings to thoughtful engineers? How else to explain this injustice of sloppy engineering eating the world (to say nothing of JavaScript)?
Interesting how the nth term index for n-Sonos non-integral is itself monotonic. Intuitively it seems it doesn’t have to be. (Handwavy looking at the n-S() behavior as hitting a ‘catastrophic’ transition at the n-th, so question is why is this index increasing as n increases?)
Everyone in Iran, including the Shah, wanted Iran’s oil nationalized. It was the economic consequences that tempered others. The Good Dr. had to go hat in hand to US and beg Eisenhower to aid after oil revenues stopped. That was his bright idea.
Also your story is not the propaganda narrative that is repeated. This is the single paragraph story:
Iran did have a democratic government, but because the PM nationalized the oil, US did a coup and installed a dictator, the shah.
And that is entirely different from your “US helped in the process”. That would be accurate because that is all it was: in the main political support. Then, we in fact had a decade were Generals were powerful, until the Shah, finally in 60s (without CIA and to the great annoyance of the Kennedys) assumed all the power after having disbanded the Communist party and defanged the National Front. The “dictatorship” began 10 years later and it was far more benevolent than say a psycho killer like Mao who murdered millions. But Mao was a “great man” and the Shah is a “dictator”. Go figure.
Your story about operation Ajax is just that - a story. Iran’s PMs were all elected by parliament and the one before Mr. Mossadeq was assassinated by Islamists allied to your “democrat” who then let the killer get off with no jail time.
You also fail to note that the PM in question had a “99%” referendum during his tenure. You also fail to mention that the said PM refused his constitutionally valid dismissal by the Shah and then proceeded to launch a COUP against the constitutional monarchy.
You fail to mention all this because NYTimes and CIA and the rest of the Western world is perfectly happy with the narrative of Kermit Roosevelt getting off the plane with a suitcase of dollars and then taking over a “99%” supported regime overnight! CIA is sure impressive!
The facts are that the PM in question began to alienate his allies — the Islamists — so they withdrew support, and very substantial chunk of the nation absolutely did not agree with his coup and his program of unilaterally changing the outcome of the 1905 Constitutional Revolution of Iran which do grant certain powers to the monarch. This includes dismissing the PM.
So, now that we have a more ‘rounded’ historic context of what actually led to ‘53 counter coup encouraged and supported by US and UK (which failed) and the next day’s Army’s counter-coup (which succeeded), the topical point remains:
Whatever CIA, or “Anglo-Saxons” or this or that evil empire has done in NO WAY excuse or elucidate the dictatorial regime of the clergy and their very open trampling the rights of women in Iran.
I am not sure what is the Islamist version of “Tankee” but you are it.
[and a ps for Iranians in the audience]
If you continue to repeat the ridiculous NYTimes/CIA version of the story you are denigrating our great people. The idea that some flunky from CIA with a suitcase of cash managed to unseat a “99%” PM overnight mainly says that Iranians are mindless chumps who are trivially manipulated. This is neither flattering or accurate.
They are denied education, freedom of movement, and freedom of conscious.
It is not slavery, as you are correct to point out - it is a regressive reading of Islam and its insistence on removing the sexual from the public space (which is fine - it is in principle a modality of civilization — that takes that stance which is not inherently oppressive of a given sex, it places restrictions on both sexes’ behavior in public space).
A sign of your backwardness is considering women —- decent, moral, upright but lacking a covering tent — as “naked”. But imo, it is not that the woman showing hair is “naked”, rather the eyes that behold are soaked in lust. It is this lust that you can not control, so “let’s control women”.
Rigor is not the only variable, agreed. The issue (again) is that the other variables are many and they are non-linear in the main. (For example, the variable of ‘competence of development organization’ is not smoothly distributed. Our field is not a “smooth” domain it is ‘chunky’.)
So where does that leave us? Opinions are one option - comparative views to other ‘industrial’ age type of activities may be informative.
I propose to you that “we moderns” live in a typed world. It is not strongly typed but it is typed. One could argue that that is a side-effect of physical world artifacts produced at scale. I would be interested in hearing the argument as to why that near universal phenomena* does not apply to software, in your opinion.
(* Industrial production at scale and emergence of standards)
No, the point does not remain that “research” “shows” anything. Seems there is agreement that ‘meaningful experiments have never been done because it is too complex and expensive’ so there is no significant research data.
But the basic argument is that a programming approach — having a compiler and a type system is not a “style” btw — that employs development time tools to reduce the burden of runtime operational tools, afford greater application of a wider set of optimization techniques at runtime, and also add to the information bandwidth of source code via type annotations is reasonably expected to be more rigorous than the other approach.
[This is just data - I’m sure it was “abnormally hot” in many places, but NYC was not one of those places. Believe it or not, 2000 and 1960 were just randomly picked out of a hat and the only other dates I tried fwiw]
It’s a client-server architecture with a bit of CRDT inspired algorithm sprinkle on for offline mode. The name of the game remains consensus and CRDTs convoluted approach is there to server a niche in the spectrum of distributed consensus. It is slower, more complex, and less transparent. I wouldn’t really use it outside of long lived and erratic P2P nodes — CRDTs solve that problem and that is what they are really designed for: partition prone, long lived, distributed, peer to peer, collaborative global state changes.
OP’s author is a prof. of religious studies and has a book on Hebrews so possibly his point of view requires the preeminence of Hebrew alphabet.
I also found some of the reasoning questionable. The reason Latin teaching was the job of Greek slaves was precisely because they were Greeks and Roman nouveau rich were adorning the education of their children. Who teaches the children of elite today? Millionaires or smart poor people? The second questionable idea of his is that “sex” and stuff like that are not of interest to “elite”. This confused thinking disregarding content for medium also was a rather weak argument. Maybe the elite were using writing as a private very exclusive chat app and sending textual selfies.
Hebrew must be first if you are a religious person who believes in God speaking Hebrew letters and creating the world. It just doesn’t work if it turns out the Egyptians created the alphabet.
Re your edit, if you re-read my op you should find we’re in agreement regarding the press’s standing and its causes.
Numerous assumptions are embedded in your optimistic analogy of printing press and machine learning systems, including continued access to general purpose computing devices (for the unwashed), data (and we can work our way up from just there to far flung concerns).
What is actually happening is that capital is no longer satisfied with owning the presses, but rather wants to own the language. That, erasure of the distinct concern of “journalism” (regardless of du jour state), via erosion of control over language and what is “correct”, is the actual issue.
Were these machines benevolent cyber prophets that were discerning ‘veritable truths’ about the human condition and thus their conditioning of the language and acceptable discourse a clear benefit, there would be no concern. But they are not, and again a reminder that the same people who own the press own the ai shops (class wise).
That is a very odd historic analog to pick but deliciously ironic in that you apparently (?) missed the bit in the OP about “few powerful” interests controlling the labeling of data and thus ‘vocabulary of discourse’ of generativeAI. It is ironic because Luther too had “few powerful” parties behind him — various Princes iirc — who also wanted to unseat Vatican and thus amplify their own power.
So sure, “journalism” is at a low prestige level because a “few powerful” interests -own- all mass media, including press, and we have a handful of “press services”.
Key issue here is the troubling “few powerful” regardless of their declared ‘denomination’, so to speak, don’t you agree?
So a jumble of chair legs is “NVIDIA burger” and it did say GPU was a “bun” so it thinks the flat thing (chicken?) is some sort of bread. If GPT-4V was “aware”, it would say “it’s funny because I won’t get it right but you will use it get a bunch of $VC, and that is funny, kinda”.
Pulsar is a very interesting architectural case study. The cost of the greater clarity and flexibility is the greater management burden. The server-side functions are nice (and remind of JEE MBeans) but the direct challenge to Kafka is the decoupling of storage from servers via Bookkeeper (which adds the lower layer cluster management burden) which addresses the rebalancing headaches with Kafka type of solution (where the server and storage are unified).
It’s not apparent as a dilemma until the said architect has spent years -convinced- that the grand edifice is “good architecture”, and finally matured as a practitioner. Only after that phase passes is there an actual ego-driven dilemma, strictly speaking.