I agree that the article is strongly worded, and Andrew seems quite angry/frustrated. However, it also gives me flashbacks of how it was back in the golden days, when Linus was calling wannabe kernel contributors idiots who should have died because they "couldn't find their mothers tit to suck on".
Having low patience is a quirk of our nerd culture, and now that the woke season has ended, it seems to be going back to how it has always been!
Treating people poorly isn’t a quirk of nerd culture. Even Linus doesn’t think so.
> This is my reality. I am not an emotionally empathetic kind of person and that probably doesn't come as a big surprise to anybody. Least of all me. The fact that I then misread people and don't realize (for years) how badly I've judged a situation and contributed to an unprofessional environment is not good.
> This week people in our community confronted me about my lifetime of not understanding emotions. My flippant attacks in emails have been both unprofessional and uncalled for.
> Especially at times when I made it personal. In my quest for a better patch, this made sense to me. I know now this was not OK and I am truly sorry.
The above is basically a long-winded way to get to the somewhat painful personal admission that hey, I need to change some of my behavior, and I want to apologize to the people that my personal behavior hurt and possibly drove away from kernel development entirely.
> I am going to take time off and get some assistance on how to understand people's emotions and respond appropriately.
And he walked the walk. He became better after that. Linux is a better project for it. But I suppose it did influence a generation of people in software who looked up to Linus and thought this is the correct way to treat people you perceive as beneath you.
But it is very common. I was watching a YouTube video by Casey Muratori where he says anyone using a garbage collected language is stupid and just not a good programmer! Just like that he offended 95% of our industry. He even said people who use smart pointers are just beginners and haven’t learned the true ways yet, offending the remaining 5%. And this sort of comment and people supporting those opinions are extremely common!
It’s important to keep in mind that “common” doesn’t mean “right” or “positive”. Lots of things, such as CFCs in aerosol spray cans and radioactive elements in household items used to be common.
I’m not saying that’s what your argument is—on the contrary, I get the feeling you’re making a statement and not justifying it—but still think it’s an important point to not forget.
> I was watching a YouTube video by Casey Muratori where
Do you remember what video it was? That’s a bit disappointing and I’d like to see for myself to gather context and tone. From all I’ve seen from Casey I’d expect gentle bashing of languages but not groups of people. Though I mostly have seen Casey on his own teaching or being interviewed one-on-one, I get the feeling he might be different in podcasts.
I truly feel like Linus did a lot of damage by normalising his brand of leadership. Younger developers wanting to emulate someone as accomplished as Linus unsurprisingly adopted the habits that are easiest to emulate - name calling, attacking, denigrating, dismissing.
Linus is better now but the behaviour is ingrained into so many people. They now “tell it like it is”, are “straight shooters”, don’t have time to be “politically correct” and so on.
While I generally think constructive criticism is usually the right choice, I suspect Github will never get the message unless there are some very strongly worded criticisms. In Andrew's defense, he did post some constructive evidence of things he considered problematic.
A high-profile repository like Zig moving off of Github is as loud a message as one can give. Tossing in "losers" and "monkeys" only muddies the delivery.
The most effective message GitHub can receive is when they don’t get to invoice you.
GHA in particular is a hot mess, I’m as surprised as a decade ago that anybody is using this crap. IMHO it’s bugs as a service kind of product, and the bugs start at the core design with the ‘pretend yaml but actually an unholy mix of shell, js and json’ language.
> This model completes tasks like code generation more thoroughly than the previous preview model and is intended to reduce cases of “laziness” where the model doesn’t complete a task.
How does one solve for this? Wrangling the prompt with "please don't be lazy", or are there inference tricks like running thru the weights differently/multiple times?
Please don't make the thread worse by crossing into off-topic attacks like this.
If you see a post or an account that ought to have been moderated but hasn't been, the likeliest explanation is that we didn't see it. If you want to help, emailing us at hn@ycombinator.com is best.
Satya did turn the company around, didn't he? It seems a reliable way to create wealth without too much trouble is to start a company and then find someone capable to run it.
Im on the hill that Ballmer turned the company around as he walked out the door, and Satya gets all the credit.
The Microsoft One was possibly the biggest reorganization the company ever saw. Ballmer pulled the trigger, was the fall guy for the past problems, and once he fixed it, it was also important to tell a new mythology which required a new titan. https://news.microsoft.com/2013/07/11/one-microsoft-company-...
> Venice was a Great Power, with colonies and occupations all over the Mediterranean, vying with states like France and England for supremacy.
The nostalgia of lost glory in Europe is touching. In today's world even France and England aren't major powers, much less Venice. The truth thing is, these cities will never become major powers again. In a world where education is disseminated fairly, the economy of any country will be directly proportional to its population (barring outlier natural resources like in Gulf countries). I would bet my money on a Tier 2 city in India like Surat over has-beens like Venice.
How to tell someone you have never been in Venice without telling them you never have been to Venice.
Just kidding, but I don't think venetians as I know them would even want to become a world power again, yet the capital of that former world power is truly amazing place. I may be spoiled because I grew up nearby, so I have been there often, but it is one of my favourite cities in the world, just because it forces you to think completely different about what a city is or could be.
Lots to unpack here. I agree that it's difficult for 'old powers' to rise again. Cities - and the ideologies bred in them - seem destined to have their heyday, use that wealth to build their culture, then sit back and bask in former glory. The drive and spark seems to give way to tradition and enjoyment.
It makes great cities of the 'old world' like Istanbul, London, Venice, and Cairo absolutely fascinating; living, breathing museums of the glories and failures of different approaches to life and power.
We'd be unwise to brush them aside lest we don't learn their lessons and tales. Venice is a tale of entrepreneurs who looked at a decaying Byzantine Empire, and who saw the value of the ancient texts wasting away within their walls. Venetians spread 'old ideas' far and wide and started to embrace reason, trade and order, over ideological dogma. While they too faded away, their ideas and impact gave birth to the European powers, who created America, who'll create ???
Regarding your comments on education. While the internet is an insanely powerful equaliser in education. It too, seems to be going the way of the Byzantines. Walls and moats, ideological purity, and a lack of drive for curiosity and greatness seem the flavour of the day. Maybe the 'Venice of the future' will need to also be a lean power who values curiosity, spark, drive, grit and greatness, as opposed to a huge population centre which can only realistically be controlled by mass-produced, packaged information?
Venice was thalassocracy and never focused on real colonies - only military/trading bases. And it dominated Europe by the strength of ducat being both Venetian and global currency. Venice was skilled at setting gold to silver exchange rates - and maintained its monetary policy consistent for decades.
Venetian navy dominated Mediterranean due to high military budget but also first modern assembly line in Arsenal (Venetian shipyard) able of mass production of ships.
In other words Venice is very interesting and worth studying. Some of Venice's achievements still echo in XXI century.
> A thalassocracy or thalattocracy,[1] sometimes also maritime empire, is a state with primarily maritime realms, an empire at sea, or a seaborne empire.[2] Traditional thalassocracies seldom dominate interiors, even in their home territories. Examples of this were the Phoenician states of Tyre, Sidon and Carthage; the Italian maritime republics of Venice and Genoa of the Mediterranean; the Chola dynasty of Tamil Nadu in India; the Omani Empire of Arabia; and the Austronesian empires of Srivijaya and Majapahit in Maritime Southeast Asia.
> The Venetian Arsenal's ability to mass-produce galleys on an almost assembly-line process was unique for its time and resulted in possibly the single largest industrial complex in Europe prior to the Industrial Revolution.
Education, wealth and access to resources will never be divided fairly or be equally accessible to all. So there will always be a massive discrepancy between various countries and the way to look at those former powers is to see them has having a head start over the rest of the world. If they turn themselves into tourist attractions (Amsterdam, Venice, Paris and many others) that's a better outcome than that they become entrenched military powers or maintain their colonial ambitions. For Surat to rival any of those you'd have to transport it in time back to the 15th century and to make India a colonial power. That will never happen, because you don't get to be a player at that level by being nice: it takes having an unfair advantage and the willingness to exploit that advantage (military, trade, something else?).
Amsterdam wouldn't be what it is without the 'golden age' (which for the countries that were plundered probably wasn't a golden age at all, but one of oppression and massive looting), Venice wouldn't be where it is today without a sizeable fraction of the monetary movement of the age flowing through its banks, not unlike Switzerland, NYC or London in more recent times. I don't think there will be any cities becoming 'major powers' ever again except maybe for SV and some in China if they manage to avoid financial collapse.
> I don't think there will be any cities becoming 'major powers' ever again except maybe for SV and some in China if they manage to avoid financial collapse.
There are more opportunities than that. Technical change that doesn't accrue existing regions can shift the balance - for example maybe souther Texas during a potential "gold rush" phase of private space exploitation. Or maybe, finally a big earthquake hits the west coast and the resulting resettlement in other cities breaks the current positive feedback loop of tech in bay area resulting in new powerhouse regions. Or some of the developing countriesin Africa finally get their act together and become an economic and later technical and military powerhouse. Or some currently minor country has a research lab discover a major technology, or makes a smart investment (like Taiwan and semiconductors) that makes it a new power, if harnessed locally and not just distributed back to existing tech centers. Plenty of opportunities - though it is indeed true is more likely for existing power centers to continue to centralize their benefits of existing human capital including access to resources like funding or transport hubs of physical goods, proximity to customers or whatever.
Hinduism did spread via the maritime route to Cambodia and Indonesia but there’s this little thing called kala pani that was probably prohibitive to direct colonization
I don’t see any nostalgia. Venice was indeed a Great Power [0] centuries ago. It doesn’t even call France and England great powers , just that Venice was in their league long time ago.
> The truth thing is, these cities will never become major powers again
Nobody claimed the opposite? Who exactly are you arguing with on this?
But I will argue that France and England are still major powers. France is core to the EU and pretty much controls it together with Germany. England is a power politically, but perhaps not economically. Its cultural exports are huge too. Power changed, but the power holders remain the same.
I would never use this, when the original is available to read, that too in English! Consider the sheer dumbification at ~27 minute mark, "The universe has it's rhythm, and im vibin' with it".
The original is in classic Koine Greek. Every translation since has been an interpretation and rewriting, often picking up the idioms and standards of the day.
>sheer dumbification
While you clearly just got that from one of the top comments and didn't actually listen to the video, can you explain what is "dumb" about that? If you've read meditations -- and note that this interpretation is basically section by section in order -- it's actually an entirely reasonable, understandable interpretation.
And having read the "original", where the original to me was an English translation performed in the 17th century by Meric Casaubon -- littered with 17th century-isms of English -- I found this video a fascinating listen because it made me reinterpret various sections.
I think what they meant is that you can find a modern translation of the original anywhere you can find books. It’s not some rare, lost tome. It’s right there, ready to be read, if you want it. You don’t have to watch a video summary of it.
Eh, their comment reads more like gatekeeping. And I wouldn't call any translation the "original". Each are doing precisely what this video does, though obviously to different degrees.
Speaking of which, too many are far too focused on this being a "video". It's an "audiobook" with some AI images. The use of YouTube for audio is pretty common.
It's something one might casually listen to in the background while doing other things, marvelling that Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, arguably the most powerful and richest person on the planet at the time -- five hundred years before the birth of Islam and barely after Christ -- had such approachable, reasonable, "modern" thoughts and concerns and outlooks.
You mention something important I left out of my micro-review in another post. I was fascinated that a book so old sounded so utterly modern. It was so candid and intimate with little flowery pontificating (which you wouldn’t expect from it, but still). Instead of a history lesson, it’s a guidebook for modern living.
I'm a big fan of Staniforth's translation. It reads remarkably close to a literal translation. I've done line-by-line, side-by-side comparisons with the Greek & Greek-English dictionary lookup, a painfully-literal English translation, and several major English translations, to see which one belonged on my shelves. It is also a breezy, modern-feeling read—for this sort of work, at any rate. It's new enough that it lacks most of the outdated-feeling English of earlier translations, which earlier translations typically deviate more than Staniforth from the original text, anyway, so it's not like they were in some way better.
Most of the "easier" or "updated" modern translations inject a ton of their own style, erasing that of the original text. One that really irks me is a translation that "fixes" the style of the opening "from so-and-so, I learned such-and-such" sentences by making them clipped little fragments, with the claim that it's more in keeping with the stylistic "quick, dashed-off notes" intent of the original—but it isn't! That is not how it's written! Some translators made those more flowery than necessary, but they definitely aren't written like that! Staniforth's reads damn near identically the original Greek, but without being at all hard to read. It's the closest I could find to ideal fidelity that also isn't clunky—it mutates the language just enough that it's entirely acceptable and easy-reading English.
Part of the charm of reading old works (even translated) is how they clearly phrase themselves in a different way than you. But then you eventually see beyond that and realize that they are 99% like you. The common human experience.
But I don’t get the same vibe from “vibin’ with it”. Ugh.
Between your comment and the one you replied to, I'm starting to think this is a good exercise. It shows how modern language can be used outside of its usual context, i.e. spoken by modern speakers. As a slightly older person than them, I can understand what they mean better, and remind myself that language evolving is a natural part of life. For them, it can make older works more accessible too, not just by translating them, but by showing to them that there's a mapping between the way they express themselves and the way other people do, and that they don't need to be intimidated by older works with different ways of speaking.
Reminds me of how NPR is always like "yup the dow was super gnarly today bro, now over to Steve so we can get an update on our best-video-games-of-the-year report" and it makes me grimace. Then I think maybe I'm getting old, but then I think, no dammit, this is just dumb, and it's probably ok for me to expect a little more professionalism from journalists. The news shouldn't need to sound like a twitch streamer, and words from our best and brightest like Aurelius shouldn't need this kind of obnoxious paraphrase either. In the end a work is relevant or it is not.. giving the work some unnecessary "update" to attempt to become/remain relevant just seems unasked for, and silly, and desperate.
NPR when I was in college used language and an affect very similar to broadcast news from the 60s or 70s, which is before I was born so it's certainly not like it was "speaking to me on my generation's terms" or whatever.
And I preferred it that way. The new "hip", vernacular style they go for sucks. If I want that shit, podcasts exist. I thought it sucked when they were starting to do it and I was still in the young, "hip" demo they were trying to target.
At the risk of ranting.. yeah, it's pretty bad and I also remember how much I used to like it. It's one thing if it was only style changes, but the dumbing-down of much of the content also is pretty hard to miss. Banter, "fun" stories, piles of shameless fluff, the fan-service moving closer to social-media levels of pandering crap, the podcast-level of contempt for the time/intelligence of the viewership. I guess we all become what we hate. Today is actually a pretty good day for them, but above the fold it's still This week's news quiz separates the winners from the losers. Which will you be?, and the search term "Barbie" appears before "Boeing".
I get actively angry with them over their absolutely terrible election coverage ("what are the implications of this event for so-and-so's campaign, and how might they respond? Let's ask our panel..." OH MY GOD MONDAY MORNING QUARTERBACKING CAMPAIGN STRATEGY IS NOT FUCKING NEWS, I yell at my radio before getting ahold of myself) which is a real problem now that election seasons, which used to be best measured in months, have somehow expanded to encompass the entire calendar of every year.
Reminds of Pakistan, specially when there was a lot of violence during 2008s. There would be _multiple_ bombs blasts on any given day and after a while, the news lost it's real world import for people. I was a tourist in Karachi then and recall appalling insensitivity when I heard of a blast on so and so road. The news just made me update the route I took that day.
I think the optimal strategy would be to use the "reduce" step in mapreduce. Have threads that read portions of the file and add data to a "list", 1 for each unique name. Then, this set of threads can "process" these lists. I don't think we need to sort, that'd be too expensive, just a linear pass would be good. I can't see how we can do SIMD since we want max/min which mandate a linear pass anyway.
The largest demographic of readers, who have the ability to make or break a book is middle class white women. If you can convince them to read your book, you have made it.
I would say it depends on the book. I don't have such data for my Elisp textbook (which fared pretty well), but I'm not sure it would confirm your claim.
Another reason for this is the sheer amount of rubbish literature that is being printed, specially in the category of "Young Adult". There are endless streams of psychopath male leads and damsel in distress characters, with predictable story lines and pretentious dialogues.
It's pulp. If you made it disappear the people reading it wouldn't magically start reading "the good stuff", they'd move onto something else suitably mindless in another medium.
just don't read it if you have a problem with it. and don't waste your emotional energy on hating it. there are a ton of books out there that you would love, why spend your time thinking about books you don't like?
let the readers read what they want, let the writers write what they want, and don't judge people based on their reading preferences. even if it's rupi kaur.
For many people, reading is a fun escape into an alternative reality that they would never want to live out in real life. If they want to escape into a world of dark romance tropes featuring psychopathic male leads, more power to them and to the authors they're supporting.
Don't forget that these also have experienced publisher and marketing networks behind them; on their own the books are a dime a dozen, it's the publishers that make it popular.
> There are endless streams of psychopath male leads and damsel in distress characters, with predictable story lines and pretentious dialogues.
I mean - it sells. Is it readers fault if other authors write unpopular stuff? "Royal Road" is my guilty pleasure. Almost everything there conforms to that quoted scheme but even among mountains of crap there exist various degrees of quality. That said the popularity isn't strongly correlated to that - checking 2 authors I follow one has $300/month on Patreon while other $20k/month.
Personally, I think this is where Patreon (and similar) shine. Allows 'true fans' to support directly with a much smaller cut than traditional distribution/publishing mechanisms, whilst also not requiring long-term subscriptions.
Honestly Royal Road is a treasure. It's the only site where I actively click on t he ads because the ads are all for new stories and there's a decent chance I'll like one.
Having low patience is a quirk of our nerd culture, and now that the woke season has ended, it seems to be going back to how it has always been!