- I understand and appreciate Reddit’s approach.
On the other hand, I think there might be a way to solve this problem for live anonymous chat in a way that doesn’t rely on threats of “punishment” or “banning”.
I think most people looking at this problem don’t appreciate how much realtime information can be calculated from the event stream and how that information can be leveraged toward solving it in near realtime.
- I am.
While I’m not the kind of person who races to test the most triggering racial slurs, I’m actually glad Anon Pond Heron did because I thought his behavior was informative, especially as you could watch him slowly type out the beginnings of a slur.
I actually think these types of CRDTs can be enhanced with a handful of simple mechanisms to ensure a higher quality chat experience.
- After watching a bunch of people use the live chat, I am not discouraged by live chat anymore.
I actually think one can make it work, one simply needs to account for moderation and flooding upfront.
The first feature you need is a way to instantly ignore people who are ruining the collective experience. I would think when a person is ignored by a certain threshold of people, their content should automatically be moderated.
The second feature that’s needed is some sort of flood protection or detection. If a user is pasting or trying to flood the chat with characters, they should be instantly hidden and their content be subject to moderation. Being able to distinguish between copying and pasting on occasion and flooding goes a long way.
- This data reflects the UK, not a 3rd world country and my comments are restricted to this dataset.
Included in that same dataset are assaults and sports related injuries, which are additional risky activities.
You might argue assaults aren’t voluntary. My personal experience suggests most assaults are the result of voluntary activity rather than involuntary activity, YMMV.
I’m not being naive. I have lived in a 3rd world country where it wasn’t uncommon to see a family of 5 on a motorcycle.
I would note that you will tend to see, proportionately speaking, more women on motorcycles in those countries for the reasons you suggested.
- Honestly, if you build transit, developers will build.
I wouldn't call it "building a city", but if you look at Northern Virginia today, you'll find that vertical districts are popping up along the Silver Line metro that now extends past Dulles airport.
At the end of the metro, there is literally a "town center" residential area on one side with buildings around 5 stories tall. On the other side of the tracks is literally fields, but the roads have been laid out like Sim City with empty plots and developers are now beginning to construct buildings starting from the outside perimeter first, working their way toward the metro station.
Throughout the DC suburbs, you will find densely populated areas with relatively tall vertical buildings (15-20 stories) that simply were not there 20 years ago. Reston is a good example. I've watched 4-6 buildings (over 10 stories) get built in Reston alone. They mostly started when the the metro line was finished.
- Nihilism is one response to disillusionment.
Another response is to come to terms with a possibly meaningless and Sisyphean reality and to keep pushing the boulder (that you care about) up the hill anyway.
I’m glad the poster is concerned and/or disillusioned about the hype, hyperbole and deception associated with this type of research.
It suggests he still cares.
- Are you saying that you’re unable to read a fluent syntax that’s been supported by most mainstream programming languages for the past 10 years?
Or are you suggesting that the majority of programmers struggle to read and understand fluent method chaining?
I don’t have a dog in this fight because this blog post is very novice oriented. I’m just genuinely confused why you think it’s unreadable or “clunky”. What is it about the fluent example that you find clunky?
- Why?
Writing your own LINQ provider is a very niche activity done by people who want to translate or “transpile” C# expression trees into something else.
It is fundamentally a difficult endeavor because you’re trying to construct a mapping between two languages AND you’re trying to do it in a way that produces efficient target code/query AND you’re trying to do that in a way that has reasonable runtime efficiency.
Granted, on top of that, I’m sure LINQ provider SDKs probably add their own complexity, but this isn’t an activity that C# developers typically encourage.
- Isn't TLA+ is more like Alloy insofar as they're thinking tools optimized for the design phase?
I'm more familiar with Alloy, which is a great tool for exploring a specification and looking for counter-examples that violate your specification.
AFAIK, none of the languages you listed above work well in conceptualization phase. Are any of them capable of synthesizing counter-examples out of the box? (Aside: I feel like Lean's meta capabilities could be leveraged to do this.)
- You are absolutely correct. This article and vocal supporters are often not reasonable and I should have made that point.
I honestly found the article to be an insufferably glib and swaggering piece that was written to maximize engagement rather than to engage the subject seriously.
The author clearly values maximizing perceived value with the least amount of effort.
Frankly, I’m tired of reading articles by people who can’t be bothered to present the arguments of the people they’re disagreeing with honestly and I just gave up halfway reading it because it was so grating.
- Approximately speaking, what do you want to see put up?
I ask this because it reads like you have a specific challenge in mind when it comes to generative AI and it sounds like anything short of "proof of the unlimited powers" will fall short of being deemed "useful".
Here's the deal: Reasonable people aren't claiming this stuff is a silver bullet or a panacea. They're not even suggesting it should be used without supervision. It's useful when used by people who understand its limitations and leverage its strengths.
If you want to see how it's been used by someone who was happy with the results, and is willing to share their results, you can scroll down a few stories on the front-page and check the commit history of this project:
https://github.com/cloudflare/workers-oauth-provider/commits...
Now here's the deal: These people aren't trying to prove anything to you. They're just sharing the results of an experiment where a very talented developer used these tools to build something useful.
So let me ask you this: Can we at least agree that these tools can be of some use to talented developers?
- I think this proposal ultimately introduces more complexity than it solves. By automatically inserting migrations (whether at compile time or via “migration files”), you end up with a form of hidden control flow that’s arguably worse than traditional overloading or type coercion. In normal type coercion, the transformation is explicit and visible in the language syntax, whereas these “migrations” happen magically behind the scenes.
Second, database migrations are notoriously tricky for developers to manage correctly. They often require significant domain knowledge to avoid breaking assumptions further down the line. Applying that paradigm directly to compiler-managed code changes feels like it would amplify the same problems—especially in languages that rely on strong type inference. The slightest mismatch in inferred types could ripple through a large codebase in ways that are far from obvious.
While it’s an interesting idea in theory, I think the “fix your old code with a macro-like script” approach just shifts maintenance costs elsewhere. We’d still be chasing edge cases, except now they’re tucked away behind code-generation layers and elaborate type transformations. It may reduce immediate breakage, but at the expense of clarity and predictable behavior in the long run.
- Preventing third parties from intercepting encrypted traffic isn’t the point of deep packet inspection (DPI).
Organizations implement DPI to PREVENT outbound encrypted connections to unknown external servers to keep internal data LEAVING the organization.
In other words, the point of DPI is to prevent unauthorized encrypted connections to unknown servers.
- It doesn’t.
Many governments block TLS connections directly between a client and an external website. Instead, they’ll install a custom root certificate and all connections and intercept traffic, using the government root certificate for each TLS connection instead of the external website’s.
- Let's find out if you're a bigot or not. I'll throw up Webster's definition for reference.
Bigot – a person who is obstinately or intolerantly devoted to his or her own opinions and prejudices.
The capacity for pregnancy is not confined to individuals with a female (46,XX) chromosomal pattern. The real world is complicated, and intersex people can be born with a (46,XY) karyotype or mixed (46,XX) and (46,XY) karyotypes as a result of chimerism. People with Swyer syndrome (46,XY) develop female reproductive anatomy (a uterus and fallopian tubes) but do not produce eggs. However, pregnancy can be achieved with donor eggs and assisted reproductive technology.
So here's the question: Are you devoted to your first opinion, or are you capable of acknowledging that the medical community may have had legitimate reasons, grounded in actual biology, to choose a more inclusive word?
- 18F and USDS always hired a mix of people, but I can tell you that I personally know a number of former colleagues and associates who worked for these organizations, writing code and architecting systems to solve real problems.
If you want a sense of what 18F did, you can visit their Wikipedia page.
- Don’t take this the wrong way—I’m not calling you dishonest; I’m calling the question dishonest.
My point wasn’t that you should have known to trust the organization. I’d never ask you to trust anyone or anything.
My argument is that the question’s vague phrasing and misleading premise make it nearly impossible to answer while also inviting the reader’s imagination to spiral into meaningless speculation.
While it may not directly inject misinformation, it fosters the kind of speculation that often leads to it—because, believe it or not, grown adults can be surprisingly impressionable.
- I didn’t grow up hearing that the U.S. was inherently evil.
I learned the messy, unfiltered history of an imperfect country—one built on a Constitution that has kept it going and evolving for nearly 250 years.
That same Constitution, which originally allowed slavery, also provided the legal framework to end it and later secure civil rights. In the early 20th century, it was amended to guarantee women the right to vote.
I was never taught that the U.S. was always a just and noble nation, nor that the founders were infallible. But I also wasn’t taught that the country was irredeemable.
Our best feature has always been our willingness to redeem ourselves by continually remaking ourselves rather tethering ourselves to our past wrongs. The fact that our constitution has multiple provisions for doing exactly this has always been its most impressive feature.
A society that can’t learn and accept the good and the bad of its history is a society doomed to stagnation -- morally, intellectually, and economically.
- No, it's a dishonest question, regardless of your intentions. Let's look at your question:
> Am I being too cynical if I read from this that they were fine with it until they got fired?
What is *it*? What exactly are you suggesting they were fine with? If you don't spell it out, you're asking a dishonest question because it's the type of vaguely defined question that dishonest people use to let peoples' imaginations run wild.
The people working at 18F were always about making government work better and more efficiently.
Absolutely nothing on the page suggests they were fine with the sledgehammering happening or granting access to systems that hold sensitive information. If anything, it suggests they wanted to be kept around to moderate what's happening and help lessen the damage.
The issue isn't whether you're becoming too cynical, it's that you've defaulted to a cynical theory, you've failed to examine your theory critically and you asked a question in a way that is indistinguishable from a dishonest question based on a dishonest premise.
- Your claim doesn't seem to reflect the reality. Marketing mail only accounts for 19% of total revenue.
Shipping and packages account for 41% and First-Class mail is about 32%.
https://about.usps.com/newsroom/national-releases/2024/1114-...
Feel free to reply with your sources.
- While I understand Feynman’s point that mathematicians love to generalize everything and that physicists focus on what actually works in the real world, as programmers, we’re doing something different from both of those groups. We’re engaged in a mix of engineering and analysis. We need to build systems that hold together under real conditions.
Category theory might seem obsessed with abstraction. In some ways, it is. However, when skilled practitioners apply these tools to areas of computer science and engineering, the point isn’t to create generalized abstractions. The point is identify the minimal, leak-proof abstractions needed to fulfill some desired quality. While I understand the language sounds very general, cryptic and off-putting, it’s also very precise.
While category theory might seem like a discipline that’s obsessed with generalizations, in practice, the abstractions one constructs using categorical tools can be very specific. The point isn’t always to construct the most general abstractions, it’s to construct abstraction that actually work 100% of the time. The irony is, mathematicians and computer scientists who are concerned with rigor often do this by proving specific cases first and then incrementally generalizing, not the other way around.
- He said the word woke *described* the "awareness of racial and social injustice". He didn't say it was a mechanism for "raising awareness".
Let me ask you this: How does one, in your mind, do "something about it?"
PG's article focuses on "woke" as a kind of performative morality and you've gone out of your way to try an unify this original definition of "woke" with Paul's performative definition.
Was "woke" being used performatively in the 1930's when black folk advised other black folk to "stay woke" when traveling in certain parts of the country that were hostile to their existence?
When does the original definition start becoming incompatible with Paul's half-assed definition in your mind?
- As someone who has personally explained the phenomenon of cargo cult to individuals over the years, I made the decision to abandon it years ago.
I didn’t succumb to the pressure of heresy. I simply grew up and realized that it wasn’t actually that useful of a tool for explaining first principles or encouraging people to learn things from a first principles perspective.
My experience was: If a person felt like they already identified as someone who understands idea from first principles, the cargo cult story didn’t incentive them to question their understanding.
I also found if the person didn’t identify as someone who understood things from first principles, then the implication that they were implicitly being compared to clever primitive people. It wasn’t exactly reassuring and motivating.
At some point, people need to grow up and realize these conversations aren’t always about trying to censor people or to construct new heresies to use as instruments of cancellation.
Sometimes we need to have these conversations so we can reflect on what we say, how our words make people feel, and if they’re actually effective at accomplishing what we hoped those ideas would accomplish.
Zoom out and look at the bigger picture.
Dafny’s expressiveness tends to be more in the service of coherent specifications and less in the service of language abstraction for its own sake.