• 4 Posts
  • 43 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • For someone starting out, I would say that a major advantage of Python over any compiled language is that you can just create a file and start writing/running code. With C++ (which I’m also a heavy user of) you need to get over the hurdle of setting up a build system, which is simple enough when you know it, but can quickly be a high bar for an absolute beginner. That’s before you start looking at things like including/linking other libraries, which in Python is done with a simple import, but where you have to set up your build system properly to get things working in C++.

    Honestly, I’m still kind of confused that the beginner course at my old university still insists on giving out a pre-written makefile and vscode config files for everyone instead of spending the first week just showing people how to actually write and compile hello world using cmake. I remember my major hurdle when leaving that course was that I knew how to write basic C++, I just had no idea how to compile and link it when I could no longer use the makefile that we were explicitly told to never touch…


  • I’m not quite sure what assumptions you’re talking about, but I do want to hear what you have to say.

    What you’re answering to is about opposing external hostile forces, that wasn’t what I was talking about. I’m talking about internal criminal environments that are dispersed in the population and make a living off anything from fabricating documents or scamming people to trafficking or smuggling. Just like modern organised criminal environments, these are not groups you can “wage war” against.

    My question is related to how these will be dealt with if not by involuntary imprisonment/re-education/some other involuntary and enforced way of preventing them from exploiting society?


  • Ok, I’m only really having issue with the “which shouldn’t be hard” part. What makes you think that violent response from an anarchist society would be more effective than the police/justice system in a modern state?

    These groups exist today, and it turns out that making them crumble by arresting (or, in some countries, executing) their members is a significantly non-trivial task. That’s when you have an organised force opposing them, which doesn’t need to deal with internal disputes the way an anarchistic force would need to.


  • I’m asking: In a hypothetical anarchist society, how do you deal with organised criminal environments that live off exploiting other members of society, and who refuse to follow rules or rulings created by the consensus of those that don’t want to be exploited?

    I’m pointing out that these groups exist and have existed in more or less every society of decent size, so they must be factored in somehow. I’m also pointing out the “voluntary prison, or else you’ll be excluded from society” likely doesn’t work, as these are people that have already accepted living a life on the side of the rest of society, within their own environment.


  • So what do you do to deal with the situation we see in modern states with an actual centralised “monopoly” on violence: Organised criminal environments that live off exploiting the rest of society?

    We’re talking about people that don’t care if you shun them, because they have their own environment, with their own hierarchy and set of rules, and they’re willing to use violence to exploit the rest of society to make a living.



  • I just came back to Europe after a couple weeks in the US. The US was beautiful (travelled in the Rockies). I was surprised by the fact that I unironically would not be able to live there just because of the food. Everything was so drowned in cheese / sugar / unspecified ultraprocessed something that I had legitimate digestion issues the first week.

    • “I would like an omelette please”
    • “Yes sir, do you want eggs in that or just the cheese?”

    I had no idea I could miss just plain real bread as much as I did by the time I got back.



  • Yes, it’s a field. Specifically, a field containing human-readable information about what is going on in adjacent fields, much like a comment. I see no issue with putting such information in a json file.

    As for “you don’t comment by putting information in variables”: In Python, your objects have the __doc__ attribute, which is specifically used for this purpose.




  • In general I agree: ChatGPT sucks at writing code. However, when I want to throw together some simple stuff in a language I rarely write, I find it can save me quite some time. Typical examples would be something like

    “Write a bash script to rename all the files in the current directory according to <pattern>”, “Give me a regex pattern for <…>”, or “write a JavaScript function to do <stupid simple thing, but I never bothered to learn JS>”

    Especially using it as a regex pattern generator is nice. It can also be nice when learning a new language and you just need to check the syntax for something- often quicker than swimming though some Geeks4Geeks blog about why you should know how to do what you’re trying to do.


  • My test suite takes quite a bit of time, not because the code base is huge, but because it consists of a variety of mathematical models that should work under a range of conditions.

    This makes it very quick to write a test that’s basically “check that every pair of models gives the same output for the same conditions” or “check that re-ordering the inputs in a certain way does not change the output”.

    If you have 10 models, with three inputs that can be ordered 6 ways, you now suddenly have 60 tests that take maybe 2-3 sec each.

    Scaling up: It becomes very easy to write automated testing for a lot of stuff, so even if each individual test is relatively quick, they suddenly take 10-15 min to run total.

    The test suite now is ≈2000 unit/integration tests, and I have experienced uncovering an obscure bug because a single one of them failed.



  • First of all, that speech is awesome.

    But I want to comment on something regarding modding, and ask an honest question: Shouldn’t reiteration of historical speeches or texts be omitted from rules about slurs? I mean, reiterating a speech, or a section of Huckleberry Finn, is obviously not the same thing as devaluing someone by calling them a slur. We actually have a quite hot debate going on in my country about this now, where some teachers were harassed for “being racist”, because in class they read aloud a famous poem written by an immigrant about racism, where he writes some of the things that were shouted at him. The whole point of the poem, and of reading it in class, is of course to make a point out of how bad racism is, and to educate about racism. Still, these teachers have been stamped as “racists” because they reiterated specific words in the poem.

    For the honest question (I’m not American or a native english speaker): Isn’t there a historical difference between the word “Negro”, and a certain similar word I’ll refrain from reiterating? The way I’ve understood it, the former is a historically more neutral form, that was simply used the way we today would use “black person”, while the latter has more or less always had some kind of devaluating undertone. I’ve gotten that interpretation, among other things, from having read speeches where people are promoting equal rights, and use “Negro” to refer to black people, while clearly not believing that they are inferior in any way (hence the promotion of equal rights). Of course, today, both words are considered unacceptable, but I would like to clarify if I’ve misunderstood, as it helps in interpreting things that were said or written in the past.



  • This is a very “yes but still no” thing in my experience. Typically, I find that if I write “naive” C++ code, where I make no effort to optimise anything, I’ll outperform python code that I’ve spent time optimising by a factor of 10-30 (given that the code is reasonably complex, this obviously isn’t true for a simple matrix-multiplication where you can use numpy). If I spend some time on optimisation, I’ll typically be outperforming python by a factor of 50+.

    In the end, I’ve found it’s mostly about what kind of data structures you’re working with, and how you’re passing them around. If you’re primarily working with arrays of some sort and doing simple math with them, using some numpy and scipy magic can get you speeds that will beat naive C++ code. On the other hand, when you have custom data structures that you want to avoid unnecessarily copying, just rewriting the exact same code in C++ and passing things by reference can give you massive speedups.

    When I choose C++ over python, it’s not only because of speed. It’s also because I want a more explicitly typed language (which is easier to maintain), overloaded functions, and to actually know the memory layout of what I’m working with to some degree.




  • Of course, Li-ion batteries will never cover large-scale power demand. Not primarily because of lack of lithium, but because it’s a technology that scales far too poorly into the MWh/TWh scale, and has a far too short lifetime.

    The battery tech we need for truly large scale storage is different from what we need for small, portable storage. Stuff like redox-flow batteries are looking promising.

    There’s also hydrogen, with different storage methods being actively researched- from direct storage to using ammonia as a carrier.

    The issue with using mechanical storage (like pumped hydropower) is threefold (off the top of my head):

    1. It has ridiculously low energy density
    2. Even after > 100 years of pumps and turbines, the power loss in a pump/release cycle is very high.
    3. It’s heavily limited by geography

    I’m not saying pumped hydropower isn’t part of the solution: I believe the solution is that we need many solutions. I just think it’s important to point out that battery tech isn’t some monolithic thing, and that there are issues with pumped hydropower (and mechanical storage in general).