When writing code for end-user applications, I think it's mostly true. When it's writing code for a database engine, a game engine, a 3d renderer, or anything else that involves heavy data processing, optimization is the core "thing" often and it might not even be a good enough solution without it. Although, a lot of time even then C++ is good enough even then when picking reasonable data structures to represent the data.
Thank you for the article! Do I see a Turbo-C screenshot there or am I imagining it? It was my first IDE (I didn't know that's what it was called) when I started programming. I sometimes miss it, it was really good, especially the help system.
I agree with the article of course. I think most confusion comes not having learned about the purpose of having them be defined based on the architecture in the first place. It took me a long time before I stumbled upon how they really worked and why, because while I started it was either x86 or nothing. When x64 showed up, suddenly it became relevant and everybody started learning about C types more in depth as they ran into issues with sizeof.
Also, misuse in data protocols is where I think the bad reputation of the flexible type sizes came from. stdint was desperately needed for that reason and it came a bit late.
I think being able to define additional rules in a language is a reasonable feature and sometimes would make life a whole lot easier, but I think when implemented through text macros rather than rewriting the underlying program graph along with accounting for all the constraints, that causes most issues.
Program graph rewriting is of course more complex, but can be better defined with regards to acceptable inputs and more defensive as opposed to letting the next step of compiler or interpreter handle it.
The other problem is that most IDEs don't offer an expand macro (or similar) option for the rewritten parts (or I haven't seen them doing that), so observing what the final code looks like requires additional steps. In some ways its similar to functions, but most languages have functions that have a well defined input/output structure whereas macros can do some unexpected things depending on the inputs.
Insert mandatory observation here that LISP was there decades ago. I don't know about SLIME in Emacs, but if you use SLIMV in Vim, you have a keyboard shortcut for MACROEXPAND already there.
Yes, especially people who subscribe to humanism as a philosophy. Studying humanities is of course great too! I didn't realize from the title that that was more what the article is about, not about the philosophical idea.
Since the article calls for learning more languages, I hope it's alright if I mention a still in-progress experiment of mine. I constructed a simple language (Not a programming language!) some months ago for my close ones, who do not share a common language.
It's intended to be very easy to learn, maybe a bit like a cross between Toki Pona and Ro. I can pinky promise it's much simpler than Mandarin. The core vocabulary consists of 70 single-syllable words with simple rules for compound word-construction to expand the language while speaking. It's somewhat limiting, but I've been usually able to bend it enough to convey what I want to express when trying.
I'd be very interested, if anybody wants to try to learn it (as recommended in the article above, to become more like the humanities!) and maybe try to chat in it online:
Please excuse the mistakes in the explanatory texts. After I made a major update to the language as a whole, left it alone for a few months and now looking at it again I'm seeing all the things that are wrong and remained without an update... I'll be correcting them soon.
Very few people can afford to pay for homes in all cash up front. Plus, financing a home is usually a great idea, since they tend to be appreciating assets (as long as the interest rate is lower than the rate of appreciation).
There’s a strong historical case to be made that houses only cost what they do because they receive government insured mortgages and preferential tax treatment. The costs rise to consume the available funding.
The reason owner-occupied financing gets that tax benefit is to put owner-occupant buyers on a (more) equal footing with a commercial borrower as commercial interest is deductible as a business expense against income whether it’s startup costs, financing a factory, an airplane, or a rental house.
Perhaps interest should not be tax deductible. It's a huge subsidy to the banks and finance industry, which does not need any assistance, and has routinely caused destructive economic recessions.
It's a subsidy by proxy. The government forgoes tax revenue on money that goes to interest payments. People deliberately get loans for the interest deduction.
If you earned $100,000 in a year but paid $5,000 in mortgage interest, government will not collect taxes on that $5,000, because you gave it to the bank. The bank gets money, but government doesn't: makes little difference if you gave it to the government first (who then handed it on to a bank), or you gave it directly to the bank.
That doesn't make sense to me. Given an interest rate and a financed amount, I have to pay the same amount of mortgage interest to the bank whether it's tax deductible or not.
If financing a home is such an obviously great deal then why are mortgage lenders okay issuing debt with very long fixed interest rates when they receive nothing from the appreciation of the underlying assets?
Because they’re backstopped by the federal government (Fannie and Freddie) and thus the income streams are practically risk free, yet still yield a much higher interest rate than T-bills.
Official docker registry, Kagi image search, and several blogs that I read were still blocked for me the last few nights at least. I'm using a local ISP, but I think they in turn operate over Orange.
Sadly I don't care at all about football. So I can't even boycott the football league that should not be named to make any difference...
I don't care about football but even I admit the impact is limited due to the scheduling of the actual football games. I am either rarely using the internet at those times or the websites/business that need to be open outside of office hours knows better but to use cloudflare.
I think the elephant in the room is that Movistar, who own TV rights for Laliga and asked the judge for the blockage, offer CDN and anti-DDoS services that are competing with Cloudflare on the Spanish market. I believe it was a twisted way for them to protect their position in the spanish market.
1. I learned enough vocabulary in a very short time to be able to more or less be able to read with the assistance of a dictionary on an e-book where you can click on a word. I spent ~2 weekends of Duolingo 8 hours a day, but I'd use flashcards in the future instead of that. It sounds a bit crazy in hindsight, but I feel like it was easier to stay strongly motivated for a short period of time than drizzling the words over a period of time. All other attempts where I did not do this, failed.
The limit of learning words for me is ~50-200 words per hour if using flashcards. It depends a lot on the language and how similar it is to the languages one already knows. 200, if it is similar to my native language, ~50, if I don't know anything similar at all. I'm also almost guaranteed to forget 80% of the words, if I don't use them in the next day or two, but its possible to cram a lot of them very fast and then move on to stage 2 to use them.
Important catch (for me at least), is that I can remember nouns far more easily than verbs or other more abstract/structural words. Those absolutely need to be in a sentence when learning. There's pretty much no point for me in trying to cram them on their own. I just cannot remember them in isolation at all and also which words they are used with differ per language anyway. Eg "to put" won't necessarily be used for all nouns in a different language even though a dictionary might say that's what it means. The good side is that knowing the nouns helps a lot in deciphering.
2. After the initial cramming I read a couple of short/simple books over some months in the evenings before sleep. I tried to listen to videos & to talk to some people a bit now and then, but it was extremely hard and boring as I understood too little. In hindsight I should have listened more to videos, but the good ones are surprisingly hard to find, if you don't live in the country that already speaks the language one is learning.
3. I tried several options for getting conversational after that. First a private teacher who knew the language well, but was not experienced enough (a university student) to teach somebody who tends to use weird methods for learning. She kept getting confused about why I understand complex words that were basically the same in English, Spanish and other European languages, but why I struggled with the basics when talking at the same time.
I also tried some learning groups. They were fine, but it's very difficult to find people at the same level after starting to learn a language and not following a preset path. I was felt either far ahead and far behind at the same time.
Eventually I found a native speaking private teacher who had years of experience. He could make the classes interesting and after ~1.5-2 years of talking with him 1-2 times per week for an hour about pretty much anything, I can hold a conversation and handle things in general. I still kept learning vocabulary in parallel and I'm not quite fluent as I don't use the language daily, but I'm not too far off either. Overall it took maybe 2-3 years, because I wasn't very consistent at the beginning.
If I were to change anything, it's getting the private teacher way sooner, skipping the learning groups entirely and using flash cards + asking for verbs/structural words as parts of sentences from either the private teacher or finding some other resource for it to start with. Using AI is possible too I guess for that purpose, but only with more common languages. Most AIs completely mess up my native language and invent words that don't exist, so I wouldn't trust them much when learning.
Very interesting, thank you for making it and releasing it for free!
Do you get faster as you practice reading like that? I read ~50-60 pages per hour in English. That would be maybe 375-425 words per minute and also seems to be about the maximum I can more or less follow with ReadKinetic just trying the demo text.
Although, I don't feel like I understand quite as well what I have just read and it felt a bit aggravating? Almost anxiety inducing for some reason. Maybe it's just because it is a new thing and I'm not used to it.
Also, as others have mentioned, the controls took a bit of time to figure out.
National UFO Reporting Center (NUFORC) witness reports (US, via the CC0 TidyTuesday project, 2023-06-20)
and
GEP e.V. UFO/UAP Falldaten (Germany, Zenodo 18071015, CDLA-Permissive-1.0), 1925–2025.
They are unlikely to include data from many other locations.