I'll very happily (as a significant benefactor) take this century's medicine over the last. And the one or two centuries before that aren't even worth starting to think about. So something must be working wioth mainstream medicinal research.
That is a weird (modern?) delusion. Without children, our species disappears in <100 years. And the last of those years would be painful for those still alive.
Those who are having and raising children are the ones doing the most for the next generation.
No, I am not saying that in a negative way. I have kids and I love them deeply.
I am saying that the people who have kids now are aware of how much effort it involves, so they consider it "part of hobbies" (as in, interesting things), not as part of "chores".
Modern society requires that, otherwise people just have no kids.
And yes absolutely, the government overlooks entirely all the work that goes into parenting now. The standards have raised enormously.
I guess you view what would be the worst crime against humanity ever to be committed (and yes, I really do mean to include all the previous ones in that statement) to be an acceptable answer to “oh, we have no more smart bombs, let’s just kill everyone in this country”?
Not committing a crime against humanity is not “good will”.
Not killing someone when one can (in a not them or me situation) is not “good will”, it’s one of the most basic ethical principles. I’m surprised you need to ask this question.
> Like, of course you can prevent all memory safety errors by using a garbage collector. That has been known since the 90s.
No, it's been known since GC was invented.
> In fact, there was a good two decades after Java released where all the research on memory safety just stopped, because the standard answer became "use a GC".
Yeah, my understanding (which is not from first-hand experience) is that a huge part of the origin of Rust was that there was a lot of research in memory safety techniques that had been going mostly unused by mainstream languages, so the idea was "Why not try to make a language using some of it?"
AT&T was already doing that as language to replace C, Cyclone.
AT&T even had a full OS, where C only had minor role, the microkernel and Dis VM/JIT, with the whole userpace implemented in Limbo, designed by the creators of UNIX and C.
Good reminder that memory-safe alternatives to C aren't new. Rust may have won more because of ecosystem and timing than because it was the first to address the problem.
All the safety improvements of 21st century wannabe C replacements, were already available in NEWP(1961), PL/I (1964), Mesa (1976), Modula-2 (1978), PL.8 (1982), Ada (1983), Object Pascal (1986), among many other lesser known ones.
However none of them had an OS available in source code for the symbolic price to send tapes around to universities.
Additionally, the remark that the UNIX and C authors themselves did not stop there, and their latest mark on the computing world was the Go programming language, after Limbo, and the acknowledgement that designing Alef without a GC was a mistake.
Probably they would not had to reboot Plan 9 OS design into C.
To clarify, I didn't mean to imply that there were never any memory-safe alternatives to C before Rust (and re-reading my comment, I still don't think it sounds like that's what I was trying to say, but if that's how people are reading it, then I didn't do a good enough job of making that clear). I was trying to say that my understanding was that Rust was trying to take advantage of research ideas that had been introduced in the past decade or so but hadn't been applied much, which is a more narrow claim than it being the first one to try to tackle the problem at all.
As the parent comment indicates, it seems like there might have been more languages that were less known that did try to apply some of these ideas, so maybe I'm misremembering the history that I had heard, or maybe I did remember what I heard right, but the people who originally expressed it were similarly unaware that some of it had been tried already. Hearing more context about the time period I was referring to is definitely interesting, and I appreciate it being shared!
*nod* They're from before I started bookmarking rigorously, but in the early days of Rust, there was a sentiment in the blog posts from the people developing it that the point of Rust was "to give good ideas a second chance" and that Rust was intentionally boring and un-innovative.
For homework: if you make homework results not count towards the final grade, then there's no reason to use an LLM - the point then just becomes to have practice problems and feedback on how well you are doing.
This is what my university (EPFL) was doing ~40 years ago. And yes, some students didn't bother with the homework, and mostly paid the price at the final exam...
The open source policy described above was in place 16 years ago (I went through it to continue working on some existing projects), and I doubt it was very new then.
This is clearly something done in official capacity, during working hours, with the knowledge and support of his manager, who announced the CLI.
It says "This is not an officially supported Google product" because it's a DevRel sample/experiment, just like dozens of other Google repositories made by Google employees as part of their job.
That's because from what i gather so far it is a google repo with other tools using the same api they kept it in there since and even had it announced by the guy's manager at the time.
You know this GitHub account might be more official than I thought? Maybe the problem is more to do with their approval process, which I guess negates a lot of my comments.
Because the US is soooooo exceptional, right? And yet the moment you provide actual proper train connections the lines are successful and profitable (see e.g. Northeast Corridor.
No, but I was pointing out that profitability isn't a very useful metric for selling the benefits of either mode. Otherwise the counterargument would be that transit in the rest of the US outside the Northeast Corridor makes it the exception to the rule.
In any case, what vehicle infrastructure does the government fund today that goes away if you expand rail service? I still need to get to my house, and I don't want to live anywhere near a public transit station. Is the pitch that we get rid of the highway system entirely and make all intercity travel rail or plane?
No, the pitch isn't that. And yet in the US inevitably people will always demand to know government subsidies for everything but cars, and will pretend that alternative modes of transport are only proposed as a full replacement of cars. No one is taking your precious cars away.
I didn't bring up money except to call out that profitability of either trains or cars is irrelevant to actual utility and comfort. Obviously they both cost money and you can subsidize either one.
I'm also not concerned with or pretending that alternative modes of transport are full replacements of cars; basic comparison of the modes obviates that.
I also don't own a car, and if I did I wouldn't consider it precious, or be worried about anybody taking it away. Public mass transit advocates always go there though, it's a pretty common ad-hominem-adjacent implication. Cars are just generally a better experience. They go from A to B, and they don't have other people on them. Those factors make them obviously desirable.
If somebody comes up with a teleporter I can install at home I'll use that instead. Maybe then I'd consider that precious, or even be in love with it. It would save me a lot of time.
All of that aside my main point is to push back against the idea that more trains solve any problems with US transit, especially looking forward even a little into the future. They're complicated and time consuming to build out additional infrastructure for compared to an airport, and solve a transit gap between self-driving vehicles and air travel that will likely increasingly narrow.
> I wouldn't consider it precious, or be worried about anybody taking it away. Public mass transit advocates always go there though, it's a pretty common ad-hominem-adjacent implication.
Aka your pure fantasy that you present as fact. Of course there might be idiots who may claim to "seize the means of private transportation" or something like that, but let's not pretend it's a serious argument.
> Cars are just generally a better experience. They go from A to B, and they don't have other people on them. Those factors make them obviously desirable.
Can't see anyone arguing against that.
> All of that aside my main point is to push back against the idea that more trains solve any problems with US transit, especially looking forward even a little into the future.
Strange then that Northeastern Corridor whose validity you immediately called into question, keeps increasing ridership.
> solve a transit gap between self-driving vehicles and air travel that will likely increasingly narrow.
Of course they don't for many obvious reasons that start with words like "capacity" and "throughput".
It's also funny and ironic that you imagine the fantasy argument of "we'll take your cars away in favor of public transportation" and then literally arguing for taking away any and all alternative modes of transport except cars, and especially except cars owned by private companies (I do love the coming era of arbitrary surge pricing at any convenient time).
> Aka your pure fantasy that you present as fact. Of course there might be idiots who may claim to "seize the means of private transportation" or something like that, but let's not pretend it's a serious argument.
I realize I could have phrased it better, but I was not talking about anybody seizing the means of private transportation. I was talking about train fetishists cheekily implying that people love their precious cars, which you did.
I also haven't argued that trains don't carry more people at once, I've just said that they suck in every other way. I also haven't argued to take away anything. Trains already exist almost everywhere they make sense to exist, which is apparently to funnel people back and forth in Japan and a couple of northeast US states on entirely private rail. It's honestly hard to find anything in your reply that intentionally or otherwise is actually responding to anything I said.
I've responded, but you decided to dismiss everything.
It's a fascinating psychological and sociological question: why Americans think that the only possible state of things is the current one as it exists in the US, and why they are completely incapable of imagining any ither possible solutions.
E.g. "Trains already exist almost everywhere they make sense to exist, which is apparently to funnel people back and forth in Japan and a couple of northeast US states".
Yup, country the size of US eastern seaboard with comparable population only needs to "funnel back and forth". And Northeast Corridor just apparently appeared out of nowhere because it somehow was needed exactly there, and not anywhere else in the US, and also "just to funnel people back and forth".
Unlike cars. Americans don't need any other forms of transportation because they are physically incapable of imagining other forms despite success cases existing even in the US, and proven to work even in the shittiest third-world countries.
We're talking here about passenger rail, not freight rail. And when it comes to passenger rail, the US is terrible by the standards of other developed countries.
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