At an even more basic level, the lack of static typing seems like such a tradeoff getting an incredibly huge nuisance in readability and stupid runtime bugs that shouldn't be a thing in exchange for a feature that's rarely useful.
Granted, I'm primarily an embedded developer. Can any Python experts explain to me a highly impactful benefit of dynamic typing?
For small programs, dynamic typing can be faster to write (not read). As soon as your program grows: "uh oh". Once you add maintenance into the cost equation, dynamic typing is a huge negative.
To be fair: 15 years ago, people were writing a lot of Java code that effectively used dynamic typing by passing around Object references, then casting to some type (unknowable to the reader) when using. (C#: Same.) It was infuriating, and also very difficult to read and maintain. Fortunately, most of that code is gone now in huge enterprise code bases.
I'm not sold on this. Often I type the output I want to get, and reverse the code to get there. and that's faster because it's now all auto completing.
That's been my experience of powershell and typescript. To a lesser extreme python because its type hints are a bit crap.
Though I can see why you might not agree after trying an extreme like Rust. Sometimes I want to run a broken program to stop the debugger and see what I'm dealing with and rust won't do that.
Yeah this is the point. Whether the claim is true or not, as a marketing tactic it has nothing at all to do with the quality of the product being sold. Marketing for a comedy show should convince me of the conedian's humor, not try to guilt me into filling an audience seat for them.
Yeah I think it's pretty undisputed there are downsides to the current day "civilized" life of office jobs and automotive vehicles consisting of precious little necessitated physical exertion or exercise of any type.
> Deterrence? I don't think that long sentences deter any crime.
So you think if there was no punishment for any crime, the crime rates wouldn't skyrocket? Not sure what to say to you if you think that's true.
> If the ultimate sentence (DP) doesn't deter murder...
Who says it doesn't?
Deter doesn't mean prevent entirely. You can't just say "well murders still happen", that doesn't prove that there wouldn't be more murders if it had no prospective punishment.
Reductio ad absurdum, and a straw man as well. Of course if you eliminated all punishment for crimes, crime would skyrocket.
I think that long sentences are counterproductive and expensive, both in terms of societal expense and in how we treat people. The US would be wise to wean itself off the nipple of hatred and revenge that feeds our punitive "correctional system."
And it doesn't take much googling to find the answer to your final question. The majority of murders are committed in anger, because of mental illness, under the influence of drugs/alcohol etc. Few murders are committed by people planning rationally in cold blood, weighing the pros and cons.
Do I think some people deserve to be locked up for life? Yup. The man who murdered my niece and two others in a fit of drunken rage should never be allowed to walk freely in society. In the state where he committed his crimes, the DP was an option, but I'm glad it wasn't imposed. Having the DP on the books sure didn't deter him. And it hasn't deterred proven to be a deterrent in states that have it as law; homicide rates are higher in states with the DP than those without.
I have family in LE. In the justice system. Colleagues who work in the FBI and DoJ. Coworkers who were COs in prison. None of them think what we're doing is effective, either for less serious offenders or the most heinous prisoners. We either put them in a SHU, give them the needle or throw them to the wolves in Gen Pop. Prisons have become our toxic waste dumps.
> In my field of robotics there are SOOO many papers that are basically taking three or four established algorithms/machine learning models, and applying them to off-the-shelf hardware.
This is a direct result of the aggressive "publish or perish" system. I worked as an aide in an autonomous vehicles lab for a year and a half during my undergrad, and while the actual work we were doing was really cool cutting edge stuff, it was absolutely maddening the amount of time we wasted blatantly pulling bullshit nothing papers exactly like you describe out of our asses to satisfy the constant chewing out we got that "your lab has only published X papers this month".
I keep hearing "Edge actually isn't bad anymore", but as long as Microsoft continues to try and jam it down my throat at any conceivable opportunity, I will continue to refuse to even consider it.
Very few things piss me off more than the other Microsoft products that feel the need to override my default browser and open pages in Edge instead. And on top of that, last time something launched Edge instead of Firefox, I was greeted with an inescapable fullscreen page that hid away the other browser tabs (i.e. the page I was trying to view) until I clicked through their idiotic "welcome to edge" bs. Sometimes lately it really feels like Microsoft is taking classes on how to piss off their users as much as possible.
That’s a Microsoft special. A big, stupid splash page which requires you to wait for it to load, and then the only option to make it go away is to click. (You can’t hit escape, for instance.) Microsoft does this in so many of their products, it must be baked into the company somehow. Often, the screen will come up indefinitely, no matter how many times you click “don’t show me this again.” I can only imagine that their UI teams have little plaques on their walls which read “Let’s do a bad job on purpose."
"Don't show this again" is a thing of the past it seems. I installed Windows 11 fresh on a new machine not long ago and after refusing all the sign-ins and cloud this or that when installing, I log in and am greeted with "let's finish setting up Windows": a window full of all the OneDrive and other features I already declined and whose only options are "continue" and "remind me tomorrow".
And then, after finally figuring out the option buried deep in Windows settings to disable that window every time I turn the computer on, I subsequently discovered it had apparently ignored all my requests to not set up OneDrive and was syncing all my user folders to the cloud anyhow.
I never made the switch from 10 to 11 and everything I've heard tells me that I made the absolutely correct decision. (I only have Windows at all for my video games.) If MS discontinues support for Windows 10 or tries to force me to go to 11, then I will simply switch to only using Linux, video games be damned.
I echo your concerns, and add that I find it slightly humorous Edge is also being offered on Linux. I've spent hours working to remove it from Windows; why would I willingly install it?
> I echo your concerns, and add that I find it slightly humorous Edge is also being offered on Linux. I've spent hours working to remove it from Windows; why would I willingly install it?
because you have a choice :)
I installed it on Fedora from flathub iirc
A work environment where you're mandated to use it, wanting to test against it, wanting to see if some of the things in it are good (AI sidebar for example)
> Very few things piss me off more than the other Microsoft products that feel the need to override my default browser
Google is also very persistent about this--any time you use Gmail in a non-Chrome browser, they pop up alerts to try to convince you to use Chrome instead.
I think the takeaway is that the scientific method is great, but since science is necessarily conducted by humans, the economic incentives within context of "doing science" also need to be correct for good science to get done.
(Currently, it seems like, this is very often not the case. Hence, your trust in current-science-as-conducted should be correspondingly lower. Lots of variation by field, probably, too.)
(Though then again maybe you shouldn't even believe anything until you see it having actual real effects in your day to day life?)
