I hope you don't mind being a bit curious about this, as a hobby driver.
At what level of motorsports are you working? It sounds like you both semi-regularly work with new teams. And are you working with them as a programmer? I'd be curious to know what kind of applications you're then working on, if so.
I work primarily with GT3 teams across the highest level championships (WEC, IMSA, DTM, GTWC, ALMS), with a variety of manufacturers.
With a small team of software engineers and data scientists, I'm building a cloud based motorsports data analysis platform which eliminates the friction involved in handling motorsports data and the differences between different manufacturers' software systems, and quickly gives drivers & coaches insights on how to improve their driving. So this involves getting into the weeds of a lot of this legacy software.
There are a few teams I work more closely with where I've set up their entire trackside network/tech stack, although nowadays I'm more focused on the software. Over the years I've done a bit of everything at the track, up to and including physically laying cables in a bare garage or setting up the systems on the car, although I don't do anything related to vehicle dynamics.
Much more egregious is the fact that the API allows returning both an error and a valid file handle. That may be documented to not happen. But look at the Read method instead. It will return both errors and a length you need to handle at the same time.
The Read() method is certainly an exception rather than a rule. The common convention is to return nil value upon encountering an error unless there's real value in returning both, e.g. for a partial read that failed in the end but produced some non-empty result nevertheless. It's a rare occasion, yes, but if you absolutely have to handle this case you can. Otherwise you typically ignore the result if err!=nil. It's a mess, true, but real world is also quite messy unfortunately, and Go acknowledges that
Most of the time if there's a result, there's no error. If there's an error, there's no result. But don't forget to check every time! And make sure you don't make a mistake when you're checking and accidentally use the value anyway, because even though it's technically meaningless it's still nominally a meaningful value since zero values are supposed to be meaningful.
Oh and make sure to double-check the docs, because the language can't let you know about the cases where both returns are meaningful.
The real world is messy. And golang doesn't give you advance warning on where the messes are, makes no effort to prevent you from stumbling into them, and stands next to you constantly criticizing you while you clean them up by yourself. "You aren't using that variable any more, clean that up too." "There's no new variables now, so use `err =` instead of `err :=`."
Dane here, and I just don't see the point of using Apple or Google pay. Aside from not wanting American tech interfering in, or data harvesting, my finances, it's not any easier to use. I just touch my card to the terminal and payment happens. Some times, or if the amount is over some limit, I have to enter a pin. I cringe every time I see someone contorting their arm to pay with their watch. It's tech for the sake of tech.
Interestingly, isn't that almost exactly what Garmin has done with their wearable ecosystem? A massive data collection people willingly agree to because of the perceived benefits.
Garmin was a long-standing well-respected consumer hardware company that started releasing a miniaturized version of the thing they were famous for: a GPS. They already had brand recognition and all the infrastructure to build quality products that people would trust.
That infrastructure and brand is extremely difficult to bootstrap.
Chromecast only works from iOS for apps that have integrated with the Chromecast SDK. Like Netflix and Youtube.
Maybe the EU can ask Google to open Chromecast up so Apple can integrate it into iOS. Then you can use it from any app without needing special integrations.
Apple has all the information they need, available publicly, to implement an OS-wide Chromecast client. They haven't done so because they don't want to.
> I believe there are people who want results sooner rather than later
In Denmark all ballots are hand-counted. It takes about 6 hours from polls close to every precinct reporting a preliminary result. Wanting it faster isn't really necessary, other than to feed the 24/7 news machine.
Italy has 60M people and paper ballots, results are out the next day. Population does not matter since polling stations can be scaled up proportionally.
I've been in voting where we had a dozen ballots per person (referendums) so this would be more than the total paper ballots in the US, it works fine.
Minor miscounts happen but nobody has ever seriously questioned the overall vote results.
Uh no. This election I had a president, two senators, a state senator, a state assembly, a county executive, city council, school board, prosecutor recall, and half a dozen ballot measures. It took four legal size paper surfaces.
Some of the regional elections in Germany have comically large ballots with dozens of options and a very complicated counting system (16 votes that can be split between individuals or party lists). The hand-counted results are generally available by the next morning. There is really no excuse for using electronic voting. In Germany it has been ruled unconstitutional since it cannot be checked by the voters.
Those could easily be prioritized. First count the federal elections, then the state elections, then the county elections. You get the presidential and congressional results within a day, the state election results within two-three days, and the more local ones within the week. Is anyone going to seriously complain that it took a week to find out who is on the school board?
So does Denmark, why do you assume it's any different? Counting doesn't take that long when you split it across 10K voting districts, which is what the U.S. did for most of its existence. We want ACCURATE elections free from corruption and hacks. You can't undo a fucked up election.
In Denmark, I don't even lock up my helmet. My bike, sure. But the helmet just casually hangs on the handlebars. I've never experienced, nor heard of, anyone losing their helmet when doing this.
> My belief is that retribution is the immune system of civilization.
Have you engaged with any justice system that isn't based on retribution? Have you seen the results they achieve? Norway is the classic example. They give more lenient punishment for crimes, their prisons are vastly more comfortable, and actively try to educate their prison population. All things Americans (as a general point) would scoff at.
The result? Norway has a vastly lower recidivism rate. 20% vs 75+% in the US. Norway is a uniquely good example, but similar results play out across Northern Europe.
> Have you engaged with any justice system that isn't based on retribution?
Most people here who live in SF have done just that, not by their own choice - and the results are not pretty. "Restorative" justice might or might not work in places like Norway, but let's just say other implementations have been quite bad.
At what level of motorsports are you working? It sounds like you both semi-regularly work with new teams. And are you working with them as a programmer? I'd be curious to know what kind of applications you're then working on, if so.