The external plot was people accosting Max for the number in his head. The internal plot, I interpreted, was that when Max stared into the sun as a little boy, it merged his left and right brain functionality. When he took a drill to that growth on the side of his head, he was breaking that connection.
I think that's the ultimate goal when dealing with yourself: creating peace between both halves of your brain. Max found enlightenment by staring into the sun, and wasn't ready for the power it wields, and went crazy.
Given that John Carmack is a massive Republican jerk, part of me wants to say "socialism (and Jet A subsidization) rules!" The rest of me wants to steal the rocket and fire myself into lower earth orbit.
You'd have to stage those. I don't think there are enough units, and there are probably significant difficulties in making many additional copies. It would be evolution in action.
When I saw that horrible hand-drying contraption, my first thought was "am I required to put my hands above shoulder-level to get them dry?" My second was "will it amputate my hands at the wrist?"
Tornado sorta makes me feel better about development, mainly because Twisted is phenomenally intimidating, like a black monolith.
A lot of people ignore common sense for platitudes. Sensationalist pro-greenwash caterwauling is just another trend among many that persists across generations, since before our modern era of lulz-inducing post-pamphleteers (Wells, Chesterton, etc.)
You didn't read it. I'm arguing for a more complex model, rather than an idealistic one.
"Less total weight carried, across the system as a whole, would result in less fuel consumption."
While this is correct from very simple standpoint, what are you really saying?
"The system carries n amount of weight." Okay, I can accept that.
"The system carries less weight if one person does not fly." True, but that one person's weight is offset on the specific flight in question by cargo.
For a very large value of n, n-200 = n. An airplane takes a massive amount of fuel to accelerate to rotation speed (it's not just pushing you and cargo, it's also shoving vast quantities of aluminum, steel, plastic and fuel.) The empty weight of a 747-400 (the industry standard) is 400,000 lbs., of which 200 is no factor.
If that empty plane takes off, it will use 100 times the body weight of a human being in fuel during takeoff operations alone and continue to burn as much during each hour of cruise flight. Adding humans decreases range. Adding cargo decreases range. Fuel will be burned.
Your statement assumes a very simple model of "if I don't get on that plane, I'm saving the environment." The actual model is "if at least 200 people don't get on that plane, a seasonally-appropriate ~15 minute delay will happen until cargo can be loaded."
I feel, therefore, that I have contradicted your statement quite soundly. I assure you that I have no interest in representing myself as an environment-hating industry apologist.
I actually did read your post, thanks. Your post didn't seem to argue for a more complex model as much as attempt to make the case that if people weren't flying they'd be doing other equally destructive things.
>While this is correct from very simple standpoint, what are you really saying?
What I'm saying is quite simple. Carelessly wasting resources, as unnecessarily flying nonstop for a month does, wastes resources and we shouldn't condone it.
>that one person's weight is offset on the specific flight in question by cargo.
If someone doesn't fly and cargo is substituted for them, that amount of cargo doesn't need to be flown on a separate flight. The less flights the less fuel consumed and the less environmental damage, no?
Given that you're probably not long out of high school, I'll cut you some slack. You look like you could use some.
The major problem with your argument is that you're telling someone that they can't learn from someone else. Then you go off and spout some pop-psy graphorrhea at her/him. Looking through your past posts, I can see that you're a fan of self-help books. That's fine. Don't push it on someone who's facing the prospect of 2 years she/he wouldn't have to otherwise waste.
The points you bring up:
Socialization: Sounds like you could use some with how much you're emphasizing romance there. Socializing is important, but unless our young poster has been living under a rock, the chances that he's had some experience making friends is pretty good. Let romance come later. Even autism finds a way to continue itself biologically. If she/he doesn't want to have sex, what's the point in making her/him feel awkward?
College: What if our poster wants to travel? Oops, that broke your model of using university as a self-realization tool.
Maturity: Is not a function of writing output on the internet. Seems like at least one of us could learn that lesson. Also, it's not a function of how many things a person has done that you consider worthy. The OP might be at the furthest possible point from your definition from a kid. We don't know. Next time you're sitting alone with your finger up your nose, think about that for a second.
As for all that pseudo-religious stuff you spouted, close your self-help book and live a little. Don't worry. Buddha/Jesus/Yaweh/David Koresh will forgive you. I promise.
Seriously, y'all, circling the drain isn't cool. The only thing that helps you is you.
Mainly, you are taking my post way too seriously. Your counter points are all based on what I literally wrote.
Socialization: Never said anything about having sex or forcing the issue with girls. I said get a gf for the sake of experiencing getting a gf. So what? Obviously he does not have to if he does not want to. Taken too seriously.
College: I specifically said I did not go to college, so I don't know what model of mine you are referring to.
Maturity: Never said anything about the internet. Yes I know you intended to be witty. Never said anything about doing anything. My take on maturity is simple: You have to mature to be mature. Actually I think we are in agreement there, though I don't know why you assume we are not. Skipping a grade, nor does any other one action entail maturity. My advice is simply to enjoy the experience and slow down.
On self-help.
Agreed. I speak of self-help books because I've read them. There is a time for learning and a time for doing. Currently I very rarely read anything any more. All the books say the same thing, and I have learned not to search for answers, but rather simply to learn from tests. Learn and grow, learn and grow.
I hope i have clarified everything for everyone else reading. I am not really religious, but I like buddhism. Finally, my post wasn't a thesis!
"Taken too seriously" whiffs of "I'm too good to eat my own dogfood." And yes, literal does mean written. And your writing was a statement backed by arguments, fulfilling necessary and sufficient conditions to be considered a thesis. Pedantry aside, I've got a beef here.
You seem like you want to be nice, and like PieSquared wants to listen. There's a definite problem here, though: I don't like Landmark indoctrinators, and a lot of your phraseology comes from that direction, so my hackles were raised instantly. It might come from having had one as a roommate, so if you're just chattering happily away, my apologies. Landmark is scary enough so that when I see them get around another person, I have an immediate negative response.
Addressing what you've currently said, slowing down (http://www.slowmovement.com, am I right?) is irrelevant, because it still means there's a checklist. School, career, car, wife, house, kids, vacation, retirement, cancer, grandkids, dead, buried, gone. Yes, we'll always be dirt in the end. No, we don't have to march to oblivion. Some of us can subvert this as authentic freethinking entrepreneurs. Not all, but some.
"As for all that pseudo-religious stuff you spouted, close your self-help book and live a little. Don't worry. Buddha/Jesus/Yaweh/David Koresh will forgive you. I promise."
This isn't Digg or reddit. I would expect a little more tolerance of diversity in these parts.
FYI, I'm an atheist, but the militant "you are dumb 'cos you believe in spirituality" mob pisses me off.
Boy, that cell phone service sucked. Virgin cost too much and had no coverage. Also, Telstra is an evil megacorporation kept alive with government incentives. Also, Vodaphone seems to ignore rural Australia's existence.
I lived in Europe.
Boy, that cell phone service sucked. It cost too much and had no coverage. Also, it required me to recharge through some obscure SIM-specific menu that crashed my phone a bunch. Also, when I went 20 km to the west and crossed into another country, the service mysteriously didn't work until I kept going another 50 km and crossed into another country.
I lived in Canada.
Boy, that cell phone service sucked. Rogers is an evil megacorporation bent on taking over Canada, charged me an arm and a leg for everything and didn't work except when I stood on my head and prayed to the Inukshuk of reception. Also, Bell's obsoletely fatuous CDMA network (and horrible phone selection) screwed me over too much to mention. Also Fido is just a shill for Rogers. Also, Telus is laughable and triple-charged me for a phone once.
Now I live in the USA.
Boy, this cell phone service sucks. AT&T has no coverage, overcharges and is hated by everyone. Etc.
As a former academic gone mercenary, I love that programmers of all skill levels can get into organization, language and specification through Python. It's a wonderful gateway to learning, and in this case, it seems to have done exactly what Python was specified to do!
For my own projects, I've used pretty much all the fad languages from BASIC to Pascal to C. I've used industry-adopted languages like Tcl, Java and Perl. I've experimented with Lisp and Erlang.
After all is said and done, I like Python/Cython/C. It gives me the option to use a glue language for the Windows programming I've done, which is perfect. It gives me a compiled (albeit ctypes-restricted) subset language for writing hashing/storage/whatever functions. It gives me a super-awesome library set that comes built-in.
I know it'll go away someday, but I'm glad to have worked in Python for as long as I have.
Python is remarkable for having a dozen or so major language features disallowed by fiat (removal of the GIL, unrestricted anonymous functions, TCO, braces) but still being extremely powerful, expressive, and used by programmers of all skill levels.
It's difficult to be obscure in Python. Yet if I really need to do something jinky like remapping an outside library's methods, I can do it with a few lines of slightly-uglier code. That's a very hard balance to make.
Good design involves a lot of "no". I don't think languages are an exception.
Minor correction. The removal of the GIL is not disallowed by fiat. The removal of the GIL was attempted (via granular locking) and destroyed single threaded performance. That's unacceptable for a variety of reasons. In the same thread, Guido has repeatedly stated that the GIL was a tradeoff, and he would welcome anything that helped lessen it's impact/remove it should it be proven not to significantly harm Python's primary function.
If someone showed up with a patch tomorrow which allowed free threading without seriously breaking python, or crippling single threaded performance, or making extension modules impossible to write, I could very well see it getting in. In reality, doing this requires a serious reworking of the interpreter (ala unladen swallow) to make it even feasible. There's a lot of things the GIL actually helps, for example the ease of writing c-based extension module, unfortunately they come with a price.
The price is/was seen as an acceptable tradeoff, and I think it has served it well, even if if it disappeared tomorrow no one would shed a tear.
Minor correction. The removal of the GIL is not disallowed by fiat.
To piggyback: don't forget that CPython ≠ Python. The GIL is an implementation detail of CPython, not a feature of the language. Other Pythons -- Jython, for one -- have no GIL.
BTW, if you'd like to chat more about concurrency, I'm around all weekend (although I'm late getting to the University of Belgrano today). As my comments during your talk yesterday indicated, I think you're pretty off-base arguing that people aren't trying out interesting concurrency solutions in Python — ZODB is a (somewhat broken) STM that's been production-stable for many years, and Stackless is specifically targeted at actor-based modeling.
So I think people in the Python community have actually been way out in front on these issues. It's just that most people use Python for production work, not research, so the researchy stuff doesn't make it into the mainline.
It's occasionally difficult to be obscure with Python syntax. It's not at all difficult to be obscure with anything in Python above that level. Even then, if you do weird things with metaclasses or decorators, it's easy to be obscure with Python.
Decorators are an odd case -- I find that they make code dramatically clearer at the call-site, but that the decorator definitions get hairy fast (and get worse the more life-saving they are). They ended up being one of the best macro systems ever devised (they're applied at compile-time!).
I seriously don't under stand that statement. Decorators are callables that return callables, nothing else, nothing special. Decorator Syntax is just sugar.
Decorators can be applied any time including runtime. I'm not even sure what you mean by "compile time" in regards to Python, import time?
Only decorator syntax happens somewhere around parse-time (which I call import time, but meh).
> completely mask the def that they are applied to.
@decorator reassign to the name of the def. But if there are other refs to that def they do not change and are not "masked". It is no different than assignment. You know that these two are identical, right?
@foo
def bar():
pass
def bar():
pass
bar = foo(bar)
Also this is a perfectly valid decorater that doesn't mask the original func
def deco(func):
# do something terrible clever here
return func
decorator syntax != decorators is my main point. But by conflating the two I can begin to understand your statement.
Aside from the obvious that just about everything will go away someday, is there a reason you believe this?
From my vantage point (albiet limited) python looks like it has staying power. It is easy to use, effecient enough (and with unladen swallow in development it may get a lot more effecient soon), and currently seems to be gaining ground instead of losing. Eventually I am sure that it and any other language you can possibly name will get supplanted, but I am not aware of any particular reason to expect that any time remotely soon.
Heh, first to be clear, I agree that very few things are truly permanent. In fact, I said that in my original question. What I said is that I do not think Python will be going away any time soon, and your examples play nicely into that theme.
The Roman Empire lasted for many centuries, Jovial, Forth, and PL/1 all had very long runs. In fact, they are all still used in some limited capacities today.
I might have dated myself above by mentioning Tcl and Pascal, but I've been programming for a few decades. Without ruining the cosmic punchline: all things go away surprisingly fast.
BASIC was never a 'fad' - it was frequently all you had (other than machine code). Remember, no internet, no CDs, even no modems for the vast unwashed such as myself - just a tape deck, 16K ROM and a TV.
The first language where I got to choose it was Lisp for the Sinclair QL, ~ 1985.
