Can you make a pitch to a Python/R user to give this a try?
What you’ve built looks very nice and heard nothing but good things about elixir elsewhere, but would take a lot to leave those much more robust ecosystems. Do you hope to grow into that over time? Is there enough in terms of viz, statistical models, and ml to survive?
That's half the story. The other half is that it's under the influence under an antagonistic authoritarian government. If tiktok were a japanese app, this would play out very differently.
If you take the thread's stated pros (low barrier to entry, experimental scripting workflow) and cons ([not] fast, compilable, no GIL) at face value, it's interesting evidence for what really matters compared to what needs to be merely acceptable for a ML language.
The thing neither of them list which is absolutely enormous is the breadth and quality of boring general purpose stuff in Python. It's a big deal that you can write a production grade web app or api in the same language you do modeling work in.
The nice thing about bogleheads is it starts pretty simple but scales into the minutia of various tax efficiency techniques, fund selection, real estate, and so on when you need it.
The other thing I like about it is that the forums have lots of detailed personal scenario discussions that are helpful for getting real life examples of the application of the dogma.
Tangential to the discussion in the thread, this is a nice reminder of some of the nice things from the blog era:
- medium form essay that's not SEO optimized
- simple, fast loading websites
- real discussion in the comments
It's too bad distribution for this type of content was never really solved.
Most of the answers here are pointing to things like inefficiencies, short-sightedness, and over engineering, but I'm not seeing the positive side.
The web is an incredible distribution channel. With decent engineering, anyone can make an app that has access to an enormous marketplace with very little capital costs.
The past 20 years of software have been dominated by this distribution model so it's easy to take for granted, but compared to pre-web distribution that involved manufacturing and much larger differences in user platform, it makes sense that the world is trying to squeeze as much software as possible into this model.
While I don't think centralization of media is a good thing, the anti-competitive argument doesn't make sense given the amount of viable competition. Microsoft is probably in 3rd place in console sales, lower if you include PC and define Steam as a separate platform.
If the merger were completed, it would certainly change things, but it wouldn't be any guarantee of Microsoft's dominance, or even a first place finish. So to block the acquisition based on something that might happen seems like a clear case of regulatory overreach.
One of the things that always sort of annoys me about complaints that "management doesn't listen to data (science)" is the lack of awareness they consist of.
It turns out that data work is limited by all the same things every other part of the business is limited by: the need to make quick decisions, institutional imperative, the beliefs of decision makers, the ability to communicate well/influence, and so on.
Having better access or skill with data doesn't give you a pass on these things, despite the suggestions otherwise from laments such as this.
I started out thinking RDR2 was immersive, but the theme park ride on rails main plot missions absolutely killed it, and diminished all the cool world stuff they did.
This was a good survey. The nature of historical books (and especially grand macro books such as these) tends to lead to an acceptance/rejection debate on a particular perspective, which can be tedious, but this did a good job of taking each perspective seriously yet critically.
Another eclectic fractal not listed here is the novel Infinite Jest. David Foster Wallace specifically noted the plot structure as a Sierpinski Gasket. You could think of the tennis academy, the halfway house, and the international assassins plots as the three subcomponent triangles within the overall triangle of the novel.
Of course literature doesn't fit cleanly - IJ simultaneously has a cyclical plot structure, but fractals are interesting way of thinking about the aesthetics of the book.
>for many of us, money is only experienced through our phones, as a number on a screen. You pay your rent with one app, you buy put options with another. The number goes up, it goes down, it lives in the little portal we hold in our hands.
And decades ago it was a number written down on a little piece of paper, and before that it was little pieces of “precious” metal locked away somewhere.
At least nowadays amateurs have a better chance to be literate.
What you’ve built looks very nice and heard nothing but good things about elixir elsewhere, but would take a lot to leave those much more robust ecosystems. Do you hope to grow into that over time? Is there enough in terms of viz, statistical models, and ml to survive?