Political discussions for me are like programming. I enjoy them because I like finding bugs in people's logic like I do in programming.
I find a lot of people's political arguments wouldn't compile because of basic logic errors, and I try to point this out. But not many people are interested in this kind of analysis, they instead prefer the tribalist point-scoring like the OP mentions.
I dream of a world where political debates can be syntax-checked. I'm sure you could do it with AI today.
But in the end its all about feelings.
I can't describe how many times I will just go along with someone's passionate ranting on something I disagree with and egg them along because its makes them happy. This is tribalism. I will disagree with the group, and if you saw me you'd think I was the strongest supporter, but I actually vehemently disagree with everything.
There are very few people it's worth having a real discussion with these days.
I don't change my opinion of people for what they think, but it's very rare to find people who reciprocate this.
> to realize fundamentally different visions of the world, based on fundamentally different values
I think your use of the word "world" is telling.
Trump, the Republicans, and the global right are focused on their citizens.
The Democrats and the global left are more focused on the world and their role in it.
It's no longer just two approaches on how we can have the strongest economy. Each party has a weighting for how much to consider every issue across the world.
For example, there are people who would be happy with less growth, lower income, but more action on climate change.
So are these "specials" being parsed by a grammar?
Would be interesting to see how the interpreter works actually...
I would guess it checks what `defun` is, which is a macro...then expands it, and the expansion should ultimately result in an s-expression, which is then parses? Is this right?
> Another unusual feature is that methods do not "belong" to classes; classes do not provide a namespace for generic functions or methods. Methods are defined separately from classes, and they have no special access (e.g. "this", "self", or "protected") to class slots.
Love this.
And the multiple dispatch.
> :before, :after, and :around
Guess these are similar to aspect-oriented programming. Maybe useful for plugin systems.
> change-class
This looks pretty cool for GUI apps. So many times you want to change a component to something else.
When people talk about us living in a simulation...you have to wonder if they have ever tried to simulate real liquids (e.g. computation fluid dynamics).
Computer graphics in films gives people an unrealistic expectation of what we can do. I would think a lot of people look at this CGI and then think such things are possible in real-time gaming/simulation.
I love how the nytimes front page is just all Trump and political crap. Literally not a word about this, and if it's real, its like the biggest thing ever.
> guessing your current state & figuring out the next one
I look at React from a Backbone lens. In Backbone, you had view with a model that managed a dom element tree. You could render whenever you wanted and exactly when needed.
> functional components...reducing development complications
Hooks and the like just feel like an entirely different programming language. It's impossible to trace what is actually going on. Yet, everyone ends up having to learn all the nuances and rules and know somewhat how they are working under the hood, and then also contort their code to work with hooks too.
React and these big frameworks draw people in because under the hood they are so damn complex that people feel like they could never write something like this themselves. But they don't realize that the code they actually need is extremely simple and something they can easily step-through with their debugger.
> we got directed data flow
We kind of didn't need it though. Think about your SQL database backend. It's a big ball of mutable state, and people get by fine with it. If I have an object, and just listen to changes to it, and re-render, its much easier than having some complicated event-sourcing thing going on.
So much of React's design is chasing this functional-programming purity kind of thing. Contrived examples can be made to look super elegant and clean, but then there are all these edge cases and the realities of interop with a big ball of DOM state. Instead of chasing these kind of concepts, the goal should rather be day-to-day developer experience. Which mostly involves debugging and tracing through code.
> Flow
Ocaml was a terrible choice. Things moved so slowly. No one could contribute. There were just so many usability issues and waiting for things to compile. Just an excuse to use shiny tech. And oh boy did they tell you often about how Ocaml was a great choice for such a project.
...
The peeve I have is the distortion of the ecosystem. For many years to come, no one can stray too far for React to innovate because of the familiarity and risk. Look at projects like Solid, Qwik, etc. It's not Meta's fault but more the community hype machine.
It's amazing we don't have good personal content filtering yet. I would pay so much for an all-encompassing blocker.
There is so much content I would block if I actually could. Completely disable YouTube Shorts on mobile. All snarky/sarcastic/political/ad-hominem takes filtered.
But then I thought deeper and as an adult I realized that there is a cost/benefit to everything that somewhat didn't exist as a child. Most of us cannot escape triggers of anxiety anymore. If you have everything you need, and complete freedom, you still can't escape the arrow of time for example.
I still think zero pressure doesn't work in the way you think it does. It's exactly something someone says when they are pre-occupied most of the time. It's wishful thinking.
Everyone in charge are already extremely wealthy. They have zero skin in the game. J. Powell, 50MM. Yellen, 20MM. There is no ability for them to empathize with a regular taxpayer. Whatever happens their lifestyle will not be impacted one bit.
You have to ask: what drives someone in this position.
And this is a question that only the 200k ultra high net individuals (30mm+) in the world can answer.
I think people stop chasing material possessions and start chasing prestige and power. These people don’t interact with the average joe much so they don’t really care about their opinion, unless you are a populist like Trump for eg. They care about their family friends and peers. So I think it creates a broey kind of culture where you want your peers to be happy with the job you are doing. If you are in finance you want the bankers to be happy. Your political party to be happy etc.
I think it becomes more about making and keeping friends. This stage for life without need for material possessions is all about people and relationships and power.
You just have to imagine yourself with infinite wealth but no friends. You would quickly run out of things to spend it on, and you would just want people to love and respect you.
So much of coding is a simple SQL -> HTML string but its mind-blowing how far abstracted we are from this today. Give some credit to PHP for simplicity here.
Something I noticed too that when there is simplicity, there is so many abstracted layers beneath that makes things slow, impossible to debug, and god help you if you if it doesn't do what you need. Things like React + Next.js. If you tried to follow the actual stack traces of what is going on underneath you would die.
I agree with this. There is always such a blame game between devs and management/the-rest-of-the-company.
We've kind of conditioned every product manager that software is really hard and you can't just ask to change things without weeks/months of warnings or all the requirements up front.
At some point it is on us for over-complicating shit, and jumping from one new language/framework to the next. If you did more than what was necessary, and requirements change, then its on you.
You are bug-free, start working on new feature, new bug reports come in, and you have to pause and work on them.
Fixing bugs is not fun work because there is usually a quick fix in an ugly way, and then a perfect fix via a large refactor and re-architecture. This results in that "soul-destorying" feeling of: if I had enough time I could fix this properly in the right way with clean code and avoid huge amounts of bugs, but alas I am just piling on tech debt.
I find a lot of people's political arguments wouldn't compile because of basic logic errors, and I try to point this out. But not many people are interested in this kind of analysis, they instead prefer the tribalist point-scoring like the OP mentions.
I dream of a world where political debates can be syntax-checked. I'm sure you could do it with AI today.
But in the end its all about feelings.
I can't describe how many times I will just go along with someone's passionate ranting on something I disagree with and egg them along because its makes them happy. This is tribalism. I will disagree with the group, and if you saw me you'd think I was the strongest supporter, but I actually vehemently disagree with everything.
There are very few people it's worth having a real discussion with these days.
I don't change my opinion of people for what they think, but it's very rare to find people who reciprocate this.