Happy to learn about the concept today. It resonates with me.
I sometimes think of something Kant wrote, about how friction (hardship, etc.) elevates us.
In Kant's own words:
"Without those in themselves unamiable characteristics of unsociability from whence opposition springs-characteristics each man must find in his own selfish pretensions-all talents would remain hidden, unborn in an Arcadian shepherd’s life, with all its concord, contentment, and mutual affection. Men, good-natured as the sheep they herd, would hardly reach a higher worth than their beasts; they would not fill the empty place in creation by achieving their end, which is rational nature. Thanks be to Nature, then, for the incompatibility, for heartless competitive vanity, for the insatiable desire to possess and to rule! Without them, all the excellent natural capacities of humanity would forever sleep, undeveloped. Man wishes concord; but Nature knows better what is good for the race; she wills discord. He wishes to live comfortably and pleasantly; Nature wills that he should be plunged from sloth and passive contentment into labor and trouble, in order that he may find means of extricating himself from them. The natural urges to this, the sources of unsociableness and mutual opposition from which so many evils arise, drive men to new exertions of their forces and thus to the manifold development of their capacities. They thereby perhaps show the ordering of a wise Creator and not the hand of an evil spirit, who bungled in his great work or spoiled it out of envy."
See the section titled "FOURTH THESIS" at the following link if interested.
As programmers and as engineers, we often seek objective metrics to judge the value of things, neglecting aesthetic value and value that cannot easily be reduced to objective metrics.
This accessible paper reminds us that reasoning is not dispassionate and that we should attend to aesthetic matters as well.
The paper itself is in the context of education and seeks how to convey to students the importance and value of a subject matter.
That's an interesting feature I didn't know F# had. It sounds similar to row polymorphism (which I found a good description of here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7829766 ).
I'm just putting this Alan Kay question (from Stack Overflow) here because of relevance.
In that question, he's considered not with implementation or how good the execution of an idea is (which is certainly one type of progress), but in genuinely new ideas.
I don't think I personally am qualified to say yes or no. There are new data structures since then for example, but those tend to be improvements over existing ideas rather than "fundamental new ideas" which I understand him (perhaps wrongly) to be asking for.
That looks pretty great! I would love to use this at work if functional programming idioms were already familiar to the team and I didn't face resistance introducing them. Thank you for sharing and developing the library.
My experience with this is in .NET, which has methods like readFile (which is async) and readFileSync.
.NET doesn't really need to provide two separate utility methods like this though, because you can use Task.wait to block until the async task is done.
I had the same opinion with async/await, that it's nice to know a function performs IO and will wait before continuing. Makes it clearer when to use Promise.all to make multiple requests in parallel and wait for all of them to finish before continuing (faster than making calls sequentially).
I kind of wish the languages I use had Haskell's IO monad too, to separate functions in terms of the type system, but that's slightly different.
Integrating Defender sounds like it would create an antitrust issue? If I remember correctly, MS was in the past taken to court and forced to sell some product or other separately, when they previously provided it for free.
No comment about being able to move Defender to not require kernel hooks (I don't know).
I'm not doubting, but can you give a few examples of Microsoft trouncing others?
I do recall Disney (a main reason copyright laws last so long, and who didn't want Steamboat Willie to enter public domain).
I also think of Amazon (which the creator of the Elm programming language describes as having "the Jeff problem" because they steal smaller people's/team's ideas), although that's a different problem.
I can't say anything comes to mind right now about MS, though, which is most likely a failure of my memory/knowledge. So I'd appreciate some examples.
Great article. Reminds me of this quote from RG Collingwood about how pervasive copying has been throughout history, and how the famous names we know to have copied would be baffled about us being shocked.
"Individualism would have it that the work of a genuine
artist is altogether ‘original’, that is to say, purely his own work and not in any way that of other artists. The emotions expressed must be simply and solely his own, and so must his way of expressing them.
It is a shock to persons labouring under this prejudice when they find that Shakespeare’s plays, and notably Hamlet, that happy hunting-ground of self-expressionists, are merely adaptations of plays by other
writers, scraps of Holinshed, Lives by Plutarch, or excerpts
from the Gesta Romanorum; that Handel copied out into his
own works whole movements by Arne; that the Scherzo of Beethoven’s C minor Symphony begins by reproducing
the Finale of Mozart’s G minor, differently barred; or that Turner was in the habit of lifting his composition from the works of Claude Lorrain. Shakespeare or Handel or Beethoven or Turner would have thought it odd that anybody should be shocked."
I do understand the desire to protect one's work too and find it hard to take a single side.
This made me think of part of RG Collingwood's Autobiography, when he spoke of growing up while many around him were artists of one kind or another.
"During the same years I was constantly watching the work of my father and mother, and the other professional painters who frequented their house, and constantly trying to imitate them ; so that I learned to think of a picture not as a finished product exposed for the admiration of virtuosi, but as the visible record, lying about the house, of an attempt to solve a definite problem in painting, so far as the attempt has gone.
I learned what some critics and aestheticians never know to the end of their lives, that no ‘work of art’ is ever finished, so that in that sense of the phrase there is no such thing as a ‘work of art’ at all. Work ceases upon the picture or manuscript, not because it is finished, but because sending-in day is at hand, or because the printer is clamorous for copy, or because ‘I am sick of working at this thing’ or ‘I can’t see what more I can do to it’."
Thanks for enumerating; I never heard of any of that except for the pandemic (and I honestly don't know either way how much better/worse someone else would have done in that position).
I think this is the best comment for helping me understand the aversion to him. Most of it is about the economy which is easy to understand the impact of.
I mentioned I never saw a difference in my daily life specifically, in response to a Trump presidency being called "dystopian". I was of course alive when Labour was in charge and have memories of that time, but people still went by their daily lives just the same from what I can tell.
The same goes for much on your list, except for increasing inequality which impacts people's standards of living. Some other comments produced better lists regarding the impact of his presidency (things I had not heard before and some which I wasn't think of like the pandemic - although I'mm not really sure either way how much better someone else would be in his place for that one).
(Brexit did shake things up when that happened - I was hearing about jobs being paused at the time and people being unable to work.)
Thanks for the reply. I suppose I have a hard time seeing much happening that will be too bad for ordinary citizens either way. I recall people panicking about a Trump presidency in 2016, but I never saw or heard many negative outcomes (for individuals) about his presidency so I don't quite understand it and have a hard time measuring how justified people's panic is.
Would you mind explaining what the negative practical consequences would be in the event of a Trump nomination?
The worst thing I remember from him (an action which was truly horrible) was related to ICE separating children from their families.
In my country (the UK), I don't see a huge personal difference in my daily life when either one of the two mainstream parties is elected. So I'm interested in where your comment comes from.
I do have my own views of course, but neither seems significantly more dystopian to me than the other.
I remember my CS course using web tech (Codio) to teach coding, which doesn't seem like a bad option for educators, as far as dealing with cross-platform differences goes.
I sometimes think of something Kant wrote, about how friction (hardship, etc.) elevates us.
In Kant's own words:
"Without those in themselves unamiable characteristics of unsociability from whence opposition springs-characteristics each man must find in his own selfish pretensions-all talents would remain hidden, unborn in an Arcadian shepherd’s life, with all its concord, contentment, and mutual affection. Men, good-natured as the sheep they herd, would hardly reach a higher worth than their beasts; they would not fill the empty place in creation by achieving their end, which is rational nature. Thanks be to Nature, then, for the incompatibility, for heartless competitive vanity, for the insatiable desire to possess and to rule! Without them, all the excellent natural capacities of humanity would forever sleep, undeveloped. Man wishes concord; but Nature knows better what is good for the race; she wills discord. He wishes to live comfortably and pleasantly; Nature wills that he should be plunged from sloth and passive contentment into labor and trouble, in order that he may find means of extricating himself from them. The natural urges to this, the sources of unsociableness and mutual opposition from which so many evils arise, drive men to new exertions of their forces and thus to the manifold development of their capacities. They thereby perhaps show the ordering of a wise Creator and not the hand of an evil spirit, who bungled in his great work or spoiled it out of envy."
See the section titled "FOURTH THESIS" at the following link if interested.
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Idea_for_a_Universal_History_...