I'm professionally a python programmer with no C/C++ experience, and I do some hobby programming in zig. I tried rust but it seemed complicated and kind of boring. Zig was a lot easier for me to get into. I don't mind that it's obscure and a bit of a moving target, but I have yet to do anything really "serious" with it.
I think the point of the saying is that as systems tend to expand, sooner or later we become part of them. That means that we can no longer see them from outside, we're now part of the system and our goals and the system's goals will align. Then the purpose of the system can't be anything else than what it does.
Well there was no way the show would be quite as good as the book. But I was still pleasantly surprised, it was definitely better than the average TV adaptation. The actors were very good.
Yes. There will always be people who see opportunity in using it destructively. Best case scenario is that others will use it to counter that. But it is usually easier to destroy than to protect. So we could have a constant AI war going on somewhere in the clouds, occasionally leaking new disasters into the human world.
I think the effort is indeed a big piece of it. For example, consider sports. I don't imagine that a lot of sports fans would be interested in watching completely AI-generated video of their favorite teams playing, even if it's totally believable. Surely the main point of the whole thing has something to do with humans at the top of their skill, measuring up against each other, and experiencing it together with them?
For me it's the same with music. I am sure I will be fooled by some AI generated music now and then, but what does that prove?
Though in principle they serve similar purposes there are some big differences though. Python with types is still just python. Typescript is a different language from JS (guess it a superset?) and it being controlled by a large company could be considered problematic.
I suppose JS could go in the same direction and adopt the typing syntax from TS as a non-runtime thing. Then the typescript compiler would become something like mypy, an entirely optional part of the ecosystem.
I don't have experience from any larger application, but from my smaller usage Preact seems like a drop in replacement. It's been compatible with the react libraries I've tried. It also works great with ES modules. So for simple stuff, I think it's worth a try.
I think a better word may be "explicitness". Zig is sometimes verbose because you have to spell things out. Can't say much about Go, but it seems it has more going on under the hood.
I find that I always learn something valuable by diving in and trying ideas out concretely. High-flying plans can also cause a lot of wasted coding on things that won't work out.
The hammer example made me remember something. I did some Aikido long ago, and the instructor spent quite a lot of time showing us how to grip things like sticks. As I remember it, instead of the instinctive way of just forming a fist around it, we should instead start from the little finger, wrapping the fingers one by one, but letting the index finger actually rest more along the handle than wrapping it. That way, supposedly, the grip is just as good, but more flexible and the index finger can help with control.
Tricky Towers is fun and while it has various silly features that adds randomness (e.g. wind), it still rewards skill enough to feel fair.
It follows the tetris logic of pieces staying in the "grid", until they touch another piece. Then they turn into "physical" 2d pieces with weight, friction etc. So it's very much like tetris in the beginning but unless you keep your tower very regular, it becomes increasingly harder to place new items. I bet it was a lot of work to tune the physics engine!
I think a contributing factor is our obsession with measurement. Happiness is hard to prove, and having money is hard to fake. So money can become a proxy for happiness even though it may only be an enabler.