I think the article is pretty fair at presenting GingerBill's legitimate grievances, Wikipedia shortcomings, acknowledging that GingerBill can be constructive and, at the same time, recognizing that the current interactions are coloured by his particular ideological grievances.
It is only at the end of a very long, well-argued article that he is very critical of GingerBill's positions. I don't think I agree that calling someone out on their contradictions or political opinions constitute "stalking".
What a fantastic article. I could not care less about the actual topic, but in these times of literacy scarcity, it is refreshing to see someone actually being able to read through sub-text and present their views in a well-reasoned manner.
Unsurprisingly, this seems to make quite some people angry.
You don't think that the fact that Ellison is a staunch defender of regimes that disregard the international order in favour of military might is relevant to the fact that is also advocating for building a surveillance state?
In case you don't, to me it's painfully clear that these are just different aspects of the move towards more authoritarian forms of government. You CANNOT support a genocide and expect that this will not have an effect on democracy.
EDIT: Also note that I am trying to take your comments on good faith, but characterising support for genocide as "a foreign policy disagreement" feels a bit like an understatement.
> I was active in the Python community in the 200x timeframe, and I daresay the common consensus is that language didn't matter and a sufficiently smart compiler/JIT/whatever would eventually make dynamic scripting languages as fast as C, so there was no reason to learn static languages rather than just waiting for this to happen.
To be very pedantic, the problem is not that these are dynamic languages _per se_, but that they were designed with semantics unconcerned with performance. As such, retrofitting performance can be extremely challenging.
As a counterexample of fast and dynamic: https://julialang.org/ (of course, you pay the prize in other places)
> Julia: Julia is another great language with an open and active community. They are currently investing in machine learning techniques, and even have good interoperability with Python APIs.
It marketed itself explicitly as a "Python superset", which could allow Python programmers to avoid learning a second language and write performant code.
I'd argue that I am not sure what kind of Python programmer is capable of learning things like comptime, borrow checking, generics but would struggle with different looking syntax. So to me this seemed like a deliberate misrepresentation of the actual challenges to generate hype and marketing.
Which fair enough, I suppose this is how things work. But it should be _fair_ to point out the obvious too.
For a language that announced itself (and raised a lot of money on the premise of) claiming to be "a Python superset", this does not sound like a huge achievement.
In all fairness, their website now reads: "Mojo is a pythonic language for blazing-fast CPU+GPU execution without CUDA. Optionally use it with MAX for insanely fast AI inference."
So I suppose now is just a compiled language with superficially similar syntax and completely different semantics to Python?
Big companies tend to develop cult dynamics. This is not an exaggeration, but a consequence of how humans tend to operate in large amounts. And I'd wager that in the case of Silicon Valley tech companies, this is also something that they embrace and nurture. I don't think this is a controversial take at all, and rather obvious.
She was probably not "afraid of being let go" (fired), but had convinced herself that it was of the utmost importance to have this level of committment. The book probably reads similar to those books of someone who leaves their church or cult.
That's mostly because Julia questions get answered on its Discourse or Slack. The sharp decline is due to an automatic cross-post bot that stopped working.
No one bothered fixing it, in great part due to Discourse being the main place of discussion, as far as I know.
I think it ultimately is a sign of the need for better languages. Of course, there are always engineering compromises. But I think a better world is possible, in which we don't have massive software projects written in JavaScript or Python.
Absolutely agree. We changed on my team to primarily use Macbooks. Originally just to make easier testing on Safari. Later, just because the hardware is pretty nice.
It has been a pretty frustrating experience at times. Most of the time is _fine_, but the problems after updates, Docker bugs, certain libraries that we cannot install..
On the other hand, it was never perfect with Linux either. But that was expected. And I can say that macOS does not deserbe the reputation it has.
Overall, kind of a mixed bag. There are some very nice aspects to both he hardware and software, but some that are jarring and make me thing "this is not really meant for professional users". Like the atrocious window management (that admittedly can bve fixed with a couple free applicaitons).
It is only at the end of a very long, well-argued article that he is very critical of GingerBill's positions. I don't think I agree that calling someone out on their contradictions or political opinions constitute "stalking".