Viewing profile — adwhit

Interesting how when it was top-voted comment it read more as the light-hearted poking of fun which I intended (I really have no problem with Wolfram, I think he's funny). But now …

Wolfram talking about Wolfram for 14,000 words. The most Wolfram thing imaginable. Wolfram!

How can I bring a child into the world when it appears likely that the child will suffer greatly? The West hasn't really grappled with this question yet, but give it 15 years - whe…

I did specifically mention "normal code". `unsafe` is not normal code. Obviously if there is a segfault, I'd fire up a debugger - GDB is just fine for such purposes. The comparison…

> I myself am a print debugger In Rust, everyone is a print debugger. The only thing that really goes wrong in normal code (once it compiles) is "why is this value not what I expec…

The left regularly address each other as "comrade", albeit sometimes a little tongue-in-cheek. Solidarity is an important and necessary part of the culture, given the odds are heav…

I had to do a double-take here, I was thinking "I don't think Bernie is all that radical, but I wouldn't describe him as center-right". But of course the US gets the colors backwar…

I’m sold, let’s get rid of the part of the government that costs the most and delivers the least. I’m talking about the military, of course.

Cars must surely be the main cause. There is an interesting phenomenon known as "shifting baseline syndrome" where we tend to compare our environment to what we recall as a child a…

We use this is production. It is fast, looks good, decent API. The kind of thing that makes the web go round. Thanks, whoever made it!

You can be almost certain that LinkedIn knew it was illegal when they did it, and accurately calculated that the fine they would receive (if any) would be much lower than the value…

Would you give up more to ensure your children don’t grow up in a dystopian nightmare? What if the necessary amount is 60% of your income? 90%? What if our only hope is to go back …

The implication that “actually, it’s all the lib’s fault” is absurd.

Don’t let the language of capitalism mystify you. These companies have shareholders and management. The profits they make go directly to these people. They are the ones getting ric…

I agree this article isn't as terrible as average. Going vegetarian and cycling to work once a week might make you feel good but it ain't gonna make a difference. It's a political …

> Please show your evidence that global trade is a zero sum game and that the "imperial core" has reaped all the benefits. I didn't say it was zero sum. Poorer nations have experie…

> But Facebook only earns a few dollars per user per year, who in their right mind would turn off their adblocker for a few dollars? This is a good point and it is interesting to t…

This is true. Nothing to do with what I said, but, it is true. It isn't what happens at the moment. Every dollar of growth worldwide is subtracted many times over from our environm…

Globalization is a hegemonic project of the West, best understood as a means to transfer capital from the economic peripheries to the imperial core, and has tended to wreak havoc o…

Are electric cars genuinely seen as part of the solution to climate change? Surely there is no place for cars in our utopian green future, they are terribly inefficient means of tr…

I was actually just amused to see climate change used in a throwaway manner to justify some kind of AI whatever. The topic of climate change deserves to be talked about seriously o…

As a creature capable of empathy, I am quite upset at the thought of incalculable suffering we are condemning future generations to just because we can't be bothered not to.

It's pretty clear from context that I meant things will change catastrophically for the worse. Extinction unlikely within 60 years, though.

Well that's OK then (???)

I always find it strange to hear people talk about climate change as if it is some sort of tricky challenge we need to solve, like improving education or curing cancer. It is a 'pr…