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Be careful about what you dislike

lucumr.pocoo.org

31–40 of 176 posts

Re: Be careful about what you dislike

#31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In that case, can you explain how Canadian and European legal systems are insufficient for seeking legal recourse for legitimate grievances? That's the wrong question to ask even though there is a very simple answer to it: that the state is not impartial. The better question to ask is why ISDS exists in the first place and this is something that the states and governments came up with and not the companies. > The a…

> That's the wrong question to ask even though there is a very simple answer to it: that the state is not impartial. The judiciary is what is in question, not the state per se. But even if they're not impartial, is that necessarily bad here? Shouldn't the health of a country's citizens take priority over the interests of shareholders? Why should foreign businesses have greater rights than local businesses? (this is t…

> But even if they're not impartial, is that necessarily bad here? Shouldn't the health of a countries' citizens take priority over the interests of shareholders?

It is in CETA.

> The nature of how trade deals are negotiated means we don't necessarily know who came up with it.

Arbitral tribunals predate modern day FTAs by 150 years or more. If you have an interest in this you can easily read up on why they exist.

> Plenty of these cases have been lost by governments.

I am aware since I read about all of them in the last few months but this is going into details. Out of the ones that have been lost, the initial NAFTA case has even been controversial among the signatories. However there are plenty of other court decisions in traditional courts that I would argue are not any less controversial.

> It's because of existing ISDS provisions that we know of their problems. Why do we need even more?

I am not sure about Canada, but the EU does not want more, they want better ISDS provisions since the current ones are quite defective in many ways.

> “All the way up to the highest European courts”? That's not how the EU's legal system works. You can't just appeal cases to the EU level.

You can definitely drag cases in front of the ECHR. Case in point: Yukos.

Anyways. This entire conversation is something that is completely removed from the original point of the article which was moving goalposts. I do not actually see a value having a conversation about CETA, particularly now.

Re: Be careful about what you dislike

#32
A very common cognitive bias or logic pattern our brain follows is to whitelist or blacklist things. When we trust something, we follow it without question or we begin rationalizing it no matter what. And in the day of the internet and Google we can confirm basically any bias we have on either side of an issue.

You should scrutinize your own thoughts and opinions and others to see if they are just believing something because it was true in the past.

In terms of Javascript, there is definitely a lot of hate out there for the language and ecosystem which was entirely true. But I would argue JS has the best trajectory right now of any language out there. So you better learn it if you want to stay relevant in development.

Lastly, I've found it best to not be so opinionated about everything. Sure having some opinions are great but you develop too many biases otherwise. So what if something sucks, use it anyway. You might learn something new, or maybe you can help improve it if it has potential.

Re: Be careful about what you dislike

#33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's the wrong question to ask even though there is a very simple answer to it: that the state is not impartial. The judiciary is what is in question, not the state per se. But even if they're not impartial, is that necessarily bad here? Shouldn't the health of a country's citizens take priority over the interests of shareholders? Why should foreign businesses have greater rights than local businesses? (this is t…

> But even if they're not impartial, is that necessarily bad here? Shouldn't the health of a countries' citizens take priority over the interests of shareholders? It is in CETA. > The nature of how trade deals are negotiated means we don't necessarily know who came up with it. Arbitral tribunals predate modern day FTAs by 150 years or more. If you have an interest in this you can easily read up on why they exist. > P…

> This entire conversation is something that is completely removed from the original point of the article which was moving goalposts.

Perhaps. I feel that your article misrepresented the argument against CETA when it used it as an example. I realise that you probably don't want to argue about this (nor do I, really), but I felt it was important to provide a contrary perspective. That's all.

Re: Be careful about what you dislike

#34
post #2

I'm fascinated by the topic of English Prime: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Prime It introduced me to the idea that 'is' should be treated very carefully. Any assertion outside of strict formal languages that use it are half-truths at best. It also introduces heightens the emotional tone of a discussion. If you say "John is foo" you tend to create the impression that John will always and has always been foo. Foo-ne…

> Any assertion outside of strict formal languages that use it are half-truths at best

I was going to say this is ironic but I will rather say I find this ironic

Re: Be careful about what you dislike

#35
post #2

I'm fascinated by the topic of English Prime: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Prime It introduced me to the idea that 'is' should be treated very carefully. Any assertion outside of strict formal languages that use it are half-truths at best. It also introduces heightens the emotional tone of a discussion. If you say "John is foo" you tend to create the impression that John will always and has always been foo. Foo-ne…

completely on point, actually. Plus a link to a cool, thought-provoking concept. thanks!

Re: Be careful about what you dislike

#36
post #5

For comparaison, Ruby 3 is gonna introduce a pretty big breaking change (frozen string literals) but they already shipped a way to optional enable it by-file (magic comment) and globally to the ruby interpreter (just a parameter) so that all the libraries and projects can slowly fix it in a compatible manner (often just calling .dup is enough). So that's when it's time for Ruby 3 the transition will be pretty painles…

Magic imports from __future__ are the usual way of turning on features in Python.

The incompatibilities introduced in Python 3 weren't done that way to save on implementation effort among other reasons.

Re: Be careful about what you dislike

#37
post #25
post #5

For comparaison, Ruby 3 is gonna introduce a pretty big breaking change (frozen string literals) but they already shipped a way to optional enable it by-file (magic comment) and globally to the ruby interpreter (just a parameter) so that all the libraries and projects can slowly fix it in a compatible manner (often just calling .dup is enough). So that's when it's time for Ruby 3 the transition will be pretty painles…

(Frozen string literals allows strings to be in memory only once and not having to reallocate each time, so a pretty big memory and cpu optimization) Isn't this the purpose of symbols in the language? This seems like a pretty basic optimization, surely there were good reasons not to introduce it in earlier versions.

e.g. 1000.times { "hello" } creates strings 1000 times but: 1000.times { "hello".freeze } only one time.

The thing about frozen strings is they can't be changed "inline":

e.g. : "Hello".freeze (It's funny because << is often recommended as an optimization)

Re: Be careful about what you dislike

#38
post #5

For comparaison, Ruby 3 is gonna introduce a pretty big breaking change (frozen string literals) but they already shipped a way to optional enable it by-file (magic comment) and globally to the ruby interpreter (just a parameter) so that all the libraries and projects can slowly fix it in a compatible manner (often just calling .dup is enough). So that's when it's time for Ruby 3 the transition will be pretty painles…

Magic imports from __future__ are the usual way of turning on features in Python. The incompatibilities introduced in Python 3 weren't done that way to save on implementation effort among other reasons.

Maybe python2 --enable-print-parentheses and other flags could have been useful to slowly detect future issues on python 2 code.

Re: Be careful about what you dislike

#39
post #5

For comparaison, Ruby 3 is gonna introduce a pretty big breaking change (frozen string literals) but they already shipped a way to optional enable it by-file (magic comment) and globally to the ruby interpreter (just a parameter) so that all the libraries and projects can slowly fix it in a compatible manner (often just calling .dup is enough). So that's when it's time for Ruby 3 the transition will be pretty painles…

This is a quite good example about myself. After I realized that too many people around Ruby do not understand the concept of immutability, I stopped to care about the whole ecosystem around it.

If this catches up, it is worth to give the Ruby a fresh look.

Re: Be careful about what you dislike

#40
Good article.

List of some of the things I don't like for which I have to occasionally take another peak to see if I'm finally wrong:

1. (In languages) Garbage collection and the idea of "safe code". I didn't like it then and still don't.

2. ORMs

3. (Relational) Data models with compound keys flying around as FKs everywhere.

4. The idea of self service BI (like PowerBI etc in the hands of a business user)

5. Regexp

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