Right, my suspicion was correct. When I interacted with them a few years ago they seemed perfectly nice and friendly, but seem to have gone off the rails more recently. It's an uncomfortable situation and I've a feeling people are afraid to discuss this kind of thing but we really need to. People are a risk factor in software projects and we need to be resilient to changes they face. Forking is the right way, but places like GitHub have sold people on centralisation. We need to get back to decentralised dev.
> but places like GitHub have sold people on centralisation. We need to get back to decentralised dev.
I don’t think that’s the case. It’s more of a marketing/market incentive. It’s great pr to be associated with the most famous project, way less so to be associated with a fork, at least until the fork becomes widespread and well recognised.
GitHub does make it fairly easy to fork a project, I wouldn’t blame the situation on github.
It's a shame, httpx has so much potential to be the default Python http library. It's crazy that there isn't one really. I contributed some patches to the project some years ago now and it was a nice and friendly process. I was expecting a v1 release imminently. It looks like the author is having some issues which seem to afflict so many in this field for some reason. I notice they've changed their name since I last interacted with the project...
You try to touch low level HTTP with Python, and once you dive into both RFC2616 and Python deep enough, your brain is cooked, basically. Look at what happened to the author of requests, a textbook example.
Or maybe it is that your brain is cooked already, or is on the brink, and your condition attracts you to HTTP and Python, after which it basically has you.
The only way to not go bonkers is to design a library by commitee, so that the disease spreads evenly and doesn't hit any one individual with full force. The result will be ugly, but hopefully free of drama.
Isn't this currently showing a flaw in their system? It correctly shows LaGuardia as having issues but also shows nearby airports as having issues due to severe arrival delays. But surely those delays are also due to LaGuardia? Maybe that's still useful, though? I don't know. Rarely fly.
A lot of that was due to LGA, yes. However, that doesn't stop those airports from being affected. Getting tons of traffic rerouted is inevitably going to cause delays across the whole airspace. Very useful to know.
Speed doesn't cause damage. Momentum causes damage. We understand speed, we do not understand momentum. It makes sense given our evolution.
People into boats need to understand this. Even a boat that travels no more than 4mph can crush you easily. This is why you never get on to moving boat from the front. Many people have made a mistake because speed is not high.
Tugboats bump other boats all day. Hundred thousand pound pieces of machinery bury themselves into the dirt. All this as part of normal operation. It's not that simple.
Speed, kinetic energy and acceleration are all interrelated and at the end of the day it's all forces (to some extent) and no amount of hand wringing commentary is going to replace genuine understanding of them.
There's nowhere near enough love for Guix. I don't understand it. It has far better foundations. I would never invest time into some "config language". Using a real programming language has huge benefits, and it's a good one (Scheme).
I love my kitchen knife and I love Emacs. More love is a good thing. Unless you're the kind of person who thinks not loving is better because you've got nothing to lose.
To me, loving inanimate "trivial" things diminishes the value of love. I love my girlfriend and my pets. I like my kitchen knife and my car. To bunch up both into the same category confuses things into "which one do I love the most", some sort of spectrum of love.
In the case of a fire, I'm sure you wouldn't prioritize your laptop with NixOS over your cat (let's imagine that the only backup is in the house that's on fire).
Lisp programmers have used editors that count the parens for them for decades. Many use something like paredit that simply automatically adds the final paren. I've written significant amounts of Lisp and you simply don't see the parens. You might as well complain about French having all those accents. It's just a different language. Learn it and you'll see why.
I can write lisp. That a lot of lisp programmers require special editors to handle it should tell you enough. It's not that the language is unworkable. You can definitely write stuff in it. The point is that it is quite far from something that should be written by people, in my opinion.
Are you really going to argue that a good programming language is one where you can construct it character by character, by hand? Emacs has existed for decades and it runs basically anywhere. Nobody is programming in ed (well, apart from Dave Beazley[0]). With LLMs the world is finally catching up to the fact that programming isn't typing characters one by one. Lisp programmers have been at this for decades.
I consider it essential for a programming language for people that it is easy to understand things by looking at things locally. Requiring/strongly encouraging extremely deep nesting is not conducive to that.
This is not some weird opinion I have. There is a reason "flat is better than nested" is part of the pretty popular zen of Python.
They shouldn't teach calculus like they taught it to me and my peers. Basically we just one day started "differentiating" equations. We learnt a completely mechanical process. Like how to chop an onion, except it doesn't actually feed you or taste delicious.
It took me a while to realise the point. It's all about rates of change. They should start with that. No need to bother with the maths, just look at graphs and be like "that's a steeper slope than that", and, ooh, that one's sloping in the opposite direction. This is a fundamental intuition that's so useful to have. Most people don't understand that braking is acceleration. They just don't have the mental model that lets them see fuel burn and braking as opposite things. The sooner this intuition is there the better. Then teach the maths.
> They shouldn't teach calculus like they taught it to me and my peers. Basically we just one day started "differentiating" equations. We learnt a completely mechanical process.
I had a similar experience and it did ruin the fun in Calculus for me. It took me a long time to derive a bare-minimum mental model that I was satisfied with. It was at this point that I could 'feel' (imagine) how the general second-order linear differential equation (of two variables) works, without the need to 'calculate' or derive anything. This equation is the fundamental model for countless phenomena in the universe. It's such a shame, because that equation is easy to explain in words, without doing a single step of derivation.
Don't get me wrong. Formalism and rigor do have very important roles in Mathematics. But ignoring intuition and emphasizing formalism doesn't get you anywhere. Intuition isn't always right, but it shows you the 1000ft view of the problem when it does get it right. Formalizing the solution gets easier from there.
I have noticed that even professionals are taken by surprise when I convey the descriptive explanation. It shows how badly these things are taught. (I don't know if this is the situation everywhere.)
> The sooner this intuition is there the better. Then teach the maths.
Yes, that is exactly what I was suggesting. However, that 'intuition' is also part of Mathematics. Many practitioners call it the 'Mathematical sense', as opposed to common sense. You might have seen a rare few gifted individuals who find the correct answers to unintuitive and confusing problems (like the infamous Monty Hall problem) in their first try. They're employing this mathematical sense while the others revert to common sense. Who knows? Even you may be using it and surprising others without realizing it.
Unfortunately, our educational systems have reinforced this misconception that Mathematics is all about manipulating numbers and symbols (for many, even the idea about symbols are missing). This is a very sad situation that just sucks the life out of mathematics. A long essay (book) by Paul Lockhart, named 'A Mathematician's Lament' explains this problem splendidly.
PS: Funnily enough, I always struggled in and hated mathematics! Others were so good at applying long sequences of operations to get to the answer, while it was Chinese to me! (No offense intended here). But I was good at science. I relied on countless diagrams, tables, concept graphs, signal flow graphs, etc in place of equations and formulae to achieve this. I just converted them to equations and formulae whenever I needed to reproduce those. I thought, "Who needs mathematics when you can reason your way to the answer?"
It was close to the end of my formal education that I realized that every reasoning that I had done in my life was proper Mathematics! I had strong autistic traits and following numerous steps in sequence and in parallel was near impossible for me. But where I made up for that was in spatial intelligence. I had created book after book of Mathematics described in a visual language that I could digest. I didn't really hate mathematics. What I hated was the way in which it was taught and represented.
Learning Mathematics has become a whole lot easier and enjoyable after realizing it and embracing the fact that I needed my own ways of doing it. But honestly, I wish that so much time wasn't wasted in needless frustration.
My partner and I share everything we eat. I think we have passed food between chopsticks before. What's the "proper" way to do this? Just reach in to the other bowl?
Also wondering how many of these apply in a Chinese setting or any other chopstick culture. Are there a different set of taboos?
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