Biobeads are not a natural phenomenon; they are produced for and used by water treatment plants and therefore it's the responsibility of their owners to ensure that they don't leak into the ocean where they don't belong.
This type of legislation is in the same line as the USA's Clean Water Act; don't shit where you eat/live.
I find the design aspect of stringing (primarily) defaults together very pleasing over the alternative of authoring ad hoc CSS/SASS/SCSS for every project.
So you might be right in correcting me, it's been a while since I've used another FP language in anger.
With regards to taking the address of foo, pointers are generally not a (user space) concept in FP languages. The compiler/runtime usually optimizes cases like this as passing function pointers is a very large corner stone of FP.
For mutation semantics you often approach it similar to how atomics works in non-FP languages. When opting into mutation you lose one of the pillars of FP which is idempotency and purity via immutability. Treating it as a special case helps scope it down to "here be dragons" areas.
I'm happy to say that ~80% of Sweden and Norway don't vote for right wing populist parties like SD and Fremskrittspartiet, so "vast majority of us" might be a bit of a stretch.
That's a misrepresentation of statistics though. FRP is the second largest party this election, with 23,8% of votes, only second to AP who got 28%. But many people won't vote based on the immigration issues, because so far, other issues are more pressing.
But my point was that I am absolutely sure the majority of Norwegians _want Norway to remain a country that retains its cultural history_ while not being exclusive to one ethnic group. It's about retaining a majority.
I don't understand why that sentiment is so problematic here on HN, because simultaneously people are clamoring for a Palestinian state for the Palestinian people.
Why can't Norway have a Norwegian state for the Norwegian people? Or Denmark? Or the UK?
> That's a misrepresentation of statistics though.
I can't speak for Norway, but in Sweden the only party worth keeping an eye on that adheres to the usual combination of pro-Russia, anti-abortion, anti-immigrant, anti-EU rhetoric etc is Sverigedemokraterna (formerly Bevara Sverige Svenskt, a party based solely on the idea of an ethnostate). They're hovering around 20%.
> But my point was that I am absolutely sure the majority of Norwegians _want Norway to remain a country that retains its cultural history_ while not being exclusive to one ethnic group. It's about retaining a majority.
Is the existence of history dependent on the ethnicity of the person reading it? I'm sure you've met non-native people who are in all other respects very much Norwegian.
Unless you mean to imply that culture is constrained to genetics. I deeply hope that that is not what you meant.
> I don't understand why that sentiment is so problematic here on HN, because simultaneously people are clamoring for a Palestinian state for the Palestinian people.
How many Norwegian cities were leveled by bombs this year? How many were murdered by foreign military?
> Why can't Norway have a Norwegian state for the Norwegian people? Or Denmark? Or the UK?
Frankly, I might be sympathetic to this view, except for a few countries: The US, the UK, France, Belgium and maybe a few others. The US is a country of immigrant, so none of that cultural history nonsense holds, except maybe for the Native Americans. As for France and the UK, yeah no one told them to go colonize a bunch of countries around the world and impose their culture on them. They don't get to complain about retaining their cultural history. Belgium doesn't get to complain either after the atrocities they committed in Central Africa.
Sweden's conservative government are pressuring building regulators to re-evaluate whether "all rooms require windows" in order to make the construction of apartments cheaper.
"Perhaps a better plan would be to replaces cranes with horses and ropes such that we can once again afford windows" was my first thought when I read that in my turn of the century starter apartment with giant windows in every room.
Like, GDP and productivity has tripled since that apartment was last renovated, let alone constructed. The idea that we can't afford a 20th century living standard anymore is nothing but absurdist propaganda.
That's a good thing to re-evaluate. The government shouldn't dictate people's preferences. People's lifestyles have changed. It's now normal for this generation of people to prefer a dark cave-like room where they play video games and socialize online. Glare from windows restrict where monitors could be placed. If they want natural light, they would prefer to go outside for a walk or a hike.
And that's not to mention rooms like kitchens and bathrooms. Older houses invariably have windows for kitchens too since you need to open the windows to let out the fumes from gas cooking. And they would have windows in the bathroom to let out moisture. These days newer houses are already designed not to have windows in either kitchens or bathrooms.
Sweden is very green and comparatively car free. Having open windows during summer to let in light, fresh air and bird sound is culturally strong here.
You can buy curtains, you can't retroactively insert a window as easily nor should you have to my lord.
I can't imagine living in a dark, centrally ventilated container. Most Swedes agree (massive pushback when this happened, gov backtracked).
No, you are right. It is absurd. The same government also increased the income tax deduction on renovations both in percentage and amount.
So is the suggestion of less light and more isolation in Sweden. One of the darkest and most lonely countries in the world. There is already no requirement for windows in bathrooms and kitchens, as you can't regularly open windows in winter anyway.
> Is there some society you know that doesn’t run on greed? … What is greed? Of course none of us are greedy. It’s only the other fellow who’s greedy. The world runs on individuals pursuing their separate interests.
Yes, and altruism doesn't exist, everyone is political, and a whole slew of other nonsense banalizations that pretend that distinctions cannot be made.
> Greed: a selfish and excessive desire for more of something (such as money) than is needed
This definition is quite easy to distinguish ordinary desire from greed. Otherwise you need to render selfish and excessive banal and meaningless as well.
Getting more than needed does not imply that something is needed at all. You can live your whole life without needing to eat a Lychee, but if you eat 1000 of those that is clearly more than needed. A person who never ate a lychee maybe cannot put it into perspective and might suggest that wanting a single lychee is greed, but most people wouldn't find it difficult to see that perspective as extreme. Change lychee for cocaine and you suddenly start getting a different balance.
I know. Per your definition, anyone who desires a vacation to a tropical island is greedy. Or eating at restaurants. Playing video games, renting a movie, eating dessert, etc. How about living on the California coast? People who want to earn more so they can move there are greedy? Or do they simply desire it?
One of my cousins' parents immigrated to the Bay Area, but mine went to the midwest. Am I greedy for desiring to earn income more than a couple standard deviations above the mean so that I could buy land in the Bay Area? Is my cousin not greedy because they were born there?
>Context and our norms is what determines it.
Exactly, which is the problem with trying to distinguish "desire" and "greed". "We" don't have norms. I was lambasted growing up by my grandparents for wanting things that any 1990s kid had in the US, but they didn't have in their poorer country from 1920 to 1940.
> Per your definition, anyone who desires a vacation to a tropical island is greedy. Or eating at restaurants.
It isn't my definition, it's Merriam-Webster dictionary, and I suggest reading the definition more carefully, it really isn't that hard to understand. That is how the word is used.
All of your examples are not selfish or excessive. So not greedy. That it isn't a clear bright line isn't a problem, most judgements in life are not clear cut.
Profit seeking through competition isn’t the same as greed. Greed is the impulse to rig the game once you’ve won a little, so you can keep extracting more without competing. And that tendency from some kinds of people corrodes free market capitalism and its ability to drive innovation and reduce prices. Competition only works if players play by the rules.
And your food analogy works against you. If we extend your analogy, profit is like eating, greed is like overeating. Saying profit = greed is like saying every person who eats three meals a day is a glutton. Competition rewards healthy eating -- efficiency, balance, discipline. Greed is scarfing down the pantry and locking the fridge so nobody else can eat.
> Greed is the impulse to rig the game once you’ve won a little, so you can keep extracting more without competing.
You're making up your own novel definition of greed there, which is certainly cheating when you're saying Milton Friedman is wrong. He was using greed in a more generally accepted sense, ie, a desire for more than one has right now.
There are a lot of greedy people out there who are scrupulously honest. As far as I can tell, the average greedy person should be modelling scrupulous honesty, advocating fair systems and enforcing rule-following behaviours - that is creating the best environment for acquiring capital and maintaining property rights. Greedy people who white-ant the systems sustaining their capital are generally more stupid than greedy.
Newton wrote more about alchemy and theology than he did on physics too. There's a reason why Newton and Smith are primarily remembered in a subset of the fields they worked in.
If you want a dictionary definition, search suggests "An excessive desire to acquire or possess more than what one needs or deserves, especially with respect to material wealth".
On their own neither of those implies any desire to rig games or to avoid competition. Some greedy people do that, but since pretty much everyone is greedy to some extent you find greedy people with every combination of human characteristics.
It's hilarious to watch people try to pretend that "crony capitalism" and "capitalism" are different things, as if the greed to rig the system once you've won is fundamentally different from the greed that pushes you to compete in an un-rigged system.
No, sorry, it's not only the same emotion, it's the same system and the same rules: if greed is good, why shouldn't one seek network effects, platform effects, last-mile dynamics, vertical and horizontal integration that block competition, engage in FUD and dumping and regulatory capture and so on and so on? The answer that the entire business community and an increasing fraction of the general population seems to agree to is that one should, and this has prevented the sort of gardening that can keep the system actually competitive and working for the people, rather than working for the people on top, which is what it overwhelmingly wants to do when left to its own devices.
A typical example here might be something like chess. The primary reason people play it is competition and enjoyment of the game. But there are some who a distorted mentality and simply want to win, even if they're not the one's doing anything, and so you get things like people using computers to cheat. And online chess sites (and increasingly even major over the board events) only work so well by making sure that these sort of people are completely removed from the game.
The desire to compete is somehow not really the same as the desire to win. This is overtly apparent in things like body building. 99.9% of body builders will never compete in a body building show, let alone win, but enjoy the journey that's mostly full of years of self inflicted pain, occasional injury, and endless dedication - largely for the sake of competition and of course what it does to your body. And that latter part isn't really about showing off or sex or whatever, but simply about pride in what you've accomplished - much in the same way one might take pride in their ability to play chess well, or manage a healthy business.
You're splitting stupid hairs here over the exact implication of words in a setting where they don't exactly matter. Whether you call it greed, self interest, a desire to amass wealth, etc, doesn't really matter because for the fat part of the bell curve it's all the same.
I was born in 1990, quite late into the end tail of ordinary people not writing letters by hand, reading (a single book/article) for hours on end etc. and it's already evident that people outside of occupations that demand it just don't consume or produce as much (quality) writing as they used to.
My fear isn't that LLMs will fail to meet our standards, my fear is that LLMs will drag us down to a new low of homogenized, dull and lifeless form of writing.
Perhaps I'm biased, but it feels as if the few times I am impressed by someones writing, the material is 20 years old or older, even if said author is still producing work.
I think you're accurately describing a "regression to the mean" phenomenon, which LLMs have transmitted to areas involving programmatic control through text.
I recently used an LLM to help scaffold a piece of technical writing. I showed it to several of my peers (sharp and accomplished PhD students), and they immediately identified the paragraphs (even sentences in captions!) written by an LLM. I had spent a good amount of time prompt engineering Opus 4 to try and produce a coherent piece of content aligned with a narrative which I had already developed, but it was still _immediately obvious_ what was not consistent ... it stood out like a sore thumb to experts.
By the the time we finished the content, there was not a sentence of LLM-generated writing in the final product.
Possibly an incorrect extrapolation, but I think my experience here is the current status quo. Code is a bit easier for these systems, because the LLM can align against test suites, type systems, etc. But for writing ... you just can't trust the current capabilities to pass the sniff test by experts.
After all, how does one commmunicate "coherence" as a test which the LLM might align its generations against? That's why you need a shared world model (with your audience) -- and if we could produce a computational representation of such a thing, we might have a chance at better coherent / consistent technical writing generations.
And having written a lot of Common Lisp, Go code is extraordinarily straight forward in a sense where every developer writes in almost the exact same style.
This is not true for Common Lisp (even though it's not as bad as people make it out to be).
I feel the exact same way with C versus C++, even if I was the person to write the C++.
Before you learn it's actually terrible if I may.
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