> I was seeking the external gratification of getting likes just like everyone else.
“You will be happy to look okay. You will be happy to turn heads. You will be happy with smoother skin. You will be happy with a flat stomach. You will be happy with a six-pack. You will be happy with an eight-pack. You will be happy when every photo of yourself gets 10,000 likes on Instagram. You will be happy when you have transcended earthly woes. You will be happy when you are at one with the universe. You will be happy when you are the universe. You will be happy when you are a god. You will be happy when you are the god to rule all gods. You will be happy when you are Zeus. In the clouds above Mount Olympus, commanding the sky. Maybe. Maybe. Maybe.”
It’s certainly a case that languages need to be championed by competent IDE writers otherwise they fail to scale. Because you can’t have 50 devs all using neovim - and only neovim - without making a huge gigantic mess. Large projects can sustain a few brilliant people working with one hand tied behind their back but not everyone.
I haven't used it much. I know a few people who have.
But as I said above, I realized long ago that languages without IDEs by and large falter in the long term (that's why I'm currently concerned about Jetbrains needing a buggy plugin to do Elixir), so Jetbrains being behind it added a lot of gravitas.
And after fighting with Larry Ellison for a bit, Android phones moved to Kotlin to get around the lawyers.
It's not dead dead, but no new projects are choosing it. Those that chose Scala as the better Java can now just use the better Java from the latest JDK.
Lots, but it's Pareto principle all over again. Those who wanted a sweeter Java were the majority of users. They have no real reason to switch to Scala 3 when Java 25 has 20% of Scala features that provide 80% of the benefits.
the OO/FP fusion hypothesis resulted in a complicated language on the OO side (too complicated for enterprise application layer) and on the FP side an autistic culture war at the seam between FP frameworks. Functional Scala remains world class at high reliability services such as video streaming at Disney+ and Comcast, and Amazon search but not so much the Java everyman use case that I recall it being marketed for 15 years ago. And now the Scala leadership and the industry frameworks are pulling in different directions, Scala is academically funded.
What started as a "this should be just a few namespace changes" might have cost thousands of person days in my current job. So many tests red, the whole CI/CD broken, and when all "fixed" and done, there were still some uncaught production bugs haunting us for many months... Simply horrible.
On paper, it really was just a few changes. In practice, it forced a massive transitive dependency and technical debt cleanup for many companies.
Newspapers are usually correct with the facts when they do report on a story. It's usually the "which truths get picked and which not" part that gets tricky. Wikipedia makes its own compilation, so citing facts out of newspapers doesn't sound too bad.
More concretely, a newspaper (or other media) will use facts like "Police Media Officer Jones stated that ....". It is factually correct that Officer Jones stated "....". Whether Media Officer Jones' statement is correct and comprehensive, that is another matter.
Feel free to substitute "Officer Jones" for any other occupation.
A very large fraction of news comes from media relations people at the organizations being reported on. Good news agencies will get context from another organization.
Great news agencies will sometimes do the kind of digging that makes leaders of large organizations uncomfortable. The costs in time, money, and reputation (even when you get it right) mean that even the very best news agencies can only report a small fraction of stories in depth.
You can get a false sense of how common, dangerous, etc something is by the frequency of reports from a news outlet. What they are saying is true, but how relevant that is to the average person can be far from the truth.
A perfect example of this. I've seen here on HN people worried about crime on public transit (any crime, from murder to petty theft). Specifically citing the terrible crime problems of NY and CA transit. Yet when you actually look at the numbers, you see the crimes per day are closer to 1 or 2 while the travelers per day are in the millions. Meaning it's a literal 1 in a million event that you'll be the target of crime on public transit.
News outlets lie to you not by telling false stories but rather by weaving false narratives around the stories. "Crime is out of control" is the false narrative, but it's backed by real stories of crime, sometimes horrific.
I think you are missing a few things about crime in a big city. People don't want to be victims of crime. So when crime rises, people adapt their behavior to adjust for that. People will stop going out at night in certain neighborhoods for example. They also stop reporting certain types of crime, like property crime.
So when there is a multi-year trend in crime, it means that where and when the crimes are happening have to change multiple times to adapt to people's changing behaviors. And if you don't keep up on how that changes, your chance of getting robbed goes up quite a bit. This is why you don't tend to see crime yourself (unless there is mental illness involved), it tends to happen where there are fewer eyeballs.
I knew quite a few people who have been the victim of violent (and random) crime. Each time it happened where other's couldn't see it. But its nice that you lived in a part of town where you never had to learn this type of street knowledge. Not everyone is so lucky.
Transportation crime fear is compounded by another issue: "scary people." I've personally never witnessed a crime. But I've seen plenty of people that raised my hackles, usually they seem intoxicated or are exhibiting some kind behavior that may indicate mental illness. Are they going to get up and stab me? Probably not, but it sure seems like it could happen, and it sometimes (though rarely in terms of transite miles) does happen. I can intellectually dismiss other low prevalence issues in a way that it is hard to do with public transit, viscerally.
I know you meant "became wary" when you wrote "raised my hackles", but that phrase means "to (visibly) upset or arouse one's anger," which I'm sure is not what you meant. But it does speak to a large part of the problem: people becoming overly engaged with something that they should probably just acknowledge and be aware of, without changing their behavior significantly.
Crime hysteria seems like it gets people, who are unlikely to be victims of crimes but more likely to have outsize political influence, involved in law enforcement policy. Without being forced to dogfood the results of their own advocacy, you end up with policing rules written by people who rarely are forced to interact with police, and who are very scared of crime that never happens to them.
One simple example: The FBI raided my friend's workplace. All the news reported the business as having shut down permanently. Yet my friend worked there for at least 4 years! He said they shut down for a few days max.
For smaller stories, talk to people involved, and you'll get an idea of how inaccurate they can be.
Match my experience as well. For every event I've been part of that's also been reported in the news, I've found the news wildly wrong. Not innacurate, wrong.
And lately, on top of that I've also had the terrifying experience of wikipedia opting for the wrong reported news and dismissing several objections from people actually involved in the actual events.
The worse is that it's oftentime not even attributable to some malicious agenda, or gross incompetence of someone in particular. It's just how this industry functions.
Someone down the thread is asking "what's the alternative".
The alternative is to admit that you are not informed beyond your immediate horrizon.
Not reading news that doesn't have a significant impact on your life is entirely reasonable.
The guy who got arrested in the other state for hacking into the DOD? It's totally reasonable not to bother knowing about it.
> I think that Republicans push mistrust of the media to eliminate any sources of information besides their own representatives
Ha! I was a news junkie in the Bush/Obama era. Getting busy in life finally cured me of that scourge, but I learned a lot of lessons. Long before Trump came on the scene I was an advocate of "There's no middle ground with the news - either go all in (time consuming) or mostly all out" - and while I didn't shout "Fake news!", it was my sentiment - you really can't trust much, and learning what you can trust will take years of aggressively analyzing the news and how it works - time most people don't have.
It was disconcerting that the person who got people to distrust the news was Trump.
Anyway, in case people think I'm advocating never trusting news: It ain't so. As I think I said elsewhere - one can find quality articles and quality journalists. You just can't do it as a casual hobby.
And my mission is to let people know they don't need 95% of the information they think they do.
But if they really need information about a particular topic/domain, they should put in the hours to find ways to verify what they read, and start ranking journalists by accuracy and integrity.
> Also, this attitude allows suffering to occur as long as it doesn't affect the majority of the people.
You're not wrong.
The flip side is that casual news reading allows quite a bit of suffering because people have a flawed model of the world due to their news perusals.
In fact, that's what this submission and many comments are pointing out. How much money is spent to fight terrorism (including invading countries to protect us from terrorists) vs heart disease prevention? Why do people believe the former is more worthy of spending money? If the news provided proportional coverage, we'd likely have spent a lot less money on the former.
I think you and I have had wildly different experiences.
If I know something about what is in the paper, it’s rare that the paper is correct. It’s almost always missing some critical piece of information, or wildly misrepresenting the situation to attempt to simplify it to the point your average person will read the article.
That is the technicality here. Bullshit is getting spewed, but in most cases, direct falsehoods aren't gett reported. If you quote someone saying something untrue, the paper didn't present a falsehood, same with bias, omission, emphasis and misleading narratives or framings. If you avoid stating facts and just cite sources, you can maintain, that the media outlet didn't lie. But only in the limited technical sense of direct commission.
I remember the first time I clicked the Start button on Windows 95 and the sheer excitement I felt seeing all those software categories. My dislike for how the newest versions of the operating system work is on a similar magnitude to that initial thrill.
In my experience Gemini 2.5 Pro is the star when it comes to complex codebases. Give it a single xml from repomix and make sure to use the one at the aistudio.
In my experience, G2.5P can handle so much more context and giving an awesome execution plan that is implemented by CC so much better than anything G2.5P will come up with. So; I give G2.5P the relevant code and data underneath and ask it to develop an execution plan and then I feed that result to CC to do the actual code writing.
This has been outstanding for what I have been developing AI assisted as of late.
I would believe this. In regular conversational use with the Gemini family of models, I've noticed they regularly have issues with context blending.. i.e. confusing what you said and they said and causality.
I would think this would manifest as poor plan execution. I personally haven't used Gemini on coding tasks primarily based on my conversational experience with them.
On the plus side, GPT5 is very malleable, so you CAN prompt it away from that, whereas it's very hard to prompt Claude into producing hard code: even with a nearly file by file breakdown of a task, it'll occasionally run into an obstacle and just give up and make a mock or top implementation, basically diverge from the entire plan, then do its own version.
Absolutely, sometimes you want, or indeed need such complexity. Some work in settings where they would want it all of the time. IMHO, most people, most of the time don't really want it, and don't want to have to prompt it every time to avoid it. That's why I think it's still very useful to build up experience with the three frontier models, so you can choose according to the situation.
I think a lot of it has to do with the super long context that it has. For extended sessions and/or large codebases that can fill up surprisingly quickly.
That said, one thing I do dislike about Gemini is how fond it is of second guessing the user. This usually manifests in doing small unrelated "cleaner code" changes as part of a larger task, but I've seen cases where the model literally had something like "the user very clearly told me to do X, but there's no way that's right - they must have meant Y instead and probably just mistakenly said X; I'll do Y now".
One specific area where this happens a lot is, ironically, when you use Gemini to code an app that uses Gemini APIs. For Python, at least, they have the legacy google-generativeai API, and the new google-genai API, which have fairly significant differences between them even though the core functionality is the same. The problem is that Gemini knows the former much better than the latter, and when confronted with such a codebase, will often try to use the old API (even if you pre-write the imports and some examples!). Which then of course breaks the type checker, so then Gemini sees this and 90% of the time goes, "oh, it must be failing because the user made an error in that import - I know it's supposed to be "generativeai" not "genai" so let me correct that.
Yup. In fact every deep research tool on the market is just a wrapper for gemini, their "secret sauce" is just how they partition/pack the codebase to feed it into gemini.
Got curious. Seems like they have been a heavy Perl shop from the beginning.
Their backend developer job ads appear to be oddly programming language neutral which I assume means they're still using Perl a lot. (Been there, done that, when recruiting for work in an unusual programming language.)
“You will be happy to look okay. You will be happy to turn heads. You will be happy with smoother skin. You will be happy with a flat stomach. You will be happy with a six-pack. You will be happy with an eight-pack. You will be happy when every photo of yourself gets 10,000 likes on Instagram. You will be happy when you have transcended earthly woes. You will be happy when you are at one with the universe. You will be happy when you are the universe. You will be happy when you are a god. You will be happy when you are the god to rule all gods. You will be happy when you are Zeus. In the clouds above Mount Olympus, commanding the sky. Maybe. Maybe. Maybe.”
― Matt Haig, Notes on a Nervous Planet , Shortened version of the many-paragraphs-long quote found on: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/10913632-you-will-be-happy-...
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