It very much is, and the point is, it _used_ to be more like java. Araq basically pulled off a very daring switchover from reference based language system to a value based one.
So now the language can credibly claim the same as c++ - no room left closer to the metal. But it's packaged in a much nicer syntax (imho), and has features like macros which we can expect I'm C++ in maybe 10 years, if we're lucky.
You can just slap a resistor in series, which will induce a drop in potential over it. That, in turn, will mean the potential difference across the capacitor is lower, leading to a more shallow exponential decay of the current over the circuit - ie a slower discharge.
And that's just a passive circuit, with an active circuit you have a lot more options.
Note: I studied maths and computing so I could very well be wrong. I would appreciate being set straight by elec eng majors!
Sorry but this is simply par for the course for any of the above.
You can certainly wrap a lot of that stuff, but you need to make assumptions, and the person that uses likely is writing demanding app, and they want full control over literally everything - but they also would like to cut time to port to Linux by half (say).
I disagree. Most of what's platform specific is stuff like shaders, and host window stuff. I definitely do NOT want a graphics layer owning that - I may want to control the type of os window (say, for an audio plugin). I already know gl shaders, and metal is really similar, a new 'common denominator' shading language would just be another language - with less docs, stackoverflow posts, etc.
And on the other hand, you get abstractions for the stuff that really is similar, like command buffers, camera control etc.
I think the API is well designed, and nails flexibility together with performance, at the cost of requiring to have, at least, expert knowledge in one library. After that I would get chatgpt to convert my shaders to metal, Vulkan, etc.
I think the documentation could be a lot clearer about this. I can understand if the goal is for the abstraction to be thin and unopinionated, and that means you have to be an expert in each backend. But they don’t seem to explain this very well.
True, only that Weiner was surprisingly endearing in that documentary. Despite at the time being a staunch republican, it's hard not to like the guy, and when the fall comes you're almost rooting for him.
But SBF? The last interview I saw him give was I think with Levine; it was shocking because SBF was describing whence crypto derives its value. And Levine remarked that SBF was describing a Ponzi scheme.
For me, that interview showed two things. First, that SBF quite obviously has no morals whatsoever. And second, he's not nearly as smart as he's portrayed to be.
His whole cred derives from his MIT degree combined with his experience at Jane Street. Jane Street is a great firm, but what they do is really specific, and not necessarily the "coolest" way to make money. It's a lot of tech and infrastructure, less finance and trading chops. (The real badasses are RenTech, for example.)
Anyway, I watched a few videos that he made while working at his crypto hedge fund, Alameda. He described the strategies, and they sounded like the typical market maker stuff - arbing exchange discrepancies yadda yadda. Not the most inspired stuff.
I don't think he lacks morals, but he seems to have a Lex Luthor "ends justify the means" way of thinking. If you're whole moral framework is effective altruism, then as long as the good you do with the money you accumulate is greater than the harm caused in its accumulation by a ratio that exceeds your alternatives, you're all good.
It doesn't even have to do that in an objective, measurable sense. It just has to do that from your perspective—meaning that any harms you can ignore don't count, and any potential good you can convince yourself you could do in the future because of it do.
Yeah, I'm glad to see someone saying this. Something that bugs me about EA is it pattern matches to a lot of the same performative behavior I grew up around with evangelical extremists. Your hypothetical good forgives your very real misbehavior in fact.
There's also just the fundamental stupidity of thinking you can reduce something as complex as human morals and ethics to a karmic checking account balance...
One remark I have on anti-"ends justify the means" is they always ignore the ends. The "ends" might literally be saving real people's lives, whose lives have value. I'm sure there are good arguments against the idea, but you must engage with the ends that you propose we forsake, or you're just not serious.
Isn't this a fundamental problem with consequentialism? If you can convince yourself of a serious enough consequence, you can do whatever you want. Steal, hurt, kill. As long as your actions lead to a .000001% chance of preventing Skynet from taking over in the year 50000 AD, any means justify those ends.
How is that something that can be seriously engaged with? Other than trying to talk some sense into these people about limiting their EA calculations to a reasonably observable time-space continuum?
I always felt the problem with consequentialism is that outcomes are uncertain, whereas actions are not. Therefore you are not guaranteed that an immoral action (means) will result in a beneficial outcome (end).
For instance, you push someone in front of a trolley to save 5 lives, but the trolley isn’t stopped and you end up with 6 dead.
If curing cancer for the rest of humanity now and forever required knowingly experimenting on and absolutely killing a certain number of people now, how many people could you justify with an Effective-Altruism ethical framework?
Not meaning to be inflammatory but the same scenario exists in flipped terms: how many people would you let die of cancer rather than, idk, eat the downside of running riskier experiments.
There’s no privileged neutral really. Consequentialism just owns that. Now, that might be a separate question from whether society should act as if there’s a privileged neutral (ie be nonconsequentialist).
Isn’t the inverse more, there will never be a cure for cancer, so how many people can you justify killing to confirm that?
All I know is that when humanity faced the decision with respect to WWII medical experiments , the decision was made to not utilize the data, regardless of potential benefits.
Depends on your expected remaining lifetime of the human race? (since from that you might compute the expected cancer deaths over that time and then you can do a simple comparison)
I wouldn't say they ignore it, but rather they categorically have decided that is an unethical justification. E.g. it doesn't matter if experimenting on patients without their consent saves more lives in the future, it is still wrong. Perhaps you might argue that this is an absolute position they can't really hold to for everything. But I think people prefer to find other ways to justify such cases.
Sometimes when you see a guy like SBF who fits the MIT hacker/ disheveled smart guy quant stereotype a little too perfectly you have to ask yourself “how much of this is an act?” Most real geniuses I know look unremarkable or boring. One place where people are masters of dressing and acting the part to get rich is Wallstreet though.
That article doesn’t remotely suggest that they are “bad”.
The article says they were advised by Deutsche Bank that they could classify certain trades in a way as to pay long-term instead of short-term capital gains taxes.
The IRS disagreed, RenTech went through an appeals process and eventually decided to settle instead of continuing the process.
There’s nothing evil about trying to legally lower your tax obligations and then being told by the IRS “Nope, you can’t do it like that.”
Sorry but this reads to me like someone who doesn't really know what they're talking about. First, I think you have totally mischaracterized or misunderstood that interview. Second, he is obviously a smart guy; I'm not claiming he's a unique generational genius but there are plenty of third party validations of intelligence (MIT, Jane Street) even if you can't tell from the way he speaks. Finally the comment "the real badasses are at RenTech" is laughable insofar as they don't hire undergrads. I would say more accurately that many of the real badasses went to PhD programs but that besides that Jane Street was a highly desired career choice for this graduating cohort.
A Phd is a liability not an asset on wall street. Source: my brother was convinced to abandon his PhD ABD by two friends who did the exact same thing a year or two ahead of him.
The real "badasses" if you insist on calling them that, work about a dozen years for a fund, hit their number, and promptly retire to do whatever the hell they want for the rest of their life. You don't read much about them vs the obsessive people who keep playing the game for the high score contest though, because there's no drama to cover.
I think it's great that you're tinkering with a compiler. But a language is more than a compiler; good language design requires a lot of programming experience, good taste and intuition, an ability to absorb programming language theory, and, yes, good programming skills. Araq has proven that he is a very capable language designer.
It sounds like you're taking Araq to task for trying out new things. And indeed, Nim is certainly a fairly expansive language. But a lot of the things he's trying are really cool, and I want to see the person with the _actual vision_ get a chance to try those things out without being encumbered by the need to write laborious commit message, because "democracy" and "best practices". Between Araq spending a marginal x minutes doing more on value types, and writing "clearer" commit messages, I'll choose the former, any day. I also trust him to jettison ideas that don't work.
I really think it's red flag when someone proposes to fork a language without being able to offer single reason that's actually related to language design. Sorry, I do realize this may come across as a bit aggressive, but I'm inclined to view you as a presumptious ingrate.
And really: when you come up with an original language that captures the imagination of scores of developers, I'll pay you the same respect.
Right now we are not forking "the language" as a collection of ideas etc. as you seem to think. Instead we are doing a much simpler thing - we are forking "the code". Of course former is built on latter, but current focus is making codebase usable for other contributors.
The main difference here seems to be that I interpret the need to "write laborious commit message" as a basic human decency that shows I'm respect other people's time. Five minutes on "value types" is not a lot all things considered, but pretty much enough to write the commit message.
This attitude always puzzled me to be honest - you just spent half an hour, maybe more, to write the code and have a good understanding of what you had just done and for which reasons. How hard would it be to sit down and type it out and save time for someone who comes next?
The meltdown in cryptocurrencies is raising alarm about the future of digital assets — or is it?
Fears over soaring prices and slowing economic growth have sent investors fleeing from risk assets, notably cryptocurrencies. In the latest Exchanges at Goldman Sachs, Mathew McDermott, global head of digital assets at Goldman Sachs, explains the drivers, evolution and the outlook for crypto assets and the broader digital assets ecosystem.
Recent volatility underscores that crypto assets are still an emerging asset class with a large number of retail participants, McDermott explains to Exchanges host Allison Nathan of Goldman Sachs Research. “The move so far has been correlated to the broader macro market moves,” notes McDermott, who points out that nearly every asset class with discounted cash flows has been hard hit by inflationary pressures.
Blockchain, crypto and digital currencies are gaining broader acceptance among investors, companies and institutions. “Maturity across both the market participants and the infrastructure has given not only confidence to many different institutional sectors, but also has enabled many more traditional traders to really look forward in how they trade this marketplace because of this maturity in the product suite,” McDermott says.
Venture capital investments in digital assets are surging. While valuations are pretty high, there continues to be “high levels of interest because people continue to see exponential growth opportunities and are keen to deploy that capital,” says McDermott. “I think valuations have got a little out of kilter, so perhaps we'll see some more sensible valuations in terms of investment opportunities, too.”
Major language crush... Everything from the type system to the compilation model to c++ compat just oozes good taste. Glorious structural record types, real union types (my running theory is that expression-based languages lacking these - looking at you, rust - are insufferable) AND variants. Pattern matching, slices, unboxed arrays/primitives, eager evaluation... Damn I love it.
Hobbes looks so totally frickin' awesome, I'm so going to play with this tonight.
Incredible work!
What would be really cool for this language is to hook into jupyterlab via xeus. It's not even that hard to do - I did it for my own (far inferior) toy language.
So now the language can credibly claim the same as c++ - no room left closer to the metal. But it's packaged in a much nicer syntax (imho), and has features like macros which we can expect I'm C++ in maybe 10 years, if we're lucky.