Say what you will about C++, but it is undoubtedly one of the most successful and influential programming languages in history.

By which metric?

C, Java, Rust, JS, C# do exist

> influential

It's certainly a cautionary tale

To be fair, checking if an interface is nil is very dumb code, and the fact that it doesn't work is one of my biggest gripes with the language. In this case it's clearly the language (creators) who's dumb

Interface is just behavior. That is the main difference from other languages. Go is about "what", not "who". So when you are checking for nil, you are essentially asking whether the variable has any logic it can perform. And that can happen only if some behavior was provided, ie. it is not nil.

I wish some of my dreams really were

For the past 15 years being progressive meant moving everything to the (US-owned) cloud

Aren't there enough wrapper libraries for all programming languages that take care of this under the hood? You don't have to rely on libc only

Sure, there are wrapper libraries. But then I'm met with the question: do I add some big heavy handed IO wrapper library, or ... do I just call poll

I wouldn't count uv/ev/etc as "big heavy IO wrapper library".

I would, especially when nothing else in the program uses it and you just introduce it for one small thing in place of calling poll(). It's over 40 000 loc, over 70 000 including tests.

I certainly would

Both Visa and Mastercard work just fine with the regular old school euro, why would you need something entirely new to create a local competitor to an already existing service?

Why might someone be interested in replacing two monopolistic entities headquartered in a foreign and increasingly irrational power both of which have long histories (and recent controversies) in applying their own moralistic framework to economic activity?

That's a great question!

You don't need to make any changes to your currency to create an alternative to Visa and Mastercard, all you need is political will. Russia created its own system years ago and forced both Visa and Mastercard to comply with it, it's the reason that card payments continue to work as expected inside the country. You can even still use your old physical visa or mastercard cards inside Russia, even though the companies themselves left in 2022.

I'm not a finance wonk so I don't know for sure, but given how absolutely everything else in the EU works I'm fairly confident that every country has their own sovereign financial system for handling currency and then cross-border transfers are facilitated via hacks.

It would therefore follow that any international financial system would be very complicated and expensive to set up, and would be helped enormously by a burn-it-to-the-ground-and-start-again replacement system.

(...if that system was well designed, and given how everything in the EU works...)

Visa and Mastercard are subjected to political pressures to disincentivise conducting transactions. If the market would be more diverse, these pressures would be way less effective.

If a digital € would change that is questionable though. Perhaps ambitions would get even worse.

Also a very good argument for cash. I like untracable transactions. I isn't just to benefit crime, it is also about privacy.

Absolutely the same change happened in Russia over the past 30 years or so, but it had nothing to do with privatisation or competition, all trains are still operated by the same state-owned corporation.

Aren't we a lot more evolved for hunting animals on foot? The whole thing with us losing our fur and sweating with the whole body, adaptations to running and throwing stuff, all of this makes us better hunters, but not necessarilly fushermen.

The two go together. Living with water requires control of breathing. Hunting animals on land requires strong endurance and probably also an ability to carry water.

GPUs aren't built in the US, though. I wonder, what percentage of all the stuff in a typical datacenter is actually made in the US

> GPUs aren't built in the US, though. I wonder, what percentage of all the stuff in a typical datacenter is actually made in the US

Does that matter? So many things these days aren't physically made in the US. So US companies don't get the profits and aren't needed?

The actual "made in" part is a small fraction of the total earnings. See how much an iPhone costs to make vs how much it gets sold for.

And now look at how making iPhones in China helped to grow the whole Chinese electronics industry, as opposed to inflating some virtual numbers for the US

> helped to grow the whole Chinese electronics industry

Why do you want it? It wouldn't have grown in the US. The protests would have erupted before anything happened. There's huge amounts of contamination, pollution, deaths, low wages, over-work, etc...

Also US focused on designing the electronics and the ecosystem around it. Are you saying there's no industry around AMD, Broadcom, Qualcomm, etc that are fabless but hire vast amounts of people?

> as opposed to inflating some virtual numbers for the US

You have App Store / SaaS (i.e. developers) and a lot more.

Would you prefer an average developer salary vs below-minimum US wage factory assembler?

It's not just virtual numbers. Apple's investors and employees (mostly in California) keep about half of the price of every iPhone sold, which is more than people in China get or keep.

And now look how the "virtual numbers" allow the USA to drag the rest of the world through the mud on a nosering.

The USA was the winner in all this, but apparently the people don't feel it. What might have gone wrong? (hint: wealth distribution, not manufacturing)

Well, the US definitely is dragging the rest of the world, the question is where and whether it's somewhere the rest of the world really wants to go. I think, we'll see soon enough

The margins collected by Nvidia end up in the US. And Nvidia and its employees get paid in the US. Only a small part of the revenue is outside the US.