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Comment Re:If you think Java has problems.... (Score 4, Interesting) 86

Node.js and Python are famously slow and bloated...and C# just really doesn't compete, even before you consider the MS factor.

Golang will perform way better than those (and who the FUCK thought making a server side language out of js was a good idea?) But actually if somebody held a gun to my head and said pick C# or Java for your next project, I'd take C#. Java honestly feels like an early alpha release of C#. C# is heavily inspired by Java, but also eliminated most of its crap. Like for example, checking if two strings are equal ACTUALLY CHECKS IF THEY'RE EQUAL, not merely the same fucking class instance. C# has CLI tooling that actually feels modern. Java's tooling...oh wait...what tooling? You mean the tooling made by third parties? And they're still not as good as C#. C# will let you use one source file for multiple classes if you want, and it will also let you use no classes or namespaces at all if you want to, which is a huge win over having to go through Java's obligatory ceremonies for even small projects.

Startup and memory are just not a concern in most business scenarios. No one cares about startup time. Whether it take 1 second or 1 minute to startup...doesn't matter. Thread startup time is also pretty fast, so not sure what you're talking about there...that might be programmer error if it's slower.

Memory usage?...similarly, no server operator cares...RAM is cheap...new instances aren't. It's far cheaper to throw RAM at a platform than cores or machines.

Until they are. Like embedded work. Like servers that need to scale. Sure, you can get away with it in the beginning, but unless your business always stays small, then you're going to have to ditch it somewhen.

Comment Re:If you think Java has problems.... (Score 1) 86

I've worked with Go a bit. It's definitely easier than C in that you've got a garbage collector to help you avoid segfaults (and unlike Java, you're not forced to pass everything but primitive types by reference) and you don't have to drop your function signatures into every file you're calling them from.

But Go has a few drawbacks that really ruin the language for me: No enums. Period. This really sucks for somebody like me who makes heavy use of Rust's excellent enums (really, IMO rust's killer feature IS its enums.) You can't even do anything analogous to unions or tagged unions in Go. It's just not a fucking thing, period. Between that, and the lack of generic types (and the newly added generics being an afterthought) there's going to be both a ton of code repetition, and being forced into a position of making invalid states representable in code and introducing semantic errors that modern (and even many older) languages get to avoid completely. I once heard of a google engineer who said that copying and pasting your own code repeatedly is idiomatic in go, so DRY isn't a thing, apparently, which also means copying and pasting your own bugs that you then have to fix multiple times is a thing too.

Comment Re:A pre-emptive ruling? (Score 1) 75

Maybe that's because, oh I don't know, the courts are there to UPHOLD the laws. Not MAKE the laws.

Neither. Their purpose is to interpret them. They can't prosecute, but they can refer a matter to prosecution. They can issue a verdict, a sentence, or an injunction based on their interpretation of the law, but they can't carry it out or enforce it.

Comment Re:um (Score 2) 75

That is not at all how copyright works.

Plagiarism isn't copyright infringement.

plagiarism doesn't really matter anymore in a non-legal context either

It never did. Plagiarism isn't a crime, rather it's considered a violation of a code of honor or ethics, mostly relegated to academia and science publication. Whether anything is done about it is entirely up to the organization whose code you've agreed to follow. Harvard in this case either doesn't have any meaningful code against it, or they just selectively enforce (i.e. nepotism, which isn't at all unheard of in academia.)

Comment Re:say what? (Score 2) 86

I'd say this is plausible, but mainly because Java has a lot of ceremonious cruft that most languages don't even need. I've never used swift, but if it doesn't force you to bundle everything into a namespace and a class like Java does, then it already has a big advantage in terms of being concise, and most of all, using fewer lines. That would be especially true if they followed a lot of Java'isms like creating getters and setters for everything, which in most cases is really just an excuse to add a lot of code for no particular reason. And then there are things that are only applicable to java, like adding more code just to work around its shitty type system, especially adding additional tags and checks to work around type erasure.

Comment Re:It's not the language. It's tech debt. (Score 4, Interesting) 86

More than likely, but Java does have a lot of inherent problems that almost certainly didn't help. It's also quite plausible that garbage collection was biting them pretty hard; example: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fdiscord.com%2Fblog%2Fwhy-d.... The whole reason for switching in that case was because of GC, which is inherent to the language's runtime, and you can't do anything about it. And of course: Java IS a memory hog. Java DOES take a long time to spin up, both initially and for new threads.

They probably would have done slightly better with rust given you can simply rely on normal pointers instead of reference counting, but knowing Apple that probably came down to an NIH decision.

Comment Re: Western liberalism ... (Score 1) 141

Oh and as a post-script: These last few posts are the longest I've written in a very long time. Mainly because yesterday morning I went diving with five other friends, and the trip back up a lengthy flight of stairs with a 120cf steel tank, 26lbs of lead weights, and at least another 20 lbs of other stuff left me pretty sore. Right now I'm taking a long-ass time to wash off all of my dive gear, and posting in between.

Comment Re: Western liberalism ... (Score 1) 141

Again, you're really attached to semantics here. Sure, USSR = Soviet Republics. That means they also called themselves Republican. Those terms are meaningless in the way they used them. In fact, the USSR was socialist in name only. After Lenin gave way to Stalin, it was a Stalinist state..simply put, totalitarian. Do you think that the Democratic People's Republic of North Korea is either democratic or a republic?

No, but I believe you have a much deeper problem here, which I'll get to in a bit. Part of the reason we use dictionaries is so that we can ground our understanding of the meaning of words, particularly when any two people seem to have differing understanding of those words. So let's start here:

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.merriam-webster.co...

In fact, the USSR meets all three definitions of socialism. To wit:

any of various egalitarian economic and political theories or movements advocating collective or governmental ownership and administration of the means of production and distribution of goods

This is exactly what the USSR did. If you had a job, it was for the government. If you bought food, you bought it from the government. If you had a farm, it was the government's farm. Sure, they weren't exactly egalitarian, but as it says, that's part of the theorem. No socialist system has ever been truly egalitarian, rather, that was the goal behind the theory. You might also note that Karl Marx himself, who was really the thought leader behind the entire movement, specifically said that the revolution and its leaders were not to be questioned, so free speech couldn't be allowed during the revolution, but *should* come back later, effectively meaning that there would be what was under his own definition, a ruling class. "But trust me bro, it will work!"

The second definition:

a system of society or group living in which there is no private property
a system or condition of society in which the means of production are owned and controlled by the state

Nothing more needs to be said here, that was in fact what the USSR did.

And see the third definition:

a stage of society in Marxist theory that is transitional between capitalism and communism (see communism sense 2c) and is distinguished by unequal distribution of goods and pay according to work done

I believe your problem here is that you have (or at least had) no idea what the word socialism means, which is something I've already mentioned is a common problem among progressives, and many others as well. You'd hardly be the first or even the fifth person I've had to correct on this. Some of these guys go around talking about how great socialism is, and then it turns out they have no idea what the word actually meant.

Words are important, which is why you should choose them carefully. Most importantly, don't use words that you don't understand.

The map is not the territory, but that graphic is a lot more accurate than your conflated soup.

Explain why. Be specific. You say mine is a conflated soup, so defend your argument for why.

Mind you, one thing I do is choose my words very carefully. You don't appear to do that at all, as so far you just kind of fly by the seat of your pants. You said the USSR was not socialist, I just proved that it was. Under that basis alone (I've got others, but going into them would be overkill) it is my assertion that you're the confused one here. This is likely because you don't even understand anything that I'm saying, because I understand the underlying material here, and you think you do but you really don't. But if you disagree, and you have a solid reasoning for why, then proving it should be pretty easy to do.

It is possible to be economically libertarian and socially liberal, and economically socialist/liberal but socially conservative.

Before we dissect this further, give some examples. And I strongly encourage you to use a dictionary before you start, even if you think you know what those terms mean.

Ultimately, it depends upon the inclusiveness of the hegemony of a state if it qualifies as a polyarchy or concentrated, which on the far left and right always becomes a concentrated-power system. Here's a classic diagram. [alchetron.com]

You're falling into a common situation among programmers: Diving too far into the academic understanding of problems and how they will work according to the theorems (which is useful but on its own can lead you into traps) while ignoring the reality of how your solution is actually going to play out (this is actually the fundamental flaw with many ideologies.) So rather than just throwing academic diagrams at me, why don't you try to provide specific real-world examples to provide context? And then explain how they fit into your ideas of left and right.

Because anarcho capitalism (while never actually instituted in the real world) devolves into hegemony of the rich and totalitarianism.

And how would you know that when it hasn't existed? But there's an even bigger problem with your overall reasoning skills: You don't seem to be able to differentiate hypothesis from results. So the idea, or the ideology behind it, is that there is no totalitarianism. Which on its face is...I don't know, left wing? But you say it's right wing because of how your academic theorem says it will play out. Meanwhile, you have no idea how it actually works in practice, but you're still going to make assertions about where it belongs on some ultimately useless chart. You also don't seem to understand the difference between totalitarianism and authoritarianism.

What progressives want is a hybrid system which has center-left socialist elements on top of the capitalist system.

So they want a third position...

America already has a hybrid capitalist-socialist economic system with Medicare, Social Security, etc. Even the staunchest conservatives won't touch Social Security despite it being well, socialist.

Stop there. It's not socialist, it's welfare. Do you understand the difference between socialism and welfare?

Progressives generally advocate for expanding this system, such as making Medicare free for all instead of for 65+.

In other words, more welfare. But that's not all they want. You really have no idea what you're talking about dude...I mentioned Bernie and AOC wanting the "economic bill of rights" proposed by FDR, did it never occur you to look up any of that? Some of those are welfare ideas, some are socialist, and at least one is definitely fascist.

On the other hand, fascist states tend to advocate for free healthcare in the context of creating healthy members of the military and society, but eliminating assistance for or euthanizing those who aren't useful e.g. Aktion T4.

You're confusing fascism with nazism. To draw an analogy that you seem to be more familiar with, even if you likely don't understand it, you're basically saying Leninism and Stalinism are the same thing. For what it's worth, I tend to be fascinated with things that I don't like, which include both socialism fascism. Which means I probably understand both better than you do.

The center-right advocates for a private system of healthcare, the center-left for a private system highly regulated.

If the regulation says "you can only make so much profit", that's distinctly fascist. So it isn't as simple as you want it to be.

But as far as your political allegiance, you seem to be a pretty bitter person

Everybody is bitter about something. What is it you think I'm bitter about?

who doesn't have a well-formed philosophy

Actually I do. Here: https://f6ffb3fa-34ce-43c1-939d-77e64deb3c0c.atarimworker.io/comments....

You might call my philosophy "the scientific method"

but rather picks sides of arguments based on what they like to argue about,

Who doesn't do this? If you don't like arguing about something bad enough, you won't argue about it. I don't like arguing about abortion for example, so I rarely argue about it. When people come along that are pro choice or pro life, I mostly just listen but don't say much.

with a strong conservative bias in many areas.

And what makes it conservative? Be specific.

The sheer volume of comments and amount of time you spend posting on Slashdot betrays the fact you're probably pretty lonely

I don't really spend as much time as you probably think. At least half of my posts, if not much more than that, were done while I was taking a shit.

which is a side effect of your crackpot personality and beliefs.

And what makes them crackpot? Be specific.

Notice how I ask that often? It's because I want other people to choose their words carefully. You say my beliefs are crackpot, in other words, impractical. Yet I'm the one asking what use is left and right, while you haven't come up with an answer. More likely, you just chose that word at random instead of having a specific intent behind it.

Comment Re: Western liberalism ... (Score 1) 141

I think you need to attend one of those colleges and actually learn what you're talking about. "Economic Fascism" is not a term used in political science

Which doesn't mean anything. Colleges aren't the ultimate arbiters of reason, nor do they claim to be. Besides, I did take political science, and you just made yourself look incredibly stupid just now, which I'll get to in a second...

but rather something made up by internet trolls and writers looking for clicks -- in this case a conservative/libertarian think tank employing it as a headline.

If you were paying attention, (obviously not) that piece was written in 1994 and the term itself long pre-dates that. Furthermore, this piece was written by a guy named Thomas DiLorenzo, who, and I quote:

"Thomas DiLorenzo is an author and professor of economics at Loyola University Maryland."

So there you have it, that piece came from an actual college professor. Which on its own wouldn't mean a lot, except for the fact that you literally just put colleges on some kind of high pedestal to be the arbiters of all of this. What you're also doing is in fact a logical error -- you're attacking the source, not the argument. In other words, you're trying to build an un-falsifiable argument, which means you never had one to begin with. See ad-hominem.

What you're describing about communism being in fact "socialist" is also poor semantics

That's nice, because that's not what I said. I said the soviets described themselves as communist, but were in fact socialist, something that they also claimed. If you can't understand the difference between that and what you just said, then I can't help you any further. The idea was they're supposed to force socialism and over time gradually transition to communism, exactly as Marx said should happen. And it's pretty obvious by now that I know a lot more about their religion than you do.

in the political spectrum from right to left, left of center heads to socialism and then the furthest left is communism. What you're describing is actually totalitarianism, which occurs at the furthest left (communism) and the furthest right (fascism) of the political spectrum.

You have no idea just how meaningless that whole left-right thing actually is. But I can already hear your argument right now "that's what political scientists at colleges say" which isn't an argument at all. Again, that whole logical fallacy thing. People here call me far right all the time, every time I ask why or what that's supposed to even mean, none can ever answer, including people who have claimed to have majored in political science. And this is exactly why I have such a hard time understanding the point of the whole left vs right nonsense. And no, I'm not a centrist or a moderate either. How could that be even remotely true when I've obviously got strong opinions on many things? The two-dimensional compasses don't work either. Look at the very first position on this:

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.politicalcompass.o...

Why does it have to be one or the other? Why can't it just be whoever is involved in each transaction? Sometimes that is governments (which is likely what the "humanity" refers to, but the reason for that is a whole other topic) sometimes it's groups of individuals and their investors (i.e. corporations) and sometimes it's just individuals. None of the radio buttons work; they're effectively asking you to go with one, the other, or a combination of the two slightly favoring one or the other. A neutral option wouldn't make any sense either. That same survey says Hitler and Putin are centrist authoritarians by the way.

What you're doing is conflating the left (progressives, social democrats) with the much further left that devolves into totalitarianism. That's the same as equating the center-right (think Mike Johnson) with fascism, which also devolves into totalitarianism. This graphic might be useful [preview.redd.it] for you to see the actual political spectrum you've made a soup of.

No, in fact I'm not. That graphic you linked, by the way, is even dumber than the political compass, which I'll get to in a second. You know what this all reminds me of? The obsolete concept of humorism, which was accepted as what all practitioners of medicine used until the 19th century. I'm certainly neither a totalitarian nor an authoritarian, so how does far anything make sense according to that? Your graphic can't figure out whether I'm a centrist or a totalitarian according to these rules that you've just laid out. Part of the problem is it picks somebody's opinion of what center actually means, and calibrates around that. You've learned nothing from the overton window, and neither did whoever created your graphic. And how does anarcho-capitalism figure as totalitarian? By definition, anarchy is the exact opposite of that, yet you literally just claimed otherwise.

If you're going to use a spectrum of any sort, then you're going to need at least 5 dimensions. And if you really want to debate this topic, then explain why you think that what progressives want, ONLY in terms of economics and economic policy, is far different from fascism, again, ONLY in terms of economics and economic policy. But I suspect you're not going to do that. I suspect that you're going to do is dismiss me as an internet troll (which is true, by the way, but us trolls often reason about problems better than non-trolls) and go back to the safety of reddit.

Comment Re: Western liberalism ... (Score 1) 141

At those schools you indicate favor Soviet influenced liberalism, they actually aren't that into communism and are really into democracy.

While the soviets said communism was their official philosophy, they were in fact socialist. And all communists claim to like democracy, but (and Karl Marx supported this) that there was to be no freedom of speech (and effectively, no democracy either) until they complete the revolution and fully transition to communism, which in practice never actually happens. You might also notice that at least some democrats going all the way back to FDR have supported the so-called economic bill of rights. Bernie and AOC call this socialism, but in fact it is not. It is in fact economic fascism, which was very popular at the time it was written, even well after the west had largely rejected fascism as a political concept.

When progressives today talk about socialism, what's actually in their head is typically economic fascism. Sometimes they cite the Nordic countries, but they really have very little understanding of how they're run. They're actually very much free market driven (even more so than the US, with even their education system privatized) with a welfare component added to it. Notice that, among other things, they don't even have the concept of a minimum wage in those countries. Contrast that to fascist Italy who had one long before the US, same with Nazi Germany, and even more, they introduced the concept of a maximum wage, which is also a thing favored by modern democrats. If you ever happen across rsilvergun posts, he talks about how great he thinks it would be all the time. (And by the way, as a percentage of GDP, the US basically the same as most Nordic states. The country with the largest welfare spending as a percentage of GDP is in fact France.)

And when you tell these guys why socialism doesn't work, which mostly has to do with the way command economies fail to respond fast enough to market changes, assuming they ever respond (hence it would take ten years and a huge amount of money just to buy a turd of a car behind the iron curtain) then they start talking about how they'd like something "in between", which basically looks like a market economy with very heavy-handed government control over every business, including things like price controls, wage controls, and even forcing companies to alter their own business model or make different strategic decisions basically because the government says so. And we've already seen that "in between" before -- this is what fascists referred to as the "third way" or the "third position." Just like today's progressives (by the way, they also referred to themselves as progressives) they hated free market capitalism AND they hated socialism (though unlike today's progressives, they all knew exactly what socialism meant) instead opting for terms like "state socialism" to draw a distinction between themselves and actual socialists.

It's worth noting also that the reason Hitler detested the word socialist is because people in his circle simply didn't like the word, and would have denied it if you told him he was. This is the exact same reason today's progressives don't like to call themselves economic fascists, and they too will deny it, even though all you have to do is take any fascist propaganda and replace every occurrence of the word 'fascist' with 'socialist', and suddenly they'll talk about how great that would be.

Keep in mind, I reject outright, both socialism AND fascism. Why? Because they're both, undeniably, very illiberal. Just like progressives.

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Ffee.org%2Farticles%2Fecono...
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.vox.com%2F2014%2F8%2F6%2F5...
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Foecdstatistics.blog%2F20...

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