Not just design. This whole product is a failure. It does not make sense from any angle. In fact I don’t understand how the website is still up and running.
It is sort of art. It looks fairly pretty I think, in a sort of everyday manner. But it also looks a little impractical, the part that might touch your wrists is very spiky. Also thought keyboards should be, if anything, tilted in the opposite direction.
It seems like an ok system if you don’t have to interact with your keyboard. But if you want to do away with the need to interact with the keyboard, a much more aggressive tilt could be used, right? This only gets you a couple inches. Ideally the top of the screen is around the top of your head, right? Of course this is for on-the-go use, so we don’t expect ideal.
Overall, it is art; I really do think it looks nice, but it is pretty impractical.
Numbers speak for themselves but I was surprised at the higher level of VC funding available in Stockholm.
Patience, long term thinking, readiness to look offshore and adaptability all seem good qualities for any business and more so in current geopolitical
Climate.
> looking to zig as a C replacement rather than Rust
Rust isn't a "replacement for C", but an addition to it. It's a tool that Torvalds et. al. has recognised the value of and thus it's been allowed in the kernel. The majority of the kernel code will still be written in C.
I'm no kernel maintainer, but I can speculate that two of the main reasons for Rust over Zig are the compile time guarantees that the language provides being better as well as the rate of adoption. There is a lot of work done by many leading companies in the industry to provide Rust native code or maintained Rust bindings for their APIs. Windows devs are re-writing parts of _their_ kernel in Rust. There's a "movement" going on that has been going on for a while. I only hope it doesn't stop.
Maybe the maintainers feel like Zig doesn't give them enough over C to be worth the change? Many of them are still opposed to Rust as well.
Hmm I think to clarify I would say that Rust _is_ intended as a replacement for C in general, but that this isn't how the Linux kernel developers are choosing to use it.
As for why the kernel developers would choose Rust, I would think another one of the primary benefits is that the type system guarantees the absence of a wide class of memory-related errors that are prevalent in C, and this type system (as well as those of its predecessors) has been subjected to significant scrutiny by the academic community over the last couple of decades to help iron out problems. I suspect this is also part of why Rust has a relatively large and passionate community compared to other C alternatives.
Agreed. The large and passionate community may have multiple factors but "things actually work" is probably a factor.
It is hard to get a full picture of how academic research influenced Rust and vice versa. Two examples:
- The use of linearity for tracking ownership in types has been known to academics but had never found its way into a mainstream language.
- researchers in programming language semantics pick Rust as a target of formalization, which was only possible because of design choices around type system. They were able to apply techniques that resulted from decades of trying to get a certified C. They have formalized parts of the standard library, including unsafe Rust, and found and fixed bugs.
So it seems fair to say that academic research on safety for C has contributed much to what makes Rust work today, and in ways that are not possible for C and C++ because these languages do not offer static guarantees where types Transport information about exclusive access to some part of memory.
> It's a tool that Torvalds et. al. has recognised the value of and thus it's been allowed in the kernel.
Has there actually been a successfull contribution to the mainline kernel? The last two big projects I heard of (ext2 / Apple drivers) seemed to have issues getting their code accepted.
As I understand it most kernel maintainers aren’t looking to replace C with anything.
Zig has much better interoperability with C than Rust, but it’s not memory safe or stable. I think we’ll see quite a lot of Zig adoption in the C world, but I don’t think it’s in direct competition with Rust as such. In my region of the world nobody is adopting Rust, the C++ people are remaining in C++. There was some interest in Rust originally but it never really caught on in any company I know of. Likely for the same reason Go has become huge in younger companies but will not really make its way into companies which are traditionally Java/C# because even if it made sense technically (and it probably doesn’t) it’s a huge change management task. Zig is seeing traction for programs without the need for dynamic memory allocation, but not much beyond that.
Zig is nowhere near mature enough to be considered for the kernel yet. There are breaking changes to it regularly still - which is a good thing for Zig now, but not so good for huge, long-lived codebases like Linux. Also compiler bugs happen.
Saying this as someone who generally likes Zig's direction.
When you are forced to use ma outlook but you only want to work with your calendar and not be distracted to emails, or notification, or emojis.
Some people just need to glance at their schedule to make a decision or plan.
Overall these type of cmd line tools like taskwarrior are for folks who want one thing at that time and wish to take the shortest, least cognitive overhead path to getting that thing/info. Same reason I use tz instead of browsing to a site with Timezone calculators. Same reason I use vifm to find and edit files.
Some people like to use devices buried in bling. Some people don't.
Pragmatism is central tenet of Buddhism. Has been thus since Gothama. Do not "believe"; learn, try, experience and then understand. About 2000 years before Americans.
But maybe I'm biased or ignorant. Happy to be enlightened (pun intended).
My impression is that Buddhism has a focus on "inner life" rather than the material world. So their pragmatism would naturally be employed on spiritual attainment, rather than science. After all, large factions within Buddhism believe that the reality around us, is mere illusion.
> There is a lot more complexity and nuance to this then your comment may lead one to believe
There's nothing in your link that contradicts my assertion. On top of which, you haven't offered an alternate explanation as to why Buddhism has produced so much more deep contemplation, than practical technology. If it is truly equal to the pragmatism that was elucidated in the article, the technological revolution would have been much further along 2000 years ago.
> There's nothing in your link that contradicts my assertion.
I was pointing to your assertion that "large factions within Buddhism believe that the reality around us, is mere illusion" is not quite right. The wikipedia page is really good in elaborating the nuances.
The phrase "Reality is mere Illusion" is the worst translated from Sanskrit/Pali into English. In the original texts "Illusion" does not mean "it does not exist" but that "it does not exist independent of a more fundamental substratum". The common analogy given is that of waves in a ocean of water. The waves are dependent on the water for their manifestation and come and go. The other point is that we only "Perceive Reality" and not as it truly is. All together we get a picture of Reality which is very simplistically called a "Illusion".
>you haven't offered an alternate explanation as to why Buddhism has produced so much more deep contemplation, than practical technology. If it is truly equal to the pragmatism that was elucidated in the article, the technological revolution would have been much further along 2000 years ago.
This is easily explained. If by various internal practices we can modulate our understanding of "Reality" (a subjective viewpoint) then the motivation to explain the "workings" of the Universe independent of us becomes no longer important. That is the reason Hindu philosophies (Buddhism/Jainism/Sikhism are all derivatives) focus exclusively on the "Mind" and understanding "our true nature".
In a sense it's kind of tautological: if someone genuinely experiences something, if "reality" is the only existent realm or category they have knowledge of (as opposed to Maya for example), then it basically has to "be" reality.
Another good analogy would be how people used to talk about the physical world before science arrived on the scene: crude approximations, that "everyone knows".
Hindu/Buddhist Philosophy is mainly experiential and explicitly says "the true self" (Purusha/Atman etc.) cannot be described in words. It can only be experienced by "dissolving" ("Laya" in Sanskrit) your self-identity (aka Ahamkara) as something different from the "whole" (Brahman etc). Different schools come at this from different angles thus complicating the matter even further.
I suppose it depends on which branch of Buddhism people are talking about. There are obviously some which practice extreme idealism, but almost all branches believe that reality (as we commonly define it) DOES exist, but merely that it's a changing reality, rather than a truth that remains forever true, thus unchanging.
Karma (cause & effect) is an observable fact of nature that can be observed that may make one think twice about murder, at least depending on the nationality of who it is being murdered (this is a reference to the cultural acceptability of (sometimes lust for) murdering our geopolitical arrivals).
I like the pragmatic nature of pragmatism (pun intended!) but this is the best critique against it. By its nature, it is descriptive and not normative, so it could be argued that it in fact, is not a philosophy at all, but instead "proto-science" or perhaps science for the common man.
I don’t get that feeling from reading James himself. He offers a VERY good philosophical and logical basis for the golden rule, and one that clearly points toward an ever-expanding “inclusion” of other beings to be taken care of/treated with respect.
Far more sound and defensible than any other moral system I’ve encountered.
TLDR of that basis: minds depend first and foremost on categorization and distinction. They must have a built-in way to discriminate types of things and they must have a preference for treating like things alike. As a conscious person develops, they understand other people to be like themselves and therefore ought to have a preference for treating others like themselves.
That’s not to say this imperative can’t be overridden by other concerns, but those other concerns all seem quite obviously more superficial than this extremely fundamental one of “how do I even discern this thing from that thing.”
Pair this with some of the work on “what is stuff” that the Buddhists made a ton of progress on, and you have a logically sound moral system that should compel you to treat everything (and certainly all living things) with respect (using “respect” as a catch-all for “the range of behaviors you’d expect from following the golden rule”)
>they must have a preference for treating like things alike
Suppose I recognize a type of thing, "dollars". I spend some of my dollars to buy food. Given this "preference for treating like things alike", does that mean I now have to spend all my dollars to buy food?
>As a conscious person develops, they understand other people to be like themselves and therefore ought to have a preference for treating others like themselves.
I imagine an egoist/solipsist could respond by saying "well, I put myself in a special category, a category with just one object in it".
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In my view, the is/ought boundary is fairly inescapable here.
Imagine a hypothetical intelligent species that's predatory, 100% carnivorous, and solitary. Like a coyote, but with the reasoning and philosophy ability of a human. It lacks mirror neurons, and it kills daily or weekly for its very survival.
Can you think of an argument that would actually work to persuade a coyote philosopher that it should adopt a vegan diet? I can't.
IMO, human compassion is downstream of us being a social species. Once you have compassion for at least one fellow human, you can at least argue that restricting that compassion to just a subset of humans, or just a single species, seems rather arbitrary.
But bootstrapping compassion from an egoist perspective, and convincing a sentient coyote philosopher to go vegan, seems a bit harder. I imagine from the coyote philosopher's perspective, "suffering is bad when it happens to you, and you're not special, therefore suffering is also bad when it happens to other beings" would seem like a rather trippy and counter-intuitive argument.
- - -
An interesting question on the boundary between is and ought: "Are shrimp capable of suffering?" (See HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42172705 ) People generally treat it as a factual question that can be resolved through ordinary scientific discourse, but it's also a key values question -- if shrimp can suffer, that ought to change our values re: the importance of humane treatment. And there's a chance we'll never know the 'fact of the matter' regarding whether shrimp can suffer. I'm not sure an experiment can, in principle, provide a definitive answer.
Same line of argument goes for advanced AI models. If AI passes the Turing test, can one argue that it's morally irrelevant merely because it runs on silicon substrate? Seems dubious. (If I gradually replace the neurons in your brain with transistors, do you gradually become morally irrelevant?)
So if we're going to regard advanced AI as non-sentient, what's the key differentiator supposed to be? Is there actually any way to definitively answer this question, even in principle?
Seems Tk is now the default cross platform UI for any language. It is doing for local apps what JavaScript has not - a usable toolset for majority of use cases without a ton of overhead and interference. I e only played with tcl/tk over the years - now will put in some hard yards to try in depth. Golang+tk for heavy lifting and server side and tcl/tk for scripts and as hoc things. After 50 years of casual/prof development this might be my personal version of nirvana. YMMV.
I agree with authors take of writing on your own blog and then posting to network(s) for engagement. If your crowd moves its social platform then you move too. Platform independence and you choose what to "push" just like you choose what to share during IRL conversations. Platforms that own the data are farming the users.
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