You both like different types of tinkering.

Some people put a generator on a tesla cybertruck and call that garage tinkering.

Some people make a go-cart out of a lawnmower and call that garage tinkering.

The first is the "batteries included Python" tinkering, the second is the "low level Zig" tinkering.

Written in Pascal. That's been a while since I've seen Pascal in the wild!

To me "deleting a failing test" is not always bad. I've also deleted many failing tests without sabotaging: the test was no longer needed.

I think the "no longer needed" and when that applies is where I simply differ of opinion with an LLM that removed by test -- it I did not want the test to be removed (you seem to imply that); as in some cases I want it to remove my test!

It should remove the test "for the right reasons"; and who gets to decide what's right?

My CLAUDE file has some instructions put there because it was too focuesed on producing "green tests", where I prefer to have a sound test that fails so I can look into it.

You misunderstand the "test" here to mean programming, rather than test against the model's capabilities.

thanks for pointing that out. makes sense.

> nefarious Chinese copycats

LLMs are themselves copy cats.

I say thanks for open sourcing and thereby promoting affordable innovation, instead of "nefarious". :)

Nice to see Ruby vs Java. Must say that in this context Kotlin deserves a mention: my Kotlin code basically looks+feels like Ruby-with-types. Both Ruby and Kotlin are essentially OO, but with "lots of FP features where it makes sense".

On the side of the jpackage: I'm currently using GraalVM compile to native for a Kotlin CLI tool. I do the build in a build container so I use an older glib to ensure compatibility on a wide variety of Linuxes, AND because this way no-one needs to install all the GraalVM requirements by hand. The result is a 57MB binary, that start in a blink of the eye. The downside is long compile times (2 minutes for a simple CLI tool that uses AWS SDK). I think I prefer this of jpackage; but I'm not building a GUI tool.

Many of those "lots of FP features where it makes sense". were already present in Smalltalk.

Especially anything related to lambdas, map, filter and co.

Something that was lost in most OOP languages that followed suit, until like a decade later.

> Many of those "lots of FP features where it makes sense". were already present in Smalltalk.

Good point. And both Java and Ruby borrowed from Smalltalk (according to Wikipedia Kotlin does not, but that is: not directly.

Sadly Java did not take Smalltalk's FP inspiration (I guess they were strayed by C++'s lead in that regard), and we needed streams and now Kotlin to fix that :)

Smalltalk's syntax never go really popular though. One could say that was its biggest drawback.

> Smalltalk's syntax never go really popular though. One could say that was its biggest drawback.

A lot of Smalltalk-style syntax was absolutely massive for a decade or so you could argue, at least under the guise of the gazillions of iPhone apps that were written in Objective-C. This random blog post probably does a better job than me:

> https://richardeng.medium.com/apple-has-been-using-smalltalk...

"Smalltalk's syntax never go really popular though. One could say that was its biggest drawback."

This would be my guess, I always heard nice things about it and liked many concepts, but the syntax was just plain ugly to me, so I never felt the urge to try it out. I imagine others felt similar.

> Sadly Java did not take Smalltalk's FP inspiration (I guess they were strayed by C++'s lead in that regard)

You guess correctly. Java was easy for C++ developers to learn which was beneficial for adoption at the time.

When I read this I can help but feel the energy inefficiency of the self-admitted [1] "billion dollar mistake" that was adding implicit nulls to the C language (and thereafter many other languages).

A bit broader: I wonder how strong typing can save energy! Maybe it makes compiling more energy consuming, but a bug in production costs a lot more energy than a few extra rounds of compiling.

Very hard to get data on. But would totally change the ranking of proglangs by "efficiency".

Exactly. You've expressed what I couldn't find the words to say.

I love C, but the shear amount of CVE and crashes are much worse in terms of global energy usage than if it were safe. I imagine the strongest strong-typing ranking that can be saved would come from Swift, where Rust's compile time would tank its ranking...

It may be that the energy drain of bugs simply eclipses the compile/run overhead of all these languages in nearly all use cases.

Oh, and if you out-source it, then I do not thing you should have a say in whom the contract. Either keep it in house, or out-source.

They contracted the market and now they want to control it as if it's in house.

Have you tried Kotlin? It's a less clunky Java. The syntax is IMHO Ruby-level charming (for an OO-first lang), but with types that are quite a bit stronger than Java. Java interop is quite smooth.

The comparison with Ruby is spot on.

I always thought that DSLs were the one thing Ruby did better than the competition, but Kotlin's combination of receiver lambdas plus syntactic sugar for calling higher-order functions make it an even better language to write DSLs in.

That's exactly how i feel about it.

And the code I'm looking at now with Kotlin is so similar to code i liked reading when I was in a committed relationship with Ruby.

There's a subreddit dedicated to this.

https://www.reddit.com/r/lolphp/top/?t=all

As an outsider I like this idea of being able to vote yourself out. This is the ultimate test of a democracy, imho, that you can leave it democratically (by vote and not by force).

We've seen some interesting cases of this, in Spain and in the Donbas of the last years.

I think the outcome of people voting against it is a great outcome. You have the freedom. You paid for the vote (its expensive) and "they" did not win. Hurray for unity at the highest level.

> As an outsider I like this idea of being able to vote yourself out

"Voting with your feet" is an option available to almost everyone except North Koreans.

If there are no good options to migrate to, that doesn't provide a way out. And, as a migrant, that's ignoring the cost of migration (e.g. the decades it takes to lose a speech accent and not be seen as "the foreigner", assuming your ethnicity allows for that anyway)

I'm not at all sure if voting to splice a country should be a thing you can do, maybe there is more merit in some international right to a proportional vote on something (no FPTP system) so you get better representation of all opinions, but simply saying "you can always go somewhere else" seems a bit too simple

It's actually not available to most people that live in any third world country, otherwise migration would be significantly higher than it already is.

Regardless, "voting with your feet" is an individual action. Voting at home is a collective one, representing the will of not just you but the people from the place that you come from and were born into. Only one of those reflects the ideals of democracy, if that's really the ideal being strived for

> It's actually not available to most people that live in any third world country

Well sure it is. It isn't easy. There's a difference between available and easy.

It’s also a very anti-democratic option whether taken voluntarily or forced.

When you leave you cut all important ties to the polity, you surrender your ability to participate in democratic processes and you revoke control over yourself and your property. It’s the nearest thing to direct violence you can do without crossing that line

> When you leave you cut all important ties to the polity, you surrender your ability to participate in democratic processes and you revoke control over yourself and your property. It’s the nearest thing to direct violence you can do without crossing that line

If that's true then isn't it better individuals do this "almost violence" only to themselves, of their own volition? Rather than impose it on everyone living in the territory? Committing "almost violence" against others, for no fault of theirs, doesn't become fair just because it was voted on, right?

Do individuals matter in a democracy?

How does one draw new political borders that way? There is practically zero unclaimed land.

You move someplace that aligns with your preferences.

And if there arent? Why are existing nation lines static?

If literally no one else on earth thinks like you, how will you win a referendum?

The people who think like me (in this example) are the people voting on the referendum!

While certainly true, it does not fix the problem (but makes it worse): if the govt does not allow you to self govern and/or break-off, and therefor people that do not like the govt "vote with their feet" and leave, there will be less people left to effect the changes.

This happened in ww2 Germany. many left. Hitler never got 51% of votes. Yet he managed to take over.

One of the problems with these types of separatist movements have is that they want to also keep resources owned by the group they are trying to leave from.

Canada owns the natural resources. The Albertan separatists want to take it from them on top of being politically separate.

The issue here is that Canada belongs to all Canadians. A portion of voters in one province can’t just vote to help themselves to the territory of Canada.

You realize that this is the perfect way for foreign influence to destabilize western society, right?

Democracy hasn't been hardened against social media and I'd prefer not to be another failed experiment like Brexit where we allow for foreign money to intentionally damage society.

Maybe, but I have trouble with the framing. Referendum votes are >50%. If a foreign nation can get >50% of the Albertans to agree to something, that's still democracy.

Yes it feels wrong for the US to be giving money to influencers to influence the vote, but it's not like those voters are being coerced. In their opinion, Alberta would be better as a separate country.

Whether that opinion is enlightened or not has no bearing on it being democratic or not.

A foreign adversary only has to convince or “add” the difference needed to reach 50%. It never starts at 0.

I can’t blanket agree that “it’s their opinion after all” because fraud works the same way. The victim willingly triggers their own loss but after being deceived. Brexit shows the works, almost half the supporters feel like they got the bait and switch, being promised one thing and then getting another. But this fraud you’ll never be able to punish and deter because the foreign party is not under your control. So why allow any avenue for it to make a difference?

> The victim willingly triggers their own loss but after being deceived

So wrapping up the process in another layer of "informed individuals" is another form of government that is even easier to manipulate, because there are fewer of them.

There is no self-protection or those who are incidentally manipulated by forgoing their own responsibility. ie Manufactured Consent. This sentiment (albeit articulated differently) is why wealth inequality has become such a hot topic in the US. It's blatant that if it's many or few, it makes little difference within US politics. Billionaires can afford the influence to make the decisions. That's the game.

There will always be undue influence but you have to draw the line somewhere. Foreign influence is generally inarguably worse, the foreign party has absolutely no duty whatsoever to your country or your people, maybe benefits if everyone is worse off. And when it’s a major power it’s also fully shielded from real consequences.

If you are going to draw that line, foreign vs. domestic is a good place to do it.