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Obligatory dismissive comment:

> 0.2

No it ain't (in production).

Anyway, this looks great. I LOVE the fact that you've provided a book too. Consider me a fan!


We're definitely not ready for production! Sorry if that was implied.

But we are ready for people to start using it in their development work. Lmk if there's a better way of describing that.


I think the most surprising thing about Rust modules is that you need to """pre-declare""" them, especially since Rust doesn't really use function prototypes.

So when you try to move a module into its own file, you need to keep the `mod foo` in the original file.


Ada,

    with foo; -- Import
    use foo;  -- open namespace
Seems familiar.


Same vibe as diners who put down money on the table and take some away every time they don't feel doted on enough


The two main problems with that are 1) caused by tipping in the US being awful and 2) it being patronizing.

We should fix tipping, and it's not inherently a problem to be patronizing to children.


They were probably mistreated this way as children!


It's funny because you'd think this watchfulness + technology like Nextdoor would let kids be more independent, e.g. if anybody tried to snatch your kid they'd be reported by half a dozen busybodies watching through their windows.


This assumes that most users of Nextdoor or have video cameras dotting their house are interested in protecting kids. Nextdoor is a cesspool of racism, and everyone I know who has "security" cameras is afraid of people stealing their stuff. Despite crime in our area being at an all time low and property theft very uncommon.


I suspect more has been spent on anti-theft for houses than total thefts.

Places where theft really IS common don’t put up cameras (they’d get stolen), they put up bars.


That rabbit hole of esotericism was pretty cool.



Biology is not programming, man.

We can work on different abstraction levels because in the worst case, we can just crack open a hex editor and write raw assembly or mess with the OS directly. We've built on that to get C, and Java, and Python, and all that other good stuff, but we can go all the way to the bottom if we need to.

Now imagine you're working on a computer with proprietary hardware. The easiest way to interact with it is via a provided high level language, like Lua. This is eating, drinking, sleeping, exercising. Now imagine that you crack open the assembly because something is just not working right. Some illness or something. And you come to realize there are thousands of different opcodes (proteins, enzymes, genes, etc.). Not only that, but sometimes they work differently depending on where in the computer they are located or the time of day or whatever (organs, menstrual cycle, circadian rhythm, etc.). You can make some good guesses on what a couple of them do, but you are not sure of the entirety of their effects for the majority of them.

So you're looking at the interfaces and you figure out if you send the right data to this and that place, you can get it to work right, maybe with some acceptable or unforeseen consequences. This is medicine, and it is a miserable way to do things due to the complete lack of understanding and control, much like driving your car from the backseat with a 10 foot pole while facing backwards.

So you've discovered a lot of hacks, made a lot of medicine, collected a lot of 10 foot poles. And as you look at your ever expanding collection, now easily in the thousands, you begin to get the creeping feeling that (a) you will never find a panacea, (b) the system you are working on is a disgusting mess of patchwork jobs on patchwork jobs developed over millions of years, and (c) there is probably an underlying system directing all of this, but its complexity might not even be better than what you're operating on now, and you definitely lack the technology to utilize it properly anyway.

And what you're doing is saving and bettering people's lives on the whole. And then some big shot comes in and says "Ackchyually, why don't you just access the lowest layer directly? Pretty sus." Try to have some perspective and humility on how horrifically complicated biology is. Life was evolved, not designed. Life isn't a computer. The relative simplicity and sanity of technological systems is a blessing absent in biology.


You're objecting to the metaphor, not the substance or the reference. The metaphor has no bearing on whether Michael Levin (who I am not familiar with) is right or wrong. I can't decode anything in your objection to the metaphor that seems to have a bearing on that, either; it just seems like a copypasta extolling expertise and showing frustration at naive internet amateurs. It takes a single google search to find that Levin is not a naive internet amateur.

Biology is not programming, except when it is like programming, or when it involves programming. But that could also be said about golf.


Also, the development environment is nothing like prod, and there are ethical constraints on making them too similar.


The cynic/conspiracy theorist in me says "Imagine blaming kids for acting weird when they're literally infested with plastic."


Easy to say this when you don't have 1 billion people also gunning for the opportunities you want (maybe less since they're in Hong Kong and not the mainland)


There’s definitely a lot of competition but 1 Billion is probably not the right number.

From the Wikipedia page for the examination required to get into Universities in HK, the number of test takers in 2020 is:

52,687 [0].

This doesn’t include students using international exams to get in, but that seems to be a fraction of this number.

Still very challenging but not 1 billion challenging.

[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hong_Kong_Diploma_of_Seconda...


Acceptance rate to the top HK university for locals is around 10% which is actually not that competitive and easier to get in than the average Ivy league universities (in addition to being cheaper).

There are 14 universities in Hong Kong of which 4 are well ranked. I would say the chances of getting into a decent university for HKers is actually much easier than for Mainland Chinese students.

There are some traditional families who feel the need to do a lot of extra curricular activities and tuition just so that there kid can go into the three prestigious subjects of law, medicine and finance but that's not all families.


Involution...



Amazing retort. You got me. Hand in the cookie jar.


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