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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • Whatever anyone China-affiliated says they’re not doing, it’s a safe bet that’s exactly what they’re doing.

    I’m not going to push any conspiracy theories, but I believe the strongest evidence pointing towards Covid-19 originating in a lab is the Chinese government insisting that it didn’t, while prohibiting anyone not under their control from investigating. That doesn’t mean it did originate from a lab, but if anything, that’s what it points to. To be explicit: My impression is that, currently, most available evidence points towards natural origins. However the Chinese government has done its best to convince me otherwise.



  • To be fair, this was originally the point of plastic. The primary point of plastic today is that it is an extremely cheap material that you can mould into pretty much any shape.

    Need a bag to carry stuff? Plastic.

    Packaging for toothpicks? Plastic.

    Spacers inside an electric circuit? Plastic.

    Packaging for clothes? Plastic.

    Fake plant? Plastic.

    Part of the problem is that we’re using a wonder-material that lasts forever (plastic) for a bunch of mundane shit where we don’t need it, because that wonder-material turns out to be the cheapest material around as well.









  • They’re getting downvoted because they’re missing the point. It’s not about whether or not I can choose to do things the way I prefer. It’s about how newcomers exposure, and thus opportunity to get into these things, is limited. The arguments about cars or calculators don’t hold up for that exact reason: The existence of cars and calculators does not severely limit people’s exposure to the experience of walking or doing arithmetic.



  • I would say that the “bad part of town” usually has overlap with the poorer part of town, regardless of what skin colour people have there. Of course, especially in the US, there’s significant overlap between economic status and skin colour. I just hate how the typical American view on “race” is projected onto other countries.

    Americans typically have this hang-up on “race” that you really don’t find anywhere else. A lot of places you have talk about “ethnicity” or similar, but the American fascination with categorising people by their skin colour and then using that to make generalisations is pretty unique.


  • With all the AI rollout in customer support, I’ve essentially built up a habit of almost immediately trying to get in touch with a human if the bot doesn’t give me what I’m looking for right away. My experience is that in most cases, the bot will try to walk me in circles, recommending that I try stuff I’ve already tried (that’s why I’m contacting support). In all those cases, the bot isn’t saving the company any time, it’s just wasting my time and making me irritated.

    In some cases it does save them support capacity, if only because I eventually give up on getting any support and just quit the service.


  • I definitely have a hangup on students I teach saying something along the lines of “I don’t know how to get started on this, I asked GPT and…”. To be clear: We’re talking about higher-level university courses here, where GPT is, from my experience, unreliable at best and useless or misleading at worst. It makes me want to yell “What do you think?!?” I’ve been teaching at a University for some years, and there’s a huge shift in the past couple years regarding how willing students are to smack their head repeatedly against a problem until they figure it out. It seems like their first instinct when they don’t know something is to ask an LLM, and if that doesn’t work, to give up.

    I honestly want shake a physical book at them (and sometimes do), and try to help them understand that actually looking up what they need in a reliable resource is an option. (Note: I’m not in the US, you get second hand course books for like 40 USD here that are absolutely great, to the point that I have a bunch myself that I use to look stuff up in my research).

    Of course, the above doesn’t apply to all students, but there’s definitely been a major shift in the past couple years.



  • I really do agree on all your points, so at the end of the day I think a lot comes down to use-case and personal preference.

    My primary use cases for Python are prototyping and as a frontend/scripting tool for software written in C/C++/Fortran. In those scenarios, spending significant time on type hinting and unittests defeats the purpose of using Python (blazing fast development).

    I’ve written/worked on only one larger code base in pure Python, and my personal opinion became that I heavily prefer strictly typed languages once the code base exceeds a certain size. It just feels so much smoother to work with when I have actual guarantees that are enforced by the language.

    With that said, we were a bunch of people that are used to using Python for prototyping that developed this larger library, and it would probably have gone a lot better if we actually enforced use of proper type hinting from the start (which we were not used to).


  • Type hints are usually great, as long as they’re kept up to date and the IDE interprets them correctly. Recently I’ve had some problems with PyCharm acting up and insisting that matplotlib doesn’t accept numpy arrays, leading me to just disable the type checker altogether.

    All in all, I’m a bit divided on type hints, because I’m unsure whether I think the (huge) value added from correct type hints outweighs the frustration I’ve experienced from incorrect type hints. Per now I’m leaning towards “type hints are good, as long as you never blindly trust them and only treat them as a coarse indicator of what some dev thought at some point.”


  • Then I absolutely understand you :)

    How common it is 100 % depends on the code base and what practices are preferred. In Python code bases where I have a word in decisions, all Boolean checks should be x is True or x is False if x should be a Boolean. In that sense, if I read if x or if not x, it’s an indicator that x does not need to be a Boolean.

    In that sense, I could say that my preference is to flip it (in Python): Explicitly indicate/check for a Boolean if you expect/need a Boolean, otherwise use a “truethiness” check.