This is a case where you have to be careful about cause-effect order. I assume that Tiwanese people that are heavily opposed to China are more likely to avoid tiktok. But of course, it’s been shown that tiktok tends to show more pro-China “content” as well, and likely influences the opinions of its users.
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.
If you read the article, you’ll find that they claim it’s broken down into something which is processed by naturally occurring bacteria. I would have preferred that they linked to an actual research article for details, but this is explicitly not one of these “degradable” plastics that just dissolves into microplastic.
Without checking out the details, I can say with fairly high confidence that a material that will be degraded by a sodium chloride solution will most likely also be degraded by other electrolytes as well.
However, the electrolyte-concentration in drinks is much, much lower than that in seawater. And if it can’t be used for electrolyte-containing drinks, it could be used for water bottles.
Maybe we could use this stuff for umbrellas too? My major concern is what this new material is broken down into.
And the glory of the interwebz is that those 5000 people are bound to find each other and start a movement around it, where just 25 years ago they would have been laughed out of the local pub as a raving idiot…
I don’t need any authority to say something can or can’t be an addiction in order to recognise when someone has an unhealthy addiction to something (is unable to regulate their consumption of said thing to the point where it significantly negatively impacts their life).
Just like you can recognise that alcoholism can be a problem without being a complete prohibitionist nutjob, it’s possible to recognise porn addiction for what it is when you see it without being a puritanical nutjob. I don’t have any intention of shaming anyone for watching porn, I’m just pointing out that I’ve seen for myself that it’s possible to develop an unhealthy relationship to porn. As with any other addiction, there’s usually an underlying problem that has nothing to do with the subject of the addiction.
While I’m aware that pretty much everything I do online is tracked, the stuff that’s shoved at me the rare times I open instagram or facebook indicate that they are clueless about how to get me to stick around. They throw a bunch of shit at the wall (mostly soft-porn or comic strips), but never anything that makes me look twice.
Porn addiction can be an actual problem though. Not to downplay that puritanical shitstains should shut up about porn, but I know someone who had actual problems with porn addiction.
As with all other addictions, it becomes a problem when it starts taking over your life. If you start missing out on things (dropping plans with friends/family, etc.) and/or develop economic problems because you can’t regulate your consumption, it’s becoming an unhealthy addiction.
I pretty much never use instagram, but I follow a shitposting channel there, and every now and then I go into instagram to show someone some old shitpost.
I’ve concluded that the instagram algorithm is frustrated as fuck from not understanding anything about me, because I never click or hover on anything it shoves in my face. However, it’s concluded that I’m a horny dude.
The result is that it floods my feed with a bunch of soft-porn. I have no idea where this all comes from, or who is spending their time uploading a bunch of soft-porn to instagram, but there’s an absolute shitload of it.
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 absolutely be happy to have a feature where an LLM could read previous issues, the docpage, and the FAQ/wiki, then you could query it regarding your issue to (a) see if it is a legitimate issue, (b) check that the issue you submit contains the info you need, and c) help you link in previous issues/PR’s referring to relevant stuff.
Never in hell do I want an LLM to be generating issues by itself.
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.
The next best time is now
If my Easter break gets boring I might just start cleaning up that Python library… It’s the prime example of something that developed from a POC to a fully functional code base, was left largely unused for about a year, and just the past weeks has suddenly seen a lot of use again. Luckily we’re strict about good docstrings, but type hints would have been nice too.
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.
I definitely agree that len is the preferred choice for checking the emptiness of an object, for the reasons you mention. I’m just pointing out that assuming a variable is a bool because it’s used in a Boolean context is a bit silly, especially in Python or other languages where any object can have a truthiness value, and where this is commonly utilised.
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.