Recalling the videos of a single male lion pretty much ripping apart a pack of hyenas… Tigers are even bigger and stronger than lions, and wolves don’t have anywhere near the bite force of a hyena. I think you’d need a lot more than three.

Similarly, what would you gain by saying uint32_t const* x = my_var.get<uint32_t>();

To be frank: You gain the information that MyConcreteType::get<uint32_t> returns a uint32_t, which I otherwise couldn’t infer from the docs. Of course, I could assume it, based on the template parameter, but I don’t want to go around assuming a bunch of stuff in order to read docs.

Take an example like auto x = my_var.to_reduced_form(), it’s very clear that x is the “reduced form” of my_var, which could be meaningful in itself, but what type is it? I need to know that if I want to do anything with x. Can I do x += 1? If I do, will that modify my_var? Let’s say I want to make a vector of whatever to_reduced_form returns… and so on.

All these questions are very easily answered by MyConcreteType x = my_var.to_reduced_form(). Now I immediately know that everything I can do with my_var, I can also do with x. This makes me happy, because I need to do less digging, and the code becomes clearer to read.

Thanks, that was a good read :)

However, my impression is that he’s largely using the existence of templates and polymorphism as arguments that “we don’t really care about type”. I disagree: A template is essentially a generic type description that says something about what types are acceptable. When working with something polymorphic, I’ll prefer ParentClass&, to indicate what kind of interface I’m working with.

Sure, it can be very useful to hide exact type information in order to generalise the code, but I think that’s a weak argument for hiding all type information by default, which is what auto does.

I really like C++ (I know, shoot me), and I think auto should be avoided at (almost) all costs.

One of the things I love about a language like C++ is that I can take one glance at the code and immediately know what types I’m working with. auto takes that away while adding almost no benefit outside of a little convenience while writing.

If I’m working with some very big template type that I don’t want to write out, 99/100 times I’ll just have a using somewhere to make it more concise. Hell, I’ll have using vectord = std::vector<double> if I’m using a lot of them, because I think it makes the code more readable. Just don’t throw auto at me.

Of course, the worst thing ever (which I’ve seen far too often) is the use of auto in examples in documentation. Fucking hell! I’m reading the docs because I don’t know the library well! When you first bother to write examples, at least let me know the return type without needing to dig through your source code!

“Not a marketing company” as in their business model is not centred around shoving ads in your face for money is how I read it.

Oh absolutely. As with all other infrastructure, there is a cost to be paid. However, when you look at an average to small river, even routing 10 % of the water via an osmosis plant before passing it to the sea is an absolutely massive volume. There’s also the point that you don’t want to build these things in large, meandering, flat river deltas. You want a large salinity gradient, which means relatively small, fast-running fresh water meeting the ocean more “suddenly” than what you get in a classical river delta is the optimal source here.

Because osmotic power has enormous potential in the sense that millions of cubic meters of fresh water is running into oceans all over the world every minute. If we’re able to get even a low-efficiency method of using the salinity gradient to generate power working then every place a river meets the sea is essentially an unlimited (albeit low-yield) power source.

This is tech that doesn’t rely on elevation (like hydropower) or weather conditions (like wind/solar) it’s stable and in principle possible to set up at pretty much any river outlet, which is great!

Exactly this. The whole premise of the tax system is based around the historically correct idea that you need to physically move goods in order to sell them, or physically be somewhere to sell services.

Companies like google are making buckets of money all over the world, and don’t need to tax a dime most places, because they have no physical presence there. This makes it pretty much impossible to compete with the international behemoths, because they have access to a munch of tax-free revenue, while a startup will typically be centred around wherever they’re based, where they also need to pay taxes.

100 % agree here. If you’re testing an actual use-case, it’s fair to compare realistic python to realistic C. However, I would argue that at that point you’re no longer benchmarking Python vs. C as languages, but Python vs. C for that particular use-case.

That completely depends on what you’re doing. If you’re doing tasks that python can completely offload to some highly optimised library written in C/C++/Fortran, then yes. However at that point you’re not really comparing Python to C anymore, but rather your C implementation to whatever library you used.

A fair comparison is to compare pure python to pure C, in which case you need to mess up the C-code pretty bad if Python is to stand a chance.

Exactly: I can understand that an open layout makes life harder for people in an already oppressive environment. This applies regardless of why the environment is oppressive any individual.

Claiming that “open environments are sexist” implies that they’re somehow inherently oppressive towards one gender. That’s absolute bullshit in my opinion: Open environments are just generally crap for productivity.

Sorry, but what?

I hate open-plan layouts as much as the next guy, but how on earth are they sexist?

In general, I don’t think it’s right to lie down flat whenever someone accuses you of saying something wrong, just because they think it was wrong.

It should be pretty fair to respond with a simple “why is that sexist? I think wet clothes are uncomfortable, so I assumed others did as well.”

Define “good”. I would say that any professional with dozens of hours of training, that could comfortably overcome any average person is “good”. Those are the people I trained with, and my impression is that Keanu is better than most of them.

IIRC, Keanu did some extensive firearms training in connection with John Wick. I’ve seen some footage of him on a training set with mobile targets, and would estimate that he’s better at handling a wide variety of firearms than a fair portion of military personnel are before the first time they see combat. This estimate is based on my own military training on similar courses.

I know the movies are choreographed, but I definitely wouldn’t give someone without extensive training good odds against him, based on footage I’ve seen from his training.

If you make any edits that contradict the physical evidence, you’ve outed yourself.

We’re talking about people that contradict both themselves and physical reality on a daily basis without their supporters batting an eye.

Export to jpeg. Compress.

Can decent edits still be reliably detected?

Great, it seems like we agree on the major points here! I’m not denying any of the major issues of the Afghan war, nor any of the glaring problems with how the whole “nation building” attempt went about. I’m very well aware of the history of the Afghan war, and have seen several of the documentaries you refer to that point out that it was largely known that the Afghan army would likely desert once the coalition left.

I’m not saying we don’t care.

That is quite literally what you said in your first comment, and is literally the only thing I’ve disagreed with you on so far (“the world simply doesn’t care”). If you didn’t mean that, then I don’t see anything I disagree with you on.

Many individual people did earnestly care, and tried their best.

This is literally the point I’ve been trying to make, but it seems like you keep misinterpreting me as saying the whole invasion was a misunderstood humanitarian operation. I’m not saying that.

It differs per community.

Good point, I’ll moderate myself and just state that I’ve never experienced it being a hard requirement in my field.

No it’s not. I have both published in a variety of scientific journals, reviewed for a couple journals, and turned down reviews for a couple journals.

No journal checks your “review history” before allowing you to publish. However, if you consistently turn down reviews from a journal, the editor is likely going to get annoyed and you will probably have a harder time publishing in that journal in the future.