Andrei Kashcha

Finding new semantics for constructing computational logic is certainly a good middle-of-the-road innovation.

The philisophical underpinnings of my own research and practice over the past decade are in constant existential friction with many of the most basic assumptions that underlie information theory. I've argued about it on here before. Since I'm terrified of general AI developing under the current power-dynamic, I haven't been too enthusiastic about contributing.

That said, a lot needs to be disbelieved-- we need an ideological grass fire on the great plans, of sorts-- before certain types of phenomenon can be reliably conjured through our electrical counting machines.

We've mistaken the representation with the thing itself, especially in the 'information sciences.' The idea of 'information' and 'data' as 'packets' presupposes the existence of a physical world composed of neatly delineated objects. While this has been and continues to be a convenient and even useful approximation of reality, it is still that-- a representation.

I've never seen this assumption questioned Im CS/IS forums. At this point, it's beyond dogma.

The unbelievable volume and density of the knowledge built in the information sciences, all of it sewn into these base assumptions of information theory, generate in the unwitting practitioner a belief considered as a hard-as-bedrock fact, always presumed but never questioned. It's confirmation bias propping up a simulacra of reality.

Like physics…

I LOVE the pattern-matching/deconstruction/guards stuff. It eliminates SO much boilerplate logic. Just the function head of an Elixir function eliminates a dozen input validation and assignment lines in most other languages. It wouldn't be nearly as spectacular if it didn't pervade the entire language, though (for example, I'm sure you could get partway there in many other languages using a DSL)

Same thing with immutability. If it doesn't pervade the entire language, it feels slapped-on, and you basically lose most (all?) of the guarantees (like removing an entire class of bugs caused by mutability).

I saw what you saw in Go, but in doing my homework, I also saw an astonishing amount of ugliness[1][2][3], and additionally I took a bit of actual offense to the core philosophy of Go's design as stated by Rob Pike himself[4][5] so I am betting on (hoping for?) spectacular Elixir adoption I guess lol, as my current and all future projects for the foreseeable future will be in Elixir.

About the only wart I've seen so far in Elixir is the pin operator[6], but that was necessary to preserve the name-rebinding ability in a pattern-matching context, and it stops seeming like a wart fairly quickly, once you realize why it's necessary.

[1] https://anvaka.github.io/common-words/#?lang=go makes it seem like 50% of the day-to-day code in the language is error-checking due to the lack of exceptions

[2] https://github.com/ksimka/go-is-not-good

[3] http://byrd.im/go-is-poor/

[4]…

I don't find these argument convincing

- hackers in Shenzhen are underrepresented b/c of the language barrier. There is actually a huge Chinese language ecosystem (a lot of it off Github on Gitee) that is sort of impenetrable but you come across it all the time. I said 10% just b/c typically I have no way to use their work b/c it's under-documented in English. If you zip around this map you will see lots of "Zh" islands: https://anvaka.github.io/map-of-github/

- Are Indian hackers working in Hindi and other regional languages?

- While I understand that it's not as financial comfortable for a programmer in Indian compared wtih the US or Europe, Chinese and Russian hackers aren't significantly better off. Your typical Chinese program is also of course worried about working for a big company and making money and all of that jazz

- "escape the hell that is 'unpaid open source work' " - I think maybe is the crux of it... Most people work on open source work b/c they enjoy it.. You're definitely not going to make a major github project used by other people just because you're looking to pad your resume.

Sidenote: I don't personally know anyone who got hired from a deliberate effort to build an open source portfolio. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone as a way to try to find a job

If Reddit actually cared about their users they'd have a feature to blanket-block various topics, like politics, meme, sports or anime subreddits. There is this big map of Reddit and if it were for me I'd never see any content of many if not most of these regions: https://anvaka.github.io/map-of-reddit/

Reddit is dearly missing a recommendation feed that actually aligns with ones interests (e.g. subreddits similar to those already subscribed to and upvoted content). Oh, and owners who care more about their users than money - but I guess that's been hopeless from the beginning. I've mostly stopped using it and would love to know alternatives

Reddit has some great individual boards, but it's not always easy to find them. This site, as well as others (https://anvaka.github.io/sayit/ comes to mind), is a nice start on making them more discoverable.

Reddit also brings to mind the old statement on UNIX - "Those who do not understand USENET are condemned to reinvent it, poorly." There will always be room for something like USENET (part of the pre-web days I miss), and Reddit is, sadly, what we have right now.