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You're losing all the state since you're not being dropped in the closure where the error happened but in the end of the program.

To see the difference use some function counter() instead of 1 in the example.


I always find it odd that people say this. If stack doesn't matter than why not start writing machine code again?


Agree. ThePrimeagen had something to say about this on one of his streams, responding to someone who said "The programming language doesn't matter, only the programmer." He said something like "If that were true, let's just all go back to writing C, it's pretty good. But then you'd say 'well not exactly...'"


I think they meant the stack doesn’t matter in the sense of “which stack you choose from the options available”, rather than “whether you choose a stack versus writing machine code”.


You can hook into the abi for software that runs in Linux trivially. So why isn't machine code acceptable? When you give the honest answer you see why the majority of languages aren't acceptable either.


It's said mostly by people who let others make technical decisions for them. Others being either their bosses or the main stream.


That's not a good faith interpretation given the near infinite amount of options for conjuring up your favourite moneyprinting system of choice besides "machine code". SBCL is about the most arcane option you can pick and even that can work, which I think actually proves the point: it doesn't matter to any significant degree (anymore).


How else is one meant to read that language doesn't matter?

You can hook into anything that runs in Linux since it's abi is rock solid so the excuse of not being able to use the usual tech stacks doesn't hold water either.


You can use RoR, .NET, SBCL, Python, Erlang and 6502 assembly if you so desire. Sure “machine code” is one option, but that doesn’t engage with the argument in any meaningful way IMO.


This is the point where you need to check your privilege. I used tor when living in a dictatorship to find out things which would destroy the moral fabric of society, such as information about lgbtqia+ issues, what condoms are, pop music and news that the government didn't want to spread.


I'm sorry you had to live through that, and I'm glad you had tools to subvert that oppression. I'm relieved that it sounds like you've escaped from that situation.

It was not my intent to assert any privilege, and it was my intent to acknowledge that scenario. If I may provide some clarification:

Marriam webster[0] defines 'double edged sword' to mean

> something that has or can have both favorable and unfavorable consequences

The use of Tor in the scenario you describe is one of the two blades (edges) I was referring to in my use of 'double bladed sword' -- the altruistic use case for which Tor absolutely should exist

The other side of the blade however, it's also used to facilitate terrible acts of abuse, notably to children (as demonstrated by the article) -- the destructive use case for which Tor absolutely should not exist.

It leaves Tor in a morally ambiguous place to me. It's not inherently bad or good. There are situations where it can be used for great good, and others when it can be used for great evil. Those situations would exist with or without Tor. I don't know if I should be thanking anyone maintaining it any more than I would thank an arms dealer.

[0] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/double-edged%20sw...


> The other side of the blade however, it's also used to facilitate terrible acts of abuse, notably to children

How do we know you are not hosting CP?

Seems like the only way to really be sure is to make random raids on everyone and confiscate their equipment for a while.


I'm not sure what point you're trying to make. Can you rephrase, please?


Would a VPN not have sufficed as well? Tor seems like overkill for what you're describing.


How does one pay a VPN when your country is under sanctions?


Get someone to sell you some euro and mail it to Mullvad.


There is no such thing as running a relay in freenet. Every user is the same as every other. The size and traffic of your node is literally a setting on the gui. All traffic and data are encrypted so you have no idea what's living on your node and what's coming in and out. That's the whole point of freenet.


I don’t think he is claiming he ran a relay and could see the traffic passing through it. Just that he had a good idea what moved about on the network from following random links as he explored it - popular stuff would load fast, non-popular would be slow. He found out what was popular.


Indeed which is why I write everything in machine code. What sort of elitist could possibly think this is a bad idea?


Scheme is not a functional programming language. The last 2/3rds of sicp are possible only because you can mutate state.


Actors in Elixir (and AFAIK the Actor Model in general) can mutate their internal state in response to receiving a message. It would probably be awkward to use actors in this way just to facilitate mutation though.


Scheme is not a pure functional language. I think you need to check the rest of your notes.


According to Let Over Lambda, Lisp is the least functional programming language ;)

https://letoverlambda.com/textmode.cl/guest/chap5.html


    (define lol
      (let ((a 0))
        (lambda ()
          (set! a (+ a 1))
          a)))
Scheme is a functional programming language in the same way python is. The only difference is that it has tail call optimisation and the stack doesn't have an arbitrary limit on the number of function calls it can hold.


The people who wrote it left and the ones who stayed don't know how the system works.


Upper management has their own offices. Of course they don't understand what open offices are like. It's like planes, they only suck if you're in economy class, first and business are great. Why would you want to fly faster when you have an actual bed?


It's interesting that you make that comparison.

I hate flying. Never flew 1st class but have flown business class a few times. It helps very much for sure. There's no comparison between peasant class and business.

That said, it's still a crappy experience for me. There's the commute to and from the airport. There's the waiting, which is not good even if you have access to good lounges. There's more waiting, sometimes for many hours, if you're making connections. Finally, and the worst of all for me, there's noise, crappy toilets and especially the low pressure in the cabin which makes everything in my body ache.

My own office would be a clear and obvious improvement over a shared seat in an open plan. It would still not be anywhere near as good as my home office.


>Never flew 1st class but have flown business class a few times.

Fly first and report back. The rest of it is because you're still in the peasant launge. First class even gets its own passport queue.


I never really had an issue with passport queues. Most airports I travel through have automated gates and it takes literally seconds to get through. When there's a queue, it's usually no more than 1-5 people getting through 5-10 gates so it takes no time at all.

Changing class won't make any of the issues I pointed out better, with the possible exception of the toilets.


If it did US life expectancy wouldn't lower today than it was in 2008.


That's a bit of a tenuous connection.

That decline is an anomaly. The majority of it is attributable to covid, and a significant minority attributable to fentanyl: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/nchs_press_releases/2022/...

I do agree that the "rising tide raises all boats" rhetoric is largely bunk. But I don't think that this one particular measure, taken at an anomalous time, is sound footing for a counterargument.


That’s mostly due to obesity, which is a consequence of the quantity and (flavor) quality of food getting better over time; a side effect of economic prosperity.


If food is killing more people than it used to that's not an improvement in food.


If you have so much food even the poorest people can get fat, you are a richer and more prosperous society than 99.9% of human history.

Btw obesity is rising in Europe as well.


s/economic prosperity/lack of regulation/

Palm oil is in everything in the US, in France there's a lot more lighter oils and butter.


The obesity epidemic hasn’t spared France either: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obesity_in_France


You meant getting worse.


No, I didn’t.

Obesity is a side effect of having so much food that calories are cheap and plentiful. That’s why obesity rates are rising everywhere in the first world. It’s also something virtually unprecedented in human history.


And it won't last. Fossil fuels make up almost all fertilizer.


Types slow you down. New work is first completed in untyped languages. People start using the work. People complain there aren't types. Types are added. Work is now slow in the language. New work is now done in another language without types.

Rinse and repeat.


“Types slow you down” is the _stupidest_ excuse I hear all the time.

As if developers of untyped languages don’t spend ungodly amounts of time pretending types don’t exist, but needing to manually check them everywhere, wonder why shit blows up at runtime, litter their code with “typeof” style checks, litter their tests with type checking.

The types exist and need to be considered whether you believe it or not. Might as well let the computer help you out.

Or you know, pretend you’re toooooo cool for it.


There are maybe some programs where "time to first run" is a critical metric. But where I sit we spend way way way way more time living with a program after it has already been written. This means maintenance, bugfixes, and refactors.

Even if what you say is true, I'll trade some initial coding time to buy more efficient maintenance.


I dunno, I think the productivity promises of dynamic typing have been conclusively disproven, so maybe next time people will be able to at least say "we know that isn't a good idea".


Maybe there is an argument there for non-programmers in technical fields, that use programming at their jobs, but it isn't their primary job. Like a data scientist or architect, trying to use something convenient and easy. The problem is, that usually it catches up with them (and with bigger programs), in terms of poor quality code and bad habits. The argument then becomes if they should have learned better practices and habits in the first place. Sometimes what seems like a shortcut, is not really so.


that might have been true in the 2000s, but it doesn't apply to modern languages with things like generics, ADTs, type inference, null safety, etc.

you know what really slows me down? trying to use a function in a dynamic language, and having no god damned clue what type of arguments it accepts, and having to figure it out by grepping through the code or dynamically instrumenting a running program.


I think its more along the lines of things are prototyped without types, the proof of concept mostly works, then people realize that types are needed to reduce bugs, improve speed, and create a maintainable base as the project grows. What people should do is rewrite from scratch using the prototype as a vague guide, but instead people try to desperately fix the prototype incrementally. Its not the types that makes things slow, its the size of the codebase, and the lack of expectations on quality and performance.


If the language has clear and consistent ways to convert types when needed, the "slow down" from types is trivial.


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