> I find brackets help me understand structure from a distance much better than whitespace.
I can't imagine how. Whitespace physically lays out the block structure on the screen; braces expect you to count and balance matching symbols, and possibly scan for them within other line noise.
Yes, and so will any reasonable text editor automatically indent to the most likely position, and remove an entire indentation level with backspace, and substitute spaces for tabs per community standards, and keep everything lined up neatly.
But GGP was making a claim about the braces themselves solving the problem, and they clearly do not. The indentation automatically inserted by your tooling solves the problem. And it's at least as easy to communicate the intended block structure with colons and backspaces as with open braces and close braces, plus it doesn't waste lines (or invite bikeshedding) for the closing braces.
Nevertheless it happens that while moving code around one wonders what indentation level that code should go. Undo, undo or git show the original code, look at it, retry more carefully.
Brackets would allow the editor to autoindent the pasted code.
Working in C# i feel basically still read code structure by the visual block structure / indentation. I dont think I've ever counted braces in my professional life. The IDE makes sure it is formatted correctly and ambiguity is basically impossible.
Exactly. So if the indentation is the actually salient thing, why not use it directly?
I mean: you don't count the braces because your tooling counts them and makes the indentation match what Python would use anyway. If you had just created that indentation in the first place (which with a proper editor is at least as easy as typing the braces; you essentially type : instead of {, and backspace instead of } ) then you'd be in the same place, except without the extra punctuation noise (well, with half of it, because GvR thought the colons were a useful signal even if redundant).
Whitespace and braces work together to make the code more readable; both by the computer and the human. And they make it less likely to have errors, because the braces convey intent (much like parens in math when they're not "needed")
It's no more 1990, when Python was born. Editors have been automatically indenting bracketed code for a long while. Probably notepad doesn't, or maybe plain vanilla vim.
Engineering and running a company are very different skill sets. Engineers are often not good at Marketing, networking, sales, ...
Even if you are good at those, for many companies, it's more about connections than about the ability to build stuff. So if you don't know the right people, it is very difficult to get a foothold.
Marketing, networking, and sales are the job. Or a large part of it. If you don't have connections, knowing how to make connections is part of it.
Accept that there are other skills besides engineering, and they can be just as challenging to learn, and just as opaque from the outside of you don't understand it.
It's a dumb joke considering Germany has been one of the most peaceful countries in decades. And the people making the jokes are often citizens of a country actively engaged in wars.
Gearmany's pacifism is just like its green energy transition hypocrytical and ineffective. Their Energiewende was to shutdown nuclear to bring back coal. Their Zeitenwend amounted to bankrolling Putin's war machine via the Norstream pipelines at the expense of the very same countries they tried to anhiliate in WW2. So yeah, I think I can crack a joke.
They're doing a lot that goes against that strategy, you just don't see it in the headlines except in cases such as these or when you dig into how they conduct international negotiations or business deals involving the Chinese market.
Not to mention how they are openly expansionist in the SCS and obviously wrt Taiwan.
Of course they want to be seen as reasonable, their ideal is to control the international narrative just how they can do it internally in China.
I have no idea and for me it's not the central question.
I don't like it from any party, but from a moral standpoint, the more authoritarian someone is about their propaganda, the more invasive and violent it feels to me.
I perceive what the CCP is doing as denying my (and other people's) humanity and individual rights. I simply cannot accept a government that imprisons artists and human rights activists. A world where art is crime is not one I find worth living in.
I perceive American propaganda in the same category as advertising, harmful and annoying, but they won't lock me up or threaten my safety if I speak up against the propaganda. Well, at least that's how it used to be, who knows with the current trajectory.
Personally, I prefer the US approach. At least then everyone knows what they're dealing with and they can openly react instead of being forced into a fake dance between what is said and what is REALLY said.
The covert stuff gives some degree of plausible deniability and it causes a good amount of the population to be complacent and ignore reality. I don't see how this can be considered good for anyone but the people creating propaganda.
What examples do you have of the US government doing to CEOs what has happened to people like Jack Ma and many other public figures?
For China, there are so many examples of people doing 180s and being full of contrition after those interventions, it's hard to imagine anything but severe intimidation or worse happening behind closed doors.
I feel like there’s a difference maybe between instrumentalism and habit.
What’s kind of weird about the article is how much the desired benefits are disconnected from the act taking place; I don’t choose a walk outside because nature “improves heart health” but I do think being outside is good and makes me feel good; I do it in service of a purpose, and I don’t think it’s implicitly wrong to make your life mostly habitual. Prayer at night, art for an hour every morning. Even 30 minutes before bed to talk to your partner.
I think a lot of people have this romantic notion that doing things you like shouldn’t be done intentionally. But if you have young kids even sometimes sex has to actually be planned, and it doesn’t have to remove the intimacy of it.
So I think I disagree with your idea that “doing relaxation” has to be stressful. Especially if you implicitly have bad habits forced around it like doom scrolling. I think forcing yourself to take a 20 minute walk outside every day has the benefits of being outside and walking. Even if it’s “doing relaxation”. And I may disagree with you entirely, that the best relaxation is an intentional process. Be it a walk, a bike ride, a video game, or yoga. I think the problem isn’t so much that intentional relaxation is bad, but more that it sounds bad.
Maybe the paradox here is that what works is what works. If you’re relaxation program, unintentional as it is is working for you. Great! It’s not my job to tell you that you’re wrong to feel relaxed after X, but I do think for those who don’t seem to share that experience it’s useful to here opinions like those of OP.
Go to Russia and ask the average person on the street what they think of Putin. Thing is, the people who had to be afraid are already long gone. The rest just didn't care or tried to stay safe rather than prioritizing their beliefs and principles.
You really think the people who are left on the streets feel free to speak their minds if it would conflict with what the Politburo is enforcing?
I'm not asking you to hear what they say, I'm asking you feel their fear (or lack thereof). If all the allegations are true then they don't need to say anything, you can feel the fear effortlessly, there's no hiding that. Also, nobody is stopping you from interacting with them in a place without cameras and witnesses.
Also, China has got nearly nothing in common with Russia. Don't lazily lump them together just because western popular thought likes to put the same label on them.
I mean, catholic priests do get taken every year in china by the government. Outside reporters do have very significant evidence of organ harvesting. You can say that you wont feel fear from the people in china, but that doesn't really change the truth.
I'll add my anecdote here: I bought a Tern Verge and the accessory bike bag about 1.5 years ago because I imagined taking the bike on the train or public transport and because I lived in a small apartment. With the bag, you can take it like any other bag, but without, even if folded, you need to pay extra and place it in dedicated bike spots.
Now partially that's just my laziness and trajectory in life, but I haven't used the bag once (I'm not even sure how to use the bag, it's...complicated?). And the bike was folded only once, when I moved.
About a year later I bought a road bike because I wanted better climbing and longer distances and more comfort. Ultimately, for me the folding bike - while great fun in general, it's fast and agile - was kind of the wrong choice.
Yeah fair. My folding bike is actually an e-bike, and unfortunately not as light as my road bike. In larger stations of Japan it gets very annoying to carry it around in a bag.
Misplaced brackets seem like a thing from the past to me when we didn't have IDEs. I don't remember ever having a bug due to that.
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