Niels Bohr, the Great Dane, was one of these skid greasers! He worked with the queen of Sweden, and also used his academic contacts in various countries to secure jobs/visas.
Interesting connection, as her father was a foreign member of the Nazi party (while living in Brazil) and had lied about his Nazi affiliation in the past. When he moved back to Germany, he joined the main party.
My mental model of Zig is that it is explicitly the language for developers who prefer using pointers in business logic (instead of just in MMIMO, and are looking for something with improvements over C); i.e. exactly this class of abstraction.
Having written a bunch of Zig, I wouldn't say that the language design or culture explicitly encourages the use of pointers over indices in such situations. I would say it's more a language which trusts the programmer to make correct decisions about which constructs are appropriate in any given circumstance.
Hasn't the past 30 years of the Internet age taught us that given such trust, programmers will make the incorrect decision with horrifying predictability? The most trivial level of software security requires that pointer safety needs to be mathematically proven not up to human (or LLM) judgment.
I appreciate the explanation! I'm a noob at this sort of thing. (My experience with pointers is limited to MMIO and C FFI).
Regarding trusting the programmer: is that in the context of pointers, or more broadly? I'm betting I'm missing more, e.g. maybe mutation control too across threads/cores etc? Or as a broad design principle? (I have written some Zig as a learning dive, but don't Grok it, as am waiting for some core functionality like HALs, GUI libs, 3D libs etc. Was also a bit miffed by the 'operator overloading will never be allowed' as the use cases where I use low level languages have a near total overlap with the ones where I use vectors, quaternions, and matrices.
Stated another way: I learned with higher level langs first, which I believe biased my mental model. Example: Say I want to use a C library in my rust program/lib. (Example: CMSIS DSP). One of the actions I take in the wrapper is convert the pointer to an array ref; my mental model is the param is a list of items; it is divorced from memory. If I want to read/write a reg, or access FLASH, that's where I look to pointers. I e I think zig vs others is about if you want to conflate or divorce collections and memory.
I could see countries drastically affected by heat doing it. If they experience mass death, or even in the case of island countries complete elimination, what threat would make them stop?
This sounds like "Smart person who has little technical experience and might have cognitive decline from age". The world is fully of people who's intelligence is legitimately lower than you might expect.
There were 2 typos in that sentence (the one I didn’t mention is “fully” instead of “full”). Talking about intelligence in such a sloppy manner sounded like a joke to me.
I'm not the same person, but probably. There are at least two errors in the quoted fragment, though personally I don't think either is especially indicative of a lack of intelligence.
It's all factored in! The unimaginably vastness of the cosmos: Past, future, at astronomical through Planck scales. You have no agency; free will is an emergent phenomenon. You are not smarter than all those quants with their Ivy league degrees and 7 figure salaries, surely; the only winning move is not to play.
I think this is generally mitigated: When traveling, people use the card that doesn't have this fee. You have cards A and B. Has a fee; B doesn't. At home you use either. When traveling, you use B.
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