I don't see memes as infecting our minds so much as giving voice to something that is already there that doesn't come up in conversation. The Nike and Sweatshop meme wouldn't be funny if people didn't already know that Nike had faced charges of using sweatshops. We all have a friend who seems to have terrible luck, so when formalized as "Bad Luck Brian" it becomes a vehicle for finding humor in this.
Every word is a story and civilisation seems to be mostly motivated, right now, by the constant creation of new words.
Meme's are a consequence of the nature of our collective consciousness, wrapping up a big story into a simple, easily recognisable symbol and thus eventually, a word.
So we can't fault memes for being, because to do so is to ignore the means we can come to know ourselves, socially. This generation has memes; the 60's had them too. They're a naturally occurring consequence of collective reality.
I think of Adam Curtis as a journalist. You may disagree with his facts or interpretation of them, but he tells an interesting story with his investigations.
It’s a stretch to call what he does journalism, but I suppose it depends on where you draw the circle around “journalist”. He uses real world events and people as his raw materials, but the subjects of his films are his own perspectives even if he isn’t up front about that. I wouldn’t classify Erol Morris as a journalist either, but he is much more in that category than Curtis because he is more interested in making the unknown known than presenting his own philosophy.
While I don’t think that Adam Curtis can hold a candle to Chris Marker as an artist, or in terms of telling an interesting story or conducting an investigation, I would put his work in the same category of “film essay”.
I would actually be surprised: Putin has the redeeming quality of autocrats, he doesn’t complain about trivial things. He certainly instruments threats, made-up or otherwise, and he might occasionally get people excited over confusing displays of nationalism, like that foreign food strike last year, but the whole message around it was grave.
Saying that a freckled teenager in California can challenge his popularity by writing nonsense on the internet… it’s unbecoming.
The author doesn't mention memory management. I gather Crystal does not have a garbage collector, but the author doesn't explain how Crystals memory management compares to C++ or Rust.
I've worked with TypeScript on large code bases. I found that the compile step becomes really slow and it slows down the debug cycle.
On my last large project, I had to wait 10 to 15 seconds for the code to build every time I saved the file (and yes the compilation step was optimized to only include relevant code; a large number of dependencies don't help).
So every time I made a change to the code to check something, I had to wait... You can't use console.log() to quickly check stuff anymore; the compile overhead is so significant that you're forced to pull up the debugger and manually step through the relevant code every single time you want to check something (you want to get as much info as possible from each debug cycle because it's so slow).
When writing plain JavaScript, I only pull up the debugger when it's a particularly difficult bug (e.g. a race condition). For most bugs, I can get all the information I need with just a couple of calls to console.log() in my code. The debugger is just unwieldy.
I used to be a c++ dev so a 15 sec compile time doesn't seem that bad. But what if you're compiler told you what was wrong faster than your console.log() could help you find it. I think is a trade off a lot of people want to make.
I agree, that makes sense for C/C++ because working with pointers and dynamic memory is a lot more complicated - Types make sense for C/C++ because the focus is execution speed and flexibility (not development productivity).
The case you describe very rarely happens to me with JavaScript; having fewer primitives to work with greatly reduces these kinds of issues... Sure it opens up the possibility that you'll do something stupid like trying to add an object with a string; but that's a pretty silly thing to do. If you name your variables properly then that never happens.
With C/C++, there are many primitives so you might get errors when you try to assign an int64 to an int8 (for example)... With JS, however, because there are fewer primitives so the odds of that happening are much much smaller.
Because there are so few primitives in JS, it's easy to remember how they all interact with each other. The only exception is the boolean truth table for '==' (which is a mess); that's why it's usually recommended to use '===' instead.
> It makes no sense at all whatsoever that the front end logic should be more strict than the API!
It does to people who appreciate type information. To each his own. I can see the appeal of dynamic typing but I am pretty sure obvious errors (obvious if the compiler has type info) go uncaught.
Even the rebuttal is immature and badly thought out, much like their cryptography.
They start by implying that the MIT Media Lab isn't really MIT (what the fuck) as an ad-hominem way to dodge their criticism. Later they whine "But Zcash rolled their own crypto, why can't we?!" which shows they really don't even understand the context of what they're doing.
