The frustrating thing isn't the small problems, in chasing these small problems one might find a big one that isn't as easy to fix: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AbSehcT19u0
I've heart this being repeated a lot so it is likely not something you came up with yourself.
I always become suspicious when a software engineer has been working on a problem +10 years. The type that spend their time upgrading angularJS to angular or something like that.
He is a kwak, instead of actual science he shills these ideas on podcasts because the general public is interested in it or something like that. Whenever I meet someone from Harvard I think of this guy and automatically think less of them. Maybe that is wrong of me but then the Harvard alumni ought to have called him out on his BS.
I tentatively agree with that take, but am trying to be charitable. The reason I tend to think this is right is that his podcast arguments for why umamua? was probably alien tech were either disingenuous or displayed incredible ignorance. i.e.: pretending that nobody had any explanation for how it accelerated without any visible tail.
I've been part of 4 commercial project that used the semantic web in one way or another. All these project or at least their semantic web part where a failure. I think that I have a good idea on where the misunderstanding about the semantic web originate. The author does seem to have a good understanding and is right about the semantic web forcing everything into a single schema. Academia sells the straight jacked of the semantic web as a life long free lunch at an all-you-can eat-buffet but instead you are convicted to a life sentence in prison. Adopting RDF is just too costly because it is never the way computers or humans structure data in order to work with it. Of course everything can be organised in a hyper graph, there is a reason why Steven Wolfram also uses this structure, they just so flexible. At the end of the day I don't agree with the author opinion of the semantic web having much of a future, I did my best but it didn't work out, time for other things.
> semantic web forcing everything into a single schema
I don't think "forcing" is the right word here, I think the right one would be "expects it to converge under practical incentives". That's a more gentle statement that reflects the fact, that it doesn't have to for SW tech to work.
Also, the term "schema" is a bit off, bc there's really no such thing in there. You can have the same graph described differently using different ontologies at the same moment without changing underlying data model, accessible via the same interface. It's a very different approach.
> never the way computers or humans structure data in order to work with it
If you haven't mentioned that you had an experience, I would say you confuse different layers of technology, because graph data model is a natural representation of many complex problems. But because you have, can I ask you to clarify what you mean here?
> Academia sells the straight jacked of the semantic web as a life long free lunch at an all-you-can eat-buffet
I disagree, bc I in fact think that academia doesn't sell shit, and that's the problem. There's no clear marketing proposal and I don't think they really bother or equipped to make it. There's a lack of human-readable specs and docs, it's insane how much time you need to invest in this topic even just to be able estimate whenever it's a reasonable to consider using SW in a first place. Also, lack of conceptual framework, "walkthroughs", tools, outdated information, incorrect information drops survival chance of a SW-based project by at least x100. But it can really shine in some use-cases, that unfortunately have little to do with the "web" itself.
RDF is just an interoperability format. You aren't supposed to use it as part of your own technology stack, it just allows multiple systems to communicate seamlessly.
People I know in academia complain about the same issues, publish or perish and all that. They even opine about formal economic models that predict that more funding/subsidies for science leads perversely to less outcome in total and not just relative to the size of the additional investment. However when you take all this as a reason to not take this industry as serious as they would like they get all offended.
> However when you take all this as a reason to not take this industry as serious as they would like they get all offended.
Just because there exists valid criticism of a thing, does not mean all criticism of it are valid: and in my experience, I mainly roll my eyes in exasperation when people criticize science for unfair reasons.
What the public thinks is broken in science is very often not what experts think is broken in science.
How does what I say validate all or any criticism of science, I just don't think that people who work in this industry get to take all progress though human history and put that on their own lapel.
Do you know this podcast decoding the guru, it is funny at times in breaking down internet persona like Jordan Peterson and Eric Weinstein but what annoys me about it though is this "researchers" talking about fringe internet phenomena. Sure you can find your cooks on the internet but maybe they should point their sharp criticism at their own sometimes and draw conclusions from it, as in stop funding it.
What do you call people that disagree to agree on something ... a research community.
For all the good science I know I can equally find you the most asinine navel gazing triviality repackaged and sold as groundbreaking progress. Please don't get me started on what experts in innovation management ISO 56002:2019 can do to help valorise all this knowledge as they piss on us from from the top floor of their ivory tower.
I bet C# and F# are actually nice languages and I shortly considered adopting them together with Unity but at the end of the day I was still suspicious of Microsoft, and support for other platforms then windows. The article honestly sounds a bit like a straw man argument. Maybe bloomberg could have made another tech choice but then again I don't know the details.
If you’re a JavaScript dev, it’s worth noting that NPM is owned by Microsoft. The mistrust angle is real, but I think it’s moot when specifically talking .NET vs. JS.
Microsoft has first-party support for .NET on linux and it's open source. Their commitment to non-windows and non-.NET platforms has only increased over time.
Not with their core languages. For example, Windows still comes bundled with the old VB6 runtimes and Microsoft still supports the language even if they no longer add features to it. I'm not really sure of any major Microsoft languages that Microsoft has just dumped, unless you count their smaller more esoteric ones.
Also keep in mind that .NET Core is not only open source, but comes with complete protection from any patents Microsoft might have. The only thing Microsoft can sue people over is the .NET Core trademark itself.
> still supports the language even if they no longer add features to it
This is what I assumed the parent post was referring to. Mostly because it mirrors complaints I've heard (and maybe had) about the .net gui story. WinForms -> WPF -> whatever the windows store app framework was called -> I think MAUI now?
That's hardly a fault with Microsoft though. WinForms is fundamentally flawed and far better alternatives now exist, it'd be foolish to continue investing in WinForms. You can still use WinForms and .NET Framework on Windows 11, just don't expect new features, which is okay.
Wasn't J# designed to be a transitional language for Java devs migrating to .NET/C#? (Wikipedia calls it a transitional language, too) Sure it wouldn't last long.
any software project or language can die, but I honestly struggle to think of a company that has a better history of long term support than Microsoft. You can fault Microsoft for quite a few things but their ability to maintain software and provide stable interfaces for devs is second to none.
MS discontinues a UI library project and then hypes up a new one every few years. Today Blazor and Maui are hot, but there's a lot of abandonware that came before.
You can see it in Windows too, where you can burrow deeper and deeper into progressively older settings dialogs, because they reshuffle the Control Panel every few years.
OTOH even stuff as old as Windows Forms (which literally shipped with .NET 1.0 - that's 2001!) still works and it actually has maintainers. You don't have to chase the shiny new stuff.
To be fair. Creating a good cross UI framework is hard. Winforms wouldn’t cross over to OS X / linux. WPF was too heavily tied to Windows. Silver light was a compeditor to flash and both of those died. Now we are up to Maui and Avalion? Blazor is more silverlight replacement imo.
Also, Winforms and WPF were designed before Microsoft embraced Linux and started making .NET truly cross-platform. Starting over with a new cross-platform UI framework sounds like a reasonable thing to do.
Their support for VSCode is pretty considerable and reached the point where I'm comfortable working on non-GUI applications in C# in it a while ago, and from a UI perspective prefer it to Visual Studio.
Maybe, but the discussion itself was about Microsoft's commitment to open-source. Open-sourcing VS Professional, traditionally (and still) an enterprise tool, would be a bridge too far. The commenter that started this debate called the article a straw man, which is ironic.
I've been working in .NET for the last year using intel Mac for the first 6 months exclusively and recently switching between Windows desktop and Mac (performance of desktop machine mostly, not willing to be early adopter with M1/2)
I also use Rider exclusively and going to Visual Studio on Windows now and then I'm not missing much (visual studio did have some nice plugin for debugging compiler plugins, had to hack around than in Rider)
I can't comment on Unity part.
F# for me overpromises and underdelivers - it all sounds amazing in theory but it's been 3 times over the last decade where I've tried to use it (last time just a few months ago) and it never just works - I've spent diagnosing "why isn't this F# feature working as advertised" than solving my problem (from tooling like F# projects breaking autocomplete in VS solution - even for C# projects, to language features like type providers just being a nightmare to work with and integrate into CI/CD)
Honestly I've found F# pretty OK to use compared to some other languages, especially when not using Visual Studio on a non-Windows machine where F# IMO is the better choice. Given a cross-development experience in some of the more recent .NET teams I've been in (great that this is finally occurring btw) especially the Mac developers using VS Code prefer F#. After using it the feedback is that the experience on F#, especially since with F# Resharper is not necessary to function/develop, is preferable over C# (i.e. "its more of a scripting language").
My observation is that the ex JS/Ruby/etc devs learning curve's seem to favor F# over C# as it is more like these languages. There's just a lot less to learn, and the coding style (e.g. modules, function first, etc) is more synonymous with langs like JS than heavy OO languages. I've recently inherited a team that moved to .NET from JS, and getting them to try C# has been painful especially when using things like ASP.NET. There's a lot of knowledge I just took for granted - we don't realise how much knowledge is required to use standard Java/C# OO in a production like setting that many dev's stumbled on when they were junior but have long forgotten the learning curve they went through. They tend to be framework heavy/dependent and require much more experience. From patterns (what's a strategy, repository, etc etc), to dep injection frameworks, to which refactoring tools I need, etc, etc - where in F# in my recent experience the experience is more, but still not quite "just code and work it out as you go".
The pit of success favors F# over C# in my experience with these teams especially if you keep it simple with the features used.
My experience has been that F# appeals to coders who are using the .NET platform coming from languages like JS/Go/etc but also has static typing who usually at least in the jobs I've been in are often on a Mac. C# dev's typically come from Java/C# enterprise kind of shops. Not one is better than the other and I will work in whatever space has interesting problems to solve - I think the difference is more cultural than technical.
No, but there are algebraic structures that allow for this, like the Riemann sphere. The proper way to talk about this is the concept of "zero dividers". For Z the only zero divider is zero, 0/0=0.
The closest thing to what you describe is the the dual number (that together with the imaginary and hyperbolic numbers make the geometric numbers), which has zero dividers, and is defined as k^2=0 (where k is not in R).
This is a very interesting number and it can help clean up a lot of problems when using complex numbers.
