The best exploration of this that I have seen in media is one of my favorite
movies: Nightcrawler (2014), starring Jake Gyllenhaal. The movie doesn't touch
on the government/democracy aspect of the article, but it very much captures
the notion that desparate people can be pressured to do horrible things when
their job is at stake.
In Nightcrawler, some characters are trying to get ahead, and others are
desperate not to fall behind, but their opportunism (driven by the necessity to
make money in order to survive in our capitalist society) makes all of them
vulnerable to exploitation by an ambitious psychopath. In that case, he is
profit-motivated, whereas the article here is about dictators retaining power,
but the same principles apply. The movie does an amazing job of exploring how
these individuals can wield power irresponsibly, poison everyone who gives them
an inch, and sound almost reasonable while they do it. It is a masterful
portrayal of how much some people can be willing to compromise on their morals
for their job.
If you haven't seen it, you should watch it. If you have seen it, but don't
remember it being deeply critical of capitalist society, you should re-watch
it. (It's easy to get so engrossed by the truly suspenseful and thrilling
moment-to-moment action that you miss the big picture.) The deterioration of
American news media is a more overt theme in the movie, but in my opinion, that
serves as a complementary backdrop to the anticapitalist message, which is the
engine that drives the movie inexorably onward. Also the acting, directing, and
writing are great.
Don't spoil it by reading the plot summary, just watch it.
I like currying because it's fun and cool, but found myself nodding along throughout the whole article. I've taken for granted that declaring and using curried functions with nice associativity (i.e., avoiding lots of parentheses) is as ergonomic as partial application syntax gets, but I'm glad to have that assumption challenged.
The "hole" syntax for partial application with dollar signs is a really creative alternative that seems much nicer. Does anyone know of any languages that actually do it that way? I'd love to try it out and see if it's actually nicer in practice.
Clojure CL as well have macros that let you thread results from call to call, but you could argue that's cheating because of how flexible Lisp syntax is.
Clojure also has the anonymous function syntax with #(foo a b %) where you essentially get exactly this hole functionality (but with % instead of $). Additionally there’s partial that does partial application, so you could also do (partial foo a b).
Thanks! I also told Aga via email in the thread where I submitted my article.
Worth noting that the HTML tag in the title was stripped from the PDF table of contents as well, so the title for that article in the contents is missing a word. No big deal, but good to know for future submissions!
Wow, this is jam-packed with interesting information. Thanks for writing it! (Also thanks for all of your other great open source work!)
Are there plans to upstream this into the Zig std library? Seems like it could be useful for more than just the cryptography package, since the benchmarks at the end have it often being faster than std pdqsort. I just checked the issue trackers on Codeberg and GitHub, and didn't see anything mentioning djbsort or NTRU Prime, which leads me to believe there aren't (official) plans to upstream this (yet).
pdqsort is a generic comparison sort. Want to sort employee names, customer email addresses, JSON blobs, or Zebras? No problem, pdqsort just needs an ordering, in both Zig and C++ you write this as a single boolean "less" predicate.
DJB's speed-up relies on vectorization, which works great for integers or things you can squint at and see an integer - but obviously can't sort your employee names, customer email addresses, JSON blobs or Zebras. You could write these branchless network designs anyway but I'm pretty sure they'd be markedly slower, at least for some common inputs.
It’s different every time, but basically “marketing”. No matter where you are showing your stuff, it’s in a subset of the population, chances are HN won’t be buying your app subscription. You need to get it in front of your actual audience.
As someone who has a small bit of skill in marketing nowadays, where would you advice me to deeply learn it? I think I have enough knowledge now to have developed a taste of what is actually good but don't know where to find a good curriculum to get started.
See also "Product Hunt". Oddly it's been about a year since I've noticed anybody who mistakes a Product Hunt launch for a marketing plan but that used to be endemic.
I consider Recursion by Blake Crouch to be similar, even though I liked Antimemetics much better. I haven't read Crouch's other books, but have heard that Dark Matter is better than Recursion, though it may be less similar to Antimemetics.
Nice fork! (I am the person who wrote the original.)
My version is still working well for me, so it's been hard to find motivation to update it. Also, I've been using my increasingly limited free time to work on some exciting new projects, rather than maintenance tasks that feel like a continuation of my day job.
All that to say I'm excited about new repos like yours that take the idea further! I also really appreciate your attention to detail calling out the differences with the original, and that you licensed your version under the GPL.
Hey, I wrote this! There are a couple of reasons that I included the disclosure.
The main one is to set reader expectations that any errors are entirely my own, and that I spent time reviewing the details of the work. The disclosure seemed to me a concise way to do that -- my intention was not any form of anti-AI virtue signaling.
The other reason is that I may use AI for some of my future work, and as a reader, I would prefer a disclosure about that. So I figured if I'm going to disclose using it, I might as well disclose not using it.
I linked to other thoughts on AI just in case others are interested in what I have to say. I don't stand to gain anything from what I write, and I don't even have analytics to tell me more people are viewing it.
All in all, I was just trying to be transparent, and share my work.
Your actor analogy in your other post about AI doesn't really work when it comes to using LLMs for coding, at least. LLMs are pretty good at writing working code, especially given suitable guidance. An actor wouldn't be able fake their way through that.
That's nice to hear. For me personally, I don't really care what tools the author uses to write the article, as long as the author takes responsibility! Yes, that means I'll blame you for everything I see in the article :P
In Nightcrawler, some characters are trying to get ahead, and others are desperate not to fall behind, but their opportunism (driven by the necessity to make money in order to survive in our capitalist society) makes all of them vulnerable to exploitation by an ambitious psychopath. In that case, he is profit-motivated, whereas the article here is about dictators retaining power, but the same principles apply. The movie does an amazing job of exploring how these individuals can wield power irresponsibly, poison everyone who gives them an inch, and sound almost reasonable while they do it. It is a masterful portrayal of how much some people can be willing to compromise on their morals for their job.
If you haven't seen it, you should watch it. If you have seen it, but don't remember it being deeply critical of capitalist society, you should re-watch it. (It's easy to get so engrossed by the truly suspenseful and thrilling moment-to-moment action that you miss the big picture.) The deterioration of American news media is a more overt theme in the movie, but in my opinion, that serves as a complementary backdrop to the anticapitalist message, which is the engine that drives the movie inexorably onward. Also the acting, directing, and writing are great.
Don't spoil it by reading the plot summary, just watch it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nightcrawler_(film)