The litmus test of this is whether they roll it out globally. If they do, Meta truly has seen the light; if they don't, this is just a cynical attempt to butter up Trump in case he regulates them into oblivion (as one could argue they deserve).
Because admitting that right/centre-right views are democratically popular would mean they'd actually have to grapple with the issues going on. It's cheaper and easier to make comparisons with the Nazis and play to the raw outrage of their readership than actually engage in real journalism.
That's as may be, but it's also a well-rehearsed cry of establishment media:
- "Neo-Nazi accused a fan of Nigel Farage, trial told", BBC [0]
- "Farage’s fascist past?", The Independent [1]
- "Giorgia Meloni appoints minister once pictured wearing Nazi armband", The Guardian [2]
- "Milei appoints former minister with pro-Nazi past as head of state lawyers", El Pais [3]
The first isn't anything to do with Farage, really. The rest are childhood indiscretions and one case of a bad taste outfit worn on a stag party. Google any democratically elected leader from the right followed by "nazis" and you'll find articles like this.
Sure, I get it, people like to call each other Nazis in a fight. I‘m just saying in the case of the FPÖ, it‘s a different story. They have/had Neo-Nazi connections, and that‘s well known.
In the sense that "establishment media" is rooted in the liberal, democratic, and constitutional state (you know, the one where free speech, freedom of the press and and many other civil liberties are actually protected) and has a problem with people who expound or even glorify ideas that would seek to abolish such a state (as proven by history)? Let's talk about civil liberties and free press in Nazi Germany, I'm pretty sure it becomes apparent why a free press is against a non-free society.
Then, maybe it really is just bad taste to show up with a Nazi armband but then, in a free country, a free press can and should point out that this is bad taste and that, maybe, we would like to consider if we want to vote or otherwise support someone with this kind of poor judgement into power. It is not a rehearsed speech just because you dislike the message.
I actually agree with you more or less entirely. I only suspect that the motivation for making such comparisons is not always so noble, however. Some of it is just plain old smearing.
The difference is that in Austria it has a bit of historic meaning.
And while there were (and probably are) Nazis and Neo-Nazis in different parties the VDU that later became the FPÖ definitely a way higher amount than average.
The left has been calling everyone on the right racist and Nazis for so long that it's lost its punch. Just because someone disagrees with you doesn't make them a Nazi or racist.
There is a growing body of evidence to suggest that heart deaths are up by a significant amount, that those deaths _may_ account for most or all of excess deaths currently seen, and that they _may_ be related to safety issues with some of the mRNA vaccines.[0]
I resent the fact that statements like this have become political and that I now have to explain myself. Nevertheless, here we go: I have no vested interested in this being true. I've had two doses of the stuff, I want it not to be true. However, there are legitimate questions here that have not been satisfactorily addressed. I'm raising this because reading the article and the other comments I can see nobody else has.
I would encourage people to look at the link and scrutinise the evidence presented themselves before deciding whether or not there might be an issue here that needs looking at.
It is kind of astonishing to me to witness the discussion in these comments proceeding civilly and with actual regard to the science. In my experience this is vanishingly rare. It's extremely refreshing. At risk of ruining that civility, I'd like to address some aspects of climate scepticism various other comments are touching on.
It is not difficult to see that a reasonable person may ask that if the UN is correct in saying 30% of climate change is due to methane[1] and this paper is correct in saying methane is 30% less effective at warming than we thought, then isn't this whole climate change problem potentially ~9% smaller than we thought? And isn't that actually pretty big? Big enough to potentially have policy implications?
I'm quite sure it's not that simple but nevertheless as a starting point for discovery it's a decent question. It's also a question that will be met with astonishing levels of derision on social media, mainstream media, and in society more generally. Merely asking it will have large international media outlets like the BBC openly describing the questioner as a 'climate sceptic/denier' which, while some may wear it as a badge of honour, actually serves the purpose of shaming them publicly for wrongthink. Social media will of course be far worse in this regard.
We now live in a world where it is popularly considered valid to provide a political (to put it kindly) response to a scientific question. It is, of course, both invalid and indefensible.
I have no ideological aversion to the idea that climate change is real and a serious threat, but the quality of societal discourse on the topic has become so poor and so overtly political that there is absolutely no basis upon which I can accept either of those assertions as _actually scientifically_ true (short of becoming a climate scientist and spending the next however many years personally reviewing all the literature). For me to accept these assertions as fact would be indistinguishable from a declaration of religious faith. It isn't going to happen.
Moreover the conduct of the pro-climate change 'lobby' from the IPCC to the BBC to Just Stop Oil activists has, on the whole, fallen so far short of the standard demanded by the severity of the problem they espouse that I simply don't believe them very much anymore. In my view--and I claim no authority on this matter, this is just how I see it--climate change may well be real and an existential threat, but it may also be a bureaucratic fantasy mistakenly grown from kernels of misunderstood or mistaken truths that has gotten so completely out of control that it's now controlling us. It could also be somewhere in between, or something else entirely: I don't know and I cannot know so long as society keeps excluding valid voices with valid questions.
I suppose I'm a climate sceptic then...but when it comes to deciding between being a sceptic or taking a leap of devotional faith, what choice do I have? Luckily it seems to me the way forward is the same in any case: the pro-climate change people, being the ones comprehensively 'winning' the 'argument' at the moment, need to show a little humility and engage in open debate with the well-meaning sceptics without the ad-hominem attacks, the gaslighting, the censorship, etc. It really is that simple, and the fact it’s so forcefully resisted should, in my view, give us all pause for thought.
Just a note, while I was in college some 6-7 years ago, I was told that methane was 19-21x worse than CO2. I don't think the consensus used to be that it was 28x.
The article also clarifies that while it is 28x, it also has a second effect in which it traps heat, so in total it seems to get to 20x.
One safe space for me is the IPCC report summary document itself.
It's generally couched much more cautiously than most of the rhetoric out there.
Its authors seem to really bend over backward to try to accurately characterize the various degrees of acceptance and certainty of the myriad different aspects of the "consensus."
And I've not seen a single good argument from skeptics. Just looking at the hockey stick graph is enough for me to understand the severity of the issue, and I've not seen a good answer to it, let alone most other arguments.
It depends what you want to use types for, really. If your motivation for using types is provable correctness and you can grok Haskell (or better yet, Idris), then you should do that. If you want performant dispatch, Clojure can give you JVM-level perf through the use of protocols. If, however, you want input validation (in the sense that you can be sure that a function argument you've been given will allow you to do what you intend with it) then static typing isn't the only player in that game.
In my experience (which I think resonates with RH and most Clojurists) is that for the vast majority of _information-driven_ systems, types are used as the latter. If you have a `Customer` class that gives you guarantees about the availability of, say, an `accountNumber` field, that is useful for correctness as you can be sure the information you need is there. However, if some future downstream coder wants to use your customer in the more general sense of being a human, then (s)he has to worry about sub/super/abstract-classing, may have to make upstream modifications to expose previously hidden data, and similar faffage. In Clojure the idiomatic solution to this problem is to "just use a map"; the real-world downside to this, however, is extremely weak contracts between functions. In this example, what `spec` allows you to do is strengthen those contracts by verifying that the data your function is provided is sufficient for your uses (as in the map contains all the keys you'll need with suitable data types in the fields) _without_ constraining what downstream consumers can also do with this data (extra map keys are ignored).
These checks are only done at runtime and only when enabled, however writing a spec gives you (very-nearly-almost) free generative testing that will run your function a default of 1000 times with random data in the correct shape to make sure it doesn't blow up—this isn't a guarantee of correctness, but it does provide extremely high levels of confidence (most type systems are also not even close to guaranteeing correctness either, only compliance with the type system). Spec also gives you (for free) performant runtime coercion for use in actual real-world code. You get a lot of bang for your buck.
`spec` is definitely not a type system, but it very capably fulfils a similar role in the kinds of programs Clojure was intended to be good at. It gives you all the flexibility and dynamism of Clojure with most of the confidence of static typing, without constraining either.
> by verifying that the data your function is provided is sufficient for your uses (as in the map contains all the keys you'll need with suitable data types in the fields) _without_ constraining what downstream consumers can also do with this data (extra map keys are ignored)
This assumes a very class-oriented type system. Duck-typing and the like don't have the upstream ontology problems.
My main desire from types is as an iteration assistant (with editor integration). Even if I wrote a function myself, I may not remember the exact order of arguments, or the exact name of that one property on the returned map. I want to a) be able to quickly peek and see what those things are - either by visiting the definition or, even better, via a pop-over in my editor - and b) have my editor tell me immediately if I did something dumb so I can correct it and keep moving.
In a dynamic language, whenever I need to double-check the contract for some code, I can't just go look look at its type signature, I have to go read through it. I have to fully load that whole subtree of information into my brain (recursively to any functions it may itself call), when I'm really trying to focus my thoughts on something else. This can be a huge, needless drain on mental resources.
Spec would help with this some, assuming the author follows a good convention of putting all of their assertions at the top of the function. But maybe those assertions are done inside conditionals, creating a more complex type. And maybe my editor doesn't know what to make of them (do any editors? genuinely curious). Etc. It just creates a bunch of little speedbumps to cognition that add up.
> In a dynamic language, whenever I need to double-check the contract for some code, I can't just go look look at its type signature, I have to go read through it. I have to fully load that whole subtree of information into my brain (recursively to any functions it may itself call), when I'm really trying to focus my thoughts on something else. This can be a huge, needless drain on mental resources.
Yes, this is a headache, and certainly a problem that afflicts Clojure. Spec doesn't really help much in this regard. There is a proper static typing system for Clojure[0] that does provide a lot of the editor integration you speak of, but as I recall it was a little too brittle and orthogonal to Clojure's way of doing things to be as useful as spec. Some of Clojure's core constructs are completely impossible to type statically.
As with everything there are tradeoffs and choices to be made. I've been writing Clojure professionally for 5+ years now and there's no other language I have much interest in dealing with full-time (yet). One has to choose one's poison I suppose.
There's also destructuring which both "extracts" local variables from data structures and serves as an informal documentation/description of the data shape.
You can combine type-hints and destructuring for a very powerful effect. Nowadays, I almost never have a problem "remembering" what or what shape of data I need to pass around.
Crucially they don't carry around mutable state by default. If you want a record with protocols to act like a stateful object you can do it, but you have to explicitly jump through hoops eg by embedding an atom in one of its fields and writing all your own getters/setters. It's not an especially pleasant or useful way to write Clojure(Script) but, as others have mentioned, it can be useful for things like achieving very high performance in certain situations.
I'm not so sure. Programming is isomorphic to mathematics (via logic) as proven by the Curry-Howard Correspondance, and so is not just applicable to ones problem/industry domain—it's applicable in a much more general sense. In my experience, the learnings on both sides of the coin filter back to the other in surprising and often highly insightful ways.
Server-side rendering of React applications is a pretty good reason to use Clojure on node as your server. Definitely not my preference of runtime but it does make this (quite common) use case substantially simpler for at least small- to medium-sized apps.
Zuck is making the right noises. Time will tell.