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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • There are other rarely-used C+±like languages that fit your criteria, and they basically all aim to eliminate the kind of thing I was talking about. If someone was used to one of those and tried picking up C++ for the first time, they’d probably end up with working, but unnecessarily slow C++, having assumed the compiler would do a bunch of things for them that it actually wouldn’t.

    The popular low-level systems programming languages that aren’t C++ are C and Rust. Neither is object-oriented. C programmers forced to use C++ tend to basically write C with a smattering of features that make it not compile with a C compiler, and produce a horror show that brings out the worst of both languages and looks nothing like C++ a C++ programmer would write, then write a blog post about how terrible C++ is because when they tried using it like C, it wasn’t as good at being C as C was. Rust programmers generally have past experience with C++, so tend to know how to use it properly, even if they hate the experience.


  • I’d say this is pretty dependent on the language. For example, with C++, you need to micromanage (or at least benefit from micromanaging) a lot of things that you can get away without knowing about at all with other languages. That stuff takes time to pick up if you’re self-teaching as you can write stuff that looks like it works without knowing its half as fast as it could be because you aren’t making use of move semantics, and if a colleague is teaching you, then that’s time they’re not spending directly doing their own work. On the other hand, someone with Typescript experience could write pretty decent Javascript from the get-go.




  • The perfect, good, mediocre, and just barely tolerable are all enemies. Sometimes bad is better as it doesn’t erode the motivation to solve the problem and means you’re more likely to end up with a good solution later. Often, when people accuse others of letting the perfect be the enemy of the good, the option was neither perfect nor good, just mediocre or barely tolerable. The exception is when one solution can go on to evolve into a better one, but it can still be better to wait until it does before deploying it.

    I’m not convinced this is exactly applicable to the story in the OP, though. The compromise would have eroded the motivation to vote for the original legislation in that election, but probably made it more likely that it could have happened in the next one, and made the consequences of putting it off that long slightly less bad.





  • We can genetically engineer bacteria to mimic the missing pancreatic cells, and it’s not too different to the way most insulin is produced as all that’s new is the system to stop producing insulin when blood sugars are already low enough. However, if you put them in a person, the immune system attacks the bacteria, so they need isolating. To do that, we need a membrane that lets sugar in and insulin out, but doesn’t let antigens or live bacteria out, and doesn’t let immune cells in. Even if the bacteria are held in place, if immune cells can get in, it’s no better than a pancreatic transplant as you’ll still need immunosuppressants, and they’re generally worse than dealing with type one manually. Development of the membrane keeps hitting unexpected hurdles, so artifical pancreases are still unable to start trials, and then they might take a decade.

    There are other approaches, e.g. using electronics to control photosensitive insulin producing bacteria, but they don’t have any advantages (the membrane still has to let sugar in so the bacteria can eat) and have more things that can go wrong.


  • Fair use only covers critique, parody and education, and only with a whole bunch of extra nuance (e.g. you can’t just put a clip of yourself saying you didn’t like a movie at the end of the movie and get away with hosting it on your site by claiming it was critique, and you can’t download a PDF of a textbook and get away with it by claiming it was for education). Fair use lets you do a lot less than people think.


  • Quantum dot LED TVs don’t actually use quantum dot LEDs (yay, marketing). They’re built like any other LCD, but instead of having a white backlight (typically a blue LED with a phosphor to fluoresce the blue to green and red, too, making white) and then a colour filter behind each pixel subelement to only let the right colour through, they have a blue LED backlight, and then a quantum dot film that fluoresces the blue to the right colour.

    The advantage of this is that you’re not making light in colours you can’t use just to get absorbed by the filter and turned into heat, so can make the backlight brighter, which, when combined with other techniques to make good LCDs, is enough to make them comparable to OLEDs in quality and price.

    Actual quantum dot LEDs let you make light at practically any frequency you want, like OLEDs (traditional LEDs only make light at bandgap frequencies for atoms of elements, and there’s not a huge choice of suitable elements, hence blue LEDs taking decades to materialise after other colours were cheap). In theory, quantum dot LEDs won’t have burn-in problems, but they’re currently not practical to make a TV out of, giving marketing people plenty of time to weasel out of their fuckup with naming existing QLED TVs.



  • Despite how it’s often framed, the NHS doesn’t get to make recommendations one way or the other in this kind of case. Once the patient’s doctors are no longer sure that it’s in their best interest to continue being kept alive, they make the legal system aware, and a court will take evidence from the patient (if they’re in a fit condition to give any, which they usually wouldn’t be), doctors, family members, relevant experts, and any other appropriate witnesses, to determine what is and isn’t in the patient’s best interest. One the court has made a decision (which might involve a lengthy appeals process if the family are upset about the initial decision), the NHS does what the court tells it to. If the patient is capable of experiencing anything other than pain, it’s unlikely that it’ll be in their best interest to die, so the court will order them to be kept alive.

    It’s relatively common for anti-abortion and anti-state-funded-healthcare political campaign groups from the US to pay for expensive lawyers to argue in favour of keeping child patients alive and persuade the parents to keep appealing as upset parents saying the state killed their baby makes an evocative headline that can easily be pivoted to make the most merciful option look cruel and callous, and sway people’s votes.

    There’s a chapter on this in one of The Secret Barrister’s books - I think the second one.