The way I understand this, the issue is that without reading it they cannot verify that it doesn’t contain sensitive information, so they can’t give it out. That sounds like a reasonable explanation to me.

The issue with online voting, no matter what you do, is that someone can force you under threat of violence to vote for a specific candidate, and watch to make sure you do it. Complete privacy in the voting booth is paramount to ensuring that everyone can vote freely.

Oh, I definitely get that the major appeal of excel is a close to non-existent barrier to entry. I mean, an elementary school kid can learn the basics(1) of using excel within a day. And yes, there are definitely programs out there that have excel as their only interface :/ I was really referring to the case where you have the option to do something “from scratch”, i.e. not relying on previously developed programs in the excel sheet.

(1) I’m aware that you can do complex stuff in excel, the point is that the barrier to entry is ridiculously low, which is a compliment.

I just cannot imagine any task you can do in excel that isn’t easier to do with Python/Pandas. The simplest manipulations of an excel sheet pretty much require you to chain an ungodly list of arcane commands that are completely unreadable, and god forbid you need to work with data from several workbooks at the same time…

You are neglecting the cost-benefit of temporarily jumping to the wrong conclusion while waiting for more conclusive evidence though. Not doing anything because evidence that this is bad is too thin, and being wrong, can have severe long-term consequences. Restricting tiktok and later finding out that it has no detrimental effects has essentially zero negative consequences. We have a word for this principle in my native language - that if you are in doubt about whether something can have severe negative consequences, you are cautious about it until you can conclude with relative certainty that it is safe, rather than the other way around, which would be what you are suggesting: Treating something as safe until you have conclusive evidence that it is not, at which point a lot of damage may already be done.

So what you’re saying is: We have a small sample of unreliable evidence that this thing may be absolutely detrimental to the developing brain. Thus, we should assume it’s fine until we have more reliable evidence. Did I get that right?

I am very fond of the idea of “stateless” code, which may seem strange coming from a person that likes OOP. When I say “stateless”, I am really referring to the fact that no class method should ever have any side-effect. Either it is an explicit set method, or it shouldn’t affect the output from other methods of the object. Objects should be used as convenient ways of storing/manipulating data in predictable/readable ways.

I’ve seen way too much code where a class has methods which will only work"as expected" if certain other methods have been called first.

Sounds reasonable to me: With what I’ve written I don’t think I’ve ever been in a situation like the one you describe, with an algorithm split over several classes. I feel like a major point of OOP is that I can package the data and the methods that operate on it, in a single encapsulated package.

Whenever I’ve written in C, I’ve just ended up passing a bunch of structs and function pointers around, basically ending up doing “C with classes” all over again…

I would argue that there are very definitely cases where operator overloading can make code more clear: Specifically when you are working with some custom data type for which different mathematical operations are well defined.

This makes sense to me, thanks! I primarily use Python, C++ and some Fortran, so my typical programs / libraries aren’t really “pure” OOP in that sense.

What I write is mostly various mathematical models, so as a rule of thumb, I’ll write a class to represent some model, which holds the model parameters and methods to operate on them. If I write generic functions (root solver, integration algorithm, etc.) those won’t be classes, because why would they be?

It sounds to me like the issue here arises more from an “everything is a nail” type of problem than anything else.

Oh, thanks then! I’ve heard people shred on OOP regularly, saying that it’s full of foot-canons, and while I’ve never understood where they’re coming from, I definitely agree that there are tasks that are best solved with a functional approach.

Can someone please enlighten me on what makes inheritance, polymorphism, an operator overloading so bad? I use the all regularly, and have yet to experience the foot cannons I have heard so much about.

I’ve found chatgpt reasonably good for one thing: Generating regex-patterns. I don’t know regex for shit, but if I ask for a pattern described with words, I get a working pattern 9/10 times. It’s also a very easy use-case to double check.

I was thinking something similar: If you have the computer write in a formal language, designed in such a way that it is impossible to make an incorrect statement, I guess it could be possible to get somewhere with this

We tried the “trade your skills for something you need”. In every surviving society it eventually lead to the development of a currency (not hard to see why), which requires/leads to regulation, which requires enforcement, aaaand you’re back at a modern society. I’m all for more regulation to reduce economic and social differences in society, but the people that are talking about abolishing governments and currencies need to pick up a history book and follow their ideas to their natural conclusion.

“Controlling speech” is a hallmark of authoritarian governments, be they far-left or far-right, there are plenty of historical examples of both.

You’re definitely correct that getting sychrotron time is hard :(

On the first part though: Yes and no. XRD will tell you about things like strain and unit cell size distribution, so in that sense, you can’t resolve a single doping site. On the other hand, if you have a reaction going on, or some dopant diffusing into your sample, synchrotron XRD is powerful/fast enough that you can “film” how the crystal structure changes in real time. That “film” will be a kind of average of many sites, but can still be focused to a relatively small region (don’t remember exactly how small off the top of my head, but I believe we’re talking nm-scale).

Not 100% comparable, but synchrotron XRD allows for real-imaging of solid state chemical reactions and can, in a sense, resolve the unit cell structure of the crystal. However, what you get from an XRD is nothing like this “photo-like” image, but a diffractogram. I think you could probably re-create an image like this from a 2D diffractogram though, but I’m not sure.

I cannot stress enough how much this reads exactly like every bot-written tutorial ever. They spend pages beating around the bush and filling the site with useless word-salad, and if you ever have a slightly unconventional problem, you can be positive that it will not even be mentioned in the guide.

Looking at a half circle and guessing that the “missing part” is a full circle is as much of a blind guess as you can get. You have exactly zero evidence that there is another half circle present. The missing part could be anything, from nothing to any shape that incorporates a half circle. And you would be guessing without any evidence whatsoever as to which of those things it is. That’s blind guessing.

Extrapolating into regions without prior data with a non-predictive model is blind guessing. If it wasn’t, the model would be predictive, which generative AI is not, is not intended to be, and has not been claimed to be.

I 100 % agree on your primary point. I still want to point out that a detail in a 4k picture that takes up a few pixels will likely be invisible to the naked eye unless you zoom. “Digital zoom” without interpolation is literally just that: Enlarging the picture so that you can see details that take up too few pixels for you to discern them clearly at normal scaling.