Interesting. I go about this differently. I have one master setting and from there ruby just autogenerates anything I'd ever need on other computers. If ruby is unavailable then I just copy the generated files. But I only edit the master setting to enable what I need.
> This process has served me well for at least 15 years now and is supported by a small handful of shell scripts to automate this process
I feel in a similar way but not with shell scripts. Ruby autogenerates them if I need them too. Ruby is my ultimate glue to hold together everything.
I hate . dirs. In fact, I hate them so much that I don't use them.
My configuration lives primarily in .yml files. These are kept
super-simple. When need be and another format is required, ruby
autogenerates these for me. For instance, all my bash aliases
are kept in .yml files which then get turned into bash rc files
or any other target format for other shells. Same for most of my
other configuration too - not always .yml but usually some text
file. I never understood the neet for .foobar directories or files.
They just hide a system that is intrinsically ugly and needlessly
complicated.
At some point they gave up on quality control. Not sure why but things went downhill at Microsoft years ago already. With the rise of AI slop and Microsoft turning into microslop, this trend just became amplified.
They fired all of their SDET, eliminated the SDET role/discipline, and made SDEs responsible for quality and shipping their features, a major conflict of interest.
Linux doesn’t define a GUI. I think you mean ”Now if only there were a distribution of Linux that implemented my personal idea of what a GUI should be.”
To which, I bet someone does. If you think Windows nails all the right ideas, there is Mint.
This depends on the country. Austria is doing quite well here.
Why are there so many homeless people in the USA? If your assumption were to work, it would not be the case. You are simply making an incomplete analysis here.
> Why are there so many homeless people in the USA? If your assumption were to work, it would not be the case.
Are you somehow assuming homeless people are all old retired people eligible for pensions? I literally cannot follow your logic here in any way no matter how much I try.
> Last week I wrote about the question of whether Europe is really falling behind the United States economically.
The USA has a few key areas where it benefits a lot - for instance, the oil mafia that is controlled by the USA, e. g. the old petrodollar deal, though with the defeat of the USA against Iran (look at the "Memorandum of Understanding" signed by Trump recently) this may change a little. But an even more important area of US dominance is the software situation. The US corporations control WAY too much already. That is not good. Then add the fact that the arms industry as well as the nuclear arsenal, is also heavily controlled by the USA; arms industry is more varied, but the nuke issue is a problem, even more so when you see that Putin has Trump by the ... precious. Europe needs to disentangle as much as possible from the USA in every area. And this is not happening. Quite the opposite, Merz is constantly surrendering and submitting to Trump. He is like the ultimate US politician. Recently the EU parliament also submitted to defeat by agreeing to Trump's selfish trade deal. And european nukes? Where are these?
So unfortunately, Europe is not doing well. It is not doing completely wrong either, but it is acting like an old man who wants to submit to others. And I don't see the current generation of politicians in the EU to want to change this. They get too much financial kickback to hold down other european citizens right now. Nobody will fix the EU either, so - a deadlock situation.
The prices of drugs in the USA are especially high. This is interesting
because the USA claims to pursue a maximum capitalistic society - but if
this were the case, you'd have competition in a free market. But you don't
have that. You have a cartel (or rather more than one).
A pure capitalistic society works on assumptions that are not real. People
are often cheaters. This would have to be taken into account. But when you
have an orange Al Capone in charge, it is pillage day. Even before the orange
King you had heavily overcharged prices in the health care system. You need
to realise that you have a mafia in charge that does not want to change this
system. Why kill the cow that you can milk for free?
> This is interesting because the USA claims to pursue a maximum capitalistic society
No it doesn't. This is silly.
Drug prices in the US are high for non-generic drugs because patent law gives the patent holder an artificial government-granted monopoly, which is blatantly not "pure" or "maximum capitalistic".
Generic drugs - where the free market does apply - in the US are as cheap or cheaper than in other countries. See [0]:
U.S. prices for brand-name originator drugs were 422 percent of prices in
comparison countries, while U.S. unbranded generics, which we found account for 90
percent of U.S. prescription volume, were on average cheaper at 67 percent of
prices in comparison countries, where on average only 41 percent of prescription
volume is for unbranded generics.
The maximum libertarian alternative to patents isn't free-for-all copying, it's trade secret formulas - e.g. Coca Cola. Drug patents actually exist as a compromise given the clear need for the state to force companies to publish their drug formulas for research. Allowing companies to just keep their drugs secret would be even more capitalistic, and would increase drug prices even more.
This is where prizes come in. If you create a drug and keep it secret, the government can grant you a large prize as an offer to reveal your secret.
This is a much better compromise. The company will end up with more money(and faster!) as a result of this prize than under a patent system - since the patent system induces dead-weight losses, and the government will end up with more lives saved.
That is just an inefficient way to spend taxpayer money than straight up paying researchers from the government’s accounts.
The US has an enormously large higher education system with all the expertise and manpower to facilitate large trials of novel medicines. The only thing missing is political will to spend the money, so instead, Eli Lilly or Novartis or Pfizer etc spend investor’s money to do it.
And then taxpayers pay for it in a super convoluted way.
Prizes pay for working results. Grants pay for possibilities. Grants are therefore riskier, and thus we allocate less resources to them.
Since the people with the money don't understand the science, these possibilities must then be assessed by bureaucrats, and this causes our best to spend half of their time writing proposals instead of working and researching. A complete waste of time. Let the people who know the most about their subject freedom to take risks, and then they are given the spoils of their rewards if they are proven correct.
Prizes are much more efficient than grants. Prizes should be given to academics according to the value they produced. I have no issue if the academics choose to spend some of the windfall profits of their prizes on trials.
> Since the people with the money don't understand the science, these possibilities must then be assessed by bureaucrats, and this causes our best to spend half of their time writing proposals instead of working and researching. A complete waste of time.
What part of this changes when a company is paying for the research, and why can't that same part be used in a government office? It's not like drug company CEOs and CFOs are also world class medical researchers. And if the funding decisions are entirely done by a CTO who is, then why would this model not be possible in a government office?
Ultimately someone needs to pay for all of the trials that don't work, and someone needs to do a cost/benefit/likelihood analysis on any research to decide whether it will be funded or not. With a public funding scheme, the benefit analysis could be based on public health interests. With a private company funding scheme, it has to be based on profitability. In healthcare, there is usually a huge gap between these two, unlike other more traditional markets.
They keep their processes secret instead under the current system, achieving a "trade-secret" like result for some drugs. For some drugs it achieves the same thing because finding a practical economic synthesis is the hard part rather than coming upon a small bit of chemical that is proven to be effective. For others it wouldn't matter whether you kept it secret or not, someone would isolate and characterize it and reverse engineer a practical synthesis.
The biggest value protector arguably of the patent-FDA approval process is on the FDA side, who create massive barriers to entry that mitigate close unpatented chemical competitors from outside the pharma oligopoly from competing.
Is the patent not for the synthesis route itself, rather than the drug? Someone can't just plop down a chemical formula on a piece of paper and patent that, can they?
I'm not really happy with the current system either - I tend to think that the state should just mandate that all medical research be fully published, and either have companies compete on research and manufacturing, or pay for it directly if it can't be made to work as a private business. My point was just that this is very much not a capitalist or libertarian position.
"Drug prices in the US are high for non-generic drugs because patent law gives the patent holder an artificial government-granted monopoly, which is blatantly not "pure" or "maximum capitalistic"."
This is very much capitalistic. It's not competitive markets (which are good for consumers) but capitalists hate competition once they have made it to the top.
> This is interesting because the USA claims to pursue a maximum capitalistic society
I don’t know why you think this. The US is not a maximally capitalist society. The reason drug prices are so high is due to regulations restriction who can manufacture them due to government-granted temporary monopolies through patent law.
If the US was maximally capitalist it would be a free for all with no patent protection.
> If the US was maximally capitalist it would be a free for all with no patent protection.
The much more likely alternative in a maximally capitalist / free market maximalist society would be keeping all drug formulas as trade secrets, and thereby having all drugs as branded, no generics whatsoever (or few - perhaps some substances could be reverse engineered). In such a society, having the state force companies to publish their formulas would be seen as unacceptable interference in the free market, almost certainly.
I'm not convinced about trade secrets being the capitalistic route here, specially since, as pointed out somewhere else, the current system is basically like trade-secrets already, which suggest inverted causality.
In a pure free market, someone could try to keep the formulas secret, but others can just reverse engineer it into being public, which is basically guaranteed to happen if there's sufficient demand. Given that they aren't wasting money trying to obfuscate the recipe nor the formula, these competitors do have an advantage over the original. As such, I posit that free-to-copy will be default behavior in a pure free market, with trade-scerets being resteicted on niche sectors.
The reason we can't do this today is primarily that reverse engineering is heavily restricted by IP laws.
The recipe for Coca Cola, the most popular soft drink in the world by far, has been a trade secret for over 100 years. And I'd wager a guess that it's slightly simpler to make then most medicines. So I don't see any reason whatsoever to assume that drugs would be easily reverse engineered.
Instead, I'd say that the assertion that today's drug making is hard to reverse engineer is hard even knowing the exact formula, substance, and dosage of every drug is unlikely to be true - is there any example of any drug that generics companies are not producing more cheaply than the original inventor, once the patent has expired?
I don't think Coca Cola is a good counterpoint due to a couple of reasons:
1) there was a recent attempt to find the formula [1], but the primary reason that was infeasible is that, allegedly by the ingredient list, they use coca extract and, IIRC, only one company provides that in the US, due to FDA regulations. Even if they were find the formula behind, it wouldn't help much, so they're are trying to replicate the flavor instead.
2) Coca Cola is, before anything, a brand. It's not comparable to generic medications because people in general don't buy it for the formula specifically, but the expectation of flavor and taste associated with the brand. Even if you were to find the current formula, the Coca Cola Company can just change it.
In regards to the last point, there probably is one (likely in heavily subsidized prices case), but, regardless, I don't see how your point shows patents are the reason anymore than a increase in competition, which we are proposing would happen if patents were abolished.
Look at the development of price and quality of something that is outside the regulated medical system, like eg Lasik, and everything within that system. Its like night and day.
If we had proper competition and price discovery, things would be much better.
Are you under the impression that dentists are under competitive pressure? The labour supply is artificially limited, similar to other doctor specialisations.
Are you in the US? This is not my experience at all. I've paid in US <2000 for dental invasive surgery including general anesthesia straight cash. That's approaching prices for medical care in Mexico.
Dentists are only slightly more honest as a profession than Chiropractors. More than half of the one's you meet are outright fraudsters/charlatans/scammers. Most who work in that business will reincarnate as cockroaches or durian fruits.
This is completely backwards read Marx. Superstructure (culture, politics) flows from the economic base (there are some important exceptions, but that’s the dominant arrow).
Coding agents do not affect me at all, meaning, I don't care about them. I think this is also the case for some other developers.
Having said that, though, this assumes that xyz is great - or was great already - before coding agents. The team around Nim is great, and nim is not inelegant, but you kind of need to want to like types, and I found that to be the biggest obstacle for entry (also for crystal, by the way; the "just ruby, but with types" is IMO an incorrect description - just simulating syntax does not mean you are having the same language. This is even more so not the case with elixir. Some people think ruby is solely or primarily ruby because of the syntax. This is wrong; it is the philosophy that is the main difference between e. g. ruby and crystal or ruby and elixir, not the syntax; syntax comes after the philosophy and the philosophy is very different, though admittedly in crystal it is closer to ruby's philosophy than elixir's philosophy is to ruby's philosophy). I kind of like having to not want to care about types at all. This is also why I think those who want to slap on types on ruby and python are wrong. They use their own biased mindset to project from this point on, how languages without types are useless. And you can not convince them otherwise - they have set up their brain to function only that way already, which is interesting (and explains why they are so desperately trying to add types to e. g. ruby and python, as an example).
This may seem like a modern conflict, but what I like about your post is its more general human cognitive orientation. Since to each new generation everything is new, people tend to forget that this kind of tension goes back to the dawn of programming with Fortran and Lisp, or even earlier if you count various notations for math.
FWIW, CPUs/hardware structurally do not have quite as much luxury for dynamism/monotyped things. So, all this does connect with how tight/abstract a bridge to the hardware world one cares about (which just varies). That naturally connects to performance, but that also becomes tricky once one moves to pragmatic problem decomposition over purity (e.g. NOT "pure" Python or "pure" Ruby). In my experience, people tend to overvalue purity as much as they tend to over-simplify. :-)
Governments always want to know everything. They are like the biggest data sniffers now, even more so than e. g. CIA-book (formerly known as Facebook).
They do, but that's irrelevant to this. Most normal people also don't want phone calls to be completely anonymous or spoofed, and the phone network has never been meant to be anonymous.
Guys.
We will just skip to perl7 anyway. People are too confused now.
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