The West just wants to hurt Assad and by extension Russia and Iran. It is truly an evil war. Syria would have been better off under Assad than with what has happened due to Western intervention. The bar for toppling a sovereign order should be very high, and should almost always include a high chance of quick success and a viable alternative regime.
Windows 2000 was an NT release, but Windows Millenium Edition (Me) was the last generally released DOS-based desktop OS released by Microsoft. Windows Me was released after Windows 2000 by a few months.
Yes, it was the direct successor of NT 4.0. Windows 2000 was still an OS aimed at the "professional" market, though. XP was the first consumer/mainstream oriented OS based on NT.
PC Magazine had the weird idea of shipping a CD-ROM of the Beta release. Having an obsession to try anything I decided to replace win98 with this thing (I had no idea what NT was).
It was so lean, fast and stable that I never used anything else until the day XP had some drivers that were absolutely necessary to use my desktop. 99% of low level crashes would just pop up a notification and nothing more, it was insane.
I used win2k for like 10 years and continued to play games it as well. I was able to ride on the XP coat tails because between the two, there were only a handful of win32 APIs that were not implemented in 2000. I ended up having to patch a few DLLs to ignore these missing endpoints, but it meant I could use legitimately the best windows there ever was for a few more years. Eventually I "upgraded" to windows 7 to get reasonable driver support because manufacturers finally stopped shipping 2k compatible drivers.. what a sad day that was.
It’s better to not be an asshole. But it’s mostly okay to be an asshole too. The world needs more than just ultra-agreeable people. I reckon grudge-holding is way more destructive to teams than abrasiveness. There’s lots to be said in favor of the asshole who moves past a conflict as soon as it’s over.
Its unnecessary conflict. If everything is the same level of disagreement, what are you _actually_ arguing and what do you just _happen_ to be arguing? You give the other party no capacity to gauge your actual level of interest. It makes the entire process that much harder for everyone and wastes the "argument budget" on ultimately meaningless stuff. Its a very similar idea to being "penny wise, pound foolish".
People are a variety of ways. A healthy culture can accommodate that variety within reason. I reckon we’ve become a little too focused on agreeableness as a culture. Not that you should strive to be an asshole. But some people are just naturally blunt and abrasive. And that’s okay. A lot of the trouble is in people’s reactions to that, since thick skin seems to be on long-term decline too.
I’m not sure we’re disagreeing about anything. What you wrote is good advice to someone who’s too argumentative.
Right, but its basically hoping that human nature fundamentally changes rather than just not making big deals about things which dont matter. The article is a great example. The anecdote is that he argued aggressively against "IF, THEN, ELSE" because its _grammatically incorrect_ even though every other language used it. He suggests "IF, THEN, OR", which is _just as bad but also different_! So now we are wasting time/energy debating this thing and the suggestion isnt even good! So how am I supposed to interpret this as the "non arguer" in this scenario? That you put the quality of the product first, or that you just want to "win" the argument in _every single scenario_? I'm likely to interpret it as the latter and now we are in a worse spot as a team because, again, I can't assume you are not just arguing for the sake of arguing in the future.
Ability to work and communicate with abrasive people is a valuable skill as well. I get to practice it here on HN sometimes.
I try to ignore the tone and insults and reply as if nothing was happening. Easier to do through text than through voice or in person. It's smart to move any discussion to a written medium in order to reply calmly and create a paper trail.
> There’s lots to be said in favor of the asshole who moves past a conflict as soon as it’s over.
I think I used to fit something like this description. I was very blunt about disagreements but I was always well intentioned and forgiving. Sometimes people took the bluntness too seriously and couldn't see that I was trying to help them.
I've since softened up somewhat. In retrospect I think some of the bluntness was a symptom of externally imposed stress.
If you throw rocks at a military unit and then chase them as they try to retreat, you’re fair game. Throwing rocks is no small matter. A single blow from a rock can kill a man. Not to mention that this was part of a series of demonstrations that had already devolved into outright rioting.
However, no less than future President John Adams defended the British soldiers in court! And of the eight British soldiers charged with manslaughter, Adams got six acquitted and two got the minor (for the time) punishment of branding their thumbs.
It's surprising how far the "American" version of the revolutionary war has spread, but it's probably because the British didn't care that much and afterwards not pissing off a friendly partner was more important.
Much of what is "taught" about the revolutionary war is obviously one-sided bullshit.
I was talking to some American friends the other day about the Boston Tea Party. It was recently propped up by the ACLU as a proud heritage moment of American protest. But my understanding is that it was a riot involving theft and destruction of property. I don’t think the seizure and destruction of the contents of, say, an Amazon Delivery Van would be seen the same way.
As a non-American with no real motivation to see any specific narrative be promoted, it feels like American history often leans heavily on “the ends justify the means.”
There is a difference between targeted violence and destruction of property as a means to exert economic pressure on a trading entity, and untargeted violence and destruction of property as a means to express your displeasure with current life. The historical claim of the Boston Tea Party rioters is that they broke a padlock and paid for a new one, as the padlock was personal property; the rest of the cargo was dumped into the harbor and ruined deliberately.
If someone was protesting Amazon, or the government's protection of Amazon, and as part of their protest they seized and destroyed the contents of an Amazon delivery van, they would be demonstrating a viable and possibly effective method of hurting Amazon (although you'd have to destroy a lot of delivery vans.)
The fact of the matter is that there are no governments that exist by the full consent of the governed. The only way for a "fully justified" government to exist is for no government to exist. The American revolution was no more or less justified than the formation of the Ottoman empire, or of Egypt during the time of the pharaohs.
Most Americans have absolutely no idea about what happened during the Boston Massacre except "British Bad", which is exactly what the propaganda wanted.
I think their acquittal says more about the court system than of the incident that led to the trial. With a good lawyer, you have always been able to get away with murder.
You’re right, at one point nvim was a continuation, but no more. For example nvim significantly cleaned up and reorganized and rewrote vim’s C code, they added complex new features like Lua config, floating windows, better plugin support. Vim copied many features they released independently… maybe vim is the continuation here now? I think one of my favorite things about vim the continuation is that after sitting on a terrible config language for >2 decades somehow when nvim released Lua support all of the sudden vim was working on a new incompatible version of vimscript.
Neovim was never a continuation. Bram has never stopped developing Vim.
As I understand it, the people behind Neovim developed some async patches which were not accepted by Bram for various reasons, and there was an ongoing discussion. Rather than reworking them to something that Bram thought was acceptable, they performed a hard fork. In the process of hard forking, they removed everything that they considered unimportant. This included gvim, support for older OSes, etc.
Vim has not, to the best of my knowledge, copied any features back from neovim, although it does now (shortly after Neovim forked) have async features (written with an API and user surface that Bram prefers) and various other features that may be similar.
Please note that Vim has had Lua, Ruby, Python, Perl, and other scripting language support for a very long time. The main difference is that rather than being compiled as an add-on and using bridging, neovim has added a Lua engine into the core (increasing complexity that way) and creating a DX-poor bridge for common vim configuration things so that startup scripts can be written in Lua.
Yes, Bram started working on Vimscript9 late, but your characterization of the history also is (unintentionally?) dishonest in that Vimscript has had extensive expansion and updates through time.
Neovim is not and has never been a continuation of the Vim project, despite their press. It has always been a hard fork that is getting increasingly incompatible with the source project, and I personally find it less usable than Vim because there’s not a single good GUI for it (there are several which may eventually become promising, and there are several which have taken bizarre directions like Oni2 did).
>… neovim has added a Lua engine into the core (increasing complexity that way) and creating a DX-poor bridge for common vim configuration things so that startup scripts can be written in Lua.
And one can look at the explosion of new Lua-based plugins that have been developed because of it. People hated Vimscript. Now that there is a better first class language (guaranteed! Not dependent upon the host environment or compilation target), NeoVim is gaining some of the plug-in functionality that had previously been Emacs exclusive.
Neovim provided Bram competition, but he has not copied those features from Neovim.
vimscript9 doesn’t look or act like Lua (it still acts like a first-class citizen, unlike Lua) even though it is definitely improved over the previous version.
There have been terminal scripts for a while, but adding virtual terminal support was something resisted because a lot of people ran vim in a tty or with tmux. (Strictly speaking, terminal support is only something that to me makes sense for gvim and the like, otherwise you’re getting into terminal emulators all the way down. So much for the neovim philosophy of ripping unnecessary things out.)
And async was the entire reason that Neovim hard forked from Vim. Bram did not like the patches and asked for changes. The Neovim developers didn’t like the changes, so they hard forked. Bram implemented the async features / API surface that he wanted shortly thereafter.
There is a constant push from the Neovim camp that Vim is stagnant, backwards, dead, etc. None of this is true, and the messaging should absolutely stop. Frankly, I’d be happier if they rebranded from Neovim, because IMO they’re not vim and have stopped caring about compatibility with vim.
> There is a constant push from the Neovim camp that Vim is stagnant, backwards, dead, etc. None of this is true, and the messaging should absolutely stop. Frankly, I’d be happier if they rebranded from Neovim, because IMO they’re not vim and have stopped caring about compatibility with vim.
I have happily used (Brams) Vim the majority of my career; some daliances into PyCharm or VSCode here and there.Prior to the NeoVim fork; Vim felt.. slow.. to adopt new features. I was OK with that generally. 5 years for Vim7 to come out was the biggest gap, before Vim8 released after a decade gap (with NeoVim getting forked ~halfway through). Each major release taking longer than the previous. You can say Vim development hadn't slowed; but major releases did; with a ten year gap was concerning.
I don't say that as a negative on Bram, but 10 years between major releases is an eternity in the modern programming world - I'm glad he's refocused, Vim-9 is a huge leap forward.
>Strictly speaking, terminal support is only something that to me makes sense for gvim and the like, otherwise you’re getting into terminal emulators all the way down.
Terminal is what allows plugins such as fzf.vim to work, I think it's amazing.
I only welcome the competition between vim and neovim, I think it's been a great improvement to the ecosystem.
I dont know if its me but I find it utterly incomprehensible to read any Lua plugin in neovim. The API is magic and Lua itself isnt a very good language. That is to say, it didnt really get any better than vimscript. Ive written a couple of plugins in vimscript back in the day so i know the pain.
"Lua itself isnt a very good language" is very subjective.
The API is pretty well documented now I think? If there is a specific area that isn't, then file a bug or write the docs. It is an open source project and thus is heavily depends on people contributing to make things better.
I use neovim heavily and I spend the first five minutes of my morning thanking the developers for their hard work - without their selflessness we wouldn't have the best text editor in the world. I was just commenting on whether the purported benefits of using Lua over Vimscript as the core scripting language really panned out. Clearly a lot of people think they did.
I haven't implemented this yet, but one thing I'm looking forward to is lua libraries. I have a data YAML that carries some autocomplete information. To use it with a vimscript function I had to convert it to a JSON first. With lua I should be able to use a library to just read the YAML directly.
I disagree that Lua isn’t a good language. As a general purpose language, it is better than Vimscript, which sort of expanded into a general purpose language by fits and starts, and often not very cleanly.
Vimscript9 fixes some of this, but it is still focused on being a special purpose language (scripting vim) far more than being a general purpose language.
I agree with you that the neovim / Lua bridge is substandard and poorly documented, and way too magic. There’s too much distance between Lua and the vim model that isn’t well bridged by the API that has been written.
Certain things are better for neovim with Lua, because you can (in theory) take advantage of all that Lua has via luarocks. But that bridge back to the editor is still ugly, and I don’t like it.
> and I personally find it less usable than Vim because there’s not a single good GUI for it
What features do you use from gvim? I used to switch between them, but I hated updating the vim font when I decided to change my terminal font, so eventually I just switched to the terminal version full-time. It's been over 10 years at this point, but I don't remember anything useful in gvim.
The OS clipboard integration, the good font hinting and rendering, better colour rendering, the fact that the terminal doesn’t intercept some keyboard strokes. There’s a bit more, but I also find vim in the terminal to be less responsive overall than gvim.
I’m using MacVim as my gvim, but as I’ve indicated, the amount of code in MacVim is fairly small over that in gvim.
VimScript has been in development for 30 years now. There has been support for many other languages (including Lua) for over 20 years, well before Neovim was a thing. The idea that Vim9Script is only due to Neovim is one of those weird ideas that I will never understand.
I don't especially like Lua as a language (it's okay-ish, I guess, but not great), and I certainly don't think it's a good fit for a Vim configuration language, but it's okay to disagree on that. But it seems that some people are unable to comprehend that some people don't think that Lua is a gift from heaven for Vim.
Vim9Script is very similar to "legacy VimScript", but with slightly different syntax and typing. Overall, I'd say is less of a breaking change than Python 3 was, and it's not like Python 3 is a "new language": just a continuation of the >20 years of Python 1 and 2 before it.
If you look at vim commit history, it was pretty much stagnant for a long period of time, and then activity picked up in 2016, when it finally got competition from neovim. IMO governance model for vim, is not much receptive to community contribution, while neovim is more open. Looking at commit history and contributors graph on github seems to validate this.
I'm not going to speculate on what someone did or didn't know, let's give him the benefit of the doubt and just say he was really lucky. My main point was just don't expect similar results if you try it yourself.
You should be a little more skeptical. People don’t always tell the truth. And reasons for quitting is probably one of the most frequent lies people tell.
A professor emeritus not decisions to take up courses is nothing like quitting. You don’t need to make up excuses for deciding to not take courses, it’s pretty much the default.
Imagine that you retire from your job but tell your boss: “I know I’m retired, but Inwouldnt mind coming b once in a while just to say hey and catch up with people.” Would you then call it quitting or getting fired if suddenly you decided “actually I’ll not be stopping by next year”
More like, “I know I’m retired, but I wouldn't mind coming in once in a while just to say "hey" and catch up with people.”
Would you then call it quitting or getting fired if suddenly you decided “actually I’ll not be stopping by next year, BECAUSE MY SON IS CONVICTED OF THE LARGEST FRAUD IN HISTORY, AND I WAS THERE HELPING HIM THE ENTIRE TIME, BUT IT IS JUST COINCIDENTAL THAT I WON'T BE STOPPING BY ANYMORE.”
Boss: Thinking "Phew, glad I didn't have to tell her not to show her face around here every again" but saying to her face, "Oh, ok...it's up to you, but I totally understand that the only reason that you are not coming by is because it is your own decision that has nothing to do with YOUR SON IS CONVICTED OF THE LARGEST FRAUD IN HISTORY, AND YOU WAS THERE HELPING HIM THE ENTIRE TIME, BUT IT IS JUST COINCIDENTAL THAT YOU WON'T BE STOPPING BY ANYMORE.”
The irony is how easily influenced you were by the article's viewpoint.
Does it not make sense that someone whose family is going through something like this would have a lot to deal with? Emeritus faculty are "retired" and electively teach classes for pay. They can't "quit" because they're not on contract and because they can't stop being emeritus.
You were pulled in my the intrigue of the author's spin on the topic, as intended, but the reality is much more boring.
> Bankman-Fried’s parents became involved in the scandal when Reuters broke that the professors had been named owners of a $16.4 million vacation home purchased by FTX. His parents told Reuters that they are seeking to return the deed to FTX
