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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 8th, 2023

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  • Software is a tool. I develop stuff that i know is of interest to companies working with everything from nuclear energy to hydrogen electrolysis and CO2 storage. I honestly believe I can make a positive contribution to the world by releasing that software under a permissive licence such that companies can freely integrate it into their proprietary production code.

    I’m also very aware that the exact same software is of interest to the petroleum industry and weapons manufacturers, and that I enable them by releasing it under a permissive licence.

    The way I see it, withholding a tool that can help do a lot of good because it can also be used for bad things just doesn’t make much sense. If everybody thinks that way, how can we have positive progress? I don’t think I can think of any more or less fundamental technology that can’t be used for both. The same chemical process that has saved millions from starvation by introducing synthetic fertiliser has taken millions of lives by creating more and better explosives. If you ask those that were bombed, they would probably say they wish it was never invented, while if you ask those that were saved from the brink of starvation they likely praise the heavens for the technology. Today, that same chemical process is a promising candidate for developing zero-emission shipping.

    I guess my point is this: For any sufficiently fundamental technology, it is impossible to foresee the uses it may have in the future. Withholding it because it may cause bad stuff is just holding technological development back, lively preventing just as much good as bad. I choose to focus on the positive impact my work can have.


  • You are aware that what Israel is doing in Gaza is comparable to the nazi treatment of e.g. the Warsaw ghettos… right?

    Take a step back, and look at the Israeli soldiers mocking Palestinian dead, mistreating the wounded and captured, and shooting at clearly unarmed civilians for fun. All this while they brag about it on video. Look at that and tell me that it doesn’t give you a sick feeling to your stomach of the type you haven’t had since you saw photos of concentration camps.

    There are dozens of children that have literally STARVED TO DEATH in Gaza because of Israel’s actions. They’re dying the same deaths that Jews were put through in concentration camps. Don’t you see the horrifying irony in this?

    Israel is at a point where humanitarian workers from recognised international organisations have been targeted and killed, and they brush it off as a “mistake”.

    I cannot think about anything in the past 70 years that compares to what Israel is doing, and I hope beyond hope that some force will smite their government and armed forces such that the slaughter will stop. Because it is a slaughter. It’s not a war when Israel is counting its dead on its fingers, while there are enough missing Palestinians in the rubble to fill a football stadium. It’s just Israel wilfully bombing, burning and slaughtering, with nobody stopping them.

    All this, and you have the fucking audacity to talk about antisemitism? Take a look at the world, and ask yourself how calling for an end to this can have anything to do with the religious beliefs of the perpetrators.



  • 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.



  • 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.





  • 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…



  • 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.