The Mars family is doing that with the vets.
They also own a large part of the pet food industry. Given how much health is affected by diet, that's a huge conflict of interest.
Readit Newsat_compile_time commented on US private credit defaults hit record 9.2% in 2025, Fitch says marketscreener.com/news/u... · Posted by u/JumpCrisscross
at_compile_time commented on British Columbia is permanently adopting daylight time cbc.ca/news/canada/britis... · Posted by u/ireflect
> Instinctively, I think morning light is important to our biology for a daily reset
I'd bet people would happily trade away the inkling of light they get during their winter commute before locking themselves into their office for some extra daylight when they leave that office.
Daylight is most enjoyable if you can actually make use of it.
The problem of offices is not when we spend time in them but rather that we spend time in them at all. What a banal hell it is we have consented to endure compared to the comforts of our homes or of any space actually designed for the wellness of human beings or even focused work.
at_compile_time commented on British Columbia is permanently adopting daylight time cbc.ca/news/canada/britis... · Posted by u/ireflect
Well, I'm not one of those people. I like waking up with the sun and driving to work in the daylight. The idea that DST solves anything absolutely blows my mind. If you want the ability to start your work day earlier and end it earlier, that seems like a worker protection bill that needs to be passed. DST is the kludgiest kludge that ever kludged.
>If you want the ability to start your work day earlier and end it earlier, that seems like a worker protection bill that needs to be passed.
If that's what passes for aspiration these days then the labour movement truly is dead.
at_compile_time commented on What it means that Ubuntu is using Rust smallcultfollowing.com/ba... · Posted by u/zdw
My understanding: Even if everyone uses the same toolchain, but someone changes the code for a module and recompiles, then you're in UB land unless everyone who depends on that recompiles
Am I wrong?
If your key is a hash of the code and its dependencies, for a given toolchain and target, then any change to the code, its dependencies, the toolchain or target will result in a new key unique to that configuration. Though I am not familiar with these distributed caching systems so I could be overlooking something.
at_compile_time commented on Zig and the design choices within blueberrywren.dev/blog/on... · Posted by u/lerno
Rust is much older than Zig, though, and there's nothing stopping Zig (or any future language that doesn't adopt Rust's precise set of guarantees) from having the same, or possibly better. Given Zig's immaturity, I certainly wouldn't use it for any serious production software today.
BTW, I'm not saying Rust is bad. All I'm saying is that the attempt at proving it's objectively best by leaning on memory-safety is not really as objective as the people who make that claim seem to think it is.
I hadn't heard of ATS before, and I think that I mistook your using it as an example of "more isn't always better" and thought you were suggesting it as an actual alternative.
I'm looking for the next thing I want to learn, and have been leaning towards logic programming and theorem provers, so you inadvertently piqued my interest.
at_compile_time commented on Zig and the design choices within blueberrywren.dev/blog/on... · Posted by u/lerno
>> Much of Zig seems to me like "wishful thinking"; if every programmer was 150% smarter and more capable, perhaps it would work.
... and the same could be said about Rust, only with Rust we can already see that it suffers from relatively low adoption at a relatively advanced age.
The funny thing about that claim is that it leads to an obvious question: if working harder to satisfy the compiler is something that requires less competence than other forms of thinking about a program, then why Rust? Why not ATS? After all, Rust does let you eliminate certain bugs at compile time, but ATS lets you eliminate so many more.
Rust's real superpower is its tooling. Cargo handles package management, building, testing, documentation, and publishing. The compiler's errors explain what went wrong and where it happened. Installing the toolchain with rustup is quick and painless, even on Windows. I can't know that it's best in class, but it's certainly the best I've used.
I can see another language having a more expressive type system, I've come up against the limitations of Rust's type system more than once, but the tradeoff isn't worth it if I have to go 20 years back in time in terms of tooling.
at_compile_time commented on Arenas in Rust russellw.github.io/arenas... · Posted by u/welovebunnies
Anticipating pushback: yes, you can disallow "pointer arithmetic" on handles, and store fingerprints in the "slots" to ensure they still contain the handle's identity to detect user-after-free, but congrats, you've implemented sparse sets, which there are dozen's of C++ implementations of with the same safety guarantees, so it's unclear what rust is bringing in that case (e.g. https://github.com/skypjack/entt/blob/master/src/entt/entity...)
That C++ already has many implementations of sparse sets seems to be a point in favor of sparse sets rather than a point against Rust, especially given that C++ doesn't need them the same way Rust does.
> Their feedback loop has things like social stability and global competitiveness as competing goals to actually doing productive work.
Sounds like you're making the case for their system here!
When I say they prioritize social stability, I mean that they won't stop producing cars regardless of how little economic sense it makes because they need to keep people employed to stave of massive civil unrest. And global competitiveness counts for little when the countries they want to export to implement anti-dumping policies to protect their own industries from government-subsidized Chinese exports.
I thought it was Super PAC that rigged American democracy. Now China is the more efficient economy since their companies are must obey the State.
We must be working from different definitions of efficient.
Yes, the CCP can say jump and expect their corporations to do so, but when everyone in a modern economy jumps at the same time, massive oversupply is the result. More market-based economies are also prone to similar overproduction when everyone gets caught up in the same mania (see AI datacenters), but investors will eventually stop lighting their money on fire when it becomes clear that the returns aren't there. Chinese companies, on the other hand, will just keep jumping until the CCP decides that they are done jumping.
Our feedback loop is geared towards only doing things that provide a return on investment. Their feedback loop has things like social stability and global competitiveness as competing goals to actually doing productive work.
Yes, they are able to accomplish a tremendous amount when they set their minds to it, but doing a tremendous amount more of something than there is actual demand is waste, the opposite of efficiency.
https://www.reuters.com/investigations/china-is-sending-its-...
at_compile_time commented on The Crisis of Professional Skepticism mitchhorowitz.substack.co... · Posted by u/mathgenius
It should be noted that the author thinks ESP is a Thing, and it's worthy of study / research. They're essentially concern-trolling / no-true-scotsman-ing skeptics - that they're not the right kind of skeptics or occasionally skeptics also did misleading things, and bullied those poor poor ESP researchers and hurt the field of ESP research and that's why we don't hwave any proof ESP is a thing. That a skeptic didn't perfectly skeptic-ize a ESP researcher (or two, or three) doesn't mean ESP research has the slightest legitimacy or value because regardless of a skeptic's methods, the burden of evidence on something as extraordinary as ESP is purely on the researcher claiming ESP exists.
Of James Randi, he complains in another article (which for some reason BoingBoing published...) on his site: "[Randi made] it more difficult for serious university-based and academically trained researchers to study ESP and mental anomalies, and to receive a fair hearing in the news media."
Uh....Yes? That was the point? Randi dedicated his time and energy to debunking shysters. At best they were seeking fame while popularizing paranormal crap and hurting scientific literacy...and at worst taking advantage of people finanically to varying degrees.
TV used to be awash in idiots claiming to be psychic or able to do absurd things like magnetize their bodies with their mind. I remember Randi was on such a show with such a "magnetic" person, watched them stick something metal to their body...then he whips out a container of baby powder, applies it to the guy who claimed to be able to magnetize himself...and wouldn't you know, the "magnetism" disappeared....because the reason something metal stuck to him was because his sweaty skin had enough stiction (and probably using some rosin to 'help') and use a part of their body angled a bit from vertical. And Randi then demonstrates this, showing he can "magnetize" himself, too.
Randi was a magician, saw people abusing lazy/shitty magic to rip people off, and didn't like that. And the world is a better place for it. That he had an ego, or that his methods weren't perfect, or he was too aggressive for the author's taste - is all completely irrelevant.
What's next, complaining that some doctor is an asshole for appearing on TV to refute people claiming ivermectin cures covid, thus making it impossible for people to seriously study ivermectin's covid benefits? Or that they were too aggressive in responding to the shyster?
>What's next, complaining that some doctor is an asshole for appearing on TV to refute people claiming ivermectin cures covid, thus making it impossible for people to seriously study ivermectin's covid benefits? Or that they were too aggressive in responding to the shyster?
That might not be the best example to use here because the incentives are entirely backwards. The people claiming to have ESP were doing it for fame and money, whereas the scientists and medical professionals claiming that ivermectin was effective for treating COVID were doing it in spite of the professional stigmatisation that came with it. The unscrupulous would have been shilling for pharma as they always have, that's where the money is, not sticking their necks out for some off-patent drug.