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continuitylimit commented on The Changing "Guarantees" Given by Python's Global Interpreter Lock   stefan-marr.de/2023/11/py... · Posted by u/abhi9u
jerf · 2 years ago
While there is some truth in what you are saying, you have a common misunderstanding of the situation. Part of the reason the GIL has proved so difficult to remove is that it is actually a good solution. In fact, there have been multiple largely successful attempts to remove it over time over the entire range of aggressiveness from CPython changes to writing an entire JIT stack (PyPy), but it has never gone in to CPython because it would either ruin all existing 3rd party libraries that used C (which is a lot of them), it would diminish performance for an already-slow language, or as in the case of PyPy, it isn't even a "patch" so much as a new project.

Especially when you consider this over the whole of Python's lifespan, which very, very firmly includes many years in which multicore was simply not a thing, followed by some years where it was a thing but it didn't work very well anyhow at the OS level so who cares what Python does with it.

It is not as if back when it was put it the choice was either to use a GIL or to correctly write a multithreaded interpreter and fix all the 3rd party libraries at the time for exactly the same cost. The latter option was orders of magnitude more expensive, and harder then than it is now, with better tooling and more collective developer experience. The choice of not using a GIL, rather than being some sort of nirvana that we could just be in if they hadn't chosen poorly 15 years ago, could well have killed the language. We don't really know. I do know that a programming language that just sort of breaks every so often when you use threads and there's absolutely nothing you can do about it from the Python level is not a very appealing proposition and it's hard to know how badly this could have hurt the language.

And Python of all the languages now has a well-justified fear of breaking everything and demanding that everyone upgrade.

So, to put this in a nutshell, if you believe the GIL is simply bad and should never have been an option, you have a very immature understanding of software engineering, especially in the light of being the leader of a very very large community who will be impacted by your decisions. It may not have been the only choice, but it was a good one, and regardless of what decision was made 15 years ago there would be some consequence to deal with now. No programming language community can be expected to get everything right in 2003 that the people of 2023 will want any more than we can expect any current programming language to be the perfect programming language of 2043 right this second.

continuitylimit · 2 years ago
Thanks jerf for your thoughtful reply. tbh I was trolling hn for the very first time in 14 years and based on the response I have a natural talent for it. Who knew. The multi-core point is well taken, as it maps to my own professional experience in that transitional era as well.
continuitylimit commented on The Changing "Guarantees" Given by Python's Global Interpreter Lock   stefan-marr.de/2023/11/py... · Posted by u/abhi9u
continuitylimit · 2 years ago
The brief blurb about how GIL came to be, in light of Python’s success as a language and a tool, makes me question my s/e belief system. Things like this are like when good things happen to bad people and bad things happen to good people. It makes you question the meaning of it all.

Is there no great architect in the sky? Is there no software god after all, looking down, punishing sloppy engineers and granting blessings to thoughtful engineers? How else to explain this injustice of sloppy engineering eating the world (to say nothing of JavaScript)?

continuitylimit commented on The astonishing behavior of recursive sequences   quantamagazine.org/the-as... · Posted by u/pseudolus
continuitylimit · 2 years ago
Interesting how the nth term index for n-Sonos non-integral is itself monotonic. Intuitively it seems it doesn’t have to be. (Handwavy looking at the n-S() behavior as hitting a ‘catastrophic’ transition at the n-th, so question is why is this index increasing as n increases?)

https://oeis.org/A030127

Deleted Comment

continuitylimit commented on Narges Mohammadi wins 2023 Nobel Peace Prize   cnn.com/world/live-news/n... · Posted by u/michaeltimo
Qiu_Zhanxuan · 2 years ago
Most people today would agree with Mossadegh's initiative and the point remains that he was ousted from power for his nationalization of a western oil company and his inimity with the islamists and the Shah. The US helped in the process. And it's no disrespect to the iranians to state those facts.
continuitylimit · 2 years ago
who are these “most people”?

Everyone in Iran, including the Shah, wanted Iran’s oil nationalized. It was the economic consequences that tempered others. The Good Dr. had to go hat in hand to US and beg Eisenhower to aid after oil revenues stopped. That was his bright idea.

Also your story is not the propaganda narrative that is repeated. This is the single paragraph story:

Iran did have a democratic government, but because the PM nationalized the oil, US did a coup and installed a dictator, the shah.

And that is entirely different from your “US helped in the process”. That would be accurate because that is all it was: in the main political support. Then, we in fact had a decade were Generals were powerful, until the Shah, finally in 60s (without CIA and to the great annoyance of the Kennedys) assumed all the power after having disbanded the Communist party and defanged the National Front. The “dictatorship” began 10 years later and it was far more benevolent than say a psycho killer like Mao who murdered millions. But Mao was a “great man” and the Shah is a “dictator”. Go figure.

continuitylimit commented on Narges Mohammadi wins 2023 Nobel Peace Prize   cnn.com/world/live-news/n... · Posted by u/michaeltimo
LindeBuzoGray · 2 years ago
> Think of what this woman and many other women trapped in these regimes are going through

Iran had a parliament in 1953, when the US and UK launched operation Ajax after the prime Minister nationalized Iran's oil. The prime Minister was ousted, a dictator replaced him - who returned to Iran on a flight with Allen Dulles. The conservative mullahs were western allies in removing power from the parliament.

Then this structure the west put into place fell out of alignment with the west in 1979, and we suddenly hear an enormous amount of stated sympathy about "women trapped in these regimes". Sympathy that we didn't hear when the CIA was handing SAVAK lists of progressive, secular women to arrest or kill. It's farcical.

continuitylimit · 2 years ago
Your story about operation Ajax is just that - a story. Iran’s PMs were all elected by parliament and the one before Mr. Mossadeq was assassinated by Islamists allied to your “democrat” who then let the killer get off with no jail time.

You also fail to note that the PM in question had a “99%” referendum during his tenure. You also fail to mention that the said PM refused his constitutionally valid dismissal by the Shah and then proceeded to launch a COUP against the constitutional monarchy.

You fail to mention all this because NYTimes and CIA and the rest of the Western world is perfectly happy with the narrative of Kermit Roosevelt getting off the plane with a suitcase of dollars and then taking over a “99%” supported regime overnight! CIA is sure impressive!

The facts are that the PM in question began to alienate his allies — the Islamists — so they withdrew support, and very substantial chunk of the nation absolutely did not agree with his coup and his program of unilaterally changing the outcome of the 1905 Constitutional Revolution of Iran which do grant certain powers to the monarch. This includes dismissing the PM.

So, now that we have a more ‘rounded’ historic context of what actually led to ‘53 counter coup encouraged and supported by US and UK (which failed) and the next day’s Army’s counter-coup (which succeeded), the topical point remains:

Whatever CIA, or “Anglo-Saxons” or this or that evil empire has done in NO WAY excuse or elucidate the dictatorial regime of the clergy and their very open trampling the rights of women in Iran.

I am not sure what is the Islamist version of “Tankee” but you are it.

[and a ps for Iranians in the audience]

If you continue to repeat the ridiculous NYTimes/CIA version of the story you are denigrating our great people. The idea that some flunky from CIA with a suitcase of cash managed to unseat a “99%” PM overnight mainly says that Iranians are mindless chumps who are trivially manipulated. This is neither flattering or accurate.

continuitylimit commented on U.S. federal price tag for the post-9/11 wars is over $8T   watson.brown.edu/costsofw... · Posted by u/snipebin
za3faran · 2 years ago
And they're "enslaved" how? Because the western backed media told their viewers that those women should be free to be naked and follow their western peers, otherwise they're "oppressed" and miserable?
continuitylimit · 2 years ago
They are denied education, freedom of movement, and freedom of conscious.

It is not slavery, as you are correct to point out - it is a regressive reading of Islam and its insistence on removing the sexual from the public space (which is fine - it is in principle a modality of civilization — that takes that stance which is not inherently oppressive of a given sex, it places restrictions on both sexes’ behavior in public space).

A sign of your backwardness is considering women —- decent, moral, upright but lacking a covering tent — as “naked”. But imo, it is not that the woman showing hair is “naked”, rather the eyes that behold are soaked in lust. It is this lust that you can not control, so “let’s control women”.

It is a sad spectacle.

continuitylimit commented on Strong static typing, a hill I'm willing to die on   svix.com/blog/strong-typi... · Posted by u/tasn
Draiken · 2 years ago
Fair point. If there was good research showing no difference, it would be equally pointless to argue either side is right, but it wouldn't be mere opinions, like they are today.

As for the move between runtime to development time tools, it still misses the cost of it.

We could move all our code to Haskell and have absolute guarantees for a lot of the common found bugs, but we don't because it's costly. And I don't mean rewrite cost, I mean the cost of its own complexities.

Nobody argues that typed languages aren't more rigorous, but that's not the only variable we care about.

continuitylimit · 2 years ago
Rigor is not the only variable, agreed. The issue (again) is that the other variables are many and they are non-linear in the main. (For example, the variable of ‘competence of development organization’ is not smoothly distributed. Our field is not a “smooth” domain it is ‘chunky’.)

So where does that leave us? Opinions are one option - comparative views to other ‘industrial’ age type of activities may be informative.

I propose to you that “we moderns” live in a typed world. It is not strongly typed but it is typed. One could argue that that is a side-effect of physical world artifacts produced at scale. I would be interested in hearing the argument as to why that near universal phenomena* does not apply to software, in your opinion.

(* Industrial production at scale and emergence of standards)

continuitylimit commented on Strong static typing, a hill I'm willing to die on   svix.com/blog/strong-typi... · Posted by u/tasn
Draiken · 2 years ago
Yeah, which is a shame. Because I truly wanted to be confident that the costs of these don't outweigh the benefits.

Regardless if it's no meaningful difference or no good research, the point remains: we simply don't know, so these discussions are about opinions for either side, not facts.

continuitylimit · 2 years ago
No, the point does not remain that “research” “shows” anything. Seems there is agreement that ‘meaningful experiments have never been done because it is too complex and expensive’ so there is no significant research data.

But the basic argument is that a programming approach — having a compiler and a type system is not a “style” btw — that employs development time tools to reduce the burden of runtime operational tools, afford greater application of a wider set of optimization techniques at runtime, and also add to the information bandwidth of source code via type annotations is reasonably expected to be more rigorous than the other approach.

continuitylimit commented on September was the most anomalously hot month ever   scientificamerican.com/ar... · Posted by u/esarbe
continuitylimit · 2 years ago
Last week of September in NYC was the coldest I remember this time of year. Rainy, windy and cold.
continuitylimit · 2 years ago
[This is just data - I’m sure it was “abnormally hot” in many places, but NYC was not one of those places. Believe it or not, 2000 and 1960 were just randomly picked out of a hat and the only other dates I tried fwiw]

September 1960: https://www.timeanddate.com/weather/usa/new-york/historic?mo...

September 2000: https://www.timeanddate.com/weather/usa/new-york/historic?mo...

September 2023: https://www.timeanddate.com/weather/usa/new-york/historic?mo...

2000 was a “hot” September.

u/continuitylimit

KarmaCake day43September 14, 2023View Original