I'm in the process of reading Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari for the first time. In it, he writes about how Sapiens' major development over other human species was the ability to believe fiction. For context, he defines fiction as any concept not observable by the senses, and doesn't equate fiction with falsehood. Rather, he seems to mean abstraction.
Assuming this to be the case, our ability to abstract is what is responsible for the creation of things like government, the arts, the sciences, and basically all of our culture and knowledge.
Is it surprising that that ability to abstract could be taken too far among certain groups of people? Conspiracy theory is like a disease, not an inherent trait of humanity.
we accept lots of things without questioning them. there is nothing wrong with that ofc until you refuse to entertain the idea it might not be true. religion aside, questioning that is a different story
Our government was extremely slow to act and didn't shut down anything which let the COVID-19 virus spread rapidly in Sweden and now we have an uncontrolled spread with no testing except for the groups at risk.
The article is basically clickbait, Sweden has one of the lowest amounts of hospital beds and respirators per capita in EU.
We have much fewer ICU-spots than Italy, lower hospital beds etc so we will certainly have a worse time than Italy if we cannot contain the spread somewhat.
The government still hasn't imposed a lot of restrictions compared to other countries. If this is good or bad, will be determined in the future.
I think that Sweden is regarded as a country with good healthcare quality. The problem here is that western governments thought misleadingly that they were safe because their healthcare systems ranked high in a number of rankings. But here we face what really is a quantitative problem, not a qualitative problem. We can provide good care at an individual level, and the virus is often benign at the individual level. It really becomes a quantitative problem and we are on the exponential phase of the epidemic.
No, Sweden was considered a country with a good healthcare system under the former socialist governments. But now that the capitalists are ruling Sweden and Denmark, the ship turned towards the US and UK systems. With its known problems.
Their healthcare system is now the 2nd worst in the EU. Social problems are rising right and left.
> Their healthcare system is now the 2nd worst in the EU
WHAT? Now I haven't been to every European country, probably around 30% of them, would be my guess. But literally the country with the best healthcare system of them all, that I've visited a hospital in, have been Sweden.
You got any numbers to backup this claim? Spain, Italy and Greece clearly have a worse healthcare system, and those are just three examples I can think of quickly. Surely lots of countries in eastern europe has it worse than Sweden.
One source showing the opposite of what you're saying:
> Sweden is ranked third by the Commonwealth Fund, with a high proportion of doctors, above-average healthcare spending, and relatively low prescriptions of drugs.
> Spain, Italy and Greece clearly have a worse healthcare system, and those are just three examples I can think of quickly. Surely lots of countries in eastern europe has it worse than Sweden.
Spain has one of the best healthcare systems in the world, usually ranked by the WHO within the top 10 while Sweden's was within top 30.
Both Spain and Sweden seems to be about equal if you average the rankings in that list. So surely if Spain has one of the best healthcare systems in the world, Sweden is pretty equal, then Sweden is nowhere near being the "2nd worst in the EU" when it comes to healthcare.
Since I wasn't the one making the original claim, I could only try my best to find the matching source, this is as close as I could get. Sorry about that.
But which one? The US and the UK healthcare systems are polar opposites. US is entirely privatised with many gaps in coverage, and it's the most expensive healthcare system in the world. The UK (despite its general conservativeness) has an entirely socialised system that's the cheapest in Europe.
Doesn't matter how starved the systems are. They're still top notch compared to most of the rest of the world. I know it's hard to see and understand this until you end up in one of the many countries where the health system is in reality non-existent, or worse, incompetent.
All health systems in Europe are starved of funding. I live I Austria and every year the health insurance covers less and less requireing you to fork more non life threatening stuff out of your own pocket. This is due in some part to an ever increasing aging population needing expensive care and lower tax income due to slower economic growth.
Swede here aswell. The government, which follows our public health authority's recommendations, have in my opinion taken many appropriate decisions regarding the spread.
Since it is a pandemic, the spread of the virus is inevitable. If we would quarantine whole cities too early, or take other measures too early, it would just hurt us economically and push the problem forward. It's all about all about timing now and flattening the curve, which we have under control at the moment.
I am proud of our government taking decisions based on the public health authority's recommendations which are based on science. Compared to some other countries who take decisions not based on science (e.g. Denmark closing it's borders at the time was not recommended by their public health authority).
Yes I'm relieved to see what I consider a level headed response. I hope that I am right and we will of course see. I remember reading a quote from our "public health authority guy" something like "it's obvious that other countries decisions are based on politics, not science". That's a pretty brave thing to say, the easy decision would have been to follow along and close everything.
I am of the very unpopular opinion that all people actually die, that quality of life is the only thing that trumps life, and that we have to bring these things into the equation at some level. Now some people read this and immediately think that I suggest that we do nothing and let everyone die, but no I just want us to consider all sides of the equation thoroughly.
Also Swede here. I have high hopes that the decision to not yet close elementary schools will have been the right choice, for now. Time will tell though and the whole thing is very unsettling.
But yes, Sweden handled this ineptly. People were coming home from hot spots in Italy - they were not tested, not told to self quarantine, anything. That's just plain stupid and slow, there's no excuse for that.
Yes shutting down elementary schools for children that needs parental supervision is probably a bad idea since that leads to the need of a parent at home.
Parents who otherwise would be working at hospitals or other important features of a society. But there has been a lot of other options that just passed as you mention.
Restrictions in Italy have been continuously yanked up as the situation became worse and worse. I hope the same isn't going to happen in Sweden, but wouldn't count on it. Stay safe.
Well, it's global sea level. It's pretty significant and just shows how fast the sea level could change if larger chunks of ice would slip into the water and melt.
I mean, quite a few apps aimed at developers do this. Sublime Text for example. I can't imagine many people who aren't comfortable editing a text file would be using a terminal.
The configuration file opens in whatever app is associated with the format.
If you associated JSON files with VS then that's specific to your personal setup and unrelated to the Terminal app.
You also don't need to learn JSON schema and - I'm sorry to say this - but if editing a well-documented text format is too much of a hurdle to you, then maybe you're simply not the target demographic for the app.
The tons of people who blindly use copy-pasta wouldn't even need to use the Terminal app (a tool explicitly aimed at power users and devs), so that's a non-argument to start with.
Thanks for labeling me a noob while I have been editing text configs for a decade and a half. Again, passable != good, and there’s hardly any defense for a GUI application putting all common settings in a text configuration, especially when you need to configure colors, fonts, etc.
I’m pretty sure the terminal app was advertised as the next generation console experience for Windows, which means it is going to replace cmd, and will be used by non-power users.
Re binding: that’s just the default when VS is installed. Also, whether it’s Visual Studio is irrelevant, what’s relevant is it definitely isn’t Windows Terminal.
Edit: By replacing cmd I probably meant replacing conhost or something. Not completely sure about Windows separation of shells and terminal emulators but the idea should be clear.
For what it's worth, I agree with you. JSON is meant to be machine readable rather than human writeable and while I don't mind reading through JSON files, I really don't enjoy editing them because it's easy to break (eg including a trailing comma on the last entry in a map or array).
The lack of comments in JSON is an often raised point and it's really useful being able to add comments in a "living" config file.
The other issue I have with many JSON config files is they don't always contain all the options, so you end up having to search around for what the right directive is to add to a particular config file (this is my biggest gripe with hacking VS Code config files). This is less of an issue with other formats because you can often comment out lesser used directives.
I think the reason JSON is popular for config files is because it's easy to implement rather than easy to maintain and I see JSON as a regression from the TOML / INI etc formats that used to be commonplace beforehand.
I also agree with your frustrations with the replies about "people who know how to use a terminal know how to use JSON"; sure they do but that doesn't mean it is appropriate usage of JSON. I could write a config file using golfed Bash and say "but you should know how to read and write Bash" but people would understandably dismiss that saying it's still not user friendly and I don't see your point here any different.
People who use a terminal know how to edit a json file. That approach has good tradition by now with Sublime etc, see the poster above. And I'm pretty sure VS doesn't auto-associate itself with json files. They handled this in the best way possible imo.
That's up to opinion. I just wanted to join in to voice another opinion since some people in MS have recently been on a "even a single opinion is enough to act" policy (see VS Santa hat debacle), which I'm trying to prevent.
> and there’s hardly any defense for a GUI application putting all common settings in a text configuration, especially when you need to configure colors, fonts, etc.
It's a good place for them to be stored; it's not a great UI, but that is a thing that can be built over any storage and there is a reason it's v0.10 and not v1.0.
> I’m pretty sure the terminal app was advertised as the next generation console experience for Windows, which means it is going to replace cmd
ConHost. Cmd is a command interpreter that runs in a console, not a console itself.
> and will be used by non-power users.
Eventually, sure. It's very much a power-user-focussed preview today, though.
> I’m pretty sure the terminal app was advertised as the next generation console experience for Windows, which means it is going to replace cmd, and will be used by non-power users.
I'd love to hear a legit day-to-day use case, though. I'm honestly very curious to hear about that since even as a developer, I pretty much never use the command line (outside of WSL, which I don't consider a typical use-case either).
I work outside of software (or any technology really), so I deal with around 30 people who are the opposite of power users, all using Windows (with one on a Mac laptop). Not a single one of them would even know what a terminal is, and I include powershell and the standard command line in that. The only thing that runs on their machines via Windows cmd are scripts I install so I can use their machines if I have to get something done on it.
I didn't say I never use a shell - I even explicitly excluded WSL.
When developing software in Windows, however, there's simply no need.
> How do you compile
I press F6 in my IDE.
> install dependencies
I click "Add nu-get package"
> etc. [I assume version control operations and the like]
Again, I simply use the built-in tools of my IDE of choice which are usually bound to hotkeys.
This is hard to fathom, especially for modern web development, but I don't do web development and the embedded systems I work with don't have a shell while the GUI programs have, well, graphical interfaces :)
> When developing software in Windows, however, there's simply no need.
This tells more about your skils then anything else. If there is NO NEED for that in your world, there is defintelly a NEED for you to dive into it - something you don't know you can't use or find a need for it.
I use the shell everyday for git, code search, running my code, SSH. I think on windows it's more common to use an IDE with a GUI for some of these things, but the CLI is generally more powerful.
I was rather curious about strictly non-power-user use cases. Someone who develops software and uses distributed version control systems isn't exactly the average user.
My take is that most companies don't need a native app unless they're specifically targeting mobile users and doesn't have a need for desktop users.
So you're better off generally to make the app a web app. If that doesn't work yet, are you sure about that? With web assembly and some new browser apis it's really very few apps left that actually need the native experience.
Sure if you build apps for cars, planes or something like that I understand that you want the native experience. But there is also tons of "native with an asterisk" tools like Xamarin and React Native for example.
Sure the app may be a bit larger but do users really care? With those kind of technologies you can build native for all platforms easily.
The choice really is up to the developers and there is lots of choices nowadays, thankfully.
A lot of this is legacy which is why making the argument for change is one about expense. Its about justifying the expense by selling the hot path of the use-case of using technical applications on a phone.
Everyone is sunk-cost fallacy here over the potential of mobile use-cases, they're dismissed as a use-case.
I vaguely bought into the idea for a while and now github are like:
> Review PRs and look at code on a mobile form factor
and now I'm like:
> oh, so that use-case is a thing?
I'm terrified some CTO in twenty years time of an org we want to sell it to will instantly shitcan our offering because it doesn't support mobile use-cases. Because mobile is their culture and the reason we don't value it today is _only_ because mobile isn't the culture we grew up with.
Well, you gotta follow the market, right? If they want mobile, then you'll have to give them mobile, lest they not buy from you. What is terrifying about that, except for not wanting to change?
Being a dinosaur and seeing a big fiery thing in the sky. Thinking maybe it'd be better to get a bit of a head start on that mammal business. But its hard to make that business case, isn't it? Thankfully this news makes it easier I guess.
ye, possibly. Perhaps when everyone starts out on phone/tablet then desktops will be seen as old and archaic.
I mean its a silly example but I never see people in sci-fi sit down with a mouse and keyboard. Perhaps new generations will force in new ergonomic standards?
As with all titles that starts with a question, the answer is probably no.
Sure it may work for some easy cases but most products aren't that simple and as soon as you want to add some extra functionality you basically have to rewrite the application from scratch.
I'm happy that it worked for this guy but if I was a betting man I wouldn't bet on "low code".
Real life is imitating art at this point, truly. Saw that whole plot point in the final season of Silicon Valley that was released last month and thought it was one of the most farfetched unrealistic scenarios in the whole show. Looks like I was really wrong.
My dad uses Linux as I installed it on his computers. He only uses the browser anyway and are very concerned about security in general. So the choice felt very natural.
Otherwise, he basically tells every "seller" to eff off so he probably wouldn't be scammed anyway.
A page that talks design in one of the worlds biggest companies - has drawings that looks like they're made from children.
Great, but the reason is obvious. It's to not offend anyone. That is the key of making modern art 2019, design and art that makes even the most grumpy SJWs happy.
That's why I am on team AI.