has nothing to do with masochism but all with realizing that you live in a society and can't just force your preferred social norms unilaterally on other, even if you can nudge people in a direction, in hope society will change in the future

given that most of the thinks added seem more inspired by other languages then "moved over" from F# the "other languages struggle with" part makes not that much sense

like some languages which had been ahead of C# and made union type a "expected general purpose" feature of "some kind":

- Java: sealed interfaces (on high level the same this C# features, details differ)

- Rust: it's enum type (but better at reducing boilerplate due to not needing to define a separate type per variant, but being able to do so if you need to)

- TypeScript: untagged sum types + literal types => tagged sum types

- C++: std::variant (let's ignore raw union usage, that is more a landmine then a feature)

either way, grate to have it, it's really convenient to represent a `TYPE is either of TYPES` relationship. Which are conceptually very common and working around them without proper type system support is annoying (but very viable).

I also would say that while it is often associated with functional programing it has become generally expected even if you language isn't functional. Comparable to e.g. having some limited closure support.

also called general purpose, general style langue

> that still can't really be done in C#

I would think about it more as them including features other more general purpose languages with a "general" style have adopted then "migrating F# features into C#, as you have mentioned there are major differences between how C# and F# do discriminated sum types.

I.e. it look more like it got inspired by it's competition like e.g. Java (via. sealed interface), Rust (via. enum), TypeScript (via structural typing & literal types) etc.

> Was a functional approach really so 'difficult'?

it was never difficult to use

but it was very different in most aspects

which makes it difficult to push, sell, adapt etc.

that the maybe most wide used functional language (Haskel) has a very bad reputation about being unnecessary complicated and obscure to use with a lot of CS-terminology/pseudo-elitism gate keeping doesn't exactly help. (Also to be clear I'm not saying it has this properties, but it has the reputation, or at least had that reputation for a long time)

easy to circumvent

but would fall under "circumventing security protections"/"hacking their API"/etc. And due to the sometimes very unreasonable laws the US has in that area they can use that to go after anyone providing a workaround.

Through that maybe won't work well for the EU, I'm not sure how much the laws have been undermined in recent years but we had laws which made it explicitly legal to circumvent DRM iff it's for the sake of producing compatibility (with some caveats).

tbh. it sounds a bit like he himself was somewhat of an internet troll during that time

and it might not be quite the same definition of "internet troll" I tend to us

like it sounds a lot like a definition of "toll" like

- "very vocal, convicted of their opinion, non stop discussing(/neutral) potentially for the sake of discussing(/neutral)"

while I tend to associate more something like

- "intentional annoying, non stop discussing for the sake of annoying people, often using dishonest discussion techniques, potentially outright harassment"

it's always surprising for me how absurdly efficient "highly specialized VM/instruction interpreters" are

like e.g. two independent research projects into how to have better (fast, more compact) serialization in rust ended up with something like a VM/interpreter for serialization instructions leading to both higher performance and more compact code size while still being cable of supporting similar feature sets as serde(1)

(in general monomorphisation and double dispatch (e.g. serde) can bring you very far, but the best approach is like always not the extrem. Neither allays monomorphisation nor dynamic dispatch but a balance between taking advantage of the strength of both. And specialized mini VMs are in a certain way an extra flexible form of dynamic dispatch.)

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(1): More compact code size on normal to large project, not necessary on micro projects as the "fixed overhead" is often slightly larger while the per serialization type/protocol overhead can be smaller.

(1b): They have been experimental research project, not sure if any of them got published to GitHub, non are suited for usage in production or similar.

but I still would recommend 6 GiB.

no matter of the OS

the problem here is more the programs you run on top of the OS (browser, electron apps, etc.)

realistic speaking you should budged at least 1GiB for you OS even if it's minimalist, and to avoid issues make it 2GiB of OS + some emergency buffer, caches, load spikes etc.

and 2GiB for your browser :(

and 500MiB for misc apps (mail, music, etc.)

wait we are already at 4.5 GiB I still need open office ....

even if xfc would safe 500 MiB it IMHO wouldn't matter (for the recommendation)

and sure you can make it work, can only have one tab open at a time, close the browser every time you don't need it, not use Spotify or YT etc.

but that isn't what people expect, so give them a recommendation which will work with what they expect and if someone tries to run it at smaller RAM it may work, but if it doesn't it at least isn't your fault

they compared the Ubuntu minimal recommended RAM to Windows absolute minimal RAM requirements.

but Windows has monetary incentives (related to vendors) to say they support 4GiB of RAM even if windows runs very shitty on it, on the other had Ubuntu is incentivized to provider a more realistic minimum for convenient usage

I mean taking a step back all common modern browsers under common usage can easily use multiple GiB of memory and that is outside of the control of the OS vendor. (1)

As consequence IMHO recommending anything below 6 GiB is just irresponsible (iff a modern browser is used) _not matter what OS you use_.

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(1): If there is no memory pressure (i.e. caches doesn't get evicted that fast, larger video buffers are used, no fast tab archiving etc.) then having YT playing likely will consume around ~600-800 MiB.(Be aware that this is not just JS memory usage but the whole usage across JS, images, video, html+css engine etc. For comparison web mail like proton or gmail is often roughly around 300MiB, Spotify interestingly "just" around 200MiB, and HN around 55MiB.

there is still the issue that this might have been classified as "a crazy letter"

a lot of the article reminds me of people which might (or might not) have competency but insists they know better and are very stubborn and very bad and compromising on solutions. The subtext of the articles is not that far afar from "everyone does everything wrong, I know better, but no one listens to me". If you frame it like that it very much sounds like a "crazy" letter.

Strictly speaking it reminds me a lot about how Pirate Software spoke about various EA related topics. (Context: Pirate Software was a streamer and confidence man who got complemented up due to family connections and "confidently knew" everything better while having little skill or contributions and didn't know when to stop having a "confidently bad" opinion. Kinda sad ending given that he did motivate people to peruse their dream in game design and engage themself for animal protection.).

Or how I did do so in the past. Appearing very confident in your know-how ironically isn't always good.

And in case it's not clear: The writing reminding me of it and having patters of someone trying to create a maximally believable writing to make MS look bad doesn't mean that he behaves like that or that the writing is intended to be seen that way.

It's more about how we have a lot of "information" which all look very believable, but in the end miss means to both: Verify many of the named "facts". And, more importantly, judge the sentiment/implicit conveyed information.

Especially if we just take the mentioned "facts" without the implicit messages and ignore the him<->management communication issues I would guess a lot of that is true.

You should be able to type without looking at your keyboard.

But the specific 5 finger arrangement taught often as "tough typing" isn't needed for that, some common issues:

- it being taught with an orthogonal arrangement of your hand to they keyboard, that is nearly guaranteed to lead to carpal tunnel syndrome if you have a typical keyboard/desk setup. Don't angle your wrist when typing.

- Pinky fingers of "average" hands already have issues reaching the right rows, with extra small or extra short hands they often aren't usable as intended with touch typing.

can even be harmful

IFF we interpret "touch typing" as the typical thought typing method and not just "typing without looking at the keyboard".

In general key arrangement traces back to physical limitations of type writers not ergonomics and layout choice isn't exactly ergonomic based either.

But even if it where, the biggest issue of touch typing is that it's often thought around the idea of your hands being somewhat orthogonal to your keyboard, _which they never should be_ (if you use a typical keyboard on a typcal desk setup) as it leads to angling you hands/wrist which is nearly guaranteed to cause you health issues long term if you are typing a lot.

The simple solution is to keep your wrist straight leading to using the keyboard in a way where you hand is at an angle to it's layout instead of orthogonal which in turn inhibits perfect touch typing. But still allows something close to it.

As keys are arranged in shifted columns this kinda works surprisingly well, an issue is the angle differs depending on left/right hand :/

Split or alice style keyboards can also help a bit, but I often feel man designs kinda miss the point. Especially many supposedly ergonomic keyboards aren't aren't really that ergonomic, especially if your hand is to large, small, or otherwise unusual...

Which brings us to the next point, human autonomy varies a lot, some people have just some very touch typing incompatible hands, like very short pinky fingers making that finger unusable for typical touch typing (even with normal hands it's a bit suboptimal which is why some keyboards shift the outer rows down by half a row).

but Trump also now has a excuse to abandon Ukraine,

and a excuse to lifte trade Embargos on Russian Oil (he already did)

this might still not change the outcome of the war, but might still be more useful then drone parts in the sense that if you either don't have money to buy drone parts or the seller stops selling you are better of with money?

and maybe he hopes for a Iranian terrorist attack before the midterms so that he can use that as an excuse to not have proper Election (Iran using terrorism for retaliation when other means fail isn't exactly new, so this isn't even that unlikely and a iff we assume he or the people consulting him really are that evil, then a false flag attack is also an option.)

quite good for China to better understand US military capabilities

maybe good for Trump if he wants to come up with excuses to fully size government power / avoid or fake mid term elections or even "just" frighten voters that if the a government change happens now it will be "very bad" for the US etc.

bad for the US (both as a supper power and for it's citizens)

and if escalating (which seems very likely) potentially far worse for Europe, Turkey and likely some other places because the refuge wave this can cause is one a completely different level then the one by Syria (like >4x times as bad if worst comes to worst, 1)

simple put for all those who want to destroy democracy in the west this is grate in many ways.

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1: Syria had ~21 Mil citizens before the war, Iran has ~92 Mil + 9 Mil refuges from Afghanistan + others. In general Iran is the land wich currently houses the largest number of refuges AFIK. If thinks go bad this are the people which often will have to flee first. To make matters worse there is a ongoing drinking water crisis, even without a ware or destroyed desalination plants Iran might need to evacuate Tehran (~10 Mil).

it's worse then them not being right

the only way a weak dollar would majorly matter for bringing back production is iff production is cheap

so a 20% weaker dollar must not come with 20% higher "dollar" prices (living cost, salary). You need to decrees living cost and dollar value in lock step (i.e. weaker dollar without inflation!). But this seem impossible IMHO. And if we look at what happened, if anything, it went the other way.

And if you try to force it anyway you are basically saying "we effectively disown most money of most US citizens" and use that to try to attack manufacturing, while likely not relevantly affecting the wealthiest.

That is just plain evil.

And not very surprising if you consider that many "manufacturing countries" have pretty horrifying working conditions often not "that" far apart from slavery.

Worse this likely wouldn't work either, because iff your countries population doesn't have the money to buy stuff anymore, and investments are risky, why would you even bother to produce there? To then export to countries where investments into production lines are more reliable? Like how is that supposed to work?

Naturally things can be different if we only speak about high-tech / high-end manufacturing. But the current steps do not seem promising to archive that either:

1) this kind of manufacturing lines need even higher investments, i.e. act even more allergic wrt. trade instability and uncertainty

2) Trump has brought some high tech manufacturing into the US with a mixture of force and bribes/subsidization. But honestly it looks a lot of it is mostly hollow promises, not making a relevant difference long term.

3) More then one case where companies did agree had a lot of big problems. One of the biggest issue being, that missing in depth know-how requires temp. importing people which can make sure things work while teaching that know how (if you want things to get going fast. If you go slow you can send your people to other countries to learn.). But a destroyed visa system makes this a high risk for anyone coming to the US and did lead to more then one person like that being detained and deported by ICE. The other risk is if this people don't teach enough you become dependent on foreign workers in a strange way for a while.

Either way nothing in the current politics seems to be actually well thought through ways to archive (relevantly) more manufacturing in the US long term. But everything seems to be designed to destroy the wealth of the majority of US citizens.

I don't see how this is supposed to be legal.

this leaves a few often small types like `DateTime`, which you can handle with serde serialization function overwrite attributes or automatic conversions not even needing new types (through some of this attributes could be better designed)

serde is not perfect but pretty decent, but IMHO the proc macros it provides need some love/a v2 rewrite, which would only affect impl. code gen and as such is fully backward compatible, can be mixed with old code and can be from a different author (i.e. it doesn't have the problem)

Anyway that doesn't make the problem go away, just serialization/serde is both the best and worst example. (Best as it's extremely wide spread, "good enough" but not perfect, which is poison for ecosystem evolution, worst as serialization is enough of a special case to make it's best solution be potentially unusable to solve the generic problem (e.g. reflections)).

yes

Through you still can run into it when unsafe is involved, e.g. C FFI/no_mange or ASM with non-mangled labels as they are globally unique. Through IMHO, it's not a common problem and has ways to make it very unlikely for the projects where it matters.

In the end if you pull in C-FFI code (or provide it) you do ope yourself up to C ABI specific problems.