The main issue I have with the language is with table accesses and 'nil'. Tables in Lua are the most fundamental type of object in the language, it can be either an array (1-based index) or a hashtable. In this language objects are basically just tables with fields in them, and with metatables you can basically emulate all the features in a typical OOP language (classes, inheritance, traits, operator overloading, etc.) Field access in objects are just table accesses (like what you can imagine with Javascript).

However, when you try to access a field in a table that doesn't exist (such as 'print(table.key_that_doesnt_exist)'): no errors or exceptions are explicitly raised, it just silently returns nil. This is such a dealbreaker that makes the language much harder to debug than other languages (at least Javascript returns undefined, which is different from null! Oh well, that actually has problems of its own though....) Some more horror: global variables are also implemented as tables (imagine that there's a table _G at the top of the scope). This means that any spelling mistakes with variables will also just silently return nil, since if it doesn't find any variable names at the local scope, it tries to find at the global scope.

The global variable thing was actually such a big problem that people came up with some voodoo metatable trickery script like strict.lua (https://github.com/deepmind/strict/blob/master/strict.lua) that prevents this from happening (a showcase of the language's power, but probably not its proudest). I'm sure you could also do this with table creation (make a wrapper function tbl() that automatically adds metatables to tables to prevent invalid field access, so every time you need to do things like 'pos = tbl({x = 1, y = 2})') But still, there isn't a solution baked into the language, and it's cumbersome to do this (and I'm not sure about the performance implications of this addition).

Right now I'm trying to integrate Squirrel (http://www.squirrel-lang.org/) instead of Lua as a scripting language into my game. Squirrel is an embedded scripting language that's hugely inspired from Lua, but also fixes this shortcoming of the language by making invalid table accesses runtime errors. And when you want to add new fields to a table you need to explicitly do so via the <- operator:

    table = {}
    // print(table.x) (Runtime error)
    // table.x = 1  (Runtime error)
    table.x <- 1
    table.y <- 2
    print(table.x) // Outputs 1

> No other re-ligion (lit. “back-binding” [one etymological analysis of the word /religion/] to some ideas to rely on for humans) is necessary for a society, but only reasoned about principles: reflection, symmetry, cooperative construction (by too many CAs -> 1CA).

I'm never explained as to how the etymology of re-ligion relates to the whole thesis, much less what the etymology actually means. That first sentence will already make 90% of the people in the humanities to close their tabs. Please explain concepts like these in full sentences, than rather jot out abbreviations and notes that only you could decipher. I'm actually intrigued about this etymology, but I can't understand! What is "CA"? What do you mean by morality relating to symmetry?

> Evolved religions like Christianity also abide to following principles. Their followers do:

  1. think/reflect about the world (our thinking: one instance of reflection)

  2. they are in search of beauty, of beautiful/good actions/deeds (symmetry (1))

  3. they try to establish one text, one book, as core of their religion.

Ah, I don't have the energy to read the rest of this, people deserve a more legible manifesto than that.

The confusions arise from thinking cryptocurrency tokens as material things (like gold). Money is just a numeric representation of the social relationship people have with each other, and the rules of the monetary system is just an technical agreement on how we should have relationships with others. This is a change of rules for the relationship between miners and owners: nothing is "lost" or "burned". Whether you agree upon that change of contract is up to yours, but the actual "disappearing" of money isn't an issue in the slightest here.

It is this aspect that I view the current Ethereum hard fork as one of the most important test the crypto scene had in a while - it's more of a political test than a technical one. I'm assuming that there will be quite some friction between the miners and the owners - and I'm interested in how it would turn out. Those two groups are dependent of each other for their existence, and the rift between them would potentially be the demise of the project. Will the project succeed in establishing a governance structure that would address both the needs and desires of both groups? Or will the project go into tyranny with one group dominating over the other (which would eventually lead to everyone's downfall)? In other words, this will be more of a test of governance than about technology. I don't have high hopes for the miners though, since there's just too much investor pressure from all the crypto craze that hasn't really been stopped since the coronavirus, and the miners doesn't seem to have a strong enough coordinated willpower to land an effective strike.

Yes, I still definitely agree with that one. US’s hubris is the undeniably the largest in the world.

> I think it's ultimately the PRC's goal to have domestic champions replace those global corporations in the global economy (e.g. Apple declines as Huawei ascends)

Maybe, maybe not? We’ll see if this goes well as planed. Easier said than done.

> I don't think the PRC is as stupid as the US was, and will not allow those companies to "pack up and move" to the degree it's disruptive to their ability to provide an unmatched manufacturing supply chain.

The point is, companies are already doing this. You’ll be surprised how much conglomerates like Samsung has already taken production out of China.

A paragraph from Chapter 8:

> Why? The single most important factor would appear to be war. Bullion predominates, above all, in periods of generalized violence. There's a very simple reason for that. Gold and silver coins are distin­ guished from credit arrangements by one spectacular feature: they can be stolen. A debt is, by definition, a record, as well as a relation of trust. Someone accepting gold or silver in exchange for merchandise, on the other hand, need trust nothing more than the accuracy of the scales, the quality of the metal, and the likelihood that someone else will be willing to accept it. In a world where war and the threat of violence are everywhere-and this appears to have been an equally ac­ curate description of Warring States China, Iron Age Greece, and pre­ Mauryan India-there are obvious advantages to making one's trans­ actions simple. This is all the more true when dealing with soldiers. On the one hand, soldiers tend to have access to a great deal of loot, much of which consists of gold and silver, and will always seek a way to trade it for the better things in life. On the other, a heavily armed itinerant soldier is the very definition of a poor credit risk. The econo­ mists' barter scenario might be absurd when applied to transactions between neighbors in the same small rural community, but when deal­ ing with a transaction between the resident of such a community and a passing mercenary, it suddenly begins to make a great deal of sense.

We've seen plenty how democratic countries can go through civil war and political struggle, this isn't something that only happens to dictatorships. And I am just so tired of the dichotomies most people have in their minds for the current form of state governments, both China and the US's political systems are complex and nuanced enough that you can't really call it communism/capitalism or dictatorship/democracy anymore. I was just comparing about which government is actually more competent than the other for dealing with the current problems in the world. One seems just a little bit more competent than the other, but that's as far as it can get.