Over half a lifetime ago now I tried studying physics. I failed miserably at it, and after a few years had to make the difficult decision of dropping out (it would take another 15 years before I would get the ADHD diagnosis that explained my struggles). This was nothing short of an identity crisis for me, on top of already struggling with my mental health for years, since becoming a scientist (or what childhood me thought a scientist was) had been a lifelong dream of mine.

Younger me decided to go all in on that identity crisis, I guess, since I switched to studying art. I was absolutely miserable during the first year, not knowing what I was going to do with my life and feeling like a complete loser. Oh, and my first serious relationship also ended on a very bad note around the same period. Those probably were the most depressing months of my life.

Around that time, friends from my former studies asked if I was going to join the International Congress of Physics Students again the next year. At first I declined, thinking it would just be a confrontation with my personal failures. I never even managed to get to the point of having a basic student project of my own to present a poster or talk about!

Then our art history teacher showed us a documentary about the Hockney-Falco thesis[0]. Which argued that the jump in realism shown by Renaissance painters was due to them secretly having access to optical aids like the camera obscura long before they officially were considered to be known to European cultures. A topic that bridged art and science.

And then, maybe as a response to being sick and tired of how I was feeling sorry for myself, I "decided" I that was going to hitchhike to ICPS 2008 in Krakow[1], meet another cute hitchhiker on the way to have a brief summer romance with, give the best talk of the conference using the HF thesis to illustrate differences between art and science, and then live happily ever after.

Absolutely ridiculous of course, but I needed a goal to keep me going. I'm actually quite introverted and used to be terribly scared of giving presentations, or anything that would draw attention to me really. Realistically I just hoped a few people would show up and enjoy the talk. But as a weird kind of self-help occupational therapy (and probably also out of fear) I went all-in on preparing the talk when not at school.

I tried to cram every sprawling thought on the topic into the talk, ending up with about 120 slides. I had 20 minutes for the presentation. Instead of doing the sensible thing of cutting down on content (did I mention I would get an ADHD diagnosis a 15 years later?) I ended up doing dry runs multiple times in the mirror with a clock, figuring out where it needed rewriting and reorganization slides to make the story flow better, and so on. Oh, and of course each slide had to have at least one joke too.

Hitchhiking from the Netherlands to ICSP 2008 ended up being a lot of fun, but no romance sadly. Then I ended up being really grateful to past me for obsessively preparing, because instead of a handful of friends showing moral support for the art weirdo like I expected, the auditorium was completely full. To my own surprise I wasn't scared because I had prepared my material so much. And the audience loved it, to the point of my talk being picked as best talk of the conference afterwards.

And as a cherry on top I met a cute Polish hitchhiker on the way home who also felt like having a brief summer fling :).

As for the "lived happily ever after" bit, obviously life still has its hardships, but yes, I'm generally happy with my life now. Because that personal success was the first time I started actually believing my life could get better, and it on average has had an upward trajectory ever since as a result.

So thanks, Hockney, you never knew me but in a way you probably saved my life, and it wasn't even with your art (love your collages though!)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hockney%E2%80%93Falco_thesis

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20080215014752/http://www.icps.a...

I also recall seeing in a documentary that the temperature of crocodile eggs will determine if it's a male or female. Wikipedia seems to back that up:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temperature-dependent_sex_dete...

Mind you, "soil" as we know it did not exist before life was there to create it. Geology as it exists on Earth does not exist on lifeless planets.

Of course spoken language also has multiple channels (e.g. tone and sound) but they still lack the spatial aspect.

Apparently, people who pick up sign language later in life commonly typically make what is known as a "split verb error", where they structure their signs sequentially like vocal languages when they should do those things simultaneously.

I'd say this is definitely a noticeable thing with small children at family gatherings, birthday parties and the like. But I grew up in a household where both of my parents came from families where big family gatherings with even extended family was common, and I know not everyone has that kind of experience, so who knows how much of that is nature or nurture as well.

In my case however this has persisted well into adulthood: despite being a chronic insomniac who has a really hard time falling a sleep normally, at these types of social gatherings I often have to fight off falling asleep precisely because I feel comfortable and safe among friends and/or family (I wonder if that is in any way related to my ADHD).

Like, yeah, what you say about TS and Kotlin is true about TS and Kotlin. But since you're not explaining what cpp2 does or plans to do differently, and why it matters, I'm not sure where you're going with that. It's probably obvious but I'm not getting it.

The metaphor Sutter was going for, as I see it, is that TS and Kotlin both added missing features to their host language. Most importantly reflection and decorators in TS, which are now becoming a standard in JS as well[0]. cpp2 mainly focuses on experimenting with reflection and metaprogramming as well, adding features currently missing in C++ by being a compiles-to-C++ language. Sutter has written C++ proposals what would allow give C++ similar reflection and metaprogramming capabilities based on what he discovered by working on cpp2. That's pretty comparable if you ask me.

[0] https://github.com/microsoft/reflect-metadata

But I do think it is different than other "compile to C++" languages, because it seems to be more of a personal case study for Sutter to figure out various reflection and metaprogramming features, and then "backport" those worked out ideas to regular C++ via proposals. And the latter don't have to match the CPP2 syntax at all.

In multiple examples he's given in talks the resulting "regular" C++ code is easier to read, mainly because the metaprogramming deals with so much boilerplate.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8U3hl8XMm8c

> at least for gcc and Visual Studio using #pragma once has a significant impact. The fact is, the compiler does not need to continue parsing the whole file when reaching a #pragma once. otherwise the compiler always needs to do it even if the include guard afterwards will avoid double processing of the content afterwards.

As written the explanation for these optimizationst suggest that both "pragma once" and include guard optimization still requires opening and closing the file each time an include is encountered, even if you bail after parsing the first line. Is that overhead zero? Or are the optimizations explained poorly and is repeatedly opening/closing the file also avoided?

Either way, do you know what causes the slowdown as a result of including ?

I played around with cppfront over Christmas and it was a lot more ergonomic than my distant memories of C++11, which I don't even have negative memories of per se.

[0] https://github.com/hsutter/cppfront

So speaking of old ways, I'm not a C++ dev, but a while ago saw someone comment that they still organize their C++ projects using tips from John Lakos' Large-scale C++ software design from 1997, and that their compile times are incredibly fast. So I decided to find a digital copy on the high seas and read it out of historical curiosity. While I didn't finish it, one wild thing stood out to me: he advised for using redundant external include guards around every include, e.g.

     #ifndef INCLUDED_MATH
     #include $\#define\; INCLUDED\_MATH\; \#endif$

Again, that was in 1997. I have no idea what mitigations for this problem exist in compilers by now, but I hope at least a few, right?

This conclusion is making me wonder if following that advice still would have a positive impact on compile times today after all though. Surely not, right? Can anyone more knowledgeable about this comment on that?

Also, has anyone ever compared the cultural context and zeitgeist of both songs? Probably would be a fun high school assignment, haha. Kraftwerk's song came out in the same decade that the Club of Rome published its Limits To Growth report[2], so when fears about humanity's future really started to become A Thing that was impossible to ignore. Later versions of the song turning it into a protest song encapsulate Cold War fears for a nuclear apocalypse of the time (presumably, I wasn't really around yet back then).

The main audience for the Imagine Dragons song was a generation fully born after the fall of the Berlin Wall. One that grew up playing the Fall Out games. It also came out in 2012, right after the 2008 crisis kick-started the "oh the previous generation will leave us with nothing huh?" Doomer mentality among millennials and Gen Z kids. Remember the media going nuts over the "Ok, Boomer" expression for a while? (which still feels like the media intentionally dividing a community to stop it from actually fixing things me, tbh, but let's not get too side-tracked)

In that context, when put side by side the ID song almost feels like a Doomer generation follow-up and implicit critique of how nothing seems to have actually be done about to prevent the impending apocalypse that the Kraftwerk song's generation was supposedly so worried about, turned into a fantasy about living in that post-apocalyptic planet.

It's "vibe" is weirdly hopeful too, especially compared to the Kraftwerk song as well. Instead of fearing an apocalypse, it's set after one and embraces living within it.

At least, that's how the two songs come across to me, which probably says more about me than anything else. Apparently Dan Reynolds, main singer on ID and one of writers of the song, has said that in retrospect after almost a decade, he had realized that it was actually about him "not giving up hope after losing faith in Mormonism."[3]. Which makes sense as a personal experience of going through feeling doomed and figuring out how to survive and embrace living on in a "post-apocalyptic" world on a personal, social level.

I think that's what annoys me about the Kraftwerk song's status as a protest song, and a lot of other music from the same era: it doesn't feel like it's insisting on a better future. It's passive late 70s, early 80s pessimism.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3viBe2Q0P8

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NyXeJZJUFHE

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Club_of_Rome

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_%28Imagine_Dragons...