As long as I can avoid or disable "AI", I'll continue to ignore it. Consistent, reliable, predictable, that's what I want from my computers. Boring is good.
genuinely surprised that kafka is something unknown, thought it had gained ubiquitous status similar to k8s but maybe that's me walking into a Baader–Meinhof effect
Zed is co-founded by one (or more?) original developer of Atom. So, it's a successor in a sense that it is a new project by the same author.
Atom was developed at GitHub, and GitHub Inc remains the owner of the original Atom project. From their perspective the successor of Atom is VSCode - developed by their parent company, - despite the claims by a former Atom engineer.
The only thing that stands out as controversial about her books was:
> In the book [Expecting Better, 2013], Oster argues against the general rule of thumb to avoid alcohol consumption while pregnant, contends that there is no evidence that (low) levels of alcohol consumption by pregnant women adversely affect their children. This claim, however, has drawn criticism from the National Organization on Fetal Alcohol Syndrome and others.
I don't have any strong opinion on the topic of the claim[0], but the way it is reported as having "drawn criticism from [Some National Organization Specializing in Arguing the Opposite of the Claim]" in my experience pattern-matches in favor of the claim.
So beyond that, what's exactly so controversial about her books?
--
[0] - Like everyone, I've had "zero alcohol while pregnant or breastfeeding" message drilled into me for decades, and that's my prior, though I've personally heard an experienced gynecologist, widely respected in the region, giving pregnant women allowance for a small glass of champagne for New Year's Eve...
I've come to see "No alcohol while pregnant" as the better simple rule. The alternative is "No more than X drinks in a day, and no more then Y drinks over your pregnancy." There will be a lot of people failing to remember the numbers (especially after a drink), the numbers vary by body type, the effects vary a lot between pregnancies for no known reason, drinking impairs decision-making, and the bad outcomes harm somebody besides the mother.
Public health guidelines targeted at non-professionals need to be simple. Same idea behind telling somebody who just wants a retirement fund to park their money in a managed portfolio, then ease those investments into safer stuff close to retirement. You could totally explain things in more detail, giving them more options and better opportunities, but most people are likely to not understand enough to safely do it. (I probably explained it incorrectly, which would reinforce my point of the general public's ignorance.)
> Public health guidelines targeted at non-professionals need to be simple.
And that's how you lose their trust. Just telling me to do simple X when it's clear to me from my own experience that sometimes not-X is better for me will make me think your overly simplifying and that your advice is not to be trusted, no matter your credentials.
One domain that a little OO seems to map to without too much pain is GUI libraries. The first OO-flavoured API I ever used was Sunview, the early GUI I used on Sun-3 workstations with SunOS. It was a beautiful API; I was never tempted to mess with the verbose, complex "Intrinsics-based" toolkits that followed it. It carried on with xview; that's what I'd try if I wanted to write a GUI in C today.
I still use tinydns, but I've moved on from dnscache to unbound.
djbdns was a great tool, clearly built with security in mind, and it forced you to understand how the whole system worked. It struggled with things added later like txt and srv records but they could still be added.
OOP has always felt to me like it was inspired by writing GUI APIs; Sun's Suntools -> Sunview -> xview (if I'm remembering the names right) were early-mid 1980s C, and felt beautifully OO, and very clean to write GUI programs. I enjoyed writing image analysis and manipulation in them. Never used the successor "intrinsics-based" Motif and CDE, the code was yucky. Didn't write another GUI until I did a dashboard (for automated software deployment) in TCL/Tk. But yeah, C++ never interested me for OO, C was fine.
For more on this see the book The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous:
> The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous is a 2020 book by Harvard professor Joseph Henrich that aims to explain history and psychological variation with approaches from cultural evolution and evolutionary psychology. In the book, Henrich explores how institutions and psychology jointly influence each other over time. More specifically, he argues that a series of Catholic Church edicts on marriage that began in the 4th century undermined the foundations of kin-based society and created the more analytical, individualistic thinking prevalent in western societies.
Maybe much more prosaic. The British were gin-soaked do-nothings running under an obsolete feudal system. Then coffee got introduced to London. Result: caffeine-fueled economic, military and scientific explosion.
This could also explain how Finland went from famine-stricken illiterate backwater in the late 19th century to a sophisticated social-democratic market economy a hundred years later. Finns drink the most coffee per capita in the world — it was just a question of getting a steady coffee supply.
That's backwards. Coffee was introduced into England before 1600. The first coffee house opened in Oxford in 1650. The explosion in the consumption of distilled spirits was half a century later, fuelled by the governments encouragement of the distilling industry and banning of French imports of spirrits. Hogarth's gin lane is from 1751.
But distilled liquors were a product of the Industrial Revolution. Of course it is perfectly possible to go about in an alcoholic haze on fermented drinks--Samuel Johnson said that the people in his hometown were soberer on wine than they had been on beer. But the scientific explosion preceded the gin.
