www is just the easily visible part of the internet that everyone could access. Usenet, BBS, email etc are all non-www parts of the internet that were more important in its early history but harder to access because you couldn't just point one program at them. www just happened to evolve fast enough that it could emulate the old layers, e.g. Hotmail is the thing that kept emails alive past 1995. I'm sure that without a www front end email would have gone the way of gopher.
Poland very much is part of the West, and is actually on course to become one of the richest countries in Europe over the next twenty years as measured by GDP per capita.
Over that same period Europe is projected to become poorer than Asia in gdp ppp for the first time in 500 years. I'm sure I won't be hearing Poles making the case they are actually part of Asia within those 20 years.
The whole west/east dichotomy is an artifact of the Cold War. Countries aligned with the US and Europe are "west", countries aligned with the Soviets (now Russia) are "east".
Nowadays China is taking the helm of "east" from Russia, but either way it's a geopolitical concept and remnant.
At the UN, “the West” officially means the “Western European and Others Group” (WEOG). Poland is not a member, it is a member of the Eastern European Group instead. Of course, many consider the UN Regional Groups to be a bit of a Cold War relic. But still, it goes to show that whether or not Poland is part of “the West” all depends on how you choose to define “the West”
"the West" does not officially mean anything, other than vaguely refer to Cold war sides. This is why it is not a very useful model (like left and right in politics).
Poland is definitely Western aligned, as Japan or Australia, which shows the absurdity of this model.
I think your assumption that “normal people” all use the term “the west” in the same way is highly questionable. Many “normal people” don’t really think about what the boundaries of “the west” are and either don’t have an opinion on whether or not Poland belongs in it, or else have a different opinion from yours.
Yes, both Bulgaria and Cyprus are without any doubt part of the west. Both are even part of the European Union. Claiming that they are not part of the west is laughable. Bulgaria is adjacent to Greece which is also part of the west. Culturally large parts of the Balkans are also part of the west.
You're confusing cause and effect. The West is defined by embracing enlightenment values, democracy, and capitalism. The "East" is defined as those powers that embraced authoritarian rule and communism.
For a while there was legit economic competition, Soviet GDP outpaced the US for a time in the 50s, but eventually the economies of scale and efficiency produced by the capitalist West out-competed the Soviets and won the Cold War.
Were this true it would be terrible, because Turing-completeness necessarily includes non-termination. This would mean that a compiler would crash, or get stuck in an infinite loop.
It is true and it is terrible. Woe to be a programmer. The Church-Turing Theorem implies it is almost impossible for any languages exhibiting recursion to not be (Church-)Turing Complete. It is easy to forget how deeply, darkly, and deceptively simple the Lambda Calculus is. It is easy to forget that anywhere you may splice in something that even gently resembles the Lambda Calculus you may draw out the frightening runes of the many eldritch combinators many of which are indeed subject to accidental infinite recursion and The Halting Problem. (Including the infamous Y combinator.)
I have seen the Typescript "computing this type lead to what appeared to be infinite recursion and I gave up" errors. The compiler is well built, it mostly does not truly crash in an exceptional case like that, but it does have to use hard, practical heuristics to avoid getting stuck in infinite loops (including harsh stack depths and calculation timeouts for type checking).
https://3fx.ch/typing-is-hard.html is a neat summary, and yes the situation is worse than most programmers would guess:
Most industry languages, including "boring" reliable ones like C++, Java or Rust have _undecidable_ type systems;( and quite a few are unsound as well.)
This doesn't mean type systems are useless! But as GP said there are tradeoffs, and suspiciously many language designers gave up "clean" properties like guaranteed-terminating compiler, or you know actually guaranteeing run-time safety...
yes, all turing complete type systems make it possible to define type structures that would cause infinite loops, but typically they are able to detect this and refuse to compile
“Oh, right.” He blusters a non-termination argument at nobody in particular. “That’s why we usually think in subsets of Haskell where types don’t have bottom values.”
Yes, this is why unsafe exists. It tells the typing system to take a hike and let the natural Turing completeness of types happen. Trying to explain to people who don't understand higher order functions that types are the first rung of an infinite ladder of meta languages is like trying to explain the colour blue to nematodes.
I'm not saying they should act in the majority's interest, I'm saying they should act in their own interest. Mitigate their risk by managing their capital properly instead of hoping ("Hope is a poor substitute for strategy") that things will work out. It's irrational to act in a way that, if a failure occurs, requires someone else to bail you out when they aren't legally or ethically required to bail you out. That's operating on hope, not strategy.
The issue isn't that cubicles are good, they aren't. The issue is that open office plans are worse. If your work is calls and emails that can be chopped up in 10 minute increments then an open office is great because that how long you can concentrate between distractions, if you need to think they are productivity killers that would give mandatory shots every 10 minutes a run for their money.
We have oscillated back and forth with each being the exciting new solution for what sucks about the other for decades, though. This is just the latest swing of the pendulum to one or the other.
I guess they are round now, maybe that was the one missing ingredient that means we will be on cubicles forever and everyone will finally understand why they are better?
Yes, but the majority of current activists want purity tests and circular firing squads. I've seen more cypher punks in board rooms of billion dollar companies in the past 5 years than I have on reddit or hn.
The opinion that no number should be illegal gets thrown out the window when you talk about an image. This used to be as common as AOL email addresses 20 years ago.
