People complained about prototype.js and how it was more of a series of hacks and one shouldn't modify DOM but should encapsulate it like jQuery's approach. HOWEVER, if we had all used prototype perhaps most of it's features would be built-in today and it would be extremely easy to migrate away once IE was not longer the prime driver of browser difference patching. But we went with jQuery so now it's quite entrenched and it's nicer workflow has many still clinging to it way beyond it's usefulness. Perhaps it's impact will be better designed interfaces for programmers?

It certainly is not making people think twice about jumping into entangling their projects around libraries which merely automate some steps by creating a whole new framework of doing things... almost like how we keep inventing new languages... something else that has spread into this world... (at least typescript is more like a future javascript.)

The problem is scripting has it's purposeful niche just like libraries and we eventually end up with feature creep pushing them beyond where they are best suited... rising to the level of their incompetence... what scripting should be doing is linking components written in many different tools as the coupler of loosely coupled work. At least web assembly has a promise of making that a reality and perhaps reducing the demand to make javascript the scripting version of C++ (and all the mess of browser issues and now the language itself requiring a mess of tools if you want to use new things early... all needing to be handled at runtime... big sites running slower on faster computers. ) Why we couldn't have macro/parser hacks in JS -- they should have done it in ECMA 6!! It would have mitigated some of the mess that continues to fester... while some would have abused it; that wasn't the reason to stop it.

The worst quality of C++ is that it's obscenely complex. I do C++ right now and one of my C++-nerd co-workers and I were joking about how shitty Perl is and how the code looks like a mishmash of random punctuation.

We had our ha-has (I still use Perl for some basic scripting, it's fine for linear automation) and then the next day he was showing me some template code he wrote to do automatic dereferencing deep copies of a pointer or some shit.

That code (Paul Harvey voice)? A random fuicking hideous mishmash of ellipses, angle brackets, and inscrutable keywords that would be 100X as much of a 'write-only' exercise than the worst fucking vomitous Perl code you can imagine. Now you know..the rest of the story.

Sounds less like a problem with C++ and more like he wrote some shit that didn't need to be done, and sounds like an early draft that should be simplified after the problem is understood.

That's exactly how we get inscrutable perl code, too. It's not the law, it's just "clever" coders being smartasses, usually when there's a library in CPAN to do what they're trying to do much easier.

Worse worse... all they seem to have done is made a system that allows for a lower error over a bit larger timestep, hence making it look 'faster', however it cannot give error bounds! so you have no way of tracking the cumulative error... on an iterative solution....

In other words, its junk for any real use - but at least its fast!

There are similar systems for turbulent fluid flow... they work very well... most of the time, until they dont.

Any factor that may have made the mother take acetaminophen may be what caused the actual observation in the babies. There is no reason to assume a causation here without some actual proof that there is.

Eating meat does not equate to support of inhumane treatment of animals. Healthy and humane livestock production are serious and important issues that are not dealt with by simply reducing meat consumption and increasing soy (for example). Plant based food production has a plethora of environmental and health concerns that similarly should not be ignored. Eating vegan does not equate to support for agricultural replacement of rain forests.

We consume a lot and there are a lot of us. No matter how we satisfy our needs, our methods of food production have a massive effect on the environment. Don't be thinking that tending soy, wheat, or rice is really any better than raising cows and chickens. You can argue that the cost of one is cheaper than the other, or that the food value energy efficiency is better but modern massive plant agriculture devastates insect populations, pollutes ground water, and damages soil.

My neighbors' cattle operation makes very localized and limited use of pesticides and medications. His fields are natural grass that are fertilized with composted manure. He almost never tills a field. Their cattle have a diverse genetic heritage and they work to keep it so. Contrast that with local canola production that depends on massive spraying of fertilizer and pesticides. The soil is tilled annually and the crop seed genetic diversity is suspect. It's genetics are patented and diversity is not part of the plan. They also consume a heck of a lot of diesel fuel throughout the production process.

The real issue is too many people on Earth along with the drive to increase production by any method without regard to the ethical and environmental consequences.

Ah yes, the devil called health. When it comes to food I've never heard more yelling about health ever before in history. Yet the same people are usually drinking ethanol or smoking, not getting enough sleep or regular exercise. So what is health to people really?

I view it as a large spider that sits right next to them. Its invisible until they look at it. And when it bites the fuck out of them, they yell and look at it for a brief moment, then move the exact distance of its fangs out of reach. Then look away and stay where they are.

So the bigger issue with meat isn't health effects, its environment impacts. Feed conversion ratios for beef are horrible. Pork is not much better. But chicken and certain farmed fish are a lot better. It would be far better for us all to focus not on dropping meat entirely but switching to more efficient production of it. This doesn't require waiting for lab grown stuff to be market ready either.

a Mozilla representative wrote: "We are working on a fix to the authentication prompt bug that we expect to land in the next couple of releases (either in Firefox 71 or 72)."

What could be more important than fixing a DoS bug in a basic browser feature? Tighter Pocket integration?

This can be a little tricky to talk about or visualize, because our brains aren't wired to perceive additional dimensions. But I'll take a stab at it. We'll have to talk by analogy though

Picture a sheet of paper lying on the table. Now put a 2D universe on it - a bunch of little stick figures, living their lives, talking about how they know what "flat" means when you're talking about a line, but what does it mean when you're talking about a 2-dimensional thing? And it's going to be kind of hard to see from their perspective. 2-D light only travels along the surface of the paper, so even if you came along in 3D space and curled the paper into a tube, they couldn't see across the gap to the other side of the tube, still just along the surface. But something important would have changed - while the universe was flat they could see forever in in every direction, but now that you've curved their universe back on itself - if they look directly parallel to the direction you curled the paper, they'll look all the way around the tube and see the back of their own head. From their perspective within the 2D universe they're looking in a perfectly straight line and something profoundly weird is going on. But from our perspective we can see that the line is in fact curved, because the paper it's drawn on is curved - the curve is just happening in a 3rd dimension that they can't see.

Does that make any sense? If our 3D universe were curled into a small enough 4D tube, we could look out into space in the right direction, and see the opposite side of Earth looking back at us, because our whole 3D universe is looped back on itself in a direction we cant see.

Of course there's no particular reason the curvature would have to be a tube, you could wrap it into a mobius strip instead, or just stretch and wrinkle it without curving it back on itself at all. That's essentially Einstein's insight with General Relativity - there isn't actually any "force of gravity" pulling the Earth towards the sun - instead the sun stretches the universe itself in such a way that when the Earth travels in a straight line, it keeps ending up back where it started. Or something like that - I admit I don't really understand the details.

Physicists though like to keep things simple - so when they talk about the shape of the universe they're mostly ignoring the "gravity wrinkles" , and in the absence of a compelling argument usually assume it's the 4D analog to one one of three simple shapes that are curved uniformly in all places and directions. Each of which has distinctive geometric properties. Using our 2D analogy the corresponding 3D shapes would be:
-- A flat plane = no curvature. Things keep going in all directions forever (or maybe there's a boundary somewhere), a straight line is actually straight no madder how many dimensions you're looking at it from, and if you fired parallel laser beams out of your eyes, the center of those beams would stay a fixed distance apart.
-- a sphere = positive curvature - go far enough in any direction and you'll end up back where you started - straight lines all follow "great circles" (e.g. lines of longitude are straight, lines of latitude are actually curved), so your parallel laser beams would actually end up crossing each other because space is always curving towards itself.
-- and finally a shape we don't normally see - a hyperbolic surface with negative curvature. Like the flat plane it doesn't curve back on itself, but your laser beams are actually gong to get further apart the farther they travel, because space is curving away from itself. To compare it with a sphere - if you tried to lay out the the surface of a non-stretchy sphere (an orange peel for example) on to a flat surface, you'll have to cut it up into pieces first because the further you get from your central starting point, the less orange peel you have to go around. If you tried to do the same thing with a hyperbolic surface you'd have the opposite problem - the further you get from the center, the mo