Historically the practice of producing pyc files on install started with system wide installed packages, I believe, when the user running the program might lack privileges to write them.
If the installer can write the .oy files it can also write the .pyc, while the user running them might not in that location.
I think this may actually be two different things. Much like how being good at coding doesn’t mean it’s fun to watch you code. Though there are “performance” coders where it really is!
No, that's true, and I don't actually think that the world is divided into good and evil. Nor do I think anyone doing this really has anything to fear from the justice system.
But to the degree you can take a normal person and twist them into something horribly unfit for civil society, having them do torture is the way. It's the express lane to not seeing others as human, not even when they're in front of you, being tortured by you.
The world has to modes: In one mode, we need people, as much as we can get, to make something bigger out of this world. In another mode, the world can no longer grow, so we divide, we conquer "the others" or be conquered.
The definition of the word "evil" changes depends on which mode we are in.
That's why Niccolò Machiavelli suggested that it is useful to be both loved and feared, it gives you the best chance when a challenge is facing you.
All republics are democracies. Not all democracies are republics. Some people seem to get confused about this and think that "democracy" means "direct democracy" only, and not any of the various sorts of indirect democracy.
To make this point crystal clear, “correcting” someone with “ackshually the US isn’t a democracy” is something poli sci departments break their freshmen of every single year.
The colloquial, broad sense of “democracy” is also how political scientists employ the term in most contexts. That is: the people who study this for a living are entirely OK with that usage. If they didn’t use that sense of the word they’d need another one to mean the same thing, because it’s very useful.
> To make this point crystal clear, “correcting” someone with “ackshually the US isn’t a democracy” is ...
it's not a democracy, when a large part of the population is barred from voting, and / or if your idea of a vote is giving power to legal persons more than to natural persons during the voting process.
but fine, let me rephrase, the US is not more a democracy than China, North Korea, Russia, or any other clown state that says "wE aRe dEmoCraCy". Having large swathes of your mostly illiterate and poverty-stricken population so badly brainwashed that they fly their flag in their personal LinkedIn Profile, or pride themselves as "patriots" with a red cap, does not make the country "democratic".
To put it even more bluntly: the way the US sees its population in Appalachia is how the rest of the world views the US.
On the upside it all makes great entertainment (see Sacha Baron Cohen's "Who is America" which first and foremost is a documentary and only secondly is Satire).
I'll do you one better, it's always been a bureaucracy, but even moreso following the end of the 1960s, after the beginning of the "meritocracy" myth within academia. In reality, the incoming well educated migrants (usually European) in the mid 1950s were extremely nepotistic to their own groups, such as the Irish entering Wall street, and hiring only other Irish stockbrokers, or Italian small business owners in New York. They essentially replaced or married the old money and became a noveau riche that's still in the American status quo to this day. There is a new clique of sorts acting as a nepotistic noveau riche, mostly stemming from South or East Asia. Nepotism affects everyone and everywhere, but it's especially prevalent in the United States.
Also the great entertainment has been declining in quality, and it was always funded directly by the U.S. Government and Military to support their ideologies and agendas abroad. The Koreans are recently doing this to great success, and possibly China as well.
I see. I thought you meant "under Trump the US is not a democracy". Which I think is a pretty common opinion. But now I understand you meant "the US has never been a democracy".
No, that ship sailed long ago. “App” has universally been a synonym for “application”, “program”, etc. for quite a number of years now. Even Windows 10 called them “apps” in the settings screen.
On my personal computer running macOS, I have this program called "App Store". And on my GNU/Linux machine, I have all of these weird programs distributed as something called "AppImage". And on my Windows machine, the Microsoft Store has a tagline which says, "Microsoft Store - Download apps, games & more".
There is not a desktop/mobile distinction in terminology other than the one you're attempting to enforce.
Yep, as much as I wish there were a distinction, I think there pretty clearly is not anymore. In related news, I hate that restaurants are now calling "Appetizers" "apps" because it massively confuses me for several seconds. IRL really needs namespacing
In theory, you can add some more complexity/fragility and have 'time notaries' sign the current time together with a challenge from the passport, verifiable against embedded public keys.
Pretty much. But you would need, first, to issue a valid certificate with a timestamp far ahead in the future. And then expose every ID card in the country to it.
Reminds me of "Ask HN: Is the world run by badly updated Excel sheets?" [0]
You need experience to see the shorcomings of spreadsheets. No version control. No tests. In general it's good for things that don't need to evolve, but stay the same (most likely because they're short lived).
[EDIT] An example of a comment from that thread pointing in this direction:
> In general, you adapt to the excel owner's quirks, not vice versa. If you don't like it you should create an excel sheet of your own and copy/paste, which people also do.
> I knew a project manager who's job seemed to be reconciling multiple versions of a spreadsheet with different authors.
Well yes, starting as a coder in the 2000s in the US, I always thought of my job as turning tortured spreadsheets sitting on a Windows network drive that have to be constantly babied by an underappreciated office staffer into web apps. But I do recognize that a lot of businesses have been run on spreadsheets and run well. There’s a scaling problem and when it hits, ideally you know and can move to an app, but perfect is the enemy of done.
You can use version control with Excel spreadsheets, though it's not very good. It's called "track changes" and even has a limited capacity to approve/reject changes from other people.
Very few people uses that feature, especially not the people who have built a Rube Goldberg machine to run their business processes, but you could do it if you wanted to.
That's not the only version control through - if you use Excel connected to Onedrive or Sharepoint (like most major orgs in my country), then you have version history built-in tracking every edit going back months.
The people who have "built a Rube Goldberg machine to run their business processes" should have used a database not a spreadsheet. Though they likely don't have enough training in database design and so if they had their result would be worse - but that is the fault of their lack of training. To be fair, database training is not something they should have in their position
It’s tricky because a lot of these spreadsheet “apps” are made when the business is young. Specifically non-tech companies who don’t have IT departments let alone any developers. They hire an MSP, get office, and go to town in Excel.
By the time they do get big enough to hire internal IT, the Rube Goldberg system is entrenched. Then by the time they get big enough again to need an internal dev team because off the shelf SaaS no longer cuts it, it’s too late. It’d take too many dev resources too much time and money to fix the spreadsheets, design databases, and start popping out web apps.
Plus the software development process is too rigid for how fast business requirements can change. The accounting department will just do it in Excel in an afternoon instead of being willing to wait 2+ weeks for the next sprint.
So we end up at a place in big enterprises where only some things get successfully moved to something more robust but there just isn’t enough resources (or will to allocate those resources) to tackle every spreadsheet, and so there are always key parts of the business that will forever run on Excel.
You can't track who changed what rows that way. Excel has native support for that.
If all you want is to see previous versions, just make the files read-only after saving them and increment a number in the file name every time you change something.
I've mostly seen the problem manifest when information is spread across a multitude of spreadsheets all stored in different places. The people involved don't know which spreadsheets contain what information and which are supposed to. Sometimes they end up having conflicting data purely because they don't realise that someone else thinks the primary source is spreadsheet A while they're only making changes to spreadsheet B.
Any flaws with Excel haven't been due to the actual program or data, but just how the files are managed within projects. Labyrinthian sharepoints, files being forgotten about on network storage, etc.
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