What you said certainly works, but I'm not sure computability is actually the biggest issue here?
Have a look at how SAT solvers or Mixed Integer Linear Programming solvers are used.
There you specify a clear goal (with your code), and then you let the solvers run. You can, but you don't need to, let the solvers run all the way to optimality. And the solvers are also allowed to use all kinds of heuristics to find their answers, but that doesn't impact the statement of your objective.
Compare that to how many people write code without solvers: the objective of what your code is trying to achieve is seldom clearly spelled out, and is instead mixed up with the how-to-compute bits, including all the compromises and heuristics you make to get a reasonable runtime or to accommodate some changes in the spec your boss asked for at the last minute.
Using a solver ain't formal verification, but it shows the same separation between spec and implementation.
Another benefit of formal verification, that you already imply: your formal verification doesn't have to determine the behaviour of your software, and you can have multiple specs simultaneously. But you can only have a single implementation active at a time (even if you use a high level implementation language.)
So you can add 'handling a user request must terminate in finite time' as a (partial) spec. It's an important property, but it tells you almost nothing about the required business logic. In addition you can add "users shouldn't be able to withdraw more than they deposited" (and other more complicated rules), and you only have to review these rules once, and don't have to touch them again, even when you implement a clever new money transfer routine.
> Carney is the most popular politician Canada has had in decades.
All thanks to Trump's silly tariffs. There's a silver lining to everything. I hope that the association makes protectionism politically taboo for decades to come.
Not in the US, at least. Every administration since at least Bush jr slapped tariffs on a few things here and there, and mostly kept the previous admin's ad hoc tariffs in place.
In more practical places, like Singapore where I live, you'd be right: tariffs are by and large unthinkable.
> I hope that the association makes protectionism politically taboo for decades to come.
That is waaaay too black and white. Trump's actions != protectionism, Trump's actions ⊂ protectionism (and have been stupid). Free trade and globalization has failed most of the world in pretty serious ways (though it's been great for the much of the elite, floating on top of big piles of capital). Protectionism is important, it just needs to be conducted in a smarter way (instead of indiscriminately tariffing everyone all the sudden)
> Free trade and globalization has failed most of the world in pretty serious ways (though it's been great for the much of the elite, floating on top of big piles of capital).
Globalization benefits capital in rich countries and labor in poor countries. As someone who is from a poor and corrupt country, I have seen many people around me come out of poverty due to globalization.
I can agree that globalization can be bad for labor in rich countries.
Edit: Ironically your comment is also waaaay too black and white.
> I have seen many people around me come out of poverty due to globalization.
This is definitely true and Phil Knight of Nike fame even said that without the opportunity to join his slave workforce in Vietnam, those people would be worse off.
> without the opportunity to join his slave workforce in Vietnam, those people would be worse off.
I am not sure if you are being sarcastic here. But without Amazon many people in my country will be worse off, however bad the working conditions maybe.
Yes it is tongue-in-cheek. I know it's a good proposition for the poor people of that country. But it is pretty widely viewed as exploitative through a wider world lens.
I remember Planet Money doing a pretty good story on this where they spoke with sweatshop workers in Bangladesh.
Relative to the labor wage of employees in the US, they were earning absolute pennies.
Relative to the places they came from? They doubled their income and were functionally free from concerns about things like famine and infected drinkable water.
Exploitation of labor is a complicated topic (and really, the meta-fight is, as is so often the case, not between nations; it's between labor and capital. Offshoring is just another form of scabbing, but the world is not yet small enough that one should expect a fresh-off-the-farm factory worker who just had their prospects opened up to join a global strike because people in the US want to make $15/hr).
(Related: As is so often the case, if you want things better for your folks back home, lift everyone out of poverty and make everyone safe. People are less likley to take "slave-wage" jobs if the alternative is not subsistence and high risk of unpredictable outcome due to localized supply disruption, disease outbreak, or war).
Bangladesh is a fascinating case story. They had a few decades of solid growth largely due to the textile industries, yes.
They went from dirt poor to merely poor. That's to be celebrated, and I hope we see Bangladeshis continue making themselves richer through their own hard work.
> (Related: As is so often the case, if you want things better for your folks back home, lift everyone out of poverty and make everyone safe. People are less likley to take "slave-wage" jobs if the alternative is not subsistence and high risk of unpredictable outcome due to localized supply disruption, disease outbreak, or war).
I assume by 'folks back home' you are referring to people who live in rich countries? Having people in Bangladesh and Vietnam become richer is definitely good from a moral point of view, but it has only second order effects on the 'folks back home'. To a first approximation, it doesn't matter economically how well off or poor foreigners are. As a second order effect, if an economy is booming next door (ie they are getting richer), some positive effects often spill over, and global security probably goes up, too.
> Exploitation of labor is a complicated topic (and really, the meta-fight is, as is so often the case, not between nations; it's between labor and capital. Offshoring is just another form of scabbing, but the world is not yet small enough that one should expect a fresh-off-the-farm factory worker who just had their prospects opened up to join a global strike because people in the US want to make $15/hr).
I'm not sure what you mean by exploitation? In any case, labour and capital are working together, you need both to produce anything in a modern economy. In fact, you need labour, capital and land working together.
If you want to get worked up about anything, it's not labour vs capital. But it's labour+capital vs land. In recent decades in the US the share of GDP going to labour has dipped a bit, capital's share has stayed stable, and the share of land went up.
Many economic analyses mix up land into capital. But that's misleading at best. We can produce more capital to compete with the old capital. We can't make more Land. (Well, not until we are building space habitats.)
(By Land with a capital L, I'm including the oceans. The Netherlands (or even more Singapore) reclaiming big swaths of land just means they are converting ocean floor Land to dry Land.)
It's ironic that USA lost 60-some thousand troops in Vietnam trying to prevent a communist takeover, only for American companies just to enslave them all anyway. I wonder how different the dynamic with Vietnam would have turned out if it had been more of a Korea situation. USA certainly never enslaved South Korea.
Huh? What do you mean by 'enslave'? If you mean that people work for low wages in the export sector, well then I have news for you on South Korea.
The reason South Korea graduated to higher wages quicker than Vietnam seems to be doing, is partially because South Korea is more capitalist, so they see more economic growth quicker.
> Globalization benefits capital in rich countries and labor in poor countries.
Globalization is about benefiting capital in rich countries, any benefits to people poor countries is an unintended side-effect.
> I can agree that globalization can be bad for labor in rich countries.
It may seem that way if you restrict your view to say, China, but it's more complicated than that, and there's more to the world than the "developed world" than Asia.
For instance: IIRC, Africa has had problems with local producers getting run out of business by Chinese knock-offs (e.g. https://www.dw.com/en/how-nigeria-lost-its-textile-market-to...), without the "benefit" of foreign sweatshop employment you've seen in Asia.
My understanding is protectionism would probably be better for Africa, as cheap imports block development of local industry and agriculture, trapping it a low level of development.
> China is now competing head-on not just against other advanced economies but the most vulnerable ones. In effect, it is blocking the ladder to prosperity for countries in the Global South.
> Indonesia lost 250,000 jobs in its backbone textile industry between 2022 and 2024 because of a deluge of Chinese imports, according to the Indonesia Fiber and Filament Yarn Producer Association — and another half-million may now be at risk....
> In Thailand, the Chinese export tsunami has precipitated a crisis among smaller firms making car parts, electrical equipment, and consumer goods, stoking fears of deindustrialization. Village-based cottage industries are particularly at risk; for example, makers of hand-painted ceramic “rooster” bowls have been idled en masse by Chinese fakes that sell for one fifth of the price.
> China’s exports to Southeast Asia are now larger than those to the US. Malaysia’s semiconductor industry, a key growth-engine, is feeling the pressure. Electronics manufacturers in the Philippines are struggling. Vietnam has erected tariff barriers to Chinese hot-rolled coil steel products....
> Yet China keeps piling on the trade pressure. Africa is the new hotspot for Chinese exports: In September, Chinese shipments to the continent surged 56% year-on-year. In the same month, shipments to Latin America were up 15.2%. Some of China’s exports to emerging economies, particularly in Asia, are being rerouted to the US to get around US tariffs, but they also compete with local manufacturers in those firms’ home markets, while displacing their overseas sales.
> My understanding is protectionism would probably be better for Africa, as cheap imports block development of local industry and agriculture, trapping it a low level of development.
It's not like protectionism and the government directing economies hasn't been tried in Africa..
>> I hope that the association makes protectionism politically taboo for decades to come.
> That is waaaay too black and white.
We're talking about Trump here: of course it's black and white.
> Free trade and globalization has failed most of the world in pretty serious ways (though it's been great for the much of the elite, floating on top of big piles of capital).
I don't know: extreme poverty has been driven down quite effectively AFAICT:
Wealth inequality dropped after the Gilded Age and post-WW2 until the 1970s (in the US); nothing said it couldn't have been kept down (say, if Reagan was not elected). There's nothing inherent to free trade and globalization that should lead to it if are willing to redistribution (e.g., through taxation and social programs).
> We're talking about Trump here: of course it's black and white.
Trump might portrait things that way, but that doesn't mean we need to analyse anything involving him that way.
> Wealth inequality dropped after the Gilded Age and post-WW2 until the 1970s (in the US); [...]
Well, if you take on a more global perspective: global inequality absolutely skyrocketed until the 1970s and has only gradually been climbing down since then. Numerically, the biggest contributor was Mao strangling the Chinese economy (and people) until his death, and then Deng Xiaoping took over and relaxed the grip around their throats. But outsourcing and container shipping and lower tariffs helped a lot, too. Not just in relation with China, but for everyone on the globe.
I'm sick of portraying the era until the 1970s as some kind of golden age. It was the nadir for most people on the globe in terms of equality, not the zenith.
The tariffs were just half of it, the attacks on national sovereignty were the other, and Pierre being his usual shallow and despicable self on the campaign trail were the third.
If Carney (or almost anyone but PP, really) were the head of the CPC, they'd have had a majority today. But looking at where the party's going, it's doubtful that the CPC will ever again elect a leader who can both read and write.
Does that work? Congress is so broken now that nothing happens. Sayings like “act of Congress” describing slow progress it would be simple for the lobbyist to just back another candidate to eliminate this “would be a shame” threat
As Matt Levine points out, the revolving door often works in more interesting ways.
If you are a bureaucrat, the way to maximise your next paycheck is often to be especially tough on companies (and on the margin push for more complicated rules that you can be an expert in). Simplified, the logic is "See how tough I am, you better give me a good paycheck to make sure I'm playing on your team."
The beauty is: the bureaucrats at the regulator don't even need to consciously think this way. They can be tough out of the ideological and conscientious conviction at the bottom of their heart, and the mechanism that gives them comparatively higher pay afterwards still works. Being tough also raises your profile, when you are but a junior or middling drone.
The logic you are describing might work, but only for the most senior appointees who already have a high profile.
the logic they describe does work. A lot. The Rollback of Dodd-Frank [0]. Recent malpractice reform (in the wrong direction) [1]. Drilling leases [2]. Asbestos. And so on and so on [3].
Tiger's in the house, y'all. And the roof is on fire. And the water is unavailable because it all got sold to nestle [4].
Ha, Raymond Hettinger has a lot of opinions. Great guy and I admire his dedication to Python, but in my own experience (and the experience of some other contributors), he has a chilling effect on contributions to certain parts of the CPython code base.
If you are a really big fan of something, you'll get familiar with the lingo, but that doesn't mean you can play StarCraft well or weld or shred your guitar.
That's actually part of why FizzBuzz was so notorious: there were (apparently) plenty of people who could talk the talk about programming and software engineering, but couldn't do FizzBuzz.
It's a bit sad that Postscript never caught on as much as it could have. In an alternate timeline, it could have been the HTML (and SVG) we got in ours.
PDF is a sad replacement for PS. As far as I can tell, it was an attempt to obscure PS, because alternative vendors were getting better as Postscript than the originators.
(There was some justification in terms of 'Oh, a binary format like PDF is more space efficient.' But PDF never really was more efficient than compressed PS.)
It's not that PS has vanished, but PS isn't nearly as 'everywhere' as HTML came to be.
From the perspective of someone who worked in printing and publishing starting in the 1980s, there's more to it than that. PostScript was and is terrific as a page description language and as a printer control language. It absolutely revolutionized the printing business. For the first time, you could get complete pages (as opposed to unpaginated galleys) out of high-end imagesetters.
But it was not all that good as a way to send documents to be printed elsewhere. Postscript files were in some ways too dependent on the printer they targeted, so the person creating the PS file had to know too much about the printer that would be used to print it: its resolution and optimal halftone screen frequencies, media sizes, etc. With high-resolution output on photographic film costing around $10 per foot, mistakes could be expensive as well as time-wasting.
Fonts could also be a problem. Ideally, the PS file would contain all the fonts it required but this did not fit very well with the terms of most font licenses. And some applications would include a copy of every font used once on each page on which it was used. This was in line with Adobe's recommended Document Structuring Conventions and had the advantage of making pages within the file independent of one another, but for documents with hundreds of pages, this could add up fast and make the PS file literally hundreds of times larger than if all the fonts were included just once. With small storage media and slow network links, this was a real problem.
The "P" in PDF is for portable, and these are the problems it solved. Unlike a PS file, a PDF file is not targeted for a specific printer model, and most font licenses allowed the licensee to include subsetted fonts in PDF files. I personally prepared PS files for a few thousand books to be printed at various places around the US and later, PDF files for thousands more. There is no comparison: PDF was and is better in every way for this purpose.
PDF is also a lot less powerful, purposefully so. You can start an infinite loop just by double-clicking a PS file, for instance.
It is extremely useful to have a full programing language as a file format, though.
I miss macOS’s Preview.app auto-converting PS to PDF when double-clicked. It was a way to easily distribute a document that could randomize question orders each time it opened, print multiple bingo cards from a single file, etc.
The stack-based and reverse Polish notation thing was also fun.
Who's everyone? There are many, many people who think AI is great.
In reality, our contemporary AIs are (still) tools with glaring limitations. Some people overlook the limitations, or don't see them, and really hype them up. I guess the people who then take the hype at face value are those that think that AI sucks? I mean, they really do honestly suck in comparison to the hypest of hypes.
reply