benjhm

Ashes are great for shade just when we need it, as their leaf-season is relatively short. I wonder whether the lack of tree-neighbours helps it avoid the beetles that bring fungi to other ashes. Also how are it’s roots getting water ?

This article feels to me really out of date. Scala3 was launched nearly five years ago, The tooling and lib-support was indeed dodgy back then but works very smoothly now. Scala3 also broke Scala2 macros, and some people whose business-model was selling support for clever libraries built on those macros made a lot of fuss (bad publicity). Meanwhile Scala3 has new more robust macros which work fine.

I develop in scala an interactive climate-scenario model web-app . It's running the model in your browser (500 years x 250 countries x many gases, sectors, feedbacks etc. - so it's complex)... The scala code compiles to js (or wasm) -which is what runs this web app - but the same code also compiles with scala-native to run fast batch- calculations or tests. It also compiles to the jvm app like my older java code, but I rarely use this now.

Scala3 code looks more like python than java - minimal brackets, and much nicer to read and higher level than rust.
As for tools I just use Zed editor with Metals for LS, Mill for build, and other libs from the lihaoyi ecosystem, no web 'frameworks'. Scala is both robust and flexible. In general - if the code compiles, typically it runs correctly first time, if not the very-intelligent compiler identifies precisely what to fix where (very different from so-called 'AI'). So instead of reams of junk 'tests', it's usually just enough to check whether my climate system plots look and behave as expected - higher level thinking.

As for Kotlin it was effectively a russian-led (at the time) fork of Scala, staying closer to Java - so less flexible, but they did much more systematic marketing - and I suspect some of that deliberately pushed blog posts knocking Scala.
What Scala lacks is promotion, so those following fashions of this hype-driven world won't find it.
For those who use it, it's a great language, to do complex stuff that scales robustly.

Good, makes sense, as Scala is 'made in Europe' (mainly swiss and polish teams), and makes very robust software. Only it’s under-hyped. Here you can try my interactive climate-system web-model written in latest Scala, which compiles three ways - to the web-app you see, to native code for fast calculations, and to a jvm desktop app (with 25 years history, originally java).

Yes. Persistent contrails - i.e. aviation-induced cirrus clouds which spread in supersaturated air layers - are indeed bad for the climate, but often their effect is ignored as hard to quantify, while the simpler small effect of short-lived contrails is conveniently cited instead.
Also, while all high clouds have a warming effect by reflecting infra-red radiation back to earth, there can also be a cooling effect due to reflecting solar radiation, which is greater when the angle of the sun is low. So the net effect is warming in the middle of the day and at night, but cooling in morning and evening.

SF6 emissions are bad news, but thanks for reporting it. Wondering whether Solvay HQ in belgium had any role in covering this up ?
I recall using SF6 30 years ago to study ocean gas fluxes, but only microlitres, as we knew about it’s crazy high GWP even then.

If you really want the selfie-type view, try this espreso link.

I hope you are right but fear that in practice (has this ever been tested?) you might not be.
See for example this discussion ( note especially comments by 'MadHatter' )

Maybe Euroclear is not the only reason - rather a convenient excuse for De Wever to waste time - as his seat of power is Antwerp with a huge chemical industry partly fueled by Russian gas, and his party is right-wing nationalist and maybe more sympathetic to the Putin-Trump vision than they dare to admit (as not in line with sentiment in the country as a whole).

When I look at polls it suggests little moved since last election, so Продължаваме Промяната & Демократична България are still far from leading an alternative government. Are those polls wrong ? Or is this another example of optimistic youth on streets in the capital, outnumbered by conservative old people in small towns (as elsewhere in europe)? How do they expect to change this ?

I'm still confused by this. Doesn't that imply that if a derivative SaaS is created in combination with a weaker ( less-copyleft ) license such as GPL, Apache or MIT, then the weaker licence wins, so the derivative source code no longer has to be published ? I'm not looking for a 'do whatever you like' licence, I'd prefer a copyleft approach like AGPL, but one that's easier to defend in europe.

Does anybody know how much energy it costs to dig such tunnels through rock ?
Anyway, I like the ferries, you get to see the sea, rocks, waves.
So boring in those tunnels, in some other one they had to put changing colour patterns to stop drivers falling asleep.

Some comments below the article are good. I like especially this one:

One thing that seems to me to be shaking out of LLMs: if an LLM can do it well enough to pass muster, it probably didn’t need doing in the first place. Coming at it from a programming perspective: if an LLM can generate the required code, it shows that you could have better abstractions that describe your behavior with less code. If an LLM can generate a document, it’s a sign that the document isn’t necessary in the first place- it’s a bit of leftover make work that should be subsumed into a better process. And so on.