I was talking about this with a friend earlier this week. The people who work in software these days seem much more extroverted and outgoing than the 'introverted nerd' stereotype from the 90s.
This is also due to the popularisation of computers, the internet and internet culture.
Everyone and their aunts now are into computers, and one in x is a software "engineer". Back in the day, it was only the hardcore nerds that were attracted to these things :)
It's like... what would you call all types that have a .write() method? Writable right? What would you call all types that have a .dispose() method? Disposable. What would you call all types that have a .flatMap() method? Monad obviously.
That’s because flatMap() is a good name for a particular list operation, but it’s not generic enough to be a good name for the corresponding monad operation.
I’m not sure there is a good name for the monad operation. Sometimes it’s called ‘bind’ but what does it bind?
I suppose you could call it ‘then’ like when working with Promises.
All pure values are automatically lifted into the Kyo monad, so `map` is effectively `flatMap`.
From the linked docs:
> This unique property removes the need to juggle between map and flatMap. All values are automatically promoted to a Kyo computation with zero pending effects, enabling you to focus on your application logic rather than the intricacies of effect handling.
In the end it makes a lot of sense I think. What you do is manipulating values inside some wrapper. Whether this wrapper is a monad or not should not matter. Just do something with the value(s) inside, and that's mapping.
A decade+ ago they used to be proper automotive journalists. IDK if they sold out or there was a change in management but now they just write really shallow "radio DJ analysis of trending stuff" type content that seems designed to appeal to the terminally online segment of the market for automotive journalism.
Jalopnik's ownership history is as spotted and confusing as any web media brand out there. It was part of the Gizmodo group for years, which was bought by private equity and split into separate themed components merged with other media holding companies bought by the same private equity. Four months ago it was sold to something called Static Media, yet another media holding company that I've never heard of, but given the about us page showing a whole lot of VPs and C-suites who look about 25 or so, I'm not sure I would expect this one to last any longer than all the previous owners.
Notably the litigation-induced bankruptcy of Gawker Media (of which Jalopnik was a part) in 2016 is the reason why Jalopnik wound up owned by these private equity groups. Most of these publications are shells of their former selves, but I suppose it could be argued that a lot of written media has gone that way—Gawker-associated and otherwise.
Jalopnik greatly exceeded the level of garbage that was normal for the automotive niche at any given point in time. They had some good years early on but at some point there was a hard cut from that to "I can't tell if they're trying to satirize Reddit or if the journalists actually believes their own bullshit" content.
I argue it was about the time the GMG was recognized that quality took a major quality blow. Then it got dumped out from there and split out along with Gizmodo and the other blogs and their quality equally suffered.
"Partisanship" doesn't mean the same thing in this era where one party is run by a reality show personality. It's barely even politics to side by default with the adults.
I was fully expecting a radio station in Tamil Nadu, but this one's in Sri Lanka. I know there's a lot of Tamil people in Sri Lanka, but that's still pretty interesting!
Thanks for your comment, that’s exactly what I was wondering about.
For me, I actually tend to see things the other way around where authors often inspire tech. Example, engineers who watched Star Trek as kids and ended up designing the first flip phones. Sometimes we build things simply because technology finally makes them possible, and only later do we realize it’s straight out of a story we grew up with.
Especially when a whole generation grows up with the same sci-fi stories, certain ideas just start to seem “normal” or even become things people expect to see for real. A kind of relationship between our collective dreams and the inventions that follow, i guess.
while i agree in principle, you seem to make it sound like without a science fiction story, some things would not have been invented. but i disagree with that. the thing is that science fiction is the imagination of humans of how the future could look like but new ideas in tech come from the same source. that is, while star trek may have predicted phones and tablets they were not invented because of star trek. they would have been invented anyways simply because it is part of the imagination of humans. just like multiple authors can come up with the same plot lines or settings, multiple people can invent the same tech.
science fiction represents the full breath of human inventiveness, and tech inventions the part that can realistically be built. in that sense the first airplane was also inspired by historical scifi
basically, someone has an idea, and either, like you, they write about it, or, if it is realistic enough, and they know how to do it, they set out to build it. and any idea that is written about but can be realized (and is practical enough to be useful) will eventually be realized. but ideas are cheap, and i feel we give far to much credit to people having an idea because a thousand others probably had the same idea, but only a few write about it and a few more are able to build it, while the remaining 995 stay silent and do nothing about it.
so i credit star trek not for inspiring the tablet, but for predicting it, and more so, for popularizing the idea. the flip phone less so, because the original communicator is just a wireless handset with a cover. very different from what a flip phone actually does. (you'll notice that the flip phone is not listed in the above wikipedia page, and even the tablet has been described more than a decade before it appeared in star trek TNG)
I get what you’re saying, and it makes total sense. I’d lean toward it being the best (and worst) of both worlds: sometimes stories spark inventions, sometimes inventions spark stories, and we can probably agree it’s rarely just one-way.
In my case, my imagination pulled me into writing, where I conjure things up, so I definitely feel that inspirational side, even if the ideas themselves aren’t always “original.” To the creator, though, they can feel original.
As I write fiction, I notice I often end up predicting futures where humans might go next. So you’re right, writing can be as much about prediction as inspiration. But I also like to think that, every now and then, a truly new paradigm emerges, something unpredictable, that most people didn’t even realize was needed until it existed. Sometimes, society doesn’t know what it needs until it’s already here.
As another Tamilian, thank you for making this! I'm fluent in spoken Tamil from my parents and I've learned to read and write at a basic level, but I'd never formally learned the language.
It's a translation map of Indian languages - type in a word, see the translations across 22 languages.
I was inspired by this HN post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43152587), and wanted to make something similar for India (which has similar linguistic diversity). Translations are fetched with Google Translate, but I also display 'romanizations' (transliterated into Latin script), which are generated with a local ML model.
Now that it's done, I've mostly been working on a little Markdown-to-HTML parser in Haskell.
