A better parallel is the fall of the republic with the rise of strong men using populism and power to dismantle its form of democracy in favor of authoritarianism.
Not OP but the book ”The storm before the storm” covers what sets in motion the fall of the republic. I think the foreword or opening chapter notes the similarities with the state of the US (Trumps first presidency at the time of writing).
The author is the podcast host of ”History of Rome”, which is also great, and he does the audiobook narration perfectly.
He's also the podcast host and narrator of Revolutions, a deep dive into major revolutions starting in Britain with Charles Stuart and ending with Stalin (well, technically ending with a science fiction revolution on Mars), with stops in Haiti, Mexico, France, Germany. It ran weekly from 2013 to 2025. Absolutely recommend.
Yup, Louisianna has the highest combined state and local sales tax rates on average of ~10% which is no where near the VAT standard which seems to be around 20% for most of Europe?
Fairly short, I'm a Go developer generally working with terraform and microservices. I'd expect some throttling if you're doing 3+ minute compiles, I think. But I think the problem is overblown by the tech video reviewer population that regularly does extremely intensive workloads.
I wouldn't call my personal project "heavy load", but I have a cross-platform C++ project that I am developing on both a Windows gaming PC and a 2020 M1 macbook air.
I use clang to compile on both machines. The M1 mac has noticeably faster compile times.
Using map, fold etc. is not the hard part of functional programming. The hard part is managing effects (via monads, monad transformers, or effects). Trying to convert a procedural inner mutating algorithm to say Haskell is challenging.
Never used monads with Clojure (the only Lisp I've done "serious" work in). Haskell introduced them to me, but I've never done anything large with Haskell (no jobs!). Scala, however, has monads via the cats or (more recently) the ZIO library and they work just fine there.
The main problem with Monads is you're almost always the only programmer on a team who even knows what a Monad is.
The Vision Pro, and despite being pretty good they were kind of a flop. Like I said elsewhere I think VR and AR are niche products tech companies and investors keep trying to make go mainstream because they showed up in a lot of sci-fi. I don't think many people want them.
If the Vision Pro was indistinguishable from a regular pair of glasses and didn't cost over $1000 it would take over the world. I don't think it's a case that people don't want them, it's more that people want what's in sci-fi you spoke of and not this early iteration.
Yeah (at least maybe). If AR were in a fashionable pair of glasses that you could effortlessly switch into a Google Lens mode for example or call up a Wikipedia article that starts getting interesting. But that's a long way off.
Meta is having some success with the Meta Quest, but it is in the gaming sector where they have cultural problems. [1] The notable thing is that the Meta Quest consumer is price sensitive: when the MQ3 came out and they dropped the price of the MQ2, MQ2 sales surged. Next year they came out with the MQ3S which has the brains of an MQ3 in the body of an MQ2, so it is a cost-reduced device that can run MQ3 software.
The AVP, on the other other hand, was just too expensive. At that price it could go with a seat of [2] (been a high end enterprise play) but no way was it going to compete with buying a big ass TV and a home theater system, which you can enjoy with other people. Worse than that, Apple rejected the immersive world experiences that are big fun on the MQ3 -- if a device is that expensive it has to do it all.
The "something huge that would push the whole industry to the mainstream" seems to be the missing piece here.
I'm sure the Vision Pro will get some follow up, but as someone who wears glasses I don't see the glasses/headset version of AR/XR ever catching on in the mainstream.
There used to be a YouTube subscription called Premium Lite which was just ad-free YouTube. I happily paid for that until they shut it down and tried to force the much bigger
subscription on me (nothing else in premium is relevant to me).
Now I use smarttube which is not only ad-free but also has tons of nice features which YouTube will never deliver. However, should premium lite comeback I would pay for it but keep using smarttube.
> A lot of chips contain animal based flavor enhancers.
I think this is mainly as a response to people using plant based fats for deep frying. Traditionally they were fried in beef tallow, no need for any flavour enhancers if you fry them in beef fat.
