Ben Matthews

Zed, for the last few months, and happy with it (previously vscode) - I code in Scala, so Metals provides the complex hints / actions.

Also remember Bush did the same for Kyoto protocol. Loop repeats again.

I’ve wondered through favelas in Rio. Nice people, tasty snacks, fine views (they are on hillsides), some great music. But that was over a decade ago, I heard situation got worse again during Temer/Bolso time, hope it’s improving now.

This is hardly surprise news, it’s just what the demographics projected. And if trends continue, China’s population will halve by 2100. The big one to watch now is India, and then central Africa, those are harder to project.
You can experiment with my model - click the ‘model pop’ plot on the left side.

I was concerned about the gap between climate science and policy. So, having learned to program as a kid, I made an interactive model to help bridge that gap, to let people experiment. This evolved over 25 years - recently moved to scala.js, still developing, not for money but because we have to keep trying to solve complex problems.

As a kid, I learned to write i = i +1, before school maths taught me it can’t. The point is, computers do iteration well, especially to model dynamics of real non-linear systems, while classical maths is good at finding algebraic solutions to equilibria - typically more theoretical than real. Calculus is great for understanding repeatable dynamics - such as waves in physics, also integrating over some distributions. But even without knowing that well you could still approximate stuff numerically with simple loops, test it, and if an inner-loop turns out to be time-critical or accuracy-critical (most are not), ask a mathematical colleague to rethink it - believe in iteration rather than perfect solutions.

I’m aware of the racism issue, I even observed it myself in China, even many years ago.
But i’ve also seen similar problems in other corners of the world. Such cultural concepts can change slowly, as they did over here.
Anyway, I doubt this would dissuade people trying to connect what will become the world’s main supply of surplus young labour, with the world’s greatest demand for care-services, combined with spare apartments, money, and a milder climate. Not saying it’s good or bad, just trying to anticipate future changes.

That seems like a big change in one year. It may to some extent reflect delay, as on average chinese used to pair-up at a younger age than typical in europe, also maybe some feel old traditions aren’t necessary to keep a stable family with children. But the article says, the core factors are economic. Even so, as they have built so many surplus apartments, the [real] prices must drop, I wonder how many years before they are trying to sell the chinese dream to migrants from Africa or elsewhere.

Indeed to use scala-native you’d need pure-scala libraries, but the core lib re-implements most java lib, and there are now small simple external libs available for common tasks like file management, database, etc. - for example check out the lihaoyi suite.
I mainly use scala-js (to make this) which was formerly a java app - as it compiles to both js and jvm (cross-project) can gradually convert stuff you already wrote. I’ve tried native for stuff like pre-processing data files.

Scala compiles either to native, js or jvm - obviously the IO / interface options vary between these envs, but the lang is the same. Recently Scala 3.5 incorporates a simple-to-use CLI which makes it easier to compile to native (or just run a small file as a script, or experiment with a repl), native binaries are small and fast, and there are some simple io libraries. Since you can also compile to jvm to interop with java, that might help with transition.

I now use Scala 3, and very happy with syntactic whitespace (combined with an intelligent compiler)

Scala-js is working on it - as its compiler design may facilitate this.
I haven’t yet tried (on todo list) and am not an expert, but bookmarked in passing:
recent github implementation, some history, following older discussion

Wonder whether the popularity of the president will follow a similar pattern as in France, trying similar idea … ?

I use vscode as I develop this model in Scala3, whose language-server ‘metals’ integrates well with vscode, and when scala3 was new in mid-21 this was the platform they first targeted. But the scala command-line tools do the clever analysis, vscode provides the layout, colours, git integration, search/regex, web-preview etc… Now considering other options (eg zed) as vscode too dependent on potentially unsafe extensions (of which too much choice), also don’t want M$ scraping my code. Long ago when same model was in java I used netbeans, then eclipse. Would prefer a pure-scala toolset.

Note that Knesset has 120 seats (not obvious from the article). (also, of course, a large fraction of people between the river and the sea don’t get to vote for any of its seats)

Hi, excuse me for replying so late, but i’ve been away from lemmy for.a while. Well, to summarise, the model calculates the future trajectories, of population, economy, emissions, atmospheric gases, and climate response etc., according to a set of (hundreds of) diverse options and uncertainties which you can adjust - the key feature is that the change shows rapidly enough to let you follow cause -> effect, to understand how the system responds in a quasi-mechanical way.
Indeed you are right, complexity is beautiful, but hard. A challenge with such tools is to adjust gradually from simple to complex. Although SWIM has four complexity levels, they are no longer systematically implemented - also what seems simple or complex varies depending where each person is coming from, so i think to adapt the complexity filter into a topic-focus filter. Much todo …

Hmm, publishing that will really help those Crimean beach hotels get customers for this summer…

I can relate to this, having developed a coupled socio-emissions-carbon-climate model, which evolved for 20 years in java, until recently converted to scala3. You can have a look here. The problem is that “coupling” in such models of complex systems is a ‘good’ thing, as there are feedbacks - for example atmospheric co2 drives climate warming but the latter also changes the carbon cycle, demography drives economic growth but the latter influences fertility and migration, etc… (some feedbacks are solved by extrapolating from the previous timestep - the delay is anyway realistic). There are also policy feedbacks - between top-down climate-stabilisation goals, and bottom up trends and national policies, the choice affects the logical calculation order. All this has to work fast within the browser (now scala.js - originally java applet), responding interactively to parameter adjustments, only recalculating curves which changed - getting all these interactions right is hard.
If restarting in scala3 I’d structure it differently, but having a lot of legacy science code known to work, it’s hard to pull it apart. Wish I’d known such principles at the beginning, but as it grew gradually, one doesn’t anticipate such complexity.

Saw same band (±) perform this in Norwich almost 30 yrs later, classic. As students we used to add ‘actions’ to dramatise it.

I began programming java climate model with UK keyboard. When I moved to the continent, switched to swiss then belgian keyboard to better type emails/docs in french, but it was so tedious for code brackets {[()]} and some other punctuation, eventually switched back. Recently converted whole codebase to Scala 3 (here’s the model), now can drop most of those brackets. I speculate whether one motivation for creating scala3 (made in in Lausanne) was swiss/french keyboards.