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.

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.

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

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.

Thanks, fixed! As you can see parts of the science code are already accessible via the ‘cogs’, but not yet the structural code - anyway keeps evolving, update soon.

Similar - I thought about codeberg for the source of my interactive climate model,
but am not yet ready to give it a pure-foss license - might split in parts with different licenses. Could try self-hosting.

I don’t buy this. I’m still using SMTP on my own domain and it’s working fine, a bit of spam but not unmanageable, real messages get read. Main challenge is digesting so many potentially-interesting list messages, indicating email’s continued dominance for professional topics. Seems this author has another agenda.
Having said that, it’s a pity the world never agreed a protocol for micro-payment for emails (and for many other services), which would resolve the spam problem, and not be a burden for honest users.

Hmm, did you consult the next french president about that ?

Sure, but diplomacy is not logical, and EU has a habit (mistake?) to do things in mega packages (look at 2004). Last I heard, the gossip was ‘by 2030’.

Is this intentionally english speaking, or does this just reflect the population of lemmy ?
I’d prefer a multilingual europe instance, ou chacun parle sa langue, para aumentar la diversidad.

Well such timescale would in any case depend on EU, not on convenience for any british parliament. There are now N. Macedonia, Albania, Montenegro, [ Bosnia, Serbia, Kosovo ?], Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia, [Turkey ?] all in the queue to join EU. On the other hand, it might help from point of view of geographic and economic balance, otherwise the centre of ‘gravity’ will shift even further SE away from Brussels. I think to expand EU has to reform processes, to end all vetos and generalise multi-speed / opt-outs.
Meanwhile a new british government could implement obviously convenient win-win cooperation step by step, until there isn’t so much left to change. And I’d be happy to see Scotland and Northern Ireland take a lead.

I’d like to be able to vote for pan-european parties, but voting for Volt only works in very large constituencies (such as Germany). In most other places it likely reduces the chance of getting pro-european MEPs who might consider implementing such an option. What other strategies can help ?

Useful study - thanks for link.

"they were not supportive of asylum seekers’ freedom of movement and would prefer them to live in a designated place (respondents were 8.3% more likely to choose the latter option … "

But who do they think does this designating, and according to what criteria, is the result really anywhere near optimal for anybody?
Doesn’t it make more sense for people to have the option to move, in their own time, to where they can find housing, jobs, languages they know etc., than be stuck in ghettos where they happened to gather due to various short-term factors ?

But what can “maximum vigilance in these last days” do to counter last-minute fake news ? The night before the brexit referendum, facebook distributed loads of fake messages on the theme of migration (e.g. especially targeted to south asians to say they could have more chance at family reunions if there would be less east-europeans, while targeted to others to say there would less asians … ), all of this after the other channels were silent following the murder of Jo cox.

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 …

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.