The richest, most powerful organizations are spending billions every month to make it more addictive, to reach more people.

Homebound and housewives used to watch hours of game shows and soap operas all day.

If a kid liked to read, some parents would tell them to "get your head out of that book and go outside."

It's just something to do to fill the boredom.

If you never practice making and having friends, how are you ever going to have them?

the real estate shortage is driving two effects; places not optimized for revenue are being priced out of existence, and workers need higher wages to pay housing costs which squeezes these places further and results in things like shorter operating hours even if full closure doesn't happen.

"Hey come over to my place" also works.

"Let's grab dinner."

If they weren't constantly driving themselves to distraction most people would be able to make at least 1 or 2 friends at work or from a shared hobby, based on the experience of all the decades prior.

The US not having "third spaces" went into the founding story of Starbucks. The big difference today is people not even having friends and no longer knowing how to even do so, thanks to the addiction machines. Why risk rejection when you can just go back to your scroll?

amongst the people I know, a fair amount are not able to willing or host events because they have roommates who they are not necessarily friends with; and amongst those lucky enough to live alone, new build apartment sizes have been shrinking.

This is old but even with the mall apocalypse, we haven’t had a reduction from 20+ sq ft per person to the 3-4 normal in Western Europe and Japan. https://www.businessinsider.com/retail-apocalypse-is-still-i...

I would actually say the (indoor) mall apocalypse is a contributing factor since for all their faults, malls were third places in a way that strip shopping centers are not.

At least for retail the problem is moreso that lenders and landlords are playing hot potato with inflated rent and extend and pretend; some(most?all?) commercial loans go into default if rent goes below a certain amount

It takes some... special mindset to be polite to not see it literally everywhere, the scale and intensity of it, the addiction of kids especially. They have no freakin' defenses and often didn't experience normal life, ever. Ask any child psychologist about their opinion of screens among kids before say 14, and even afterwards.

It can be fought, we are quite successful so far with our kids and we have quite a few parents around us with same mindset, but we have to lead by example.

Easiest is to unplug from active social cancers (fb, instagram, tiktok or whatever kids are addicted to these days). Ignore most of the news, read about topic from source far away from place/country affected. TV can serve some quality content but one has to do some effort, no ads. Computer games are a waste of time and life (I know, I've wasted half of my childhood with them, 100x that for any online gaming), if one is bored then get a sport, passion, read a book, force yourself into some social action, whatever is vastly better. Then comes along junk food, again parents lead by examples.

Life is freakin' short, its pretty sad view to waste it on all above in more than a minimal fashion. Its sort of life success in 'look I am not a homeless person or heroine addict', but just a good fat notch above that. Literally anybody can do better.

Thinking about it, my overall position is to maintain a balance between dopamine from long-term sources and short-term ones. I think long-running creative projects that make you think are generally good whether they are digital (see: 3D animators/artists) or physical - it's just personal preference which one you tend towards. The types of games I try to limit are those with temporary rounds/matches/etc... unlike a Minecraft world, there is no cumulative aspect, no long-term planning apart from your own increase in skill. Despite that, the short satisfaction from momentary successes in each game keep you playing.

I just hate seeing them in hands of kids who should get development pressures from anything but glowing interactive screens, and generally folks who form addictions very easily (I am simply on the opposite side for whatever reason, when comparing to many peers in various drugs but also general mental habits... but I feel if I fell for it hard enough my defenses would weaken across the board, probably permanently).

Is what I describe so unreachable for you that you make your words make sound... unkind?

I am also doing these passions while helping raising 2 small kids: hiking, sport climbing, via ferratas, skiing, ski touring, diving, and recently abandoned paragliding due to brushing death in pretty bad accident. Those take way more time and effort than coming here. I spend almost 0 time in front of TV, don't have consoles, play like 1 game per 2 years, offline and on desktop PC only (last one was Baldur's Gate 3).

I wonder if there's any statistics comparing deaths and injuries from drunk driving versus distracted driving over the past 20 years or so. Is it a comparable at all?

First, TVs were stationary. Unlike smartphones, you couldn't take them wherever you went. If you were wealthier, you could somewhat compensate for this by having multiple TVs, for example in the bedroom in addition to the living room. But whenever you stepped outside your house the TV did not come with you. Places like doctors offices or hotel lobbies might have them in waiting rooms but that was really it in terms of the average person's exposure.

Second, TV programming was not explicitly designed to be addictive. Sure, studios wanted people to watch their programs because that's how they got ad revenue, but they had neither sophisticated tools nor the methods to dial addictiveness to the max. They did not have algorithms, for example, to serve you personalized content based on your tastes and desires. You picked from a limited selection of what was available in that week's programming.

Third, TVs did not have built-in mechanisms to demand re-engagement when you had them turned off. No such thing as notifications. At best you had blurbs about what is next on the program, but those were both channel-specific and also required your TV to be on. So people were not constantly bombarded with micro dopamine hits like they are today.

I could go on, but yeah, your rebuttal does not stand up to critical scrutiny. What we have today is a global scale addiction. It is absolutely nothing like TVs or newspapers/books before them.

Whereas the plethora of web/apps can provide simulations for all those different circuits in your brain, as you move between them each satiating a different aspect of your personality. And then when you've got time to really "relax", you can still turn on TV in the background to be engaged in multiple low effort stimulations at once.

All three of which I have seen people walking on the sidewalk while reading, btw.

That's why me having a butter knife is of no concern, but they certainly won't give me the nuclear launch codes.

The quantity and availability of "visual entertainment" for me as a child of the 70s pales in comparison to what my young kids have available to them. As parents we're continuously fighting it, including shutting off the router at set times.

That's literally what an addiction is.

> people not knowing how to spend their free time in other ways

Are two indications how it is difficult to stop something.

Not touching alcohol for 12 hours a day does not mean you are not an alcoholic.

If someone stops drinking for a long enough period, with no urge to return to drinking, then yes, they aren't an alcoholic. You just made up a silly 12 hour window so you could beat a straw man to death.

When you are staring at a wall all day, you can probably think of a lot of other things you could do and did. When you stare at a wall all day, and think of nothing and enjoy it, then I would say you have mental problems. The problem isn't that you do something for a long time, the problem is that you can't think of something else or can't control you to do something else, even if you want.

It's just something to do to fill the boredom.

(That's to say: Just because something was mildly bad in the past doesn't mean that the current, somewhat similar, thing in the present isn't horrifically bad. The issues are orthogonal +- 5deg max)

Many places have “supervised consumption” sites or decriminalization now that has gone very poorly, I think in retrospect having opium dens for those who choose to live that way might have been a better alternative to the current state.

I am VERY online, but I don’t usual traditional social media. I mostly read Hackers News and a DC parenting forum which is pretty no-holds bar, but is a website out of the 90s so not really capable of infinite scroll or dark patterns (other than the addictive and open ended topics).

I also read a lot of news like NYT and watch TV like Apple TV, but it’s hardly the dopamine drip of TikTok or Instagram. Yet I am ashamed of my 8 hours of screen time despite my best efforts. I used to reach out to friends more but as I get older it feels intrusive and hard to make conversations.

There's just something about having a beautiful OLED screen, the tablet-like shape, touch interface, and access to all of human knowledge/news/entertainment. I remember when people used to have a tv on when they lounged around the house, or cooked, or cleaned. My parents even had a little special splash proof CRT TV in the kitchen.

The modern screens are just that, except also much more convenient and with million times more content, and personalized, and wireless ANC headphones if you like. This is it, this is peak human information environment. It's not a conspiracy of corporations.

Much like obesity is primarily driven by abundance of calories, another fight we won with our natural environment. The highly processed foods and marketing are just barely making a dent at the edge, and are largely a zero-sum game between food manufacturers.

I’ve had success consciously worsening my experience, doing stuff like reducing color intensity with accessibility options or using the web version of an app for added friction, which is ridiculous but here we are.

Reducing color intensity is a great idea to worsen the experience, I’ll give it a go. Yet first thing I do after wake up is checking Hacker News and the design is probably not at fault. Still some self improvement to do.

0 still security updated! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45270108

But not only that, also my work iPhone got recently upgraded from an old SE with small screen and laggy performance to the new 16e, and I found myself more eager to check work emails, ms teams than ever before.

I don’t think that’s a good development, but at the end it’s my responsibility and my own decision on how I use those devices. That also means I will probably downgrade to a worse iPhone instead of getting the best available.

I know some people have gone back to carrying a digital pocket camera, but I haven’t really bought into the idea for convenience and because I think taking it out has different social implications.

It definitely does, but in my experience a standalone camera is usually better received than a phone.

I think it’s got to do with the implication of easy shareability. Pointing a phone at someone always brings to mind the idea that the photo can be sent anywhere within seconds. Are they going to post you on their instagram story? Are they going to send it to their friends and laugh about you?

The friction to sharing photos is so much higher with a standalone camera that I think a lot of people feel much more comfortable with one pointed at them.

Then again, that same friction quickly becomes a problem for the user - I know I’ve lost a lot of my photos just because I couldn’t be bothered to connect the camera, transfer the photos, organize them, back them up etc.

Selfies or phone pictures are quick and people mostly don’t react, but cameras make us pose, subconsciously. At least I feel a phone gets me more natural photos, that work better as memories of the moment.

The lack of instant online backup is also a good point, I don’t know if that’s on the table on newer models.

That's it in a nutshell, I think. We had television at home since I was maybe 10 years old but the content that would interest a kid was very neatly time-slotted to small segments of each day (with Sunday being essentially an entertainment desert to a kid).

So TV was boring most of the day so we went outside, or if Winter, found ways to amuse ourselves indoors. I drew pictures, played board games with my sister, wired up a circuit with my 65-in-1 electronics kit…

Whatever it was that made humans enjoy books, newspapers, magazines, movies, tv shows, written correspondence, phone calls, etc, is now available times a million, 24/7, in your pocket, essentially free (if you don’t count externalities ofc). Plus the ability to handle a huge number of admin and business tasks from anywhere. Not hard to see why it’s so addictive for almost everyone.

And I just checked their site, and what do you know... https://www.sparkfun.com/sparkfun-inventors-kit-for-micropyt...

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/the-rise-and-f...

"... Sodium cyanide can dissolve gold in water, but it is also a deadly poison. “Atomic” chemistry sets of the 1950s included radioactive uranium ore. Glassblowing kits, which taught a skill still important in today’s chemistry labs, came with a blowtorch."

It's hard to believe but initially the content was much thoughful, with actual cultural gems produced for it. Then that content got pushed further and further late at night and eventually disapeared. We can categorize that trend as some kind of "natural erosion" but that'd be ignoring the various forces that fought to change that medium, one of which may be lazy humans relinquishing their soul to the beautiful screen, but another sure one is profit seeking through selling advertisement.

Also, I remember a time when bringing a handheld video game at school would be terrible for a kid's social status. Now it's socially acceptable to spend time in video games.

I don't remember that time. Even the "jocks" loved Mattel Football. And what else were they going to do in school, pay attention to the teacher? ;-)

Ye Discovery channel etc used to be serious. By todays standard I guess MTV would be considered fancy.

Something we could not have imagined a few decades ago.

If you can’t install it because you’re using chrome, switch to a real browser :)

But yeah it's kind of delusional to put a blanket ban on code you could read yourself.

uBlock origin is 307k lines of code. Yes, you could read it all, but its an impractical task.

Just to be clear, I'm not suggesting uBO is untrustworthy, but just because a piece of software is open source doesn't mean it is practical for an individual to audit the code themselves.

How do you keep track of this? Yes you can read the diffs, but not really practical.

I'll just wait until Firefox ships with a secure sandbox for extensions.

I'm sure typing this comment and sending it over the internet involves billions of lines of code running on countless pieces of hardware. Of course there has to be some level of trust somewhere.

Who is getting obese from fresh fruit and vegetables, whole grains, and the like?

People will eat a whole bag of salted potato chips or a whole container of ice cream in a sitting, but who eats a whole bag of oranges in a sitting?

I suppose that for any given action, there's likely always someone who will do it, but in any case a bag of oranges has significantly different nutritional properties than a bag of chips. How many oranges are we talking about, and what size oranges?

I could too... if I wanted to. For me at least, oranges are not the type of food that inspires me to binge. Do you seriously not understand why people tend to binge on certain foods and not on others? In any case, 5 oranges is at most maybe 400 calories, very low fat and sodium.

> I'm not obese.

Which is my original point: "Who is getting obese from fresh fruit"

Compared to our hunter-gatherer ancestors, we have a practically unlimited supply of fruit, but I don't think thats really the problem.

No, that's not possible. Your comment will be seen by a tiny minority of people on the internet and is a drop in the ocean. The impulse to persuade social change works in small groups, and the frustration you're feeling is completely feckless on the internet. (ie, if you were saying "can we stop [thing] in a small workplace you might actually have success. Out here on the internet this is really impossible, and is a mismatch between our intuitions and reality.)

/s

Fully agree with you comment. I am shocked that the hyperbole with the classic "greedy corporations are eating us alive" empty narrative got so many upvotes here

Sugar, anyone?

Yeah we know sugar is bad. The article's about screens. It's not really important whether sugar addiction or screen addiction is bigger. This isn't worth fighting over.

They can both be bad and you can post an article about sugar for talking about sugar.

> Screen addiction is a pandemic. The biggest one humanity has ever seen.

I disagree, sugar is bigger than screens.

And instead of complaining about my answering another comment, you can write an article about complaining.

But the copious amounts we're ingesting these days? It's actually terrible. A major contributor to the coronary disease epidemic.

Highly processed foods and fast food aren't just bad because of sugar. If you read the nutrition facts, they're extremely calorie dense and contain huge amounts of saturated fats.

Just swapping your sugar intake for steaks and cheeseburgers won't save you. It feels almost like one of those "get rich quick" schemes.

Doctors HATE this one trick! (Just don't eat sugar)

No, actually, you'll still be obese if you do that. You need to eat greens too, and live an active lifestyle, and limit your saturated fat intake, and eat less animal products.

We're not addicted to sugar, the "sugar cravings" are mostly to combos of carbs and fats.

Eating enough turns off my "sugar cravings". Eating lots of protein makes any craving for sugar disappear (I survived last Christmas by not eating any cakes, just lots of meat).

Glad it works for you, but that's not universal. I'm pretty much addicted to sugar, regardless of what else I eat. So I have to not buy it in the first place - that way it's just not available.

Grab a fistful of whatever candy you're thinking about when you say that and put it in your mouth. Then once you've done that, try doing the same with pure sugar. Tell me if you think you got different amounts of sugar in your mouth or not.

It's not the first time I hear this soundbite, and while it perhaps sounds cool as a TikTok comment, it really doesn't make much sense in reality.

Take pure sugar, add to hot water to make a thick syrup, add food colouring, cook at two hundred and something degrees. Hard candy.

Most other candy recipes are similar, and over 50% sugar by weight. Sugar is the main ingredient by weight after water of many drinks.

You're being deliberately obtuse if you continue to insist on comparing a bag of sugar to something made mostly of sugar. It's like saying "You like steak? Ok, go lick that cow then tell me you like steak!" - it's a straw man argument.

Then I did something like "3 pieces weigh 18g with ~11g total sugars and 17g total carbs so about 61% sugars"

I've been told to use an offhand rule of fiber vs sugar as a ratio. For every 1 gram of fiber 'up to' 50 of carbs ~ calories, with lower better.

Fiber also has other benefits https://www.cdc.gov/diabetes/healthy-eating/fiber-helps-diab...

(plus some other quick search results)

https://www.calculatorultra.com/en/tool/carbohydrate-to-fibe...

https://www.everydayhealth.com/diabetes/the-ratio-of-fats-ca...

> I've been told to use an offhand rule of fiber vs sugar as a ratio. For every 1 gram of fiber 'up to' 50 of carbs ~ calories, with lower better.

I don't think this really captures the concept of "sugar". Here's ordinary sourdough bread: https://beckmannsbakery.com/collections/sourdough-breads/pro...

Serving size 38g, 22g carbohydrate, 0g fiber.

By the time you're saying that most of what everyone eats is nothing but sugar, you've taken things too far. Grain isn't sugar.

(I'm really curious what the rest of the bread is. The nutrition facts note 4g of protein, but that leaves 12 grams, or 32% of the bread (!) unaccounted for.)

Maybe other minerals, salt is some but not 12g of it.

The difficulty I have with this idea is that they would have to also not count as "carbohydrate".

> Maybe other minerals, salt is some but not 12g of it.

Sodium is reported to the microgram, so we know that salt is 0.5g of it.

For one third of the bread to be "minerals", I'd start to worry that it'd be more like eating a rock than eating bread.

EDIT: it has been brought to my attention that the missing weight is water.

https://www.nerdscandy.com/nerds

(Serving size: 15g, of which sugar: 14g. These numbers are rounded pretty badly. Compare https://crdms.images.consumerreports.org/f_auto,w_600/prod/p... , in which 2.5g of "total fat" break down into 0.5g of polyunsaturated fat, 1g of monounsaturated fat, 0g of saturated fat, and 0g of trans fat.)

A sister product, Runts, reports 13g of sugar in a 15g serving size. Spree appears to be the same thing as Runts, but in a disc shape instead of a stylized fruit shape.

Skittles are 75% sugar at 21g per 28g serving size. They have to be soft and chewy, which I assume explains the difference.

Some other chewy candies:

Sour Patch Kids report 80% sugar (24g / 30g).

Swedish Fish report 77% sugar.

Going back to the "it's just sugar" candies, Necco wafers report that one 57g roll contains 56g of carbohydrates, of which 53g are sugar.

> especially since the rest is corn syrup.

Huh, you might be on to something. Karo corn syrup doesn't appear to report its amount by weight. But its nutrition facts report that every 30 mL of syrup contain 30g of carbohydrates, of which 10g are sugar. So corn syrup will drive a wedge between reported "carbohydrates" and reported "sugar".

So what is the difference, exactly? Depends on what’s in the other 40%, right? It would be a bigger difference if the other 40% was made of fats or proteins or fiber, but in the case of Jolly Ranchers and many other candies, the other 40% of calories is cornstarch, which isn’t sugar but is made of glucose chains and breaks down into sugar when digested. Cornstarch, like sugar, is 100% carbohydrate. https://www.soupersage.com/compare-nutrition/cornstarch-vs-w...

@saagarjha didn’t claim candies are pure sugar, they said it’s surprising how close they are to pure sugar. And 60% sugar + 40% flavorless cornstarch + flavoring and food coloring is close to pure sugar with food coloring. Close is a relative term, so when arguing about it, it’d be helpful to provide a baseline or examples or definitions. Jolly Ranchers are much closer to pure sugar than meat or broccoli is. Jolly Ranchers are much closer to pure sugar than even a banana, which is also 100% carbohydrate calories. I don’t know how to argue that Jolly Ranchers aren’t close to pure sugar. Maybe you can give an example?

BTW, the current product website says Jolly Ranchers are 72% sugar: https://www.hersheyland.com/products/jolly-rancher-original-...

I wouldn't say that we breath "too much".

Here in Singapore almost every restaurant and hawker is obsessed with jacking their food up with sugar. Worse though is that if they don't the local Singaporean "foodie" hitmen will annihilate the restaurant with poor reviews on Google Maps for being "bland".

So eating out is a no go. Cooking again unless you're obsessed with reading packaging or make everything from scratch yourself you're instantly adding more sugar than you know.

I have a suspicion that now fruits are also being engineered to be sweeter because apples are way way sweeter than I remember growing up and a lot of the oranges my mother in law buys for me also are blindingly sweet. And yet I feel there's a certain fragrance missing from these sweet fruits...

Yes. But it's not by injecting sugar into fruits like many people think.

Farmers including the one next to my rural alt house:

- Take consultancy of agritech and selectively breed variants that are sweeter [0]

- Optimize min(fruits/tree-or-vine) to concentrate sugars in remaining fruits. [1]

- Ethylene-based post-pluck ripening to convert some starch to sugars and make it sweeter. [2]

- and more. Richer the farmer, the more sophisticated the techniques.

If you want truly fresh natural fruits, buy from a poor farmer directly and pay for logistics yourself. They have to be poor because well, they have to sell at market rate. Tragedy of the commons and all that. And logistics chains depend on fruits being fairly resilient. The logistics loss for natural fruits is 30-50% depending on the fruit. So yeah you need to pay 3x as well.

[1] this technique leads to lesser minerals, polyphenols, vit c etc in fruits. "Crowding out".

[2] this technique leads to less fiber formation since there's no time for polysacs to form. Major reason for fiber deficiency today according to agtech person I know is that people are eating fruits the same way their grandparents did, but whoops, you don't get enough anymore.

[0] They are bred to naturally do the above two things. Mostly, they are bred to autocatalyctically generate ethylene earlier.

If your country is in the business of exporting fruits, then the farmer has to compete with the whole world, and the tragedy of the commons mentioned above goes global. So every effect mentioned above multiplies 2-3x. Because it has to be even more logistics friendly, supply has to be really uniform due to expensive GTM, etc,.

sure sounds like someone needs a 10kg bag of sugar to be emptied down the back of his shirt on instagram live

glucose (C₆H₁₂O₆) + oxygen (6O₂) → carbon dioxide (6CO₂) + water (6H₂O) + energy (ATP).

Not only do we live in food abundance, commercial interests exploit our hardcoded desire to seek out energy rich food to make more profit from us usually by pumping sugar into everything.

This can be as innocent as competing for repeat business at your local restaurants or engineering your food to optimise for the bliss point[0] in order to subvert your natural satiety mechanisms and maximise the addictive quality of the product.

Sugar and its derivatives like HFCS are everywhere. Your sauces and condiments are swimming in it. Subway bread was so high in sugar it couldn't be legally called bread in the UK.

My own personal favourite anecdote was from someone senior in McDonalds:

"we find from our studies that children do not like a meaty beef flavour in their patties so we deliberately choose a bland patty mix while adding sugar to the buns and smothering the burger in ketchup because kids love sweet stuff, unlike our competitor Burger King. Once the habit is conditioned from young, they will be a customer for life"

Case in point, my wife loves the idea of McDonalds and admits every time that the reality is always disappointing but she is still drawn to it due to nostalgia.

Given that a lot of the developed world has obesity problems which puts a strain on public resources, it's really important to get a grip on our sugar consumption

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bliss_point_(food)

Japanese food is definitely healthier in many respects although there's still a lot of sugar hiding in sushi for example, and oyakodon, teriyaki and katsudon sauces are also often quite sweet.

Shabu shabu is better but so are most hotpots in a clear soup

Portion size, saturated fat, excessive salt, sugar, sometimes alcohol, low fiber— the industry has defined itself as an extension of the junk food industry. Which is ironic! Because pretty much the only food I would be willing to pay a premium for would be healthy food, demonstrably healthy food.

* The worst addictions, i.e. all the ones really worthy of the name, punish you (or kill you) if you stop.

- You can add new traces, or modify/disable existing ones at runtime without having to recompile and rerun your program.

- Once you've fixed the bug, you don't have to cleanup all the prints that you left around the codebase.

I know that there is a good reason for debugging with prints: The debugging experience of many languages suck. In that case I always use prints. But if I'm lucky to use a language with good debugging tooling (e.g Java/Kotlin + IntelliJ IDEA), there is zero chance to ever print for debugging.

    struct Constant { value: i32 }
    struct BinaryPlus { lhs: i32, rhs: i32 }
    
    trait Evaluate {
        fn evaluate(&self) -> i32;
    }
    
    impl Evaluate for Constant {
        fn evaluate(&self) -> i32 { self.value }
    }
    
    impl Evaluate for BinaryPlus {
        fn evaluate(&self) -> i32 { self.lhs + self.rhs }
    }
    
    // Adding a new operation is easy. Let's add stringify:
    
    trait Stringify {
        fn stringify(&self) -> String;
    }
    
    impl Stringify for Constant {
        fn stringify(&self) -> String { format!("{}", self.value) }
    }
    
    impl Stringify for BinaryPlus {
        fn stringify(&self) -> String { format!("{} + {}", self.lhs, self.rhs) }
    }
    
    // How about adding new types? Suppose we want to add FunctionCall
    
    struct FunctionCall { name: String, arguments: Vec<i32> }
    
    impl Evaluate for FunctionCall {
        fn evaluate(&self) -> i32 { todo!() }
    }
    
    impl Stringify for FunctionCall {
        fn stringify(&self) -> String { todo!() }
    }

Assuming the whole Stringify section goes into a new file (likewise with FunctionCall) then I agree that this solves the expression problem.

To me it looks like this is exactly the expression problem. The expression problem is not about adding methods to a trait, it's about adding an operation to a set of types. In this case every operation is defined by a single trait.

The idea behind the expression problem is to be able to define either a new operation or a new type in such a way that the code is nicely together. Rust trait system accomplish this beautifully.

> That's not unique to Rust, you can add new interfaces in any language...

Many languages have interfaces, but most of them don't allow you to implement them for an arbitrary type that you have not defined. For example, in Java, if you create an interface called `PrettyPrintable`, but you can't implement it for the `ArrayList` type from the standard library. In Rust you can do this kind of things.

The orphan rule only disallow impls if both the trait and the type are defined outside the crate.

But in this example if you are adding a new type (struct) or a new operation (trait), well this new item should be in your crate, so all the impls that follow are allowed.

The goal isn't to allow a new type to work for an existing implementation of a function nor is it to take an existing type and write a new function that works with it. In the proposed solution you have `some_function` and the author claims that this solves the expression problem because you can take a new type C and pass it into some_function. Pretty much every language has a way to define new types and pass them into existing functions.

The goal is to allow for that new type, C, to have its own implementation of `some_function` that is particular to C, as well as the ability to write new functions that can be specialized for existing types. In particular we want calls to `some_function` through an interface to call C's specific implementation when the runtime type of an object resolves to C, and calls whatever other implementations exist when called through another interface.

The author's solution doesn't do that, it literally does nothing that you can't do in pretty much any other language.

If you are interesting in learning in more detail how to write a C compiler, I highly recommend the book "Writing a C Compiler" by Nora Sandler [0]. This is a super detailed, incremental guide on how to write a C compiler. This also uses the traditional architecture of using multiple passes. It uses its own IR called Tacky and it even includes some optimization passes such as constant folding, copy propagation, dead code elimination, register allocation, etc. The book also implements much more features, including arrays, pointers, structs/unions, static variables, floating point, strings, linking to stdlib via System V ABI, and much more.

[0] https://norasandler.com/book/

Tim Cook explains it better that I could ever do:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2wacXUrONUY

Tim Cook had a direct hand in this and know it and is now deflecting because it looks bad.

One of the comments on the video puts it way better than I could:

@cpaviolo : "He’s partially right, but when I began my career in the industry 30 years ago, the United States was full of highly skilled workers. I had the privilege of being mentored by individuals who had worked on the Space Shuttle program—brilliant professionals who could build anything. I’d like to remind Mr. Cook that during that time, Apple was manufacturing and selling computers made in the U.S., and doing so profitably.

Things began to change around 1996 with the rise of outsourcing. Countless shops were forced to close due to a sharp decline in business, and many of those exceptionally skilled workers had to find jobs in other industries. I remember one of my mentors, an incredibly talented tool and die maker, who ended up working as a bartender at the age of 64.

That generation of craftsmen has either retired or passed away, and the new generation hasn’t had the opportunity to learn those skills—largely because there are no longer places where such expertise is needed. On top of that, many American workers were required to train their Chinese replacements. Jobs weren’t stolen by China; they were handed over by American corporations, led by executives like Tim Cook, in pursuit of higher profits."

The product looks polished and I definitely see myself using it. My only concern is: Are they taking VC money? Is this going to be enshittified to death trying to pursue a 1000x investment return?

There's some other dependencies in there that are only used when building for test/benchmarking like serde, zstd, and criterion. You would need to be certain you're building only the library and not the test harness to be sure those aren't being built too.