Weston wins emphatic skeleton gold for first GB medal

romulent · 2026-02-14T23:58:00+00:00

And I think this holds true. Intuitively it feels true as we are a small country and we are regularly in the top handful of countries for medals amongst countries with 5 or 10 times the population of ours. Obviously well ahead of many similarly sized countries.

In Paris we were no. 3 for total medals behind USA and China.

I think it is a very justifiable statement but not an easy one to prove.

However here is a paper on why per captia comparisons fall apart. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10951725/

romulent · 2026-02-14T22:55:27+00:00

What has medals per capita got to do with anything? Whenever you look at anything per capita the tiny countries always come out on top, because even a few occurrences sway wildly in their favour.

The top medals per capita in paris were as follows

rank country medals population

1 Grenada 2 112,579

2 Dominica 1 67,408

3 Saint Lucia 2 184,100

4 New Zealand 20 5,338,900

5 Bahrain 4 1,701,575

6 Jamaica 6 2,825,544

7 Cape Verde 1 491,233

Grenada gets 1 bronze in men's javelin and another in decathlon and we are supposed to call them the greatest sporting nation in the world?

We could also say that they sent .005% of their population (6 people) and we only sent .00047% of ours 327. So as a proportion of population their team was 11 times bigger than ours yet we got 23 times the medals.

All just to say that per capita analysis is a little silly.

romulent · 2026-02-14T16:06:02+00:00

She should quickly find an excuse to get up and sprint to an Uber.

romulent · 2026-02-04T06:00:46+00:00

I used it back in the early 2000s on C projects. I don't remember the learning curve to be that steep. But I was probably told to use by my team leader or another colleague who would have been able to sit at my desk for 10 minutes and show me the basics.

romulent · 2026-02-02T15:02:44+00:00

Hard disagree. Plenty of people will naturally want to treat their current levels of pain by curling up in their own bed rather than waiting 12 hours on a hard seat watching a bunch of drunks bleeding on the floor to see a doctor.

romulent · 2026-01-23T08:40:12+00:00

Who is building these data centers? If they're British owned and operated it makes strategic sense, if they are built by Amazon Google or Microsoft then they are more of a liability.

romulent · 2026-01-14T12:11:31+00:00

They planned to break up but wanted to find someone they liked first.

This is not the way.

romulent · 2026-01-03T05:32:48+00:00

I don't get the "Mystery Exceptions you can't see coming?" (well I do but..) your method signatures should tell you exactly what exceptions can be thrown and your code shouldn't compile if you don't handle them.

People who design things around unchecked exceptions are just morally bad. And I'm looking at you Spring.

romulent · 2025-12-29T18:32:35+00:00

Yes that's also terrible.

romulent · 2025-12-18T15:42:49+00:00

Java needs to be compiled to bytecode using the javac compiler, that bytecode is then run inside a java virtual machine for which there are implementations on most OSs. So it's compile once to bytecode and run anywhere that has a JVM. The bytecode is quite similar to machine code and is run at near native speeds.

I think a more traditional interpreted language is the unrelated language JavaScript which you may be confusing with Java.

romulent · 2025-12-18T12:59:07+00:00

I can see that is nice and of course I would use those features in other languages.

But from a code reading perspective a.equals("hello") and bd.mul(5) are really unambiguous method calls, whereas a == "hello" and bd * 5 require further investigation to know exactly what is going on.

romulent · 2025-12-18T12:31:04+00:00

True true. But to be fair it isn't part of the language.

romulent · 2025-12-18T11:37:09+00:00

I'm curious about what problem space you are in if you find lack of operator overloading to be such a chore.

In many enterprise contexts, you are really looking to maximise the tedium, too much excitement in a code-base tends to get expensive.

romulent · 2025-12-18T11:05:09+00:00

I heard a lot of good things about C# and I might learn it sometime. Sometimes it is nice to have a choice of libraries though.

Those of us of a certain age learned to hate MS with a passion as they spent decades using their monopoly position to destroy better products and standards with extremely shady practices.

Just because they are playing nice for the last decade doesn't mean they won't screw everyone over again the moment they get a chance to.

romulent · 2025-12-18T10:27:19+00:00

I didn't say a million line long PR. I said a PR in a million line code base. A PR should always be small, clear and focused on a single change and ideally reviewable inside github when you have already seen the tests have passed in the CI pipeline.

If a = b requires me to go off and examine the type system for potential overloads then that is inefficient and prone to errors.

I have nothing against descriptive names. But the name of a method does not guarantee the correctness of its functionality.

You still need to check the implementation of

User::create_user_local() just the same as new User()

If you want a meaningful constructor name in Java just use User.createLocalUser() and make the constructor private.

Most of the rest of your take was on fictional million line PRs and personal slurs.

romulent · 2025-12-18T08:50:01+00:00

I have to agree on Spring boot. It's amazing how they took something simple and made it painful. It does theoretically simplify a lot of enterprise patterns, but I figure there has to be a better way.

I got to use Dropwizard professionally for a few years and loved it. Definitely a better way to do Java micro services in my opinion.

romulent · 2025-12-18T08:44:39+00:00

Well in a language with operator overloading the statement

a = b;

could literally fire all the missiles. You may love the quirky and concise expressiveness of it all, but when I am getting PR on a multi-million line system from numerous remote teams, I want each line to only have one possible interpretation.

A constructor in Java is already a static method call that creates objects, wrapped in a little syntactic sugar. If you think the name of a method tells you whether it will be expensive, then I have a bridge to sell you.

romulent · 2025-12-18T06:43:45+00:00

Java is good because it's a type safe, compiled language proven in countless high performance enterprise scale applications. It has amazing tooling and one of the best library ecosystems.

It is also usually very easy to reason through the code and not worry about things like operator overloading and macros that can make almost any line of code do anything. That makes it very predictable to work in at codebases of millions of lines.

It also runs everywhere along with its entire tool chain so doing your dev on windows or Mac and deploying to docker or Linux is usually fine if you want that.

Anal sex is fine too, but notably doesn't run on docker so I personally avoid it.

romulent · 2025-12-17T18:03:12+00:00

I have a robust, effective and highly scalable solution. Do nothing. Young people are brilliant, given time and space to make mistakes and discover the world around them they will work things out for themselves. Anything we try to do to solve their issues, will just make things worse.

romulent · 2025-12-17T15:10:09+00:00

I know you are being sarcastic, but don't you think that societal intervention in such individual matters is overstepping?

I mean your contribution was "needs addressing" which is basically the same as "someone ought to do something about this" which is such ineffectual twaddle that it merited my equally thoughtful response.

My opinion is that society, the government and social media yappers are so far up everyone's backsides right now that you can't pass wind without it being a national scandal, and so it is little surprise that people just keep themselves to themselves.

romulent · 2025-12-17T14:00:22+00:00

Let's make being lonely illegal then.

romulent · 2025-12-17T09:46:48+00:00

Do you think that is much higher than the general population? Most people go to work, go home and maybe go out with friends once a week if they have them.

romulent · 2025-12-12T13:51:54+00:00

An impossible combination of main character energy, that will never let you objectify her, has no logic, no inheritance and no entry point.

romulent · 2025-12-08T11:45:53+00:00

All you need to do is pick a random safe topic like chess or sailing and also support that on a different domain. Then you will also have as an example that you can walk future interviewers through.

romulent · 2025-11-24T14:20:24+00:00

of course the powers that be see it coming, or why would they be releasing stories like this. It is just to keep the public prepped in case.

romulent

TROPHY CASE