It's not that physics feels no responsibility to explain why, it's that all other fields of science answer the why by punting to some lower level of science that is taken as an assumption until you get down to physics which has nothing lower level to punt to.
Psychology explains why you feel tired by pointing to biology. Biology explains why cells need ATP by pointing to chemistry. Chemistry explains why ATP releases energy by pointing to physics. Physics explains that by pointing to some higher level form of physics like thermodynamics, which points to statistical mechanics, which point to quantum laws. When you get down to a certain level you simply have nothing left to punt to. You simply accept it because it's what's observed and makes reproducible predictions or you don't and go study philosophy or religion or something.
> += deferred concatenation requires lazy strings and that didn't come until 10-15 years later.
CPython's += does not perform deferred concatenation and CPython does not use lazy strings. The optimization uses an eager in-place realloc if the string's ref-count is 1. This remains the optimization used even to this day and was introduced in 2005:
>However, concatenating string lists with sum() was a common Python idiom at the time
It could not possibly have been a common Python idiom since sum() explicitly rejected strings by throwing a TypeError. This was explicitly special cased to avoid the degenerate performance and the TypeError even has an error message saying "TypeError: sum() can't sum strings [use ''.join(seq) instead]".
>Gvr's reduce dislike was more about its syntax. It doesn't mesh well with Python's lambda syntax.
No it had nothing to do with mixing with lambda syntax, on the contrary GvR actually wanted to remove reduce and lambda (and map and filter as well). Here is the actual article by GvR regarding removing reduce, absolutely nothing in it involves how it mixes with lambda expressions.
>So now reduce(). This is actually the one I've always hated most, because, apart from a few examples involving + or *, almost every time I see a reduce() call with a non-trivial function argument, I need to grab pen and paper to diagram what's actually being fed into that function before I understand what the reduce() is supposed to do. So in my mind, the applicability of reduce() is pretty much limited to associative operators, and in all other cases it's better to write out the accumulation loop explicitly.
Yes thanks for finding the Python 2.4 release page which shows the optimization! So I remembered correctly -- Python already had that optimization back then. (There seems to be a large amount of confusion on that in this subthread)
And the March 2005 Artima post is also a very good reference! That actually predates my story, since Guido hadn't joined Google by then. I recall that he joined in December 2005.
So maybe the bug I remember was more of a "push" in the direction he had already thought of, not the direct inspiration.
It's clear from the blog post that he disliked all of map / filter / reduce, and then I'm sure that users or python-dev pushed back on removing them, so he settled for banishing reduce() to the stdlib.
The study addresses it. You don't walk into an ER and say "Doctor I have a gambling addiction.", rather you typically present as having a suicide attempt, intoxication or drug overdose, psychosis, or panic attack. During the assessment the treating team identifies the main contributing reason for one of the above listed conditions and there are two specific codes available if gambling is one of the primary contributors.
Where can I find an oven made with entirely US parts (or even ~85-90%+)?
I'll tell you in advance that I haven't been able to locate one in a few years of looking. Most major appliances are, at best, 60-80% american with no accurate accounting, even if they're "assembled in the USA". Cars are the only thing with accurate sourcing labels due to legislation.
Entirely US parts is a very high bar. Isn't it the final product design and assembly that counts in the end? If China has a comparative advantage making resistors, who cares, let them.
Not that you've explicitly claimed it's authentic, but the very idea of a pirate hunting tour is a hoax that resurfaces across the Internet every so often in different forms:
This is like saying, "I'm not addicted to smoking, I'm addicted to the happiness cigarettes give me." Addiction is a harmful dependency you pursue to achieve some desired outcome. The harmful dependency is the endless browsing, scrolling, and searching you engage in to obtain it, all the time wasted doing it and doing it in a way that consumes a significant amount of time that could be spent acquiring that same information in a more productive manner.
I'm not sure there's always a more efficient way to find that same information. If you already have a question, sure, you can look for an answer. Sometimes you stumble across a post about something you hadn't even thought to look into, though. I think that's part of what he's talking about when he mentions finding things that changed his life.
If you are browsing, you aren't searching for any specific piece of information. You're just looking at whatever is presented to you via whatever algo in use. In this case reading a book would, IMHO, be better. You stumble across all kinds of interesting pieces of knowledge, thoughtfully written prose, facts (in some books), great stories and characters in other. Though I do now have to condition this with; books written before say 2022 to stay clear of AI slop books that are flooding the space as we speak. Those books are worse than browsing the internet.
I think he misses the old forums where he'd just drop in to see what people were talking about. Not necessarily looking for an answer to something. Actually, he didn't need a recommendation feed to find a thread worth reading. But I do agree with you: books always win.
This is like saying, "I'm not addicted to smoking, I'm addicted to the happiness cigarettes give me."
No, it's like saying you're addicted to nicotine or routine or a break with people, because that's what cigarettes give you and there are other sources of that.
It is possible to get information from other sources just as it is possible to get nicotine or a break with people from other sources. Because of this your metaphor breaks down.
Moreover, the "content" isn't always information. It can be informative and it can be news you need to know about. But it's often garbage, disinformation and the information analogue of empty calories in food.
How did you search? I really wonder if I just have a vastly different Google algorithm than others because whenever a post similar to this pops up I have no problem finding the info using the most obvious and basic of Google searches, while other people seemingly struggle to find authoritative information. At any rate, the info comes from S&P themselves:
For me, right now the latest result is from Feb 27, 2026
2 - Google search with this query: `site:spglobal.com Nike`
Even when I limited the search results to the last month, the only page that shows for me is https://www.spglobal.com/market-intelligence/en but I'm not sure why - it doesn't have anything to do with it.
I see now your link, thanks. I have no idea why it's not indexed in the site's own search or why it's skipped for me in Google. Interestingly, I just checked the same query on Bing and it's there, but not in the top.
Did you find a page that lists all the companies on S&P 100 in a simple table?
Psychology explains why you feel tired by pointing to biology. Biology explains why cells need ATP by pointing to chemistry. Chemistry explains why ATP releases energy by pointing to physics. Physics explains that by pointing to some higher level form of physics like thermodynamics, which points to statistical mechanics, which point to quantum laws. When you get down to a certain level you simply have nothing left to punt to. You simply accept it because it's what's observed and makes reproducible predictions or you don't and go study philosophy or religion or something.
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