My main programming language is Perl, but I have learned a number of others to varying degrees of competence. These days I do a lot with A/B testing, reporting, and fun math stuff. That hasn't been planned, but I'm just shy of a PhD in math so it has proven to be a fit for me.
You can email me at btilly@gmail.com.
- Question, have you been an immigrant? Do you know any immigrants?
When you immigrate into a country, all of a sudden all of your reflexes are wrong. Some are obviously wrong. Some are more subtle. It is overwhelming, and too much.
While in retrospect it is easy to say that they should prioritize some things over others, in practice they tend to learn from experience after people respond badly, and those who are a little more used to the culture explain why they are wrong. And the experience of being told that they are wrong all of the time will make many hold on to some of their old habits extremely strongly.
Don't criticize how slowly immigrants adapt to a new country, until you've been an immigrant in a foreign culture.
- They had multiple pathways. The top three destinations were Canada, the USA, and Australia. These locations offered a major benefit over the UK - they were on trade routes along which people from Hong Kong were already doing business.
Canada was particularly affected. It absorbed the most immigrants, they were a larger share of the population, and this was a major increase in ethnic diversity. The resulting cultural clashes were sometimes an issue. Here is one that literally doubled car insurance rates in British Columbia around the time I left.
Three cars, 2 in front with the left-hand car being driven by a Canadian, and the back car driven by a recent immigrant. The immigrant sees the opportunity to pass, swings out into oncoming traffic, and guns it. Leaving just a few inches of room. Normal Hong Kong driving.
The Canadian has no idea that this is happening until OMG I'M ABOUT TO BE HIT! The Canadian then swerves right to avoid the emergency, and hits the car on the right.
The immigrant drives off. Presumably wondering about these crazy Canadians who don't know how to drive.
Everyone involved behaved reasonably for how they were used to driving. But the combination worked out very poorly...
- There is knowing, and then there is knowing.
For example suppose that someone likes to work in Markdown using VSCode. To get the kind of Word document that everyone else expects, you just copy and paste into Word. AI isn't involved, but it will look exactly like AI to you.
And there are more complicated hybrids. For example my wife has a workflow where everything that she does, communications, and so on, wind up in Markdown in Obsidian. She adds information about who was at the meeting that includes basuc research into them done by an agent (company directory, title, LinkedIn, and so on - all good to know for someone working in sales). Her AI assistant then extracts out bullet points, cross references, and so on. She uses that to create summaries that she references whenever she goes back to that project. And if someone wants to know what has happened or is currently planned for that project, AI extracts that from the same repository.
There's lots of AI in this workflow. But the content and thought is mostly from her. (With facts from searches that an agent did.) The fact that she's automated a lot of her organizational scutwork to an AI doesn't make the output "AI slop".
- How would this have compared to using rsync?
- Oregon has a huge political tension. Portland is solidly blue. The rest of the state is solidly red. In the 1920s, Oregon was one of the centers of Klan activity. Today it is a stronghold for the Proud Boys.
The Grand Ronde reservation is in rural Oregon, mostly in Polk County. This is where the event that I referenced took place. It is very strongly conservative, with a long racist history.
- I like semantically different words for unrelated things. So I'd stay away from import.
I've called this kind of thing load, initialize, get_all, and so on.
I may also call it something based on where the data is stored if that is important. For example from_csv.
I might also name it based on what it is for. For example load_config.
Whatever seems clearest, and fits best with how the project itself does things.
- No.
But carrying it is unlikely to be against the law either.
- Given the First Amendment, the only thing that I can think of as banned is copyright violations.
The Pentagon Papers case says that, once revealed, classified information can be published.
How about dangerous information. Want to know how to make a fusion bomb? Start at https://www.atomicarchive.com/science/fusion/index.html. More detailed schematics are easy to find.
All that said, I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
- True. If you win your case, the taxpayer no longer pays. Lots of places have those pay to stay laws.
But if your case has not been officially lost, you can't be set to forced labor either.
(Of course our BS system in many places still charges exonerees after the fact despite the fact that it was a wrongful conviction.)
- It's called pay-to-stay. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pay-to-stay_%28imprisonment%29 for more.
This happened in Oregon to my kind of brother in law. (Married to half sister of my half siblings - what do you call that?)
He's Native American, so the local police thought that they could target him with a BS charge. They lost. The private jail that he'd been kept in, now that they weren't getting paid by the state, sued him for the cost of keeping him. Incidentally the counter sheriff is on the board of directors for the private prison in question.
Can you spell conflict of interest? Of course you can! Can you spell corruption? That too, wow!
Can anyone do a danged thing about it? Of course not! As long as they are only targeting people that nobody likes, like Native Americans, their victims won't get the time of day in our wonderful United States of America.
(I really wish I was making this up.)
- All true, but on the flip side they get free room and board...
Joking aside, read the 13th amendment https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/amendment-13/ and pay close attention to the bit that reads, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted. In the United States, involuntary labor, slavery, and locking someone in a cell are all equally not allowed. And all equally allowed - as punishment for crimes of which you have been convicted.
If you think that this is ripe for abuse, you'd be exactly right. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convict_leasing. We got rid of chattel slavery - and immediately accomplished the same effect with the black codes and convict leasing. As the name suggests, this was overwhelmingly directed at the same black people who had just theoretically been emancipated.
- This is exactly right. It affects movie stars, dictators, successful politicians, powerful CEOs, cult leaders, and so on. (Hello there, Donald Trump.) When you're surrounded by people who are willing to tell you whatever they think that they want to hear, a contrary opinion can become painful.
And people who have fallen into this are very often exploitable. See Scientology for an organization that has successfully done this in Hollywood. (I didn't see you there, Tom Cruise.)
I have some personal familiarity with this. Two of my sisters are (at this point minor) movie stars with Oscar nominations. (Jennifer Tilly, and Meg Tilly.) Neither suffers from this. But only by consciously working to keep touch with reality. And both know plenty of others who went off the rails.
When I've seen recently how people have been losing touch with reality with ChatGPT, it was very familiar. It's actually building on the same phenomena that creates ideological bubbles in social networks. The leaders of whom have also had this same famous disease. (I won't even try to name the various influencers.) Except this time more personalized. You get to be the center of attention, rather than a member of the group.
I think we've all known a few narcissists in our lives. Well buckle in. That's becoming the new normal. And there's no limit on how far out there these ones are going.
- She's still serving her sentence. Just not in prison.
As for why it is so short, that's her reward for helping them get SBF.
- Thank you. That's what I'm trying to be.
However I'm also a work in progress. I spent a long time being significantly less than terrific...
- This idea comes for free if you're also using hot water in radiators as a way to heat your home at the same time. Which the Soviets did. And in the Soviet era, they also were generally heating that water at the district level, then circulating it to all of the homes. This can only be workable if you're pumping the water continuously. So the cost of the pumping is just part of the overall system.
Places where this was built up, still generally use it today.
In the USA, nobody ever built the district wide heaters. Nor would they be viable in the suburbs that many of us live in. We generally use central air instead of radiators to heat our houses. And the result is that constantly circulating hot water is significantly more expensive for us.
Does that answer your question?
- Yes. Just as we can build an ACL on a capability system, we can build a capability system on an ACL.
But this approach is more natural in a capability system. You have to write software differently for dealing with "I got permission through an ACL" versus "I got information through a capability". So when the default expectation is, "I get a capability," the right abstraction is already there for "...and this capability has something more behind it."
- The dental work that was needed, negotiated in advance, and paid for, happened.
The dentist's exorbitant rate on nitrous oxide (which we were not informed of in advance) was successfully renegotiated.
Unsurprisingly, my initial suggestions were in no way helpful to discovering this solution to the problem.
- As the OP whose situation was being described, I guarantee that my wife is very far from the worst case. If she was, we would not be married.
- It looks like you are passing judgement on the OP's situation.
As the OP, I can confidently tell you that you are absolutely in the wrong. You do not have sufficient information to pass this judgment.
I was emphatically not, "trying to make the situation better." Though that was the excuse that I would have made for myself. I was distracted, and wanting the problem to go away so I could get back to something else. (Which was rather less important.) I was throwing out suggestions before I had heard enough to say anything that had any chance of actually being useful. And if my mindset had been, "trying to make the situation better," I would have absolutely realized that.
The theory "it happened like they said it" explains why the rise in accidents happened, and fits with normal driving habits in Hong Kong.