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lucas_membrane
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- lucas_membrane parentAbout 30 years ago, buying compilers retail went from the common route for beginners to more expensive than most beginners wanted to spend. And specialized professional software engineering became pretty damned expensive, too. The first of those changes made python comparatively attractive to every programmer starting out before the last 30 years who did not yet work as a programmer. The second of those changes made python comparatively attractive to every domain expert with a computer already on their desk working in an organization of any size who could not get their desired or imagined super simple and easy high-value application funded by said organization. Inevitable.
- Compare the causes of death in midlife now with the causes of death in midlife 50,000 years ago. What is total over all causes of the lesser of the % of deaths by that cause 50,000 years ago and the % of deaths by that cause now? My guess is that total overlap is way less than half. So the things that kill us are mostly modern. The things that we evolved to survive are mostly ancient. And we are a species controlled by the brain, mostly by the subconscious brain, which is basically a collection of ancient survival mechanisms and ancient survival inhibitions. Our brains are proud of removing us from our roots and strive to accelerate our separation from what we are prepared to deal with, which introduces just a few changes that appear to our conscious brains easy enough to mitigate in the long run. But our brains are much better at handling the short run and are absolutely confounded by choices involving both the long run and short run. IOW, we live by deep myths and the myths are dying.
- Coroners will almost never classify death by motor vehicle or aircraft collision or impact as suicide.
- I just found out that if one is developing a wxPython app, this:
menuFont = wx.Font(12, wx.DEFAULT, wx.NORMAL, wx.NORMAL) # 12pt font
Will be flagged as an error by ty, wx.DEFAULT and wx.NORMAL being some kind of wxPython place holder that wxPython can interpret into a value later on, not a value just yet. Can you get past that kind of late binding?
- Not exactly. For example, Major League Baseball has been granted an anti-trust exemption by the US Supreme Court, because they said it was not a business. In some cases in which firms have been found guilty of violating the anti-trust laws, they were fined amounts minuscule in relation to the profits they gained by operating the monopoly. Various governments in the US outsource public services to private monopolies, and the results have sometimes amounted to a serious restraint of trade. The chicanery goes back a long way. For the first decade or so after the passage of the Sherman Act, it was not used against the corporate monopolies that it was written to limit; it was invoked only against labor unions trying to find a way to get a better deal out of the firms operating company stores and company towns etc, etc. Then Teddy Roosevelt, the so-called trust-buster, invoked it under the assumption that he could tell the difference between good and bad monopolies and that he had the power to leave the good monopolies alone. 120 years later, we are in the same sorry situation.
- Except that both the number of commercial minutes and the number product plugs in each hour have quadrupled in my recent memory, which is not even so good anymore since the Dumont network vanished and Ed Murrow took that government job.
- A functional program is an a self-contained expression -- an isolated system following its own rules. The foremost example we have of such a thing is the universe itself, but the universe is not a good example in this discussion, because we have plenty of reasons to think that the universe contains pure (not pseudo-) randomness. Beyond that, isolation , when it matters, is not an easily proven proposition, and is a deplorable fantasy when assumed in many of the other science and engineering disciplines.
- Not for me. I spent a few weeks a few weeks ago trying to use it. Much I liked. Much I didn't.
I like FP, so that was not a problem. But I found that lots of stuff was pretty hard for me as just an old guy trying to write some fancy little GUI apps to assist some of my other spare time activities. The project system, dune, was puzzling to me, and when I looked for clarification on-line it was pretty clear that I had lots of company. Not wanting to pass time writing code and seeing many potentialy useful packages available, I downloaded quite a few (actually, I downloaded not too many, but the dependencies required for those multiplied rapidly). Then I found myself managing multiple environments, because the different versions of this and that do not always work together so nice.
Some library code has to get imported some ways, some other ways. Etc, etc. Many tutorials teach the toplevel interpreter, but that's not recommended for projects of any size, and the other environments will choke on the code that works in the toplevel.
What I liked is that the OCaml ecosystem doen't look like it wants to control or ought to fear the next big thing. It's what you get when you have a lot of smart creative people who get inspired and do their best according to their own motivations and their own conception of quality. I admire that. I'm glad that I tried it.
- Seeing all those SRFI's listed, etc, on that page (63 of them), is astounding. How long would I have to work with scheme to get to comprehend what each represents without looking them up Captain Wimby's Bird Atlas of Nomenclature? What percentage of the people who take the time to read that page, for example, if they are trying to learn if Chez Scheme might fit their needs for a language implementation, are going to get a good idea about anything by scrutinizing that list? Isn't that like a bookstore filling its advertising with a list of ISBNs? I have tried to do some stuff with scheme at times in years past, and when I saw such lists galore with no plain-language information attached while trying figure out which tool to grab, it gave me some idea that the scheme community was a somewhat isolated ethnocentric culture of its own.
- I believe that you have a fine understanding of the issues involved. The risk is two-sided. One part of it is that AI may somehow become smarter than us. The other side is that humans have developed mathematics, which encourages us to treat the universe as an optimization problem, which encourages us to think that the best optimizers are the best people and that they deserve great rewards for optimizing, which leads to competition at optimizing optimization, serious negative feedback for the losers, single winner systems, and all the winners realizing that the more they resemble their enemies, the less likely they are to be targeted as a resource to plunder. Perhaps we are not able to figure out if any of this is wrong, but the emphasis on convergent thinking will make our species easy to fool and sabotage, if our species doesn't win a Darwin award first. AI will be able to avoid the blame. It may be optimizing the fire department and selling fire insurance when civilization burns down, but the fire started millennia ago.
- > "good enough" sound
40 or more years ago, the big hifi brands were racing to get total harmonic distortion down to 0.05% or less. The average person is unlikely to complain if it is 5.00%.
There was once a hifi show at which one of the most revered hifi reviewers gave a talk and played some samples for the audience. Almost all the audience noticed at once that his samples had a defect, a loud high-frequency tone somewhere around 10,000 Hz. He didn't hear it.
The concept of good enough has won. Many consumers still think that HD radio is high-definition. It is hierarchical digital, a standard developed to be good enough that most people would not complain. And, speaking of HD, lots of HD TV buyers were perfectly happy even though they were unaware that they have not got their TV producing HD pictures.
- Some other factors were pretty important:
1. In the modern family, everyone wants to listen to something different. In the family of the 1960's to this was not possible, because too many kids, not room for so many big speakers, etc, etc.
2. Now, the speakers are there to carry the audio, status is derived from the size of the video screen. The screens crowded out the speakers. And you need 5 or more speakers now, which makes a set of big speakers exceptionally unfashionable.
3. Speaker size is inversely related to potential big box store volume because of the huge warehouses and sequesterd listening rooms that large speaker retailing would require. Buying without listening first makes does not fit with the idea of spending big on something that you need because your are elite afficianado.
4. The middle class is dead. In the 1960's, 1970's, or early 1980's, a 'good' stereo would cost about a month's net income for a median income worker. Today the good stereo still costs about a month's net income for a median income wroker, but the median median income worker is two weeks net pay away from homelessness or moving back in with his parents. And in that supposed golden age of stereo, the 'good' stereo was expected to last about 10 years and many of them did. Some are still working, many have been in the repair shop several times and keep going. Today, no one expects anything to outlast its warranty by much (except maybe a car), and competent repairs for anything more complicated than shoes are a not easy to come by.
- Trying to keep up with new software at that site got a lot a easier for me a few days ago. The experience is now a daily "Spotted nothing, installed same."
I see that they had a major failure a few months back. Is this another, even worse?
- I have the same trepidations. It's getting damn near impossible to get a haircut or a surgical procedure or a parking place without carrying a cellphone. The trend is toward all technology that is permitted becoming mandatory, and all technology that is not mandatory is becoming forbidden.
So much of the free as in whatever software sector (and much of the telecomm infrastructure that it relies on) is now subject to change without notice, mostly because it is tolerated, funded or owned by very business-oriented mega-corporations who (note: corporations being people in the USA, please do not think I am casting aspersions on any of my flesh-and-blood brethren) have tempered their avarice to the extent that they want to move only somewhat faster than everyone else, and only break things that slow their progress. So the list of things that are going to get worse before they get better is bound to get longer before it gets shorter. Progress is our only product, love it or leave it. I could give you 37 or 38 pages of examples off the top of my head, but I don't want to die of legal fees.
That brings me to Viktor Frankl: "Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way".
- I think I've found ways to dodge the problems you describe. I am a person who is has been addiction-adjacent in my search for novelty for an absurdly long time. I've been quite devoted, however, to physical exercise very much like that described in the article for around 20 years, with favorable results. Throughout this time, I have listened to audio recordings while exercising, and it has always been my favorite aspect of the routine. But I have switched between music, audiobooks, and podcasts a few times during the 20 years, and the novelty of the various genres and topics available is enough to keep me going. For the last few years I've been doing the podcasts, and these seem to keep my interest. I've got a 32 GB mp3 player, which allows me to select from 15 or so roughly hour-long episodes of 15 or so podcasts, some of which take in a wide range of topics and most of the rest are put together by people who embody novelty in their deepest vesicles. I spend an hour or three every month or three searching out new episodes of the podcasts that continue operating and archives of old podcasts that arouse my interests. And I like doing that, too.
- Fun fact (???) wayback about 40 years ago Central Point Software was humiliating Microsoft with its suites of utilities for Microsoft's OS's, which included file managers for Windows (and MS-DOS IIRC), and was a top rated #1 best seller. Microsoft graciously offered to buy a license for said software from Central Point, which they would make a standard part of windows. This was the kind of deal that practical realists tend to accept, even though it spells DOOM with a capital 3-finger salute. 'Tis great to see something as versatile as the wheel and axle or the Oklahoma speed wrench still rolling along.
- I've been using the free VSCode editor on linux, and it has recently started hinting that I ought to install some version of Copilot. I'm an old retired guy who just programs hobby stuff for myself, and I try to separate my leisure activities from the world of sordid materialism. I would rather not deal with AI, as I use my computing projects to track the normal decline of my mental abilities now in progress. I reason that Microsoft, or its github arm, wants to find some way to turn me into a revenue source by either requiring me to use something like that and then making it cost something, or requiring me to use something like that and then making me give them more information about myself in order to use it. How long until that happens?
- You make a fine point. My simplified version of it is that there is no such thing as an isolated system. Things change. A system optimized for one environment is likely to fail when things change. Most of the hugely successful firms of today focus more on controlling their environment than on developing a capacity to adapt to unforeseeable consequences of unforeseen changes in their environment, even the ones that they cause themselves.
- I was thinking of Player Piano, which might be the best of Vonnegut's novels, as I thought over this article. Vonnegut said that all of the stories we believe are lies, because we are not smart enough to know the truth. Where do you think Vonnegut would place the blame, on some story, on the species, on the technology, or on the universe? Or how about the view that technology is a bottle full of miracles, but when one reaches in the bottle and tries to pull out a miracle, one's fist is always too big to pass through the bottle's neck?
- Teddy Roosevelt, a man anxious to do good things, probably gave the idea that people who know things should control things a big boost by promoting science, public health, and reasonable regulation of businesses. This succeeded so well that it seemed like a reasonable approach to government and was extended with the founding of the Federal Reserve to manage the money, by Wilson during WWI when the government took over the economy, by Herbert Hoover when he was a leading problem solver for US presidents during the decade or so before he became president. FDR and most of his successors have continued the trend, with many obvious successes. But the unseen problem was that people felt disenfranchised by the reliance on experts, and our social system, which requires shared wisdom and a balancing of interests and powers did not have appropriate checks and balances to arrange things so that either the technical intelligentsia would somehow be self-correcting or that there would be some other intelligentsia that could check and balance.
- Anyone here know anything about where and how the cotton for bandages for the Union wounded was obtained during the US civil war? India and the Middle East being so distant, I'm guessing that some kind of smuggling or trading happened, but I've never read of it. But I have read of some traveling merchants who were allowed by the Union to exit the areas the Union controlled. Even more postmodern is the likelihood that printers in the Union states propped up the Confederacy by flooding the states in revolt with counterfeit confederate paper money. There being a dearth of competent printers, genuine Confederate cash was so shabby looking that no one would have trusted it, and the Southern economy would have collapsed even sooner than it did because no one would take money like that seriously. But the bogus money from the North was typically so respectable in appearance that it had a street value above the coin of the local realm, giving said revolting realm a stronger medium of exchange.
During WWII, one of Hitler's higher ranking underlings let the Allies know that they could spare the lives of a large number of Hungarian persons bound for the death camps in exchange for trucks shipped through Spain, approximately 1 truck for each 10 lives saved, but that offer drew no genuine response.
- Few things that the article missed. 1. Software products had a huge physical size. Sometimes a single application or development environment would have 3 to five kg of serious mass. You could get it much faster by going to a store than by ordering it and waiting for it to come in the mail. And ecommerce at a distance was a somewhat iffy thing in those days pre-2k when Egghead was bleeding, and the customers were divided about 50/50 between those who wanted to buy from startup geniuses operating in the garage in their skivvies, and those who wanted to deal with market leaders who spent so much on tech support that they were doomed. If you could go to a store and evaluate the tangible reality of a product, you could see that the product was actually shipping, and you might be able to guess whether or not the firm that created it had adult supervision. 2. Software-related salaries shot up pretty fast during the 1990's, so keeping a competent staff in retail became more and more difficult as the generation that knew how the toy computers worked got old enough to get full-time jobs. 3. People liked bringing home those boxes of software, many containing over 150 tangible items (manuals, diskettes in envelopes, warranty cards, advertising, coupons, mouse pads, reference cards, keyboard decorations and cheat sheets, free trials of other software, invites to join the loozer groups, dongles ...) until the time when our offices started overflowing with it all. Then we realized how little of it had any lasting value, and that they had to buy a new version of everything at least once a year. And spouses didn't like seeing all that bling piling up.
- That kind of statement is made to warn the investors and potential investors about the contents of the financial statement to which it is attached. The statement will include amounts representing the 'value' of the firm's assets according to the accounting rules for valuing assets. Current earnings being the most important number that investors and potential investors look for in the financial statements, the 'rules' for reporting those asset 'values' are designed to get the current earnings to come out 'right' for firms that are operating more or less normally. In other words, the asset 'values' and the 'earnings' numbers are hypothetical, being based on the hypotheses that either the assets will be of use to the company or that the company will keep operating long enough to write off the mis-valued assets over many years without that amortization of the value ever having a catastrophic impact on earnings. Bottom line on that disclosure is that Kodak's accountants or auditors made them say it and that's because accounting standards make them make them say it, and that's all that it means.
When I look at the company's follow up assertion characterizing the required disclosure as not direful, the first thing I notice is what is not there: they do not deny that the firm is likely to be acquired.
- A couple of weeks ago, I asked google, ordinary google search, how many times the letter r is found in preferred, and it told me 2. This century has taken quite a bitter turn against those of us who think that the 'enough' in 'good enough' ought to exclude products indistinguishable from the most grievously disgraceful products of sloth. But I have also lately realized that human beings, brains, society, culture, education, technology, computers, etc, are all extremely complicated emergent properties of a universe that is far beyond our understanding. And we ought not to complain too seriously, because this, too, shall pass.
- There are problems with late night network TV as a business -- it has lost most of its audience about twice in the last decade, it has struggled to hold its audience in between the really bad years, and only a very small fraction of the audience it retains is in the born 1985 or later demographic cohort that advertisers want to reach. The high-priced talent it has not let go is still a losing proposition. Whoever is planning on leading the new organization after the merger probably suggested that the pre-merger management should take the black eye of firing Colbert with them when they ride off into the sunset. Of course, Trump will figure that he got his way because he is so clever, but the network managers are probably tickled pink that Trump gave them an excuse for doing what they already saw as no-brainer cost cutting.
- Yes. With Bach, microscopes, portable and naval artillery, and a patent system that rewarded people for thinking up stuff that worked, paper money (1690) was the last thing needed to make everything since a foregone conclusion.
- Sorry, not that I know of. They never let me near that stuff, and the various really important standards bodies are monopoly providers of information, so they inevitably charge more for copies of their standards than non-subservients like me can afford. I just tried to quickly scan the 25,000+ ISO standards and did not find anything even possibly related under $100. The Securities Industry Association was the maven of bonds when I was trying to figure them out, but, knock me over with a feather, they were dissolved almost 20 years ago. You might start with the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision, the Financial Markets Standards Board, the Bank for International Settlements, the Fixed Income Clearing Corporation, or https://www.bis.org/publ/mktc13.pdf.
- My recollection, contrary to TFA, is that development of PL/I or PL1 (both names were used) started in 1964 or a bit earlier with the intention of coming up with a replacement for Fortran. I think some referred to it as Fortran V or Fortran VI. IBM introduced PL1 pretty quickly after the it rolled out 360 mainframes, maybe because it might help sell more megabuck hardware, but there were two different compilers that compiled two different versions of the language (a fork that remained a wretched stumbling block for at least 20 or 25 years) into the one for the big mainframes (model 50 or bigger) and one for the economical mid-line mainframes, and none for the model 20. In that period, Gerald Weinberg published some good stuff about PL1, including a strong warning against concurrent processing. There was also a PL1 on Multics that tried to be a little more suited to academia than the IBM versions. In the middle 1980's there was a PL1 subset that ran on PC's. It couldn't do anything that Turbo Pascal couldn't do, but it did it much slower.
- There are some regulations in bond pricing or international banking or stuff like that that require over 25 decimal places. IIRC, the best COBOL or whatever could do on the IBM 360's was 15 digits. The smaller, cheaper, and older 1401 business machines didn't have any limit. Of course, for nerdy financial applications, compound interest and discounting of future money would require exponentiation, which was damn-near tragic on all those old machines. So was trying to add or subtract 2 numbers that were using the maximum number of digits, but with a different number of decimal places, or trying to multiply or divide numbers that each used the maximum number decimal places, with the decimal point in various positions, and it was suicide-adjacent to try to evaluate any expression that included multiple max precision numbers in which both multiplication and division each happened at least twice.