- russellbeattieHN being down makes you start wondering about the differences between routine, addiction, compulsion, and habit.
- I want to preface this by noting that as an adult, I totally understand the intent behind LOGO, its use as an educational tool, and understand its historic place in computer history.
But as a pre-teen kid in the early 80s? I hated LOGO! I thought it was a baby language and I wanted to get back to doing cool stuff in BASIC. Ten year old Me thought LOGO was soooo dumb - you couldn't make a video game, so what use was it?
It seemed every year we'd have a grade school class using LOGO - for a math lesson, or an art project, or an "intro to computing", etc. I was always a classic 80s young computer nerd snob about it.
- > "foreigners here who are net-costs to taxpayers"?
This is a straight up falsehood, using any measure you'd like. Why do regressives insist on just making things up to justify their prejudices?
The recent surge in immigration is going to lower the deficit by nearly $1 trillion over the next decade.
Unauthorized immigrants pay federal taxes yet receive no federal services. They commit less crime, fulfill unmet labor needs at both ends of the skill ladder, and cost less than the average American in terms of healthcare.
Your whole worldview is based on stuff you just made up in your head and right wing fever dreams.
- Housing costs? Nothing to do with immigrants.
Crime rates? Nothing to do with immigrants. They commit less crimes than Americans.
Healthcare costs? Nothing to do with immigrants. Don't believe lies about unauthorized immigrants getting Medicaid, it doesn't happen.
Insurance rates? Nothing to do with immigrants.
Why would we support people wanting to emigrate to the U.S.? We are a nation of immigrants. Full stop. It is our greatest strength. Name an American with Mayflower ancestry who has done anything of any note in the past 100 years. It's all immigrants and their first generation children.
I'm sure you're totally fine with Elon and Melania, you just don't like brown immigrants.
And again, besides pleasing your political hatred, how does deporting anyone make you happy?
- You mean "natural" citizens. Naturalized is when one is not a citizen, but is made one.
On that note, the administration has started the process of de-naturalizing immigrants, which is something I'd never thought I'd see except in extreme cases.
- What are you talking about? For all intents and purposes it is all innocents, and you know it. Arguing otherwise is just that - an argument, said just to try to "win" for your "side".
You're advocating that we assume everyone is a violent criminal so that we can jail that 1 in 9,000 that actually is dangerous. Guilty until proven innocent. You can't get more un-American than that, really.
- I'm not looking for a political angle, I'm straight up asking: Has the 70,000 people put in concentration camps and then deported made their lives demonstrably better and happier?
- I'm now completely torn! I always return carts just out of habit as a nice thing to do, but I totally see this as a legitimate reason not to return them! I never worked at a grocery, but I have worked at other jobs where there was that one task that got you out of sight of management so you could take your time and mentally relax for a while. Taking the trash to the dumpster way out back, restocking the walk-in fridge from the basement, etc. It was less about not working, as it was about the freedom.
Then again, they still have to go out to the cart return areas to collect them which takes time, so in that sense leaving carts around just makes their job a bit harder. Hmm. Not sure now!
- > "Opinions on his coding style are divided, though general consensus seems to be that it's incomprehensible."
I wholeheartedly concur with popular opinion. It's like writing a program in obfuscated code.
Hmmm... his way of basically making C work like APL made me wonder: Is there a programming language out there that defines its own syntax in some sort of header and then uses that syntax for the actual code?
- This shouldn't be a product, but a licensed patented technology like Dolby or CDMA, sold to OEMs and directly integrated into cameras and phones.
It should be an industry standard system for guaranteeing authenticity by coordinating hardware and software to be as tamper proof as possible and saved in a cryptographically verifiable way.
No system like this would be perfect, but that's the enemy of the good.
- It's easy to explain: They have no idea what's happening.
Most people can't keep up with the firehose of news and don't really want to. This particular bit of unethical behavior is just one more bit of inconsequential news which will have completely disappeared from the headlines by tomorrow. It basically never happened to 95% of the country, regardless of political leaning.
Secondly, conservatives live in their own highly filtered and mutated information bubble. Good news is amplified, bad news is either downplayed, justified (pure fiction is acceptable) or simply ignored. So even if they do hear about this, it won't be a big deal.
In short, most people won't care, and conservative media will actively work to overlook or more often, rationalize this sort of unethical behavior to the point where it somehow is totally fine. (Simply read this thread to watch it happen in real time.)
- The moment of true enlightenment is when you finally decide to once and for all memorize all the arguments and their order for those command line utilities that you use at an interval that's just at the edge of your memory: xargs, find, curl, rsync, etc.
That, plus knowing how to parse a man file to actually understand how to use a command (a skill that takes years to master) pretty much removes the need for most aliases and scripts.
- Hmmm... If skills could create Skills, then evaluate the success of those generated Skills and updating as needed, in a loop, seems like an interesting thing to try. It could be like a form of code creation caching. (Or a Skynet in the making).
The question is whether the analysis of all the Skill descriptions is faster or slower than just rewriting the code from scratch each time. Would it be a good or bad thing if an agent has created thousands of slightly varied skills.
- Until LLM models came along, I was convinced the first file format to gain sentience would be a PDF.
It can contain vector drawings, fonts, bitmap images, formatting, hypertext, plain text, rasterization hints (for everything from watch displays to 10 ton multicolor printing presses), layers, annotations, metadata, versioning, multiple languages, interactive forms, digital signatures/encryption, DRM, audio, video, 3D objects including CAD drawings, accessibility info, captions, file attachments and yes, even JavaScript. (And probably more - most of that was off the top of my head plus a quick search to remind myself.)
I'm personally amazed that any application can successfully open and edit a PDF document without creating a black hole in space, so Acrobat's continued suckiness into its third decade doesn't surprise me in the least.
- The reason Preview works so well is because deep inside Apple's Quartz libraries used to render, rasterize and composite graphics such as windows, docs and images is a version of "Display PDF". Basically, PDF is a native macOS protocol.
The best of my understanding is that NeXT considered Display PDF the successor to Display PostScript and OS X inherited it. I have no idea how much or how little the latest macOS and iOS rely on PDF encoding for their GUIs now, but I know at one point it was an integral part of the windowing and drawing system and is still in there for processing PDF docs.
- Earlier in the year I was watching yet another series about a British mob. There were so many murders on the show, I wondered how many actual homicides there are in the UK every year.
Looking it up, there are around 500 homicides each year in England and Wales, and around 30 of them involve guns. In 2023 there were 22 gun deaths total. (For comparison, in the same year the US had 46,700).
Now compare that to the number of shows broadcast every day in the UK that have murders. I think a single BBC murder mystery show has more deaths than the entirety of the country, let alone a single Guy Ritchie film.
It's not just the news media which warps people's perceptions. I bet the same survey in the UK would be similarly skewed.
This has been a thing since forever. I remember in the 80s the complaints about violence in media. That's not going to change. And sensationalist headlines have been part of news since its first inception.
What really needs to change is the education system so that people are able to differentiate reality from media, news and video games.
- I was thinking more about how he was banging his partner's adopted daughter who was 25 years younger than him while she was still in school (though over 18), then later marrying her. It screwed up the entire family.
All the rancor and accusations (true or false) stem from what a selfish horny creepy cheating idiot Allen was at the time. It's all on him.
So I stand by my subtle criticism of Allen.