Chiba-City

Their bottom up innovation will come to a screeching halt. They will export more young utility focused entrepreneurs fed up and not wanting in to that domineering state whacking their friends. We had a different colonial trajectory, but our own McCarthy era had disastrous cascading outcomes. "Rights to be forgotten" is another peculiar notion popular in some TV propaganda driven Western countries loving makeovers. Keep on rocking in the free world while it lasts.

Getting any technical books even for money before Borders and now Amazon arrived was almost impossible. I used to go to DC's Library of Congress to get papers on garbage collection. Publishers freaked out over Xerox machines during the 80's. Financial windfall incentives were never good reasons to study or design. Broke lesser universities mostly funnel noise into our pools of research. Silly entertainment fictions and games are more valuable in dollars. Information asymmetries on taxpayer subsidized research was both unjust and leveraged for cascading abuses. Non-monetizable riches are the HIGH CLASS problems our civilization needs. We can solve that "problem" forever.

I roughly frame mobile PC's as libraries, letter carriers and proof assistants saving trees in books and car hours. I live in DC near the National Cathedral, don't drive and cook my food at home from scratch. These guys are smart. I admire the Anabaptist "Punk" DIY ethic. The music Punks were too loud. Live music is not Lo-Fi.

Why "prosecution" and not "investigation." There's a difference. It depends upon an audience. What about self portraits? That's how photographers learn. I had a Canonet and black and white film as a kid. I loved it. Asking questions doesn't have threaten kids. Good kids will answer good questions. Have I missed something?

There are no lifetime guaranteed jobs. That is a peculiar idea that might only apply to being "born to farm your patch" in history at all. Institutions and entire job categories go away.

Collective bargaining is OK and not usually conflictual outside down cycles or downsizing legacy industries. The conflict narratives appeal far more to general consumers. Working class hero is huge in American history for both good and ill.

Where many unions go bad is running interference on liability, incompetency or even criminality. That is not unique to unions but suffers embarrassing large scale instances (cops? teachers? auto workers who stole tools).

These are tough things to get right. The battles for enough and fair (predictable is a giant issue for service workers) overlap with battles that should never be waged and mostly lose.

Mathematicians are globalists. Software is like High Latin or sheet music. CPU's are its translators or maybe pipe organs. What could anyone miss here? This was, is and shall remain the very overt and enduring goal of cultured people. I did get to study nuclear strategy relevant game theory with Thomas Schelling decades back. But I should not be newly informing software guru CPU composers that "good jobs for good wages to impress ladies" or "sky bomber tools" are not goals. Those are minimal essential system basslines or nothing. Math applies everywhere we listen. There is no politics or wishing to it whatsoever. Just more math and music.

There are generative forces of new statements not "predictable" prior to statements like Euclid's or Newton's Laws that newly rendered features of both past and future suddenly known to be determinate upon measured examinations. What generates any hypothesis? Do we imagine exhaustive search of every generated hypothesis like monkeys banging on typewriters. Software developers should have a keen sense for evolving composition and syntheses against conundrums.

I ploughed through a semester of Phenomenology with other kids at Harvard and grabbed Kojeve and In the Spirit Of Hegel as guides. Very tough going for a young Anglo-American scholar. Phenomenology made more sense over years in rear view mirrors than at the time. I will add Kalkavage to the reading pile.

Salespeople also come in tiers with overlapping recruits and cattle calls. The recruits get bigger or quicker commissions on "who-they-know." Some cattle call younger salespeople find a mentor or get lucky. But attrition rates are high. I brought in IBM fed sales head for a talk years back. IBM only adjusted base salaries once around 1974 or so. They just let them die on the vines otherwise when sales go down.

The Spice will not flow.

Low level backward compatibility with portability idioms is great for enduring software assets. Anyone not sweating speed and space between equivalent possible implementations is a different kind of useful software developer with different operative quality criteria and execution risks. Rust will hopefully enjoy a long and boring stable future.

Did I make a mistake? Is it unfashionable to be for well documented, reliable and stable Linux And OSS tools? I like old and new programming languages too. Those are not so incompatible. Is there a thematic disatisfaction I am missing?

Linux is very close to perfect as a "decision support and design" workstation. Tool performance, ubiquity, interoperability and stability are the big targets there. We have to name as a goal data and media asset durability and tool compatibility over years or decades.

Linux has virtues that end up conflicting. An occupational hazard of Linux as a tool and OS innovation platform are disruptions, disappointments, instability and dropped balls.

Other people are goofing off without enduring responsibility for a large user base. We confuse design criteria we inherit from the commercial world. Easy to use, easy to remember, easy to diagnose problems and "quick to getting going" are not the same always compatible design targets. The Window Manager wars took up tons of Linux desktop attention. Gaming is naturally an arena for hardware churn and 1-upmanship.

I have great hope for Linux desktop stability with government deployments and thus a global tug for stability against rushing breaking changes. The Linux platform and package manager contents are remarkable achievements.

Wittgenstein gave away his fortune. He left academia and taught kids math. Never equate trinket lusts and synthetics peddlers with sciences. Kaczynski was specifically a young victim of wholly inferior bad men playing with superior men who should be named, denigrated and brutally punished if still breathing. Tit-for-tat for children of bad men is counseled by Harvard game theorists like Thomas Schelling. These are misadventures and not always good jobs at good wages.

Google is like a reasonable run utility. MS with Office became something like that and did the job too well with XP. Legacy media companies today hate Google, FB or even Craigslist taking away their messaging for dollars relevance. We have been consolidating wood behind legacy family arrows for decades. Google serves global markets efficiently. Here is Nobel Prize winner Robert Shiller explaining pump-dump wagon circling local American economic problems. Younger people forget how NYC and SF attracted educated talent pools when they were relatively CHEAP. https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/real-estate-pri...

I worked in State/AID around folks doing commodity exports. Never underestimate the amount of sheer inbound "order taking" from endlessly needy Congressional staffers living on trading favors. I later worked around "developers" whose only Fu was tricks for passing lie detector tests to screw up projects in lead lined bunkers. I suppose the dress up, TV pageantry and fancy looking machines make disorderly bumbling infinitely costly operations look orderly. Our trade presses are mostly very open about the dysfunctions, but few waving flags pay much attention.

That epidemiology sounds compelling. I had 18 months of completely debilitating IBS due to "allergic reactions" to Cipro and Levaquin. That left other serious now diagnosed scars in nerve demyelination and yet another rarer autoimmune disease. I of necessity live a pretty refined weekly regimen I keep tweaking (anti-inflammation, upper respiratory, gut health). Humira for example is contraindicated by my nerve demyelination. Restoration to American grab and go commercial habits is not really in my cards according to overlapping specialists. My remaining dream is to kickstart an Open Source Longevity movement with open data sets, cost accounting and revision history on GitHub. My kid and Americans generally need more oxytocin rich hippie deluxe food and hospitality and less Soylent.

System software that manages semantics of machine, user, job and developers resources confuses many younger developers. They imagine "coding about computing" is just knowing how to code in C. That is obviously completely false in all manners to real engineers addressing real use cases but a very common mistake. Now older I have known many engineers spun out constantly playing with new tools. Real system software projects have longer historical narratives involving human use cases and stakeholders anyone can read.

I was lucky to love my job for the outcomes and not just the paychecks. Is there any central pooling of contract work around more important Open Source projects? Here in DC we have interns working for free or cheap on good causes they hope will lead somewhere. I would think many software devs not raising families would take lower steadier rate for work they can talk about and be proud of. Many governments are seeking stable OSS office automation infrastructure. Stability is the goal compared to pyrotechnics. Is that a solved problem yet?

I try to live in Skill Sprints that direct focus for a few years. I pick things that combine history, books, places and tool mastery like photography, music training, cooking, core muscle exercises or even Buddhist Pali suttas and walking meditation. You have to create your series of time boxed challenges. With a daily drumbeat of global finance news and HN it keeps me out of trouble. Our notational computer process logic and memory access hierarchies turn out to describe almost everything worthwhile. [ed. Did not want to skip music training.]

We are linking gut health to schizophrenia and now ASD. At 51, I eat homemade yogurt, Braggs vinegar, live pickled vegetables, some miso and ground flax seed every day. I just avoid sugars, booze and factory food at home. I have serious seasonal allergies and inflammation common to people who relocate to flowery swampy Washington, DC. I had one round of sinus surgery due to constant infections. I will not be an Olympic swimmer, but strong gut maintenance makes food better and days easier than time wasting doctors, pills and powders. The solutions are too simple and regimen based to weaponize, refine, patent and bottle.

For most of Western history commoners lived to 28F/32M. Average age rose to around 40 by 1800 in France. I used to work for Futures Group in the early 90's (inherited Robert Tappan Morris's code) spending US taxpayer dollars on global demographic engineering. Human biomass is now way too high. Being fruitful multiplying is not such a great game plan anymore. Adjust lifespan expectations for pathologies we fuel with VAST profitable supply chains consumers only imagine are personal moral failings. We run full court presses against more making of us. I signed no security clearances. These are not really secrets. Maybe security via obscurity was more popular before the Net became popular.

Large populations expecting or knowing longevity are new. Never forget we count down from Depression hysteresis and post-WW2 50% share of global wealth. We have horrible diet and health statistics here. People are wise to not marry. By way of comparison Japan's population falls faster than their economic deflation.

These are mostly solved problems (minus omniscience or scale) with just handfuls of books that represent most parts of the solution.

Workaday environments suffer impediments to SE application not solvable by tooling. Many large organizations run de jure or de facto Need-to-Know (NtK) departments. I have witnessed Functional or Class Decomposition and Module Hiding repurposed for NtK atomized development teams not knowing shared OUTCOME semantics. Organizations and people turn SE abstraction boundaries into NtK semantic ASYMMETRIES, i.e., SECRECIES.

That does not work well, efficiently, or predictably. Anyone can rightfully detect motivations for both FSF/OSS and Skunkworks structured "startup" teams where all wood is behind the same arrow.

Other problems are lack of SE training. There are big tugs in finite training days between reading/writing skills, problem domain maths, tool churn, machine models, scheduling techniques and so on. Many HN Skunkworks styles teams are in VERY good shape compared to 20 years ago or contemporary organizations trying to turn SE into contract management.

I am 51. The last few years I studied Pali Suttas, Stoic writings and Christian Church Fathers. That leads all the way up to Frege, Wittgenstein and NAND Gates. The overlaps were astounding. It filled in just tons of historical explanatory blanks in my view of the world.

very true. I spent a few years deep diving into manual film photography, scanning and digital printing. I learned to study photographs upside down to see the geometries. The process logic, chemistry and relevant metrics opened my eyes and helped me appreciate fine photography.

Algorithms are really great foundation for learning anything. I prefer outcome goals driving new learning experiences.

My latest project is optimizing a homemade $10/day food regimen optimized for 1) gut immune health, 2) inflammation and 3) common North American seasonal allergies. I call it OSL - Open Source Longevity for retirees. I recently learned Wholefoods gives away premium fish heads for free around 10AM. I have never eaten better cost accounting for homemade tahini, yogurt and peanut butter.

Do we confuse efficiency engineers (purpose, work, routing, training, outcomes) with inefficiency engineers(distraction, entertainment, inputs)? I cut some teeth on early laser printed govt report generation where every page has a minutes-to-read constraint for decision makers. That is efficiency.

Couchsurfing And Meetup make in-person local group formation and related discussions possible. DC here is a town where people talk for money, but many communities of Americans are very shy about meeting any strangers.

Masses of people burdened by kids and long commutes or old age mostly seek distraction. Those are yesterday's TV ad audiences ordering more pizza cheese.

I ignore my phone. Some nerdier people have "auditory agoraphobia" and tune in to music, podcasts or books on tape in lieu of chewing cud. I think that is good compared to listening to Howard Stern in a car.

Other people are just remarkably bored. I bothered to spend a few weeks asking people what they were they doing on their phones outside offices. I was surprised to learn how most women I asked were constantly catalog shopping. I was surprised because I use Amazon like preppies used LL Bean to avoid wasting time in retail shopping. Visually obsessed shoppers are problems few will pay engineers to solve.

I loved playing soccer and tennis. Heroes for little kids are nice. I grew up with some Baltimore Oriole playing families in Baltimore.

But why would anyone care? we suffer fools dumping taxpayer dollars into ludicrous athletic programs for lesser colleges and mostly empty new stadium sky boxes for corporate lobbyists.

Passive viewing of sports and entertainment is dull. Attentions and dollars are better devoted to efficient live musical performance. So many of my fellow DC software engineers turned out to be talented instrumental musicians. I presume that early ambidextrous and symbolic training cultivating skilled code slinging applied mathematicians is not coincidental.

My consulting firm did some work in drug discovery. We were already tapped out on brute force discovery by the 1990's. Elective medicine seems indefensible feeding kids synthetic food and leaded water.

Encouraging kids to suffer supersized heroes on drugs beating dogs and women is unwise. My own mathlete kid watches ZERO TV And loves Aikido.

Has demographic crisis, boredom and research attentions wasted on militaries driven good people mad?

These are complicated terms. Harvard's CS was part of their Applied Math department. There are Applied Maths of scheduling programmatic Engineering outcomes for sure. Fred Brooks taught us all that.

I studied Russell, Godel, Tarski and Quine and then compiler and runtime logic (as a Philosophy major). Back then CS was mostly a realm of 3-Page proofs on alpha renaming or newfangled Skip List speed/space utility.

As an old VAX/Sun or 512K/DOS C programmer working in DC for decades around lots of TC, datacenter and transaction processing folks, an SE MUST have basic speed/space, set theoretic, programming by contract, data integrity and MTBF abstractions in their heads while they plan and develop. Both accuracy and performance against test and measure just matter for the business cases 24/7.

Content software developers patching together framework components on 2 day schedules for consumer Web bloatware rarely understand something like data integrity needs of billing system logic embedding in redundant switches failing over on rough schedules. Typing commands is not even Software Engineering.

Software Engineering is not an individual identity phenomenon. SE is how groups show responsibility for stakeholder outcomes unrelated to paychecks. First rule of SE is everyone on the team passes the bus test. Nobody is essential. Unless we seek luck, we can't improve what we don't measure. Learning how and what to measure takes real training and group method application. So many out there never know what they are missing.

Business competition minus lucky windfalls is largely based on COST ACCOUNTING. Successful operations will discover heat dissipation costs challenges. Basic CS speed/space, contract covenant assertions, data integrity and MTBF logic in Software Engineers translates very easily into understanding business innovation problems.

The Bhavana Society Theravadins (roughly "Tradition Of Elders") in High View, West Virginia take ordinations. Theravadins keep the earliest known Pali Sutta scriptures. It is its own idiom but surprisingly similar to Stoic philosophical traditions with a Orthodox Ladder of Divine Ascent group study and meditation regimen. Great life option for long lived calmer wiser folks who do not want to raise families and enjoy reading nonfiction.