ScottBurson

Its effectiveness at preventing the person who receives it from dying doesn't prove it also substantially reduces the probability of transmission, which is what the parent is talking about.

> Classic myths from decades ago, like "Lisp is interpreted and slow", still echo from time to time too.

Pretty funny, considering how much faster CL is than, say, Python -- never mind Ruby.

Freedom comes from within. Sure, external forces can take it away. But even if you're not externally constrained, you can be internally so.

The military, I've heard, tries to instill in you a sense of duty. Perhaps you need to let go of that. Handle your legitimate responsibilities, of course, but don't let other people dump duties on you -- including your parents and others in your past. Get in touch with what you want in life.

It's very hard to catch bugs in a code review. I manage it occasionally, but it's much more common that I'll be working on something else that touches on some piece of code that already passed review, and then I'll notice a bug, because I'm already thinking about how that module should work -- I have already loaded the relevant context into my head. Loading that context just to do a code review takes too long.

This is frustrating, because it's not a difficult crime to deter. The gain to the thief is very small, but if the city makes no enforcement effort at all, the risk to the thief is even smaller. Some people think that since police couldn't catch a large fraction of the offenders, it's not practical to deter the crime, but this isn't true; all that's needed is to bring the risk into the same range as the gain, which, again, is quite small. So almost any real chance of prosecution is sufficient. I've read that this theory has been verified experimentally, though I don't recall where.

I think there's a difference between a company licensing IP it has developed itself vs. acquiring another company's IP that is already being used by competitors. Not saying the latter is never allowable, but it weighs against allowing the acquisition.

Still, you raise a good point. Maybe along with blocking more mergers, we should be looking at breaking some companies up.

Here's Matt Stoller's explanation: https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/ftc-sues-to-block-nvidia-...

I'm guessing "the law" is probably the Sherman Antitrust Act, which is still on the books, though enforcement went out of fashion in the 1980s. Seems to be making a comeback, though.

Having actually worked with James Cooke Brown on Loglan (I wrote the first Yacc grammar for it), I have to say my recollection is that Jim's view was more tentative and nuanced than you've made it sound. While we certainly enjoyed finding things that seemed easier to say in Loglan than English, I don't recall him ever suggesting that there might be a thought that a non-Loglan speaker couldn't think.

I think it would be fairer to say that he was convinced that Whorfian effects were strong enough that there would be value in engineering a language to take advantage of them. But while value is somewhat in the eye of the beholder, I would say this hypothesis has not held up well either.

Sure, these early treatments have happened on a small scale; I've seen some of the papers. And don't get me wrong here; clearly we have to start with informal experiments and progress to small studies, to find promising treatments, before we expand their use. But there's still a world of difference between one doctor in one hospital cherry-picking the patients who happen to come in early and treating them successfully, versus basing one's entire public health strategy on early treatments. For one thing, if you do somehow convince people to come in early, you're going to have a lot more patients to treat. Not only do you have to make sure you have enough of the drugs and other supplies, but you have to have enough trained staff to administer them.

All that said, I would actually like to see someone try it. There are plenty of countries that have little expectation of receiving much vaccine supply this year anyway; they have little to lose. But it's no slam dunk; they face a daunting public education problem first, and then if they somehow solve that puzzle, they'll have to deal with the logistical difficulties.

Against all that, I think vaccines have more than just a marketing advantage. As long as they're reasonably safe and effective, they're a much more practical solution. Of course, what counts as "reasonably safe and effective" is debatable.

As a recommendation to individuals, the suggestion to seek early treatment -- indeed, to apply certain treatments immediately to oneself -- is, I believe, sound, and I second it.

But the situation as regards public health policy and messaging is more complicated. Denial is among the most human of emotional patterns; many people do not want to face the possibility that they've contracted a dread disease, and will procrastinate seeking treatment until they are quite ill. Altering that behavior on a large scale strikes me as a very heavy lift; but that is what we would have to do to pursue a public health strategy that leans heavily on early treatment. If you think it's doable anyway, why has no other country done it?

That said, the risk of vaccine escape seems to be real. Perhaps that's why the CDC is telling us to expect boosters.

Reminds me of the time I was on a Lisp Machine and did

  (trace format)

This causes a line to be printed every time FORMAT is called, showing the arguments it was called with. Well, FORMAT is Lisp's printf -- it's used everywhere, including by TRACE. Oops!!! Time for Ctrl-Meta-Ctrl-Meta-Rubout! (That was the key sequence for an immediate reboot. Interesting how it prefigured the IBM PC's Ctrl-Alt-Delete.)

They may not be from someone telling you about it, but what you're remembering is mostly the previous occasions of recalling it. The original impression would be gone if it hadn't been occasionally reinforced by reconstructing it.

Here's a deduce-the-rule problem that completely stumped me until I wrote down a series of examples: https://illuminations.nctm.org/lessons/petals/petals.htm

You might find Matt Stoller's blog interesting: https://mattstoller.substack.com/

Reminds me of the time a native French speaker asked me if I had ever tried ... and here he said a word that I'll transcribe as "balling"; the first syllable was quite short and the vowel only slightly rounded. Anyway, I didn't recognize it. After a little back-and-forth I finally got what he was talking about, and said, "Oh, BOWLing."

Hard to pick a winner, since the most esoteric languages will be those that were only ever used by their creators, and there are many of those :-) But listing candidates is fun anyway. Here are a few:

SNOBOL, an early string-based pattern-matching language

K, a database query/programming language

PROSE, a dynamic systems modeling language from the 1970s that introduced automatic differentiation

Among languages most people would have heard of, though, my vote for the most esoteric goes to Prolog.

In none of the last four jobs I've gotten was there anyone there who knew me. What I knew seems to have been the important factor.

Yes, the NYT seems to have lost the ability to treat both sides of an argument skeptically. Disappointing.

> It points literally 0% towards lab origin.

Even given the CGG codon? Sorry, not buying it. You can argue that its evidentiary value is weaker than the article suggests, but it's not 0%.

Yes. What Prop. 13 has done is taken all the tax money that would go to fund local services, and instead given it to former property owners. From a cash flow perspective, there's no difference between paying a large mortgage and small property tax, or a smaller mortgage and larger property tax that total to around the same amount. But the difference to the local economy is that the tax money would stay in it, while the mortgage payment effectively funds a large payout to the previous owner, who then most likely takes the money out of local circulation.

That's an interesting way of putting it -- "the house itself pays the taxes". I guess you mean the solution I favor, which is to allow the property owner to defer some of the tax until the property is sold. I suggest that Prop. 13 in California, for example, should have limited not the growth rate of the tax, but the growth rate of the amount that actually had to be paid in a given year. The balance would be covered by a lien due at sale.

I believe the original intention was to tax the market value of the land a structure sits on, not the structure itself. So in the case of apartments, presumably local density would have to be fairly high to make it a good place to build an apartment building there in the first place, and so the market value of the land would also be high; but the units would not be taxed directly at all, though their occupants would have to pay some fraction of the overall LVT. (Presumably that fraction would be higher for the penthouse.)

You can see why the LVT is relatively density-friendly: the taller the building, the less tax paid by each resident.

Except in Common Lisp, where every base is base 10, but only one base is base 10. .

Yes, it seems very odd that someone who writes so beautifully and with such wisdom would get suspended. I poked around on Google a little to see whether I could find out what happened, but no luck.

Here's a rebuttal to the Littman paper: https://juliaserano.medium.com/everything-you-need-to-know-a...

Here, OTOH, is a young woman talking about how she was temporarily convinced she was a trans man: https://youtu.be/r57wGbiK3U8

A Land Value Tax applies, as the name suggests, only to the value of land, not that of any structures built on it. Most real property taxes apply to both. Thus, the latter somewhat discourage construction for higher density. (Though in practice, zoning laws are a much bigger barrier.)

The intuition behind the LVT is that increases in the value of land, in urban areas, are mostly driven by a growing local economy; therefore the community should benefit from them. Increases in the value of structures, OTOH, mostly come from investments by the property owner.

There's a fascinating book (well, if you have any interest in economics) about the LVT, from 1879, by Henry George: http://www.henrygeorge.org/pcontents.htm

I code on a Model 01 all the time. I've customized the layout significantly, and it certainly did take some getting used to, but I love it now.

Though it's been out of production for 15 or 20 years, the Kinesis Evolution belongs in here. I have a chair-mount model that still works.

But used indoors, it consumes oxygen, and can produce carbon monoxide. Leaving it on while you sleep is dangerous.

You can. But you shouldn't :-)