Taikonerd

When you have kids? Absolutely ;-)

> The best thing would be to ban these sites.

I think we could legislate some easy-to-understand, easy-to-enforce rules. Like, "you can't have more than N bets open at a time." (1?) Or, "you can't have more than $1,000 worth of bets open at a time."

True, addicts could skirt these rules by having different bets on different sites. But at least it would add a little friction, and it would be easy to monitor compliance.

> So many questions and so much to clean up.

Yes -- the main reason my wife and I stopped doing "Spaghetti Sundays" was because I hated cleaning up the house (for hours and hours!) before the guests showed up.

That's why we need voting reform: to make it realistic for new parties to form!

Oh, sorry! Yes, I meant Camden.

Some interesting context: the city of Camden, NJ had its (much larger) police department closed by the state in 2013. Its duties were handed over to the county police, the same as they're doing in the linked article.

The Camden County police successfully brought the crime rate way down. And in the summer of 2020, when riots rocked the US, the CCPD was held up as an example of good policing.

[0]: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/new-jersey-city-disband...

(EDIT: corrected name of city)

> Putting this on gender is such a weird thing to do.

Yes -- this phenomenon is somewhat gendered, but not overwhelmingly so. From the article's own statistic:

A 2025 Pew Research Center study found that 54 percent of women say they turn to a friend for emotional support but only 38 percent of men say they do.

So I think this is a problem that affects men somewhat more often than women, but happens plenty to both.

I feel like this article oscillates between sympathy for the lonely men, and victim-blaming that they're not trying hard enough, they're expecting their wife to manage their social life, etc.

I will say that loneliness and depression go hand-in-hand. And if someone's husband is clinically depressed, that's going to look a lot like "they're not even trying."

Do lodges generally attract an older crowd? There's a lodge near me, and I have the impression it's mostly retired-age men.

I really like this answer. I wish there were a men's group near me.

Refactoring legacy code seems like something where formal methods could help. "Prove that these 2 subroutines are equivalent, across all inputs" is exactly the kind of thing that they're good at!

The authors cite this, but just to mention it: this sounds like F*, another proof-oriented language. (https://fstar-lang.org/)

F* is in the ML family of languages, so it looks pretty different from C*.

Always happy to see D2 on here! In my last job, I had to do several architecture diagrams. Learning D2 took maybe 1 day, and saved me much more time than that.

> Really the main issue [is] ... energy production

I know that's what the rhetoric focuses on, but is it the real issue? The people I know personally who are against "data centers" are really just against AI, period. "It takes jobs from artists, it's going to take my job, it's going to enrich a handful of oligarchs," etc.

I suspect that even if some magical breakthrough meant that AI usage could grow and grow without building a single new data center, these guys would still oppose AI.

And understandably so! "I'm worried that AI will take my job" is a reasonable worry, for many jobs! But I feel like "data centers" is, for many people, a pretext.

This is like a plot point in the old sci-fi movie Colossus: the Forbin Project.[0]

In the movie, America and the Soviet Union have both developed an AI. The two AIs are linked, and they rapidly shift from speaking human languages, to speaking in sequences of numbers that the onlooking humans can't understand.

Spoiler alert: this all goes horribly wrong for humanity.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossus%3A_The_Forbin_Project

I find that Claude Code writes very long comments, longer than even a human trying to be helpful would write.

I figure that it's basically making notes for itself, when it has to revisit the same code in a fresh session.

IIUC, Bowling Alone pointed the finger at TV. If you looked at time-use surveys in the 50s, versus when Putnam was writing in the late 90s, it looked like TV watching had eaten much of the time that used to be spent doing IRL social activities.

I wish that weren't such a signal now. What if I really want to use "it's not X, it's Y" in my actual writing?!

On that note, I'd like to share Fix the News: https://substack.fixthenews.com/

It's a Substack that reports good things happening around the world, divided into sections like "Conservation and Restoration," "Climate and Energy," "Medicine," etc. And they also give part of their profits directly to projects in those categories.

(I'm not affiliated with them, I'm just a subscriber.)

This sounds like what the company Mechanical Orchard offers: https://www.mechanical-orchard.com/

Their pitch is like, "we take your COBOL code, and all the real-world data you can give us. Then we model your COBOL program as a graph, where each node has inputs and outputs. Then we use AI to port each node, making sure that it has the same (input => output) mapping for all the test data you gave us."

Maybe so, but our weakness is that we depend on new debt to finance our government spending. If investors stopped buying that debt, the US government would have to make sudden, dramatic spending cuts.

And that's not a problem that's solvable with military might! "Investors around the world are declining to buy US government bonds" can't be bombed the way an oil refinery can be.

It always gives me an ominous feeling to see these headlines. It's like we're walking out further and further on a frozen lake. "Hey, it's OK, the ice hasn't cracked yet! Let's keep going!"

So many people are nostalgic for these kind of interest-based stores that there's a whole subgenre of simulation games.

For video stores, there's Retro Rewind: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3552140/Retro_Rewind__Vid...

There are also games like that for trading-card stores, video arcades, and record stores.

(I'm probably going to buy the record store one, "Wax Heads." Being a music-genre nerd and recommending bands to people is a fantasy that I was born 10 years too late to do in real life.)

The field really needs more popularizers. I mean people or projects who can do "advertising" like, "if you add our linter to your CI/CD pipeline, you'll never have X class of bug ever again!"

> Does formal verification lead to a strange-loop style or "It's verification all the way down" scenario, where you are shifting the correctness from the original code to the verification? Then must verify the verification ad-infinitum?

IANA formal methods guy, but my understanding is: yes, you're shifting the correctness burden from the code to the spec.

So why is that better? Because the spec is much shorter and more focused -- it strips out all of the implementation details.

It's bad to say "you have to trust this 100,000 line program." It's much better to say "you have to trust this 100 line spec, and the code that verifies it."

Worker's compensation is similar, and that actually is mandatory for employers to offer in most US states. But IIUC, that's only for injuries that are caused by your job in some way?

If you read this article and feel worried about your financial situation if you become disabled, you might look into long-term disability insurance (LTD).

It's a policy where, if you become disabled to the point where you can't work, it pays out $X per month, every year until you're 65. And if you're partly disabled and have to cut back your hours, some policies compensate you for those lost wages.

These LTD policies are expensive, but they DO give you peace of mind about this possibility.

I think that you misread my earlier post -- I'm not endorsing a libertarian approach. I was just saying that the Cato Institute presumably would.

Name a healthcare model that's neither a 100% free-market model, nor a fully-socialized model like the NHS? OK, how about...

* Medicare in the US (single-payer, private providers)

* Medicare Advantage in the US (government provides capitated payments to competing private companies, which then do all the administration work)

* The Singaporean system (complicated, but revolves around mandatory payments to HSAs)

etc.

> But I can’t imagine it happening nationwide. Maybe cities can create their own public options, say a flat 3% income tax and you get health insurance.

It's interesting: 3 states (Vermont, Colorado, and Massachusetts) did recently try to make state-level single-payer systems. https://www.thirdway.org/report/single-payer-health-care-a-t...