VyseofArcadia

I assumed given Wayland and Weston exist that Acton was named after yet another small town in metrowest Massachusetts.

> All the disadvantages of a monopoly, none of the advantages of a free market.

Just wait until someone tells you about Comcast.

Donald Trump won the election 77 million to 74 million, and that's only counting voters. 74 million is a lot of people who voted against that oligarchy and are likely ideologically aligned with being gleeful with health insurance CEO murder.

I think it's important to recognize that a lot of Americans (most? nearly all?) simply don't have a choice in health insurance. If you are on United, it's probably because that's what your employer has offered as a benefit. I don't remember how much choice I had when I purchased my own health insurance through the ACA, but that was also almost a decade ago and the market has likely changed. In light of that, I think this

> They go to sleep at night knowing the populace hates them. And yet there's a complete inability to look inward.

is because they go to sleep thinking, "what are our customers going to do about it? They're a captive audience. We only have to treat them as well as we are legally obligated to." And they are wholly unprepared for how many Americans are currently thinking, "hmm, I suppose murder is something we could do about it."

> The time value of a slot at a gas pump is ~$0.07 per fill up

I think charging stations have an asset that you have neglected to consider: a captive audience.

Yeah, there will always be people who plug in their car and then scroll for half an hour. But there are also people who would be interested in grabbing a bite to eat, walking around, spending money on something dumb, etc. Having a charging station be a place that you can spend money on human amenities in addition to charging improves the economics.

But instead our charging stations are like, three plugs in the back of a hotel parking lot.

One of the host hotels for Dragon Con in Atlanta is the Marriott Marquis, which until several years ago had a very iconic carpet that has been since been replaced with something boring.

Many people who spent many hours staring at the old carpet while in line for panels missed it very much and founded the Cult of the Carpet[0]. It has "priests" that wear robes with the pattern, you can buy bags and t-shirts with the pattern, etc. My favorite is the guy who painted his storm trooper armor with the pattern.

[0] https://www.11alive.com/article/news/weird/dragon-con-cult-o...

What I have discovered about teaching[0] is that some people just don't want to learn the fundamental interaction principles. They just don't. They have a small list of specific things they want to do, and they would rather memorize those specific workflows than something that generalizes. Of course they'll have to learn it all from scratch again when Google decides to change the gmail UI for the gazillionth time, but that's a problem for the future.

I'm curious how much feedback you'll get of the form, "don't teach me all this stuff, just teach me how to look at photos of my grandkids".

[0] and not just the elderly, although I feel the elderly are worse about this in general

Trump hasn't come into power yet. He doesn't take office until near the end of January.

Seconding the Imperial Radch series, which has a similar "not exactly human" perspective.

Maybe the pop culture obsession is new, but the snarky, reluctant protagonist is something I have seen enough to be kind of tired of. Off the top of my head, Murderbot also reminds me of the protagonist of Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City which I recently read.

If you enjoyed Murderbot, take that as a recommendation, although it is less sci-fi and more historical fiction.

I enjoyed the novella but also didn't feel like it did anything particularly new or interesting. I think a lot of people just relate to a snarky unwilling protagonist who would rather be watching TV.

> Total available human Attention does not grow.

Yes it does. It scales with population, which last time I checked is still going up.

Well I wouldn't say any other language. Common Lisp for example you have a currently running lisp instance that you are modifying.

You can pretty easily set up Emacs to work that way for any language with a REPL.

Macros are pretty ubiquitous in lisp. This would result in a trust warning for pretty much every .el file. I think this would go about as well as Windows Vista UAC pop ups or State of California cancer warnings. If everything is dangerous, nothing is.

This feels like a social problem instead of a technical one. Macros and macro expansion are a core language feature. Code analysis tools have to do macro expansion. You can't handicap core language features and tools in the name of safety. If you are doing something potentially dangerous, you just have to take precautions.

Real world analogy: construction sites are dangerous, but you can't outlaw the bulldozer. It is a necessary piece of equipment. The best you can do is take precautions. Hard hats, high visibility clothing, audible warnings, etc.

I have seen a lot of C++ code that has a lot of "this is clearly just C" in it. None of it is because of "greybeards and lone warriors". All of it was because it started as a C codebase, and sometime in the mid to late 90s when object-oriented fever swept the world they started just adding C++ on top of the existing C codebase.

Given that the general industry approach to technical debt is "yes, more please", it is unsurprising to me that any sufficiently old C++ project still has lots and lots of plain C inside it.

> five well-known celebrities (Justin Bieber, Ellen DeGeneres, Kim Kardashian, Barack Obama, and Mark Zuckerberg)

It feels weird to me to bundle a tech CEO and a former President of the United States in with a pop idol, a talk show host, and a reality TV influencer as "celebrities".

I'd love such an article.

I wish someone had told me about these computer vision applications of Lie groups when I was writing my dissertation on Lie groups, but better late than never!

Why?

This makes sense in the case of, for example, a bestselling author who kicks puppies. Purchasing books by this author means you are giving them money, if indirectly, and thus to some degree subsidizing their puppy kicking habit.

That I can determine using APE gives the original author nothing.

Wooting is in fact mentioned in TFA.

Sorry, I should have been more clear. Not unilaterally revert, but submit a reversion patch to the mailing list for discussion.

This is a little, uh, I don't know a polite way to say it, but is the author ok?

If you contribute code to a free software project, people are going to use, extend, or modify it. They don't have an obligation to ask permission or even inform you. That is kind of the point.

I agree that the change is maybe not the most well thought out and introducing ambiguity in the meaning of a symbol is probably bad software engineering in the long term. But to call it "an act of aggression" is unhinged.

In meme form:

> contributes code to a free software project

> someone else touches that code

> suprised pikachu face

Did I miss WWIII?

How does Hawaii have interstates?

English <-> (insert Germanic or Romance language here) is always pretty solid, but should that be a surprise? This is also the case that is easiest for people.

I wonder if anyone has played around with Language A <-> Common Intermediate Representation <-> Language B. If not, I nominate Lojban for the CIR.

I do love that we are still using Doom 2016, an eight year old game, as an example of modern AAA. It is an incredible game.

I have read reams of rhetoric regarding relations with Russia rehashed as "don't poke the bear".

No one ever seems to want to discuss what to do about the bear going around poking everyone else.

It depends on your goals, right?

If your goal is "maximize total happiness", then engineering blisshrimp is obviously the winning play. If your goal is "minimize total suffering", than the play is to engineer something that 1. experiences no suffering, 2. is delicious, and 3. outcompetes existing shrimp so we don't have to worry about their suffering anymore.

Ideally we'd engineer something that is in a state of perpetual bliss and wants to be eaten, not unlike the cows in Restaurant at the End of the Universe.

Prayer wheels is an excellent example of where this kind of logic leads.

Kudos to you for making the connection.

This is an intensely weird read. I kept waiting for the satire to become more obvious. Maybe throw in a reference or two to the Futurama episode "The Problem with Popplers". But by the end I can only conclude that it is sincere.

I guess what strikes me the most odd is that not eating shrimp is never suggested as an alternative. It starts from the premise that, well, we're going to eat shrimp anyway, so the least we could do is give them a painless death first. If you follow this logic to its extremes, you get things like, "well, it's expensive to actually feed these starving children, but for just pennies a day you can make sure they at least die painlessly".