bolangi

This article gives a great background to Ruby's syntax origins in perl. Also, with a series of "What happened to perl?" articles appearing lately (maybe just one on HN) it gives a nice retrospective on both good parts and quirks of the language. That perl was eagerly adopted in many toolchains vital to linux distributions (such as Gnu autotools) and is a deep dependency through the IT world today is a testament to the strong fundamentals of the language beyond the oft-flamed syntax pecadilos.

To my thinking, the tides of perl bashing in articles and comments is a sign of the vitality of the language (all publicity is good publicity) especially with the continued development and renaissance of the language -- new language features such as in-core OO, mature tools such as the Perl Data Language -- along with cultural commitment to on-boarding and mentoring in the perl community.

A slightly different audience, probably, but I was greatly assisted by Intuitive IC Electronics by Thomas Fredriksen.

https://www.amazon.com/Intuitive-electronics-sophisticated-e...

The war on drugs and millions of non-violent offenders in prison does not exactly suggest to me the term "sacrosanct."

Every honest therapist looks at all components of a patient's life, and the patient, too, has a responsibility to identify what is helping and what is hurting them, or in which situations a trade-off is justified.

We will never be able to arrive at a complete and perfect answer for everyone because people happen to be individuals. However the medical profession (including therapy professions) lean heavily on generalizations to avoid the overhead of having to deal with a living, breathing individual with a history and family context, where possible.

Kurt Vonnegut wrote that an aspiring writer should take any writing job he or she can get. A hack job will at least keep the creative wheels turning. I think the same applies to software development jobs. Take one where you can learn something, hone your chops. Doesn't have to be your passion, because turning an abstract conception into working software is intrinsically satisfying to someone who appreciates that particular form of magic.

Do your own projects on the side and keep your antenna peeled for other opportunities more in line with your own life goals.

Reacting to the headline, I understand the basic concept of medicine is you treat a patient who presents with a condition, not a condition in isolation like some kind of abstract math problem. I think it's a mistake when doctors say to each other, even as a shorthand, I have a gallbladder to deal with, when it's a real person, and the best results come from considering the whole person when pondering how to care for them and which treatments to administer, with the medicine being only a part.

> Its inner diameter is 20 micrometers, which is about 100% finer than the best commercially available tips.

"100% finer", who uses language like this? I don't even know what it means. How about "half the diameter"?

I don't know what TLA+ is, but thanks for an entertaining rant, and the excerpt from Heller's timeless book.

I've been there since the DOS days when it was all dark mode, green phosphor characters on a black CRT. I was there when amber monitors were the new thing. (I still love sunglasses with brown lenses.) And I watched the early Apple computers with graphics and black-characters-on-white display style that has been the rage ever since... well since the recent new thing being dark mode.

It reminds me of fashion trends, miniskirts then maxis, up and down past the knee like tides.

Fads, that's the word.

Not sure how well this dovetails with the research presented in the article, but Grinder and Bandler's work -- which they named Neuro Linguistic Programing (derived I understand from analyzing the brief therapy and hypnotherapy techniques of Milton Erickson) -- postulated that people have dominant modes of thought: visual, auditory, and kinesthetic. They correlated these modes with eye movements they observed in subjects when asked to recall certain events.

In my personal experience, my mind became much less busy as a result of several steps. One being abandoning the theory of mind -- in contrast to spiritual practices such as Zen and forms of Hinduism, where controlling the mind, preventing its misbehavior, or getting rid of it somehow is frequently described as a goal, the mind's activity being to blame for a loss of a person's ability to be present in the here and now.

As a teenager, I can remember trying to plan in advance what I will say to a person when faced with a situation of conflict, or maybe desire toward the opposite sex, doubting that language will reliably sprout from my feelings when facing a person, whose facial reactions (and my dependence on their good will) pulls me out of my mental emotional kinesthetic grounding.

As humans we use language, however, it seems possible to live in our experience. Some people who are alienated from their experience, or overwhelmed by others, seek refuge in language.

There is obviously a gap between research such as this, and how someone can make sense of their agency in life, finding their way forward when confronted with conflict, uncertainty, etc.

Unicomp took over the IBM buckling keyboard manufacturing. I like their clicky keys, but now their Model M costs US $189, a bit high.

The article is missing links to one of the first fingerprint diagnostic tools, https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/ , formerly called something like panopticon.net.

For a short while, I ran the Eumel operating system and wrote an application in Elan. Among other interesting properties, files weren't saved, but were checkpointed by the OS. I enjoyed this exercise, although Eumel remained a very small niche.

Britney Spears did it in the music video for Toxic.

Here's a demonstration of a 1958 relay computer.

https://youtu.be/_j544ELauus?t=373

I use one called 48sx, however, I've only ever used +-*/. Clicky physical buttons are much better of course. An accountant I worked with years ago had one with a printer, which meant she had a paper record and could verify that the entries were correct.

Hello hath no fury like a lithium ion battery fire.

So does that make the developer a sarcasmaholic?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JcOfFeKXcd4

The commenter was right that the correct unit is Wh, then slipped up. Does gasoline contain power? Do "high-power" Li-ion batteries? In common parlance, power and energy are used interchangeably. I believe people writing about science should hold themselves to a higher standard, but there is always something more important.

Because American literacy in math and hard sciences has only declined over the decades since the post-Sputnik spurt that benefited my generation. Journalism as practiced today doesn't require scientific literacy or rigor, or at least, they are secondary to the purposes of the writers' employers.

Without actually reading the book, it appears the author asserts that a large component of human intelligence can be reproduced by AI, and perhaps the chaotic interactions that underpin human intelligence, also allow nonliving systems such as AI farms to express intelligent behavior.

What he would like people to believe is that AI is real intelligence, for some value of real.

Even without AI, computers can be programmed for a purpose, and appear to exhibit intelligence. And mechanical systems, such as the governor of a lawnmower engine, seem able to seek a goal they are set for.

What AI models have in common with human and animal learning is having a history which forms the basis for a response. For humans, our sensory motor history, with its emotional associations, is an embodied context out of which creative responses derive.

There is no attempt to recreate such learning in AI. And by missing out on embodied existence, AI can hardly be claimed as being on the same order as human or animal intelligence.

To understand the origin of human intelligence, a good starting point would be, Ester Thelen's book[0], "A Dynamic Systems Approach to the Development of Cognition and Action" (also MIT Press, btw.)

According to Thelen, there is no privileged component with prior knowledge of the end state of an infant's development, no genetic program that their life is executing. Instead, there is a process of trial and error that develops the associations between senses and muscular manipulation that organize complex actions like reaching.

If anything, it is caregivers in the family system that knowledge of an end result resides: if something isn't going right with the baby, if she not able to breastfeed within a few days of birth (a learned behavior) or not able to roll over by themselves at 9 months, they will be ones to seek help.

In my opinion, it is in the caring arts, investing time in our children's development and education, that advances us as a civilization, although there is now a separate track, the advances in computers and technology, that often serves as a proxy for improving our culture and humanity, easier to measure, easier to allocate funds, than for the squishy human culture of attentive parenting, teaching and caregiving.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Approach-Development-Cognition-Cognit...

Great idea. I'd love to hear something realistic like, "Practically everyone who uses a phone or computer is under surveillance. While this project may seem late relative to the damage done thru unlawful surveillance over previous decades, it represents a start that could lead to better privacy for some early adopters and gradual shift away from the blobs and proprietary technology that place control of our hardware in other hands than our own."

Gradual typing seems to be alive in the Raku language. I can't comment on soundness guarantees.

Don't forget other alternatives. On the pre-unicode side, we have lout http://jeffreykingston.id.au/lout/ . On the postmodern side, we have rakudoc https://raku.github.io/rakudoc .

For comparison, I asked about async in the raku programming language (https://rakulang.org). While I don't know details, raku's design avoids function coloring ( https://www.reddit.com/r/rakulang/comments/1n8hjrr/async_in_...).

So, that explains the benefits of chewing on one's own locks.

SpaceX does well on this front. There are four teams of workers at Boca Chica, working around the clock on 8-hour shifts that overlap. This helps continuity as well as sharing of knowhow.

Aside from the choice of language, I will be interested in what window managers are similar, or an inspiration for plwm.

> It [Raku] was a flop.

From what I read, it's a living, breathing language with innovative features, core developers, regular releases and a healthy community of users. What more do you want?

Porges started with studying the difference in the length of successive heartbeats, and the nerve systems that control this variability. He accumulated lots of data, and published his findings. He looks at the function of the different branches of the vagus nerve before he eventually connects the state of the vagus nerve with the functioning of the social engagement mechanism--the system that enables us to recognize faces and read their emotional signals. He also connects the vagus nerve with fight-or-flight survival mode of the organism, vs. the rest-and-recuperate mode where resources are made available for healing. It is well-founded, plausible, has good explanatory power for how (to give one example) family visits to a hospitalized family member contribute so greatly to their recovery.

I have an in-law from a family of temple carpenters in Nara. They're not finding people who want go through the rigorous training and the work load demanded of an apprentice.