brent_noorda

I was assigned Libra at birth but identify as Gemini. It’s infuriating how many of these young people refuse to accept my sign.

Yes. And apologies are written by the winners’ grandchildren

Does the state need to encourage charitable giving, though?

Would a person stop donating $1000 of their expendable wealth to their favorite cause (e.g., hunger, cancer, cloning hitler, whatever) if that $1000 donation no longer reduced their taxes by $200 (for example)? If so, what kind of person would do that? Probably not the kind of person who ever donates to anything in the first place.

Worst case, if there were no more tax-deductible charities: that person would pay the $200 taxes and only donate $800 (instead of $1000) to their favorite cause. Best case: Megawealthy would no longer leave $20 billion to their favorite cause (be that their dog, the LDS church, their love of oil drilling, or whatever), but would pay $5 in estate taxes and only have $15 billion leftover for their love of oil drilling (or whatever be their whim).

No organization should be tax-exempt (not religions, not charities, not foundations), and no donations to such organizations should be tax exempt. Tax exemption takes money from the one democratic charity (our government) that supports vastly more than any other, increases undemocratic amounts of influence among the wealthy, and leads to financial shenanigans such as those we see here withe the LDS hoard. I've been in position to witness all of this via my parent's wealth distribution (almost entirely to charities, starting with 50% to LDS church).

the amniotic sac, just like the placenta and umbilical cord, are organs we all developed as fetuses. it should not be too surprising that we have methods to repair our own organs.

pick a side

Is that why Alexa, Siri, and OK Google, which are all wonderful, default to female voices?

Love it. This is one of the primary features that RDIO had that I miss in Spotify, because it allows for discovering songs, as in “if someone likes this song enough to add it to a song list, I wonder what else they like”. I look forward to the indexing to increase, because many of my favorites aren’t in your index yet. (And they what would it be like if you cooold enter two or more song titles?)

You should make a law about Microsoft research pages and name it after yourself.

NASA licensed one $3 copy, but we didn't know why until ~a year later (just a guess how long it was) then found they'd had a team analyzing lots of software options, so by 2003 or so we knew it was for a next-gen telescope.

SE was never "open source" in the standard sense, although almost everyone who licensed it got the source. In the very early nineties I was contact by people to say that what I'd been working on should be "open sourced" in the "free beer" context. I needed money to pay rent, put shoes on the kids' feet, and stuff like that, so didn't understand how to get paid for free software. They said "people will pay you to customize it, or to fix bugs" and I said "it's already ultra-customizable and I don't release software with bugs". I kind of get it now, and if I could talk to my old self I would tell self to open-source at least parts so that there was no reason for anyone NOT to use it. So now I'm working on inventing a time machine to go back and tell myself that and A LOT of more important things, but the time-machine work is going very very slow.

Because JavaScript happened to be the language we at Nombas implemented in our "robust and predictable" engine. If a, e.g., python or TcL engine were as solid at the time for a can't-fail embedded engine, they could have happily used that.

Thank. Yes, it feels very satisfying having it finally be deployed and operational, like a big sigh of relieve after holding in a small bit of breath (one alveoli's worth) for 20 years. ScriptEase started when I began working alone on a project, instead of with big teams, and needed a faster program paradigm so that I alone could be as productive as a big team. It turned out to be generic enough that it was useful for a lot of types of projects, not just mine (which was to be an infinite backup product) or cameras (nothing on my mind at the time at all) but pretty much any software who's core libraries needed easy modification--also turned out to be useful in web browers, although I didn't know it at the time, because I didn't know there was such as thing yet as browsers or the web. The development stopped because by early 2000 times were really changing--people were getting less into paying for software libraries and more into getting free stuff; but it was 9/11 that really killed it, because our customers stopped paying us (because their customers stopped paying them, and so on). The final nail in the coffin was a big snowstorm on the day someone offered to acquihire us and move us to California where we'd never have to shovel snow again.

Finally, ScriptEase itself would have too many legal troubles being used by anyone, but I do believe just about everything needs a script language so it can be altered and customized and personalized and applied to infinite new purposes (and not a new one invented every week, just something boring and stable).

If I were to revive something from ScriptEase, I've often thought it should be the ideas behind the test environment around it. Where everything that can go wrong will go wrong and it must still survive.

I just updated our "Nombas doesn't exist anymore" page, for readers of this nice and mostly-accurate article, with a little more background on why I think NASA chose it (tl;dr "robust and predictable"). <http://brent-noorda.com/nombas/us/index.htm>

BTW, it just occurred to me after writing that that one of the first customers to ever license our software, over the dozen years we were in business, used it to control a camera, while possibly our last customer (NASA) also used it to control a (much bigger) camera. JavaScript: it's a language for taking pictures.

A turnkey Alzheimer’s town. The next Hogeweyk. Sign me up (I’m just about ready).

Some of the tiles become darker and then cannot be turned. What's that about?

About 7 years ago I switched to nursing from nearly 35 years as a software engineer. Each 13-hour shift my 6 or 7 patients, if there was a moment to talk, would ask why I did so. I'd make pretty much the same joke every time: "I was looking a job that was much much harder and paid much much less, so I landed on nursing. Unlike in a hospital, when I was in software and there was a crisis, we'd schedule a meeting and order burritos." The jokes stopped being funny, so three weeks ago I quit my last hospital nursing job.

Recently tried the new Fiesta Veggie Burrito at Taco Bell. Two dollars. Exquisite.

When the “similar” setting is even a little bigger than the minority setting, it is hard to achieve satisfiaction. For example, if the minority color is at 10% but satisfaction requires 15%, then you can’t find satisfaction. This tool shows that the absolute fastest way to be satisfied is to not care about the color of your neighbor. IE, the way to societal happiness is to be color blind.

You can’t research something if no one will fund it, and no one dares fund anything that might show neurological disorders in women.

If you’re asking yourself “why does an insulator speed conduction?” Then it’s worth reading the “function” section of the Wikipedia article on myelin, for an introduction on the role of these short, interrupted sections of insulator and why it makes conduction faster. Nerves don’t conduct electric signals like wires so (much slower, for one thing) making it hard for us to keep up with the processing of computers.

I made a beautiful app called ShoutFireInACrowdedTheater. With one tap it would shout “fire” in a crowded theater. Great interface. Amazing graphics. Voice activated. ADA compliant. But Google and Apple both banned it. Cancel Culture is real!

Micropayments are used somewhere? Anywhere? And they work? Examples, please.

They said 80 unarmed, meaning the rest of the 1043 were armed.

The Counted is not necessarily police brutality as much as listing everyone killed by police in the US, along with a brief description. The Counted totally fascinates me. I like to close my eyes and pick some square at random and read the story there, which is always a brief tragedy, but not necessarily what I would call police brutality. Many surprises there, including a surprising number of cases involving machetes.

Even as I bet against electric flight being commercially feasible except in extremely limited conditions, I'm excited by any news that I might possibly be worng.

Prioritizing where the need is greatest and the cost-per-life-enhanced is lowest makes sense to me.

RSS feed?

Being alive to criticize the treatment is usually better than the alternative.

The cities of the Peninsula voted against getting a BART subway line decades ago, leaving them in the car-dependent, flat suburbs of the 60s

I led the team that created the JavaScript interpreter JWST is using, and I still occasionally work with them on it. 16 (or so) years ago I was blown away at the amount of research NASA did covering all of the control language options, and of course glad that they selected ours. The language itself wasn’t so important as having adequate performance, robustness, memory use, reproducibility and extreme QC.. the way I remember thinking about it was that when your system is running a million miles away, you can’t send an IT tech to press ctl-alt-del when something goes wrong. IMHO they made a well-researched choice that continues to hold up.