cabalamat

> It's a very clever proof.

Which makes it a bad one, IMO. In maths, as in programming, one should go with the simplest way that works.

> It's not clear how you could effectively regulate this stuff - especially in our highly polarised political climate. The right will immediately target "wokeness", and the left will immediately target "hate speech". And the kids will be totally forgotten about.

A good start would be to ban feeds based on algorithms; instead your feed would be a chronological list of new posts from channels you've chosen to follow.

There might have been 20 years ago, but in the meantime it's been killed by politicians and big corps.

> And no, they cannot simply create a new campus several miles away. Because even if most of the real estate within that radius wasn't ruinously expensive (though less so than Cambridge), transporting people between those two campuses would be a logistical nightmare.

Fine, have a separate standalone campus, maybe on the west cvoast. Or just shift everything to the new campus. They could easily do this if they wanted to. They don't want to.

Whether it is wrong and silly is irrelevant; my claim is that it is "ideological and unrigorous".

I'm sure lots of them were smart and erudite.

They could very easily set up a new campus a few miles away.

Also I doubt there are any truly "historic" buildings at Harvard -- universities that really have historic buildings predate the USA by multiple centuries.

In the 19th century you could get a degree in Divinity, which is clearly ideological and unrigorous.

If you live in a society where most people go to university, and average IQ is 100 (by definition it was when it was normed) then you're going to get people with <100 IQs going to university, and some of them will graduate.

> How would you balance who to let in between a kid who has tutors and no job who gets higher marks than a kid who has to work to feed their family and has lower marks if you don't have a holistic review process?

Give a bonus to kids with low parental income/assets.

> extracurricular activities, personal statements, letters of recommendation

These are just selection for middle-classness.

What makes humans generally intelligent, in practical terms, is that we can build complex societies with scientific, technological and economic growth.

It is for this sort of reason that I use Python instead of shell scripts.

> To stop that unfair extraction we need guaranteed jobs, not guaranteed income.

How would you answer Scott Alexander's arguments against your position, as enunciated in his essay "Basic Income, Not Basic Jobs: Against Hijacking Utopia"[1] ?

[1]: https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/05/16/basic-income-not-basic...

> Communist-inspired Universal Basic Income

Which communist country has or had UBI? Because I am not aware of any, nor do I regard it as communist.

So what do I mean by communism? All economies are run by a mixture of markets and commands. Communism is any economy that is largely command-based (all real economies are a mixture of the two, of course). UBI is where someone is given a regular amount of money and can spend it however they like (i.e. market based).

The USSR was not run like this. Instead it was command-based, e.g. Krushchev build millions of Krushchevkas (standardised apartment housing) and people were allocated an apartment.

So when Andreessen says "Communist-inspired Universal Basic Income" what he really means is presumably "I disapprove of UBI so I'm going to smear it by inaccurately associating it with something I presume my readers dislike". IMO this is deeply dishonest.

It's your metalanguage so you should make it the way you like. If I was doing it, I'd allow for default values for stuff.

Facebook building Shiri's Scissor for real? I'm sure that will end well. /s

In expressions such as:

    uint(48, ~);

What does ~ mean? If it means anything is allowed, then it would be more concise to simply say:

    uint(48);

High level languages have been making programmers more productive for decades. But that hasn't resulted in fewer programmers, but more programs.

> most legacy apps should continue to work

*most*

I recently had an issue with MS deleting IE and a corporate legacy app not working.

> Help me understand, it sounds like you're saying that "when the poor people agree with the rich people, everyone gets what they want and democracy is proved to be healthy, nevermind that when they disagree, the rich people get what they want anyway."

That's how I read it too.

I'm writing Quickiebase[1], a NoSQL database with an API similar to MongoDB. it has a roadmap: https://github.com/cabalamat/quickiebase/wiki/roadmap

[1]: https://github.com/cabalamat/quickiebase

> "trie" data structure

How is that word pronounced? If it's pronounced "tree", it clashes with the name of another data structure. But if it's pronounced "try", it clashes with the name of a reserved word in many languages.

> Imagine being hooked up to an ML model designed to classify whether you’re thinking about porn or not

Or whether you're thinking thoughts the government doesn't like.

Not a big fan of this, but I will admit their homepage looks pretty.

> Unlike rice, it's fine to "soak" pasta in the sauce

Why is this bad with rice? When I make a stew I often put some rice in, with the expectation that the rice will absorb some of the stew.

> Yeah, that was my assumption. Still, typing in Python feels very clunky compared to TypeScript.

I used comments in the code to say what the types were, e.g.:

    def processNotesForm(d):
        """ process the notes form
        @param d::{str:str} = the form data
        """

Of course in modern Python one would simply say:

    def processNotesForm(d: Dict[str,str]):

> Cohorts of children need a brand licensing trust to create financial instruments to manage the use of their brand (Gen Foo, YYmm-YYnn) for promised option benefits via legislative restrictions on societal futures. Performance of each financial instrument to be evaluated by its cohort when they reach adulthood, based on open telemetry data escrowed for objective assessment.

I've read this paragraph multiple times and have no idea what you're trying to say. Could you rephrase it in simpler terms please?

Python has types now (though it didn't when I wrote the 36kLOC program I had in mind).

What problems are there with python variable scoping -- you can have global and local variables, shouldn't that be enough?

> Python is great for small scripts or explorations.

I've used Python on program with >30000 LOC without any problems.

Smalltalk/V from the late 1980s was quite cheap, as I recall.