clarkmoody

How many laws does the federal government have?

> The Library of Congress has said trying to count them is nearly impossible.

Subjects, not citizens.

My comment on this idea from 9 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16291641

First reply was exactly the same as most of the top-level comments here today: "That doesn’t prove anything. Make your fake video, point your phone camera at it, record."

Of course, I'm sure someone else had thought of something along these lines in the 90s, I just didn't have a citation to hand.

Nearly impossible to actually buy A4 paper in the US

To be fair to yourself, a16z could have changed over that time, and the marketing was honest early on.

> To translate such figures into comparable 2026 magnitudes, multiply by a factor of 1,200.

Perhaps this has something to do with the economic dislocations and world wars between the 1870s and today?

One of the most frustrating assignments[1] (2011) in my computer science education was trying to build a better mousetrap for elevator control.

[1]: https://clarkmoody.com/Moody_AgentBasedElevatorControl.pdf

Don't forget that the incumbents will fight to keep regulatory barriers high.

The collapse of the government does not imply the collapse of civil society.

> heavy new 8% tax on our endowment returns

Cry me a river.

Insider trading laws are for the plebs. Tip off your cousin about an acquisition by a public company? Go to prison. Tip off your cronies about war? Business as usual.

Own nothing, be happy

The bathroom was on a raft floating on the surface of an ocean planet.

Simmons opened new frontiers of thought for me with his Hyperion Cantos. A house with each room on a different planet. A heartbreaking tale of a daughter aging in reverse. A romance playing out over space and time. A grand piano on the pop-out balcony of a starship. The cruciform parasite. The Shrike.

Branches of humanity torn between decadent stagnation and radical evolution. The artificial intelligence civilization with its own agenda. The All Thing (Internet) as the third branch of government.

So much good stuff, published in 1989 no less.

Rest in Peace to a true legend.

Rule #1 of power: never outshine the master

The FBI won't get involved unless it's politically advantageous.

Wait until your local police force has fully autonomous lethal robots on the streets.

...and then what happened?

He uses the word "fascism" without any relationship to that word's meaning.

The ballot has always been a proxy for the bayonet.

The war always comes home.

Massive outages of core Internet services popping up shortly after corps firing devs and bragging about AI writing more of their code.

Can we stop changing our clocks twice a year as well?

I recently jumped into typst for creating a course syllabus to learn programming. The experience has been great, especially compared with the LaTeX memories from grad school.

The magic moment is importing your secret key into an alternate client and all your contacts, posts, and feed populate from the data stored in the relays.

The more nerds that get sniped by a simple-seeming protocol, the more likely it is to catch on. Hitting a 100 page spec doc full of XML and links to other specs is a big de-motivator to start hacking on the protocol.

The iterator can be implemented fairly simply:

  self.prev.iter()
    .chain(iter::once(self.active))
    .chain(self.next)

I'm not sure what you mean by including active in another position, but see my sibling comment that makes the active element of a different type, for another wrinkle on this thing.

In one version I've seen, the active element is of a different type, offering enhanced functionality over the vectors of next and prev items:

  struct List<T, A> {
    prev: Vec<T>,
    active: A,
    next: Vec<T>,
  }

This could be used for some active type that has ephemeral cache information or state associated with it (view state in a GUI app, for instance). The inactive type may be hydrated and converted to active, and the active type can be archived into an inactive type.

I've used the zipper concept with lists for making impossible states impossible [0] in the context of Rust programs. The rich enum type in Rust creates opportunities to avoid bugs by baking small state machines into the code everywhere, like loading data in the linked example.

A concrete example is for managing the active item in a list. Instead of storing the active item as an index into the vector like this:

  struct List<T> {
    items: Vec<T>,
    active: usize,
  }

...which two the glaring impossible states. The vector can be empty, or the index can be outside the vector. Each time the active item is desired, we must check the index against the current state of the list.

Instead, we can use the zipper concept so we always have a concrete active item:

  struct List<T> {
    prev: Vec<T>,
    active: T,
    next: Vec<T>,
  }

Switching to a different active item requires some logic internal to the data structure, but accessing the active item always results in a concrete instance with no additional checks required.

[0]: https://sporto.github.io/elm-patterns/basic/impossible-state...

For all the talk of Trump being Hitler, I never saw any real tax protest movement to defund the regime...