cwp

Not a physicist, but it feels more like the orbit of Mercury. Newtonian physics didn't quite predict it correctly, but it was still the best theory available until relativity came along. That seems to be the thrust of the GP comment: "you got a better idea?"

No, what he was saying was that the probability of you winning the lottery is quite high compared to the probability of you existing in the first place. His point was that mathematicians sometimes try to contextualize these very low probability scenarios so that lay-people don't collapse them all into a single "basically impossible" bucket. They're not wrong, but it's not a useful way to think about whether buying a lottery ticket is a good idea.

No. That's like flipping a coin and then saying the probability of getting heads is 1. The fact that something happened is not proof that it was guaranteed to happen.

It's not that I think there's someone more skilled at operations. It's that Cook got Apple into this situation. He was the one that reimagined Apple's manufacturing strategy, closed their American factories and moved everything to China. He then spent 20 years expanding, refining and doubling down on that strategy. And it was brilliant. Jobs could not have saved Apple without Tim Cook. But the time for that strategy has passed.

To get out of China, Apple will need to again reimagine all its operations from first principals, and they need someone who is intellectually and emotionally free to do that—even able to repudiate Cook's past decisions in order push Apple in the right direction. Just as Ballmer couldn't lead a shift away from Windows and it took Nadella transform Microsoft, Tim Cook will not be able to remake Apple.

Apple is about to find its self in need of a wartime CEO. The threat will come when China is no longer a viable place to manufacture high-tech devices. Apple has deep pockets, but they've been doubling down on China with each new warning sign. At some point they'll have to scramble to start manufacturing on this side of the Pacific, and it'll be rough.

Ok, the specific culture that she wants to protect aside, I can see this being an effective way to give reminders. It's not going to work with people that are so new that they don't know what the cultural norms are. But, let's say there's an issue with the continuous deployment system:

"Ah, let's just build it locally and copy the binary to the production servers."

"No. We don't do that here."

<sigh> "Yeah. Ok, I'll see if I can debug this thing..."

The reasons are obvious, and we don't need to open a debate right now, despite the inconvenience at the moment.

The problem with English is that you have to plan out the whole noun phrase in your head before you start talking. Not only do the adjectives have to come first, they have to be in the right order. With Romance languages you can just say the noun and then keep tacking on adjectives as they occur to you.

I don't know what the numbers are, but my first thought would be "growth". Online communities tend to be awesome until they hit a certain level of success, and then they represent a large-enough audience that people start performing instead of participating. Site admins and community norms can speed or slow that process, but AFAICT it's inevitable.

Yeah, for sure. I'm just grumbling about these kids that don't know how good they have it. Even with unreliable keyboards and Intel failing to deliver, the period leading up to the M1 wasn't even close to "the worst the Mac has ever been". I had to walk to school barefoot!

Not really an Easter egg, just the normal release process. That code basically sets up the GUI for the released image - sets up the menubar, opens and arranges windows, etc. The release notes at the top will get styled and appear in a window in the IDE.

This file is part of the build system, and the text is meant to be read within the Squeak IDE, so it's going to look a little weird on the web. If you scroll all the way to the bottom, there's a bunch of code for styling the text, opening and arranging windows, setting up the menu bar etc.

> the worst the Mac has ever been

No. No no no. The worst was the Amelio era.

It's not the ad industry that would suffer, but small businesses that buy ads. Targeted advertising is how new products and services can bootstrap themselves into existence. As scale increases, targeting accuracy declines, so larger companies don't benefit as much. But if you want to put your product in front of 1000 people who will be highly likely to try it, targeted advertising is superb. If that goes away, it's the startup ecosystem that will be hardest hit.

> Carbon dioxide is easier to compress and store at ambient temperature and atmospheric pressure compared to other gaseous storage vehicles, like hydrogen or air.

There are two problems with the "affordable housing" strategy, IMO.

One is that many (most?) advocates for this are actually being dishonest. It's a cudgel that can be used to stop just about any development project, because nothing is ever affordable enough. Any proposal that involves a mix of market-rate and subsidized housing should have more subsidized housing. Any proposal that's 100% affordable housing should be bigger and better. (I kid you not, I've seen people say that apartments that are being provided to the homeless for free should have granite countertops or GTFO). Non-market rents are too high, unless they're in existing apartments, in which they can never ever be raised. And so on. The result is that people who're only casually involved in city politics basically sign up for a total ban on construction, because "affordable housing" sounds reasonable.

The other is that economically, it's basically price controls, and that never has good results. The fact is, the housing crisis is a simple lack of housing. We need a lot more housing in most cities. The population has grown and industrialization/post-industrialization has shifted economic opportunity away from small towns and cities toward the largest cities. Housing is expensive because demand has gone up, but we've artificially restricted supply by not allowing construction. The affordable housing "solution" is to keep restricting housing supply, but shield a select group from the consequences of that. Who qualifies is subject to debate, but it's always a small number of people, and everybody else is SOL. So either you bought a long time ago, you're rich enough to buy now, or you're part of the protected class. Everyone else is SOL, and that includes a lot of people that spend a good chunk of their lives commuting because they can't afford to live where they work. Heck, it also includes a lot people in the protected class that would like to move but can't afford to lose their subsidy.

A Civ VI fan, I see.

The article notes that online sales growth has slowed, but honestly I don't think that matters. Amazon is building out their own logistics and that'll be useful to them even if online sales were flat. Even beyond their own deliveries, there could be an AWS-style business there.

I'll echo this: CUE provides a lot of expressive power without being a Turing-complete language. That's a sweet spot for configuration—you can DRY things up and catch errors early, without introducing nondeterministic behavior.

> Value in terms of dollars is not really correlated with productive value to society.

No correlation? No, I don't think that's true. Sure, there are externalities, but if something truly isn't valuable, you can't make money from it.

Also, what do you think shouldn't be built? I have a hard time coming up with "a lot" of software that has zero or negative value. Sometimes a startup will build something that doesn't end up being valuable, but it was at least potentially valuable, or it wouldn't have been funded.

I'm sure that we haven't found the limit yet. Usually this kind of discussion turns to supply-and-demand economics and somebody says that if you want to hire software engineers you just have to offer more. That's not wrong, but it too narrow a view. A free labour market ensures that skilled people get allocated to the highest value work, which is a great outcome for everyone. But there are so many projects that never happen at all because software engineers are so scarce. The cost of a software project is not just paying the engineers to do the work, it also has to get over the hurdle of finding, evaluating and enticing them to join the project in the first place.

bcantrill had a pretty good take on this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5170246

Wow, a Kids in the Hall reunion. It really gives me hope for the future. If this can happen, then anything is possible!

Yeah, I don't care about all the gamer-centric stuff. I wanted a wireless keyboard with firm, low profile keys and the ability to switch between several Macs easily, ideally just by plugging my hub into the laptop. This is quite nice, but I had to use Karabiner to swap Cmd and Option on the left. I still haven't been able to get the FN and "menu" keys on the right to behave.

I'll have to look closely at this new keyboard, but it seems to check all the boxes, and I might buy one.

Ah man. I just bought a G915 TKL, as the closest thing to what I really wanted, which was this.

I wonder how much of this is just that Julia is more composable than most people are used to, and the community hasn't yet developed the patterns and culture that are needed to avoid these kinds of problems.

I'm thinking, for example, of the way that Smalltalkers often create parameters with type-evocative names, such as "aString". Or Objective-C with two-letter prefixes to work around lack of namespaces. Or even the Java "EntityAdaptorFactoryFactory" design aesthetic. (Some of you will shudder, and I'm with you, but it did solve real problems that the Java world was facing.)

Julia is still a pretty young language, and it's probably only recently that the ecosystem has gotten big enough to hit these problems.

Edit: come to think of it, one of the issues that the Java folks were dealing with was lack of composability. :-/

I think the only real way to do content moderation is to delegate it to users. Let people create something like a subreddit, and then be in charge of content policy for it. Different communities can have different standards, and kicking people out of a given community doesn't ban them from Twitter entirely. There's even some informal version of this already as you can see with the "this part of Twitter" meme.

And of course he married a woman named Jacqueline.

The solution is go find another job. Everbody, but everybody, is hiring.

What does renewability have to do with climate change?

Yeah, sounds smart.