gumby

Get through paywall: https://archive.li/2026.10.07-170143/https://www.nytimes.com...

He has a pm unusually large volume and has been around an unusually long time and they are the group responsible for anomalies in space-time.

The original title was too long and then when I considered how to edit it I realized that the original title was too obscure for anyone not steeped in that particular literature (“photo 51”)

All of that was common in MACLISP (MIT) and InterLISP (BBN) before PARC was founded. It was part of the lineage Alan talked about when founding PARC. DWIM was Teitelman’s PhD thesis (BTW his advisor was Minsky, which seems odd today but was normal back then).

> Most states in 2026 are slowly removing the need to display license plates at all

Do you have a reference? I have not read this, and California is going the opposite way.

Nobody seems to recognize how deranged it is that we drive around with easily identifiable numbers plastered on our vehicle. This has seemed weird and privacy-violating to me since I was a kid, yet even today when people complain about Flock cameras they don’t complain about what the cameras are looking for.

What if gun owners had to walk around wearing a huge plate with their gun registration number when they wanted to carry a gun?

And why do driver’s licenses have all sorts of extraneous info (all you need is a biometric, like a photo, expiration date, class of license, and any restrictions)? Just because I walked into a bar or bought a beer at the supermarket doesn’t mean they should be allowed to harvest my address, DOB etc.

The whole edifice is absurd.

Famously, when asked about a god, J.B.S. Haldane allegedly said that if there is a god or gods, they must have an “inordinate fondness for beetles.”

I really don’t remember much influence of smalltalk on interlisp at the time (I worked in the KSL, though I was working on 3Lisp so Interlisp was in theory just our implementation language…but of course boundaries were not what PARC was about.

Static test is still, IMHO best, but if they want that fancy transition they could at least have used a gif. All that js is terrible overkill.

Actual title was too long: “Cannabis use is associated with increased risk of violence: A systematic review and meta-analysis”

It’s hard to strip it down these days as the OS image and its core, immutable filesystem cannot be edited. Admittedly this helps keep idiots from destroying their filesystem and also blocks many malware attacks on the system, but, for example. I don’t believe you can delete the chess program.

Don’t let them wear hats or have pockets!!

Maybe use a hologram

Sheesh, does nobody speak English any more? “Meteorites” are the members of that revolutionary faction who support more meteors.

FDA trials follow this approach. If something bad happens it’s logged as an adverse event; if they croak it’s a serious adverse event (SAE).

So if you have a treatment for moles, and a patient (trial participant) has a mole on their back treated and then falls down the stairs or is run over by a trolley the agency wants you to do an analysis to see if the treatment might have had something to do with getting run over or not taking the lift.

Note: this is not an exaggeration. I have written phase I and phase II clinical trial protocols earlier in my career.

Reddit is leaving me, by killing RSS. Oh well.

Whats’s the monopoly in this case?

In general, whatever else one can say about Apple, it’s hard to see them having a monopoly in anything. Apple phones are about 1/3 of all phones in use; Apple laptops are well less than 20% of all laptops (bigger than I would have guessed), their VR headsets in use might crack three digits (OK, an exaggeration, but could there be more than 100K actually in image? I doubt it), etc.

Same is true in software and services (does anyone use iMessage outside the US?), and every place that takes Apple Pay takes Google too, nd most also take Samsung; many countries just use QR codes.

to get around paywall: https://archive.ph/4uZAg

I think people would just pack them into their checked luggage, where a fire could be much more dangerous.

Even 20 years ago batteries were advancing at a plodding pace. Things were just changing enough that you could build a smart phone, but battery life was by today’s standards low and charger anxiety was a real issue.

Nowadays I rarely carry a charger. On the either hand I am carrying several devices that are right on the knife edge of catching fire at any time

I love this one. I usually say “dinosaur-burner” (though really oil and natgas were overwhelmingly made from algae).

And every time you want to get angry at the petroleum companies remember that they saved the whales.

In some ways it’s easier. In my 40s I was meeting ppl online and one mentioned that she knew my name, where I had gone to university, and from those starting points learned a lot about me. Not enough to sustain more than a few dates but at least she knew I was not a convicted mass killer. And nowadays reverse image search and such means you can scope out your prospective date’s background.

Around the same time I met my now wife online and it turns out I knew several of her neighbours (she knew them all), had visited some of them, yet she and I had never met. So community cred isn’t automatic.

And I have friends who met in a bar 30-odd years ago, both who were there alone. So…?

A half a year! I was an arpanet(->Internet) user starting in the 70s and yes it was a massive research accelerator (for a tiny set of domains) but the real use (human contact, mainly mailing lists back then), while already strong, took decades to reach mass adoption.

I speculated in a different reply that it’s to reduce dups. Two people could post the same article, but if they used different paywall-bypassers they would appear as separate submissions.

My understanding is you’re not supposed to post paywall-cutting links but it’s ok to post them as comments. Perhaps to prevent dupes? Or perhaps there is no such rule.

Of course in enterprise sales this has been the norm since forever, referred to as “value pricing”.

Back in the early days of laptops, I went to Oracle to give them a quote; while cooling my heels in the lobby I looked round, realized I was being an idiot, and so opened my laptop and increased the prices across the board.

SCADA (Supervisory control and data acquisition) goes back to the 50s with, yes, remote access. Security has never been a design factor (after all, how many people had mainframes in the 50s?).

So yes, from very early in the design process.

Yeah, there will be a flourishing of “butterfly collecting” in cross-domain correlation and then it will settle down and just be an unremarkable part of scientific research: occasionally enlightening but often a fruitless task.

French kids started doing this in the 1930s with the talking clock (a French invention BTW). The clock was basically a busbar: callers were all connected to the clock. When it was not speaking the time (at the minute) callers could speak and be heard by others. And it was a free call!

The phone system had switched to digital by the time I started using it so I never got to experience this, but in exchange I could use Minitel!

I am extremely excited and supportive of the exploration of our solar system and beyond.

But what’s with the obsession of sending humans?? Robots already do the important space science (at least the data collection parts) and are well adapted to working in space, unlike humans who have to drag a chunk of Earth around with them everywhere. Robots are leaving the solar system, while no human would be interested in such a journey, no matter how interested they are in the data.

Frankly, the people who act as if it’s important to have humans in space, as rather embarrassing.

On the other hand, I’m perfectly supportive of human spaceflight for tourism and recreation. But let’s not pretend that humans should be involved in the important work out there, except from Earth.

Never send a human to do a machine’s job.