157 karma · joined June 17, 2018
C macros on the other hand, should die. I use C a lot but never ever use c macros, they are evil. Extremely hard to debug, confusing and very weak.
When we want macros, we use Lisp, that have proper macros.
In the same way you can put a store in a rural place, or you could put in in New York 5th Avenue with warrantied traffic.
And of course that 100% does not take into account your cost of hosting, creating or adapting the necessary infrastructure and maintenance.
The answer is EXTREMELY DIFFICULT. The problem is that it is a network system. The number of possible connections of different elements with different elements is a mathematical concept called "factorial".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combinatorics
Even small factorials become extremely huge fast. Huge like the number of atoms in the entire known Universe huge.
In engineering we have machines that do only one thing well. For example, you can burn wood well. No problems.
If the wood have mercury(button batteries), even small quantities, you have a terrible problem (people dying from cancer near the incinerator), if the wood has pesticides or Teflon or chloric materials you will be creating dioxins which are one of earth biggest poison, making burning extremely expensive.
Just a single button battery can contaminate tons of material or water.
Wet wipes for example have made cost of sewerage to skyrocket.
Humans or living beings have something machines do not have: flexibility.
Something that cost 1 monetary unit to do with a machine, becomes 20, 50, 100 units when you get out of the working conditions of the machine.
The fact is that the cost have been externalized. Make people in Africa or Asia die from our waste pollution. It is a good thing that they start saying no and forcing us to deal with the real cost, so we have to be smart with our waste.
At the end of the day it is not that hard. The US was the absolute champion of waste, invented "the use and trow" concept, because they could do it without dealing with the consequences.
Combine that with this with companies like Apple tracking your pulse in your clock(that gives them knowledge about your deep emotions an activities on real time).
Add companies like Google that track your phone, your car(with the maps abilities) on real time.
Add to this companies that track what your friends are doing on real time: https://www.apertus.org/facebook
This gives the US secret services more control over people than Stasi had. With the difference that they control all the people in the world. Too much power with so small oversight.
There is this tv series in Amazon about Einstein life and you could see him opposing using his knowledge to improve weapons, while Haber(creator of Bosh Haber process) did not.
Haber was probably murdered while traveling by secret services in the same way the US killed engineers of Iran nuclear program openly. His wife and son committed suicide because of his work.
As a technical person with decades of experience in science you can do enormous harm if you really want. All you really need is a powerful reason for that.
If you see other countries developing so strong weapons they could invade your country with no cost for them, this is a powerful reason for you to collaborate.
The US has focused so much in developing force that is seen more and more in the world as the bully while countries like China build bridges, ports or roads.
Certainly most people in Europe know more than one language, most people in Africa(poor people) and most people in Asia, most people in South America. Most people from Canada.
It is just people of the USA, because they just can get by with just one language.
But this is like using Imperial Units. The (North)Americans even forced the rest of the world not to use metric, like in aviation(French and Germans of course used meters for it in WWII).
China will experience a traumatic experience(growing pains) for getting to a service economy like the rest of the world had.
If Apple continue raising prices they will lose the mass production advantage they have. Steve Jobs always created products that were affordable(like the iPod, or the inexpensive macbook) so it gave the expensive ones mass production components(like accelerometers, cameras, special glass, wifi chips, touch screens).
It seems Tim Cook had the brilliant idea of eliminating low cost products in order to raise margins(that are obscene high right now at Apple), but people are not stupid and alternatives exist.
Countries that people say are Socialist like those in the north of Europe, are really capitalistic societies.
I have known plenty of real socialist countries in the world, and they only share misery. In those socialist countries, like Venezuela or Cuba, the old Soviet World, differences between those in power and those that are not are enormous, bigger than in any capitalist system.
In Venezuela for example, those in power made deals selling the gold of the country, the oil and until recently, had access to favorable exchange of currency that they sold in the black market making a tremendous profit.
In Cuba people earn a maximum by law of something like 30 dollars/month. But people in charge sells access to country resources like permission to place a Hotel or a factory and make millions. All the heroes of revolution living in Mansions in front of the sea while normal people do not have permission to change a broken electrical switch in their houses or feeding the cow in front of their house, starbing.
Cooperatives, like Mondragón in Spain or kibbutz in Israel have their own set of problems. If you pay everybody the same, the best people just get out soon.
You create complex neural networks that process this sensory data.
It is incredible how we see an image with text on it and text just pop out effortless in Mandarin or English, Russian or Spanish.
But IMHO, it is not speaking spoken languages that will give you an edge, because they all are similar, but knowing the different languages of very different fields.
For example a Musician speak the language of Music, tones, frequencies,Harmonics. It works in the same way, after lots of practice it becomes second nature to understand complex patterns in the world.
There is a language of science, understanding orders of magnitude, entropy, energy, numbers in general, experiments, errors.After lots of practice, it becomes second nature to you understanding those patterns.
Someone who works with people or animals like dogs could anticipate what they are thinking (or what they will think in the future), just by looking at the body language or speech nuances. After lots of practice, it becomes second nature.
Programmers learn a computer language, and after years of practice, it becomes part of who they are. There are Holy wars in programming because people that master a language feel threatened when this language is attacked, is an attack on themselves.
In business you should never depend on just one provider. This provider could be the best in the world, now, because it has amazing management. But people die, or are hit by a bus, or get crazy after a divorce or just retire and they get replaced by the antitheses.
In my personal experience, real portability has great benefits on their own. Design is easier to understand and you constantly find bugs thanks to running your software in different architectures, compilers and so on.
At the end of the day, it is the quality of your team. If your team is bad, your software will be bad and vice versa.
We actually broke low quality diamonds with a hammer. They are also very easy to burn.
What is very hard is scratching diamond. If you combine the properties of different materials like diamond on the surface, and something that absorbs impacts inside it could be a wonderful material.
This is a force bigger and stronger than you are.
The overspending always must come to an end when for every additional monetary unit in debt you get very low improvement in the economy but you in debt the future. You are living from your children income.
What usually comes after that is destruction of capital, either by war(you loose all what you have) or inflation, deflation or both simultaneusly(terrible deflation in some things,terrible inflation in others).
You can make the general population pay for it(raising inflation higher than incomes), or you can make the owners of capital pay for it(haircut of 30% or so of their worth).
Of course the owners of capital, like the owners of the NewYorkTimes do not want to pay for it. So they will try to influence the population to do what is best for them basically with propaganda.
In the past it was basically States and Church the only capable institutions for using propaganda. Right now there are also private institutions who control what people feel and think through PR, ownership of media, think tanks and Universities.
While talking about an Empire expansion you omit the biggest factor: You expand or grow conquering-stealing-destroying others and the limit for this is geographic, not taxes.
In the particular case of the Roman Empire they needed to communicate all the provinces, and they did that by sea, mainly using the Mediterranean Sea. There was no train, like there is today(which is a tremendous difference as it is several orders of magnitude of difference transporting things).
Once you conquered all the Mediterranean Sea, there was nothing else to conquer, communicating by land was super expensive. Today it is the size of the world, until we get out to other planets.
Also in today's world there are weapons of mass destruction like nuclear weapons. If you try to grow at the expense of others you could get destroyed.
Those product are the best products out there. They could be overpriced, yes. But other products "many times better", no way!!
Other products could be cheaper, but better, no they are not.
You can't compare an aluminum laptop with a plastic one, filled with spyware(from vendors and Windows today is spyware too), a screen that is sh*t and a battery that last nothing because the manufacturer has not optimized it like Apple has. Not to talk about the chipset electronics, Apple has a volume that gives them the Upper hand choosing the best components.
If the price os something goes too high, it is a good thing that it goes down to levels in which they are affordable again for those that need it for living on them and not for speculating.
I can do way more(orders of magnitude more) with less resources in Lisp and C-python and very simple JS than most of those frameworks do. But it took me years of learning to be able to do that.
The alternative is just having frameworks that have everything that most people will need prefabricated. This way beginners could use them easily if they do not get out of the paved way.
When they want to get out of the paved way and do something else... well, there is another framework for that.
The fact is that from an economic point of view, if you market your courses for the general Public(in the millions) , those people(most of them, 90% or so) do not want to invest what it takes to become an expert in this particular area(or any other by the way).
Most of them just want a pill that fixes their problems as fast as possible, an instant gratification at the minimum possible cost(free). They want a job, they have heard this is the future, they want money to pay the rent.
Those people in the end spend way more time always following the new fashion, the new trend, the new bubble, instead of learning the fundamentals that never change.
If you market your courses for the General population at free prices, IMHO there is no other way. General population is not going to change, they consume porn(fast sex),fast food and fast education.
For me, it will be crazy if paid courses were like this. I spend my money on paid courses(some of them expensive) and certainly they are not like this.
Mr Mussolini was a member of the Communist Party in Italy before creating its own version.
The main difference between socialism and fascism(also called national socialism) is that instead of accepting the International Socialist agreement(that was supported[paid by] and controlled by Russia by the way), they decided to be on their own, that is nation interest are a priority over international agreements.
The other important difference is that fascist were completely defeated, while communist won the WWII. That has made "fascist" an insult while "communist" is not.
You can make films about Hitler or Mussolini being terrible, but you can not about Mao big leap and cultural revolution for example. Most documentation on Russia's atrocities has been destroyed.
When people talk about "images" in the memorization world, they are not just talking about visual memories. But also touch(we have millions of touch sensors distributed along the skin) "images". Speech images. Spacial 3d "images", "smell images","kinestesic or muscle memory and so on.
A persona that is born blind can't make visual images, a baby with malfunctioning ears will not develop sound images. In fact, you could restore vision or cochlea "sensors" later in life and they will not be able to hear or see because the brain as a baby did not have it and neural connections were not made. This is the reason they test for hearing on babies and operate them as soon as possible.
But that a blind or deaf person could not see or listen, it does not mean that he could not make an "image" of the world, in fact some areas of their brains will be actually stronger than on people that can see or hear.
You have to know thyself, what are your strong areas, and favor those sensory images. I am deeply kinesthetic for example, so I always favor space relationships and movement, actions and so on.
In fact, Apple has dominated the portable music player for a long time.
They also dominate the laptops market, making the biggest seller models of all the world. They make them in Aluminum(extremely expensive to make for small productions) and the big quantity they sell make extremely hard for others to compete.
They dominate the smartphones also. Other manufacturers have more market share but divided in lots of models, and several manufacturers.
The Ipads had been selling fro hundreds of millions per year. There is no sophisticated product in the world that have been sold at those massive numbers in the entire history of mankind.
This is something that Steve Jobs understood very well. The current CEO was the boss of manufacturing for a long time, so he knows it.
But if they continue raising prices, they will lose the mass production.
As industrial engineer I know what it takes to develop any new product. The real world is enormous and you will always face the unexpected when releasing something new. People is going to buy your product and travel to Siberia or the Sahara desert, or to the beach, and discover things about your product you could not plan.
The fact is that early adopters usually are "long tail beta testers".
So when I buy a product is 2 years or so after it was first released and never have the problems that my friends that are early adopters have.
For example, they give us an audio and they tell us a robotic voice is telling "Laurel", but they then tell us that what we hear depends on the speakers.
So the fact is that we are not hearing the same thing. So it is not a valid test.
Indeed, the test is wrong because it is computer synthesizers the ones who have problems pronouncing certain sounds, like the "l" that we create putting our tongue back and creating a loop that lets air go out by the sides.
This is a complex analog movement and resonance that is hard to emulate with digital technology, because it is not static and dynamic sounds are very hard to control as we use Fourier analysis for that with windows that introduce distortions in the signal.
Most companies out there just record those sounds from real people.
So those guys instead of accepting the limitations of current technology and accepting their test is wrong, they use it to prove that others are wrong while hearing it.
Oh, the irony. The interesting thing is that while it is very hard to admit that you are wrong, it is extremely easy to admit that other people are wrong.
For me is one of the most interesting lectures I ever watched. Requires effort because it makes you think, and this is one of the great things about it.
Not for beginners? Yeah, like structural engineering, physics, biology,chemistry, writing, or anything worth something in life you need to work on it, have interest and abilities doing that if you want to become a professional.
Some people want to make University so easy that the title becomes worthless, like happened with University titles inflation in the UK.
On the other hand, people need other personalities to complement their personalities. Organizing this environment is not simple for most people, as it requires a complete different set of skills than most technical work.
People will have to enter a company to get this environment, as it is already created for you. Usually not well created, but something is better than nothing.
IMHO Paul Graham acquired these skills from his now wife, thanks to that they created YC and you have all this environment of mutual support, the "family", the "Church".
It always surprising when you go to the US, how isolated most people is from each other.
This makes PG advice extremely damaging for most people in the US. The technical people that will listen to it are already not very social. Without social support, you will perish. No matter how good you are, people are social creatures.
From the other countries perspective, it is a tremendous power imbalance.
The fact that any city of your country could be destroyed by an invading force in 3 seconds at zero cost for the invaders is for sure not very reassuring.
That actually happened in the US territory with native people, they were exterminated by outsiders with superior technology leaving almost not trace behind. This was costly for the invaders because the technology difference being great was not that great.
Right now, with the US(spaceX) able to put a rocket in any part of the world in 30 minutes with a nuclear head, the power imbalance is extreme. They do not have to risk a single life to destroy an entire city or nation!!
This is something that no country on earth should tolerate and they will not tolerate if if they have enough technology.
They supported the Iranian revolution expecting they will be able to control the outcome. That was ending the British relationship and starting an only American one with their oil.
This worked out pretty well in Saudi Arabia, which was very primitive and had very small population.
In the end,though,in Iran they are Muslims first and Iranians second, with a long History. They could have accepted all the money from infidels that they could get, and promised whatever to them, but their own religion says they could(and should) lie to infidels. So they did it.
It is like Windows. When it appeared it was significantly inferior to Unix options, but it made a hundred or a thousand times more people to experience computers.
If a 1 to 10 percent of people is naturally innovative and creative, then the platform with most users ends innovating way more.
Lisp use at first was restricted only to Academics, it was so inefficient that you even required a very special(and expensive) purpose computer to run it. Those academics were not paying the machine with their paycheck so they didn't care.
More affordable solutions like c became popular and forced Lisp to improve(creating compilation pathways and so on), when it was obvious everyone was using the c toolchain(c++, objc, java).
If you try to avoid future regrets(future errors), you are going to procrastinate in life, because it is impossible to do anything meaningful in life without making mistakes.
It is impossible to do anything new without making mistakes. Real life is not Academia, in which you can make strait As always. Unless you play it safe, which is quite a boring life IMHO.
I would give me permission to fail, and will choose something. If you make a mistake you could always quit as soon as possible and choose something different.
What happens is that real master takes commitment. Most people quit too early to succeed.
Anyway, nobody could life your life but you, you should take responsibility for it, not trying to delegate on strangers on internet. Take a notebook, write everything down and learn from your previous mistakes until you are a master on thyself(the good and the bad).
Once you know about you, read a book like "Principles" Ray Dalio, you will be able to do something about it, like finding people that complement you.
This does not mean that he really believed that.
I had seen several atheist and agnostics go to AA without any problems. When you have a serious problem like this that makes you loose your wife, your kids, your job, you try anything that could get you out.
When you are desperate you try anything, anything, including visiting shamans.
From my point of view the people that have problems with AA will be the hyper rational people that could not test something without knowing why they are doing that.
The problem is that when you are under the influence of drugs, your mind is not really free to think, but is strongly biased(cognition bias), so what looks from inside like common sense is not objectively. You can rationalize anything.
What the AA method does is you accepting that the solution is outside you, accepting external influence without judging. This is a necessary step, at least while the influence is very strong.
By the way, this book has an old version, I think pre WWII or something, and later versions.
Pick the old one, it is the original. It was later "improved" by the author's descendants.