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This is one of the most cogent summarizations of the status quo that I've seen.

It leads nicely into a conclusion that, even without the preface, seems reasonable: build personal buffers of water, electricity, and cash.

Another similar issue, with similar consequences and timeline, is Post Quantum Cryptography.

I knew of Emily Wilson and her credentials when I wrote my comment.

For what it’s worth, I think there’s a case to be made that Gareth Hinds‘ adaptation of The Odyssey was just as much of an influence.

When I read a critique that could roughly be summarized as "I could have done better" my response generally falls somewhere between "you should" and "I'd like to see you try".

Not everyone understands just how hard it is to create something from nothing, so I can excuse a certain level of ignorance in a critic. But I find it very disappointing when a critic does understand how hard it is in their domain, but isn't able to transfer that understanding to another.

When I think of critiques, I often thing of this quote from the book "Art & Fear":

  Writer Henry James once proposed three questions you could productively put to an artist's work. The first two were disarmingly straightforward: 

  What was the artist trying to achieve? 

  Did he/she succeed? 

  The third's a zinger: 

  Was it worth doing? 

  Those first two questions alone are worth the price of admission. They address art at a level that can be tested directly against real-world values and experience; they commit you to accepting the perspective of the maker into your own understanding of the work.

This is one of my all time favorite games. It and Shenzhen I/O do a wonderful job of capturing the essence of what makes programming fun and put them into a game.

My biggest surprise from playing EXAPUNKS is how futile it is to try and pre-optimize a solution. I had to remind myself time and again to solve the puzzle first, then try and try and optimize it.

While the games are fun on their own, I recommend playing them at the same time as a friend. Trash-talking about finding more optimal solutions really added to the overall fun of playing the games.

This comment resonated with me in a way that few pieces of writing do. My only complaint is that it’s perhaps too short. I get the impression that you could turn this comment into longer post (with citations) and I encourage you to do so.

Can anybody point me at any interviews of Fabrice? I've looked several times (including just now) and I can't find /anything/ - am I missing something obvious?

I helped set up the first meeting between a Microsoft executive and Thomas Preston-Werner.

One of the moments that stood out to me was when Robert Youngjohns (the exec) asked Tom what it would take to have GitHub move to Azure. I was surprised that Tom had a response ready, saying that IOPS were really important and that virtual disks weren’t fast enough.

I uninstalled it because I have no need for Claude Desktop and there’s no way to keep the 10+ GiB VM image off of my machine

Slate seems closer to shipping a ~$30k electric pickup: https://www.slate.auto

John C. Mallery of MIT

Tangentially related: Since you are at Texas Instruments, I wonder if you could find out what the status is of the intellectual property for the TI Explorer lisp machines. I know who owns the IP for Genera, but wasn’t able to find out about TI’s lisp OS

It has no cosponsors and hasn’t been presented to a committee yet. It’s like calling a bowl of flour, water, and yeast a “new bread”

I think that’s why the document had some suggested pushback to meeting invites (e.g. “what’s the agenda so I can prepare”)

As somone who vigorously declines meetings, this gave me some extra criteria to use (estimated speaking time per attendee)

What I found the most useful was the focus that was put on having agendas for every meeting, something that I try to do for every meeting that I schedule.

I came here to see if AppHarbor was still running and was pleased to see this post :D

Interesting. Langley isn’t that far away

It’s weird, and a little unnerving, to have a line from Anathem by Neil Stephenson immediately come to mind:

“Can you read? And by that I don’t just mean interpreting Logotype…” “No one uses that any more,” said Quin. “You’re talking about the symbols on your underwear that tell you not to use bleach. That sort of thing.”

That’s my interpretation

Yes, this was a plot point in GATTACA

I found found this post to be very interesting and am grateful that you wrote it.

> The visual real-time image OCR stuff was an app they purchased (Magic Lens?) that I had previously used.

Word Lens, by Quest Visual

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quest_Visual

I've spent many delightful hours playing Zack's games and look forward to trying out this one.

I love this background information. I hope you’re backing up those MIDI files!

Sweet! Do you have anything written up yet?

I clicked on the link guessing, and then hoping, that it would have MIDI files of the piano rolls. Not so, but archive.org has at least 14,233: https://archive.org/details/pianorollmusic.com-midifiles

I’ve been paying more attention to Náhuatl after reading “The Aztecs: A Very Short Introduction” [0] and seeing the names of my great uncles and great aunts in there (e.g. Xochitl, Nezahualcoyotl) which opened a mystery of sorts. My grandmother and her older brother had very classically Mexican names and the four younger siblings had Náhuatl names, but why? My great aunts didn’t know but I suspect that the answer is related to the “Indigenismo” movement in Mexico [1], which may also be behind the linguistic renaissance that this article describes.

My personal ties to this history aside, it’s fascinating to see how many Náhuatl words made it into Mexican Spanish and into English and beyond! [2]

Footnotes:

0: https://academic.oup.com/book/481

1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indigenismo_in_Mexico

2: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Spanish_words_of_Nah...

I enjoyed seeing how these sorts of “magic tricks” work.

Thanks for making that decision, the title you picked is better