jgon

I believe that at least one of them worked for Meta before they embarked on this journey and I believe that they basically used the big tech money to FIRE. They've been able to them supplement and transition their income with the games and apps they've produced as well as related income from their 100rabbits work, as well as having minimized living expenses and no children. None of this is meant to be judgement or in any way demean the work they currently do, I love all of their stuff. Just trying to answer your question.

It doesn't get a hold, because, again, culturally it is very hard for it to take hold. Just like your other response that says "well we should just start enforcing existing laws", the problem is that by the time you get into defining a nuisance in the face of some profit-oriented rules lawyer, or getting bylaw enforcement some breathing room in their workload from the 10000x other calls they have regarding bylaw infractions, you're downstream of the underlying cause and just trying to bandaid things up as best you can. You don't need nuisance based bylaws if people are starting out from a mindset of not wanting to be a nuisance to their neighbors, and Japan probably has bylaw enforcement and its probably really great, but it doesn't just get enforced by magic it gets enforced because they likely have a much smaller workload than exists for bylaw enforcement in my area, and that smaller workload is serviced by a number of people that is probably more sustainable as people generally don't constantly try to oppose any sort of taxes collected and so the department has sufficient funding that isn't at risk of being continually cut every civic election cycle.

On and on up the chain I could go, turning this comment into a wall of text as we work our way up the cause and effect ladder until we ultimately arrive at the things a society values, aka its culture. Its ultimately all downstream of a society and culture that either is constantly looking for a loophole to grab whatever profit there is in a desperate race to the bottom, winner-takes-all struggle, or a society that prizes something different.

I generally agree with the sentiment behind this, but like many other things, underneath the zoning issues what it actually actually goes back to is cultural issues. For a large number of other countries you could loosen zoning up and ultimately someone would start operating an abattoir next to an elementary school and it would make the 5 o'clock news and then the city council would throw a bunch of new regulations in and the whole thing would be over.

I hate to even sound like this, I hate the cynicism in my comment, and maybe the answer is to actually just do it and not declare premature defeat, but having watched how other initiatives in my own local area have gone I can't help but feel that we don't have the real secret weapon that works for places like Japan, and makes stuff like Star Trek work outside of all the fancy tech, and that's sufficiently advanced culture to not immediately race this all to the bottom.

I think its important to think about this point in the context that Jessica attended one of the most elite private schools in the US, Phillips Academy, with an annual tuition that is currently ~60kUSD/year. Notable alumni include both Bush presidents, and many billionaires or their children. Afterwards she attended Bucknell University, another private elite institution, tuition ~65kUSD/year, where the median family income is > 200kUSD/year, and 73% of the student body is from the top 20% income bracket.

So its important to "find your people", but as always it's as important to situate advice in the context where the advice-giver issues it from, and in this case Jessica has spent her entire life as an elite, finding other elites in elite circles, and I'm going to hazard a guess that this is probably something that has had a positive impact on her life.

I think your friends are probably on to something, realizing that you're responsible for helping to guide your child as they grow up has a way of crystalizing certain arguments, and various "hypotheticals" fall by the wayside as the attraction of an intellectual experiment and being the devil's advocate just doesn't really have the same pull anymore once it's your own child's future at stake and not just some thought experiment about "volumes and contrasts". As always people are free to make their own choices, and even listen to a speech from someone who was able have almost $200,000 of money spent on their high-school education, a speech about how to plan your career that is big on "gumption" and "stick to it" energy, and surprisingly short on "be born in the top 1% of economic circles", but given that this is a speech at the aforementioned Bucknell, I am pretty sure that most of the crowd is already pretty hip to the realities of the world they're about to enter.

This is your lucky day, because you get to learn about the Government Accountability office! Formed literally over 100 years ago to literally provide professional and non-partisan audit and investigative services to the government! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_Accountability_Offi...

This is probably a good time to do some reflection on your current world view. You thought that it seemed possible, and possibly even likely that the largest and most powerful government in the world was operating completely without any sort of accounting checks as it worked with literal trillions of dollars a year, and that none of the hundreds of thousands, possibly millions of people who make up the workforce of this organization had any motive to try and responsibly carry out their duties and spend their money. They were all just irredeemably committed to flagrantly wasting your money and enriching themselves on your tax dollars, instead of taking seriously the responsibility they had.

As it turns out, this is just a completely ludicrous fantasy. There are already numerous mechanisms in place to combat fraud and waste, staffed by competent professionals who generally try their best to uphold the trust granted to them. Some of them might even be your friends or neighbors. They're people, just like you, and are generally trying to do a good job and move society forward.

In any multi-trillion dollar organization there is going to be waste and fraud. Like the battle against entropy it can never be fully won, its an ongoing battle that is fought each year. There will be scandals of misspent money, and victories of services delivered for good value on the dollar spent. Its not some sort of black and white, good vs evil struggle, and the fact you thought that literally no one had every thought to do this before should probably give you pause the next time you start to think about politics.

So your prediction is that chinese EVs manage to take over and destroy the Japanese car market, but the American auto market somehow gets a pass and Tesla wins? Why would Tesla be any more able to withstand cars that cost like 1/2 for similar quality, and why wouldn't that same calculus apply to their "halo" products? Are the Chinese fundamentally incapable of building a luxury EV? And if Tesla somehow sees that an EV halo product is their only chance for survival, why wouldn't current halo manufacturers like BMW and Mercedes and Lexus also try for that market, and why are they sure to fail while Tesla succeeds?

And maybe your response to all of the above is that Tesla will not be allowed to fail as part of an industrial strategy on the part of America, in which case the question is why would the other domestic manufacturers like Ford and GM be allowed to fall by the wayside? And further, why would Japan not also embark on a similar strategy and prop up their domestic manufacturers?

Any way you look at it, a prediction that China wins out everywhere except for plucky old Tesla moving into the "Apple" position seems like some sort of bizarre partisanship/home team support that doesn't stand up to a moment of scrutiny.

Just so we're clear, this is a "beginner programming book" that has you create a scheme interpreter, then a register machine simulator, then a compiler out of your interpreter that will then have its compiled code run on the register machine simulator, by the final chapter.

This is probably the part where you'd step up and post a link to your repo with solutions to the exercises to back up your talk, but generally I only see this sort of casual dismissal from people who haven't actually worked through the book.

The texinfo version was I believe the source for the really nice HTML5 version if you want to read it in a browser, but with nice formatting that the MIT original version: https://sarabander.github.io/sicp/

Shades of The Book of the New Sun, and Severian reviving Typhon only to realize what sort of threat he poses.

I thought that this video essay was a pretty eye opening take on what I had been struggling to articulate about BOTW: https://youtu.be/RNCCKABmHO8?si=fFX6z_ZnCSBDNpio

Basically, BOTW is "poetry" because it is heavily vibes based, at a time when a lot of games are "story" based. My most memorable moments of BOTW are exactly what you described, standing on plateau watching the sunset, walking towards hyrule castle in the rain, finally ready to face Ganon and the zelda theme starts to play, etc, etc. Not specific story reveals but the moment to moment feelings that originate organically from the world and the unscripted interactions and events occurring within it.

My understanding is that the company is saying they went with the new stylus technology because the old tech was wacom and if they had stuck with that, as well as adding in front light, the pen-to-screen distance would have increased past where it is on the rm2. With the current tech they have made it essentially the same (maybe slightly smaller I believe), and since they heavily lean on the writing experience for these tablets I am guessing that distance was a deal-breaker with regard to sticking with wacom. Now is that the whole truth? I can't say as I don't have a full understanding of the engineering involved in these touch layers, but it at least sounds plausible to me.

Microsoft did a similar switch with their surface tablets, which were initially wacom based, and switched to a different tech that also required batteries in their pens, so this isn't without precedence.

Well it didn't. :) The person replying to your comment was basically saying the organized crime in Chicago is still relevant for civilians, and gave several examples, a direct rebuttal to your statement that "Into the 1970s, organized crime might have had some salience for civilians like us, but I think it's been decades since it mattered."

You'll note that this sentence of yours does not specify "mafia-type organized crime", so when someone replies about the relevance of what you did specify, organized crime, its a pretty clear line. :)

This is the right answer and it is hopefully one people will converge on, although true to form it will be after trying everything else. Its super frustrating in a lot of cities right now because the current political environment seems to want to have a "stochastic junkie" if you will. When it comes to violence, disorder, theft and just generally refusing to be part of society in a non-harmful way all we get right now is a ton of verbiage about how addiction is a disease, these people can't be held responsible for the actions they've undertaken, they're serving their addiction, etc, etc, etc. And so then someone says "Well if they are completely incapable of conducting themselves rationally then we should probably step in and force them into treatment to remove the thing that is making them act this way." And of course a huge uproar comes in response from the same enablers "We can't force them into treatment! They have rights! We need to wait until they choose to enter treatment and they have to consciously take responsibility for completing the treatment."

And so we're caught in this terrible in-between with people who can't be held responsible for their actions, but who also can't have the state enforce care on them unless they ask for it, and regular citizens just trying to peacefully live their lives bear the brunt of it. Its a luxury belief whose costs are disproportionately borne by the lower income members of society which makes it even more galling to watch it masquerade as some sort of progressivism. Ultimately people are going to force politicians to make a choice. If these people aren't responsible then the state needs to step in until they can become responsible. If they have inalienable rights then they also have responsibilities that come with those rights and need to be punished for their misdeeds. The current path is not cutting it and the voting public is waking up to that.

Brian Goetz just gave a talk about all the stuff that's been delivered up to Java 21 that announced they'd be rolling out a fully supported VS Code plugin for Java that should be better than the current language support. It should be out within the next week or two.

Timestamp for the announcement: https://youtu.be/eXCx2hW_xNI?t=1955

http://dev.java might be what you're looking for.

The Lionhead legacy goes even deeper, as I remember the lead up and hype for their first game Black and White. You'd have a creature that you didn't control but rather you "taught it" what you wanted it to do. I can't remember if the words neural net were mentioned in some of pieces I read in PC Gamer, but I feel like it might have been. It was going to be a revolution in game AI because it wasn't just a bunch of if-statements or state machines. And who was the hotshot young programmer behind this wizardry? A young Cambridge graduate named Demis Hassabis, who'd previous done level design and other work for Bullfrog as a teenage before attending university!

Of course on the meagre PCs of the day this revolutionary AI didn't quite pan out and you couldn't ever really get your creature to do what you want. And what became of our young AI programmer? Well after a few more years in the game industry he went back to school and continued his pursuit of AI and neural nets and founded a little company that you might have heard of, Deep Mind, aka Google's AI division creating things like AlphaGo and generally kicking off the machine learning revolution we currently find ourselves in.

And to think, you could have had a preview of all of this, like I did, back in 2001 on a janky underpowered PC, cursing at my neural net powered ape creature as I tried to get it to stop crushing my village.

I don't think that the older generation "hates" youth, I don't think they think about them at all really. In the conversations I've had with Boomers and older people, although there is the standard derision for youth that is stereotypically expected of older generations, I would say there is more an immense blindspot and unwillingness to consider even a slight sacrifice of any type, even for their own children. The expectation is that the youth will just have to work hard like they did in there day and a complete unwillingness to confront any sort of conversation about what hard work could buy in their day vs the present one. I've watched boomers talk to each other about their kids or grandkids being unable to buy a home amongst each and other and I would describe the overall vibe as being one of detached "oh well, sucks for them" type acceptance, and trying to console each other that their kids are doing fine in other ways (they buy a new iphone every other year!!!). Your comment actually mirrors a lot of their attitude, especially the part about how the youth of today would definitely do the same things, so why feel guilty about doing it, a hypothesis that has no way of being disproved and which exists largely as a balm to soothe their conscience as they try to deal with the cognitive dissonance of watching their children suffer, and then voting for parties and policies that will prolong that suffering.

You wouldn't imagine any young person doing something to help another person out in some sort of solidarity and yet I generally see this exact mindset in terms of voting for left wing parties that will raise taxes, including theirs, voting and campaigning for increased density which will affect the character of their neighborhoods and possibly decrease their property values. Hell I have never voted for a party that would decrease my taxes and I am pretty up front about needing to be taxed more as I am very fortunate with my employment and income situation. I've had conversations at length with boomers advocating for tax cuts which would cut funding to education, arguing that it is pretty convenient that they want these cuts right around the time that they have no children in public school and asked if we should also cut medical funding, funding that they disproportionately draw on and the response has been universally "No", that funding is good and necessary.

So I don't think that they young are "especially targeted" and more that anyone who is not a boomer and up is targeted and that happens to include the youth. We can tell ourselves a bunch of stories but stats around home ownership, lifespan, healthspan, median income, etc, etc, etc, a laundry list tells the actual story of what the current relationship is like between generations. You don't have to hate someone to harm them greatly...

We usually have checks and balances in democracy so that a majority can't vote to say, take all the money from some minority group that has less voting power than them. What is happening now is that a "loophole" has been discovered wherein instead of just directly taking all of the money from some minority class the property owning class just instead condemns them to a lifetime of renting whereby just enough rent is charged to ensure that they are by and large never able to move out of renting, but not so much as to sow the seeds of a violent revolution (yet). Its democracy in the same way that voting to end all medical benefits for people over 65 would also be "democracy", which is to say it would be naked inter-generational and inter-class warfare.

The conspiracy is not to "own" those things, even though in most cases you still need them. So don't fret that you're still renting and don't own your own place and pay no attention to the fact that your rent goes to an enormous REIT that you'll pay for the rest of your life as opposed to when you finally own your home free and clear. Don't worry about owning possessions, just send subscription services a monthly fee, each and every month for the rest of your life, unlike that book on your shelf that you can read now or when you're 80.

Wanting possessions definitely fuels you to work hard, but you know what gives people even more drive? Existential threats like not being able to afford food or keep a roof over your head. A man with his own house and his own car and no debts is a man you don't have much leverage over. A man who needs to keep sending you a monthly flow of money in order to have shelter, entertainment and whatever else is a man who you control on a fundamental level.

Technology has allowed humanity to push back the frontier for a while now, but I can't believe that anyone could look around and think that the current regime is sustainable. Like a village that is feeling great about how full their bellies are now that they've eaten all their seed corn, I get the same feeling from proclamations like the one you've made above. Record levels of C02 in the atmosphere, each year with more and more devastating heat waves (my city just had several of the hottest days on record since records began in the 1880s), the green revolution allowing us to feed people by basically converting petroleum products into agricultural yield, crashing biodiversity all over, fish stocks disappearing, top soil depleting. Its just this cacophony in the background shouting "IT'S TOO MUCH" and its feels like our modern capitalist economy and government can't bear to face this so we just avert our eyes and keep chugging forward.

I have some hope that we're starting to turn the corner as birth rates keep going down, and I am somewhat hopeful that things like renewables will keep pushing forward and contribute to helping us move in a better direction, but there's still a ton of stuff that won't be helped. You can't eat cheap electricity provided by solar panels, at least not in any sort of regime that feels believable (I don't think giant fields of green houses is a plausible replacement for modern intensive agriculture), and it still relies on all sorts of manufacturing processes that are in no way sustainable. That hope runs up against proclamations from people like Musk and my local government that WE MUST GROW at all costs. We need to triple our population by 2100 despite the fact that our infrastructure is already groaning at less that half the goal. I think its pretty clear that there is no sustainable QUALITY of life at 9 billion, and I can't see it being feasible anywhere over 5 billion, maybe. But the powers that be in society see that they could reign over a teeming mass of the impoverished and I truly get the feeling the sentiment is our billionaire class would rather reign over a ramshackle society of poverty where the gulf between them and everyone else is titanic instead of a sustainable society when the objective standard of living is higher but the gap is narrower, and so I'm not sure if we'll actually make any moves to improve things or just slowly work our way to a grinding cyberpunk dystopia.

To summarize, it feels like people dunking on Malthus and Ehrlich are whistling past the graveyard, their stomach full of seed corn allowing them to put off thoughts of the future and all that matters in our society currently is the next quarter's results. Winter is coming and its not going to be pretty.

My sense is that our current society is pretty similar to what you write here except with the labels completely reversed, and the 5% that depend on basically the rest of society to operate and maintain the titanic lifestyle they've accustomed themselves to tell themselves that they are "the minority that make things happen". Ultimately we still need to dig food out of the dirt under the hot sun more or less, and nail together wood and lay down shingles, again either under the hot sun or in the freezing cold, etc, etc. Its a whole ton of getting your hands dirty and wrecking your body for decades until the bill comes due, and then watching as someone whose hands are buttery soft says "Thanks for the fruits of you labor, remember that I 'made this happen'" in reference to their token gestures of contributing.

Probably worse depending on what type of roofing you have. Asphalt shingle debris sitting in water for an extended amount probably isn't putting anything good into it.

Mario Run flaming out in the mobile space should be looked at as a pretty harsh indictment of the whole mobile gaming landscape. The premier gaming franchise in the world, in a pretty well made game, with a fairly non-exploitative monetization scheme couldn't make it. All the big publishers salivate looking at the number of possible players and profits that mobile provides but if your aim is to win out via quality gaming the market just isn't there. Mobile players will not pay for your game if it is priced such that you don't need predatory monetization.

You hear a lot about "gatekeeping" and "elitism" whenever mobile gaming and traditional gaming are discussed and compared but I'll be honest I don't get why we can't just call it like we see it. The mobile gaming landscape is not a place for quality and I kind of get where some of the resentment from traditional gaming comes from when those spaces are judged against the profits of mobile gaming. Like asking why your local theatre isn't making as much money as the local casino, its just two totally different goals and mindsets and if all you care about is the bottom line then sure I guess the casino is the way to go, but lets not pretend there's capital-A Art in those games the way there is on consoles or PCs.

Mario Kart 8 Deluxe sold over 50 million copies at a price that has mostly been $60 and which I don't believe has ever dipped below $40, so that should give you a flavor for the types of numbers they are looking for when it comes to Mario Kart.

I wanted to experiment with creating a "Rust-like" option and result type for Java and so figured that I would need records and pattern matching for this and I ran into exactly what you are talking about here with records and public constructors.

My solution was to create a sealed interface that permitted the None and Some records as the only classes to implement it. Those records are not available outside the package, while the interface is exposed. Using default methods in the interface I could expose a state "create()" method which would then instantiate the appropriate None or Some record. In this way you control the exposure of the construction of the specific record implementations of your interface.

You can then either interact with the option through the methods on the interface, .isOk(), .unwrap(), etc, etc, or with the upgraded pattern matching in switches with this release you could have something like

  switch(option) {
    case option when option.isNone() -> blah
    case option when option.isSome() -> foo

}

Its not as pleasing as Rust matching directly on Some and None, but it gets you pretty close.

You seem pretty emphatic that senior managers have had their compensation clawed back but have posted absolutely zero proof that this is the case. Care to show any reason we should believe you?

Doing a little bit of digging into the Gauche manual would have led you to a listing of the various utility libraries that it offers: http://practical-scheme.net/gauche/man/gauche-refe/Library-m... As you can see it is pretty extensive, and could likely handle most of the needs you mentioned in your comment. I would call this pretty “practical”.

No they wouldn't. They would take to the polls and vote in a city council that would reverse whatever sort of plans you think would be implemented. A lot of people seem to think that they will just be able to force a majority of people to join them in bike heaven on the other side of sweeping infrastructure changes but there are far too many people who aren't interested in it and won't let it happen. Car driving and the things it enables are valued much higher by a much bigger proportion of the population that many people seem to want to believe.

This analogy doesn't work because programming in "industry" has been like the MMA since day 1 in the sense that you have always had to "test your skills" and make something that people wanted and compete with other products. In the martial arts world a bunch of different martial arts just completely went without full-contact sparring/competition and instead built up a bunch of different rules and scenarios around how they were "too deadly to be done in practice". This is the bullshit that MMA exposed, and its interesting to note that the two practices in the comment you're responding to, judo and karate, have had a long history of being practiced "for real" in the gym and in competition and thus have spawned a long line of highly successful MMA competitors.

The analogy also doesn't work because BJJ isn't some silver bullet. What people discovered is that the first M in MMA is actually the important part and if all you know is BJJ you're going to get starched by a boxer with a sprawl, or more likely a wrestler with a modicum of submission knowledge, who will never let you get to the floor in the first place, and instead just grind you out.

So just like the question "what is the best martial art" currently has no answer outside of "you need a mix of striking and grappling not just one thing", there is no answer to "What is the best programming style" outside of "think about the problem you have at hand and crib on examples and knowledge from other people who have solved a similar problem". This "unfortunately" points to boring industry standard tools, like Java, C/C++, Javascript, RDBMSs, IDEs, Linux etc, etc. Probably some newer stuff like Rust and React as well. And note that answer isn't one specific technology, like MMA its a bag of different tools you combine.

I kind of hear you, but honestly I have to question even that? If it is less separate than I can imagine how does that work in the face of catastrophic global warming? It was one thing when elites could pull the strings in one nation, knowing if things go real they go just hop on a private jet, but global warming is just that, global. Everyone is going to feel the consequences, and that's not even talking about other resources such as food, raw materials, etc. You can't just have a bunker in New Zealand, unless you also plan to just live in the bunker for years and years? I guess what I am trying to say is that Elysium is plausible because it's literally "up there". Riding out the second half of this century on earth seems waaaaaay different to me.