mch82

Continuing with the car loan analogy, the interest portion of the car loan is similar to the guaranteed rate of return in a pension. If a car company sets up a loan with a bad interest rate the car company will lose money on the sale.

The main difference between car loans and pensions is the time horizon. It’s much simpler to manage the risk of a 3-5 year loan than a 30+ year retirement that begins 45 years in the future.

“impractical rate of return” is one element of “mismanaged”

Pensions are nonexistent now because other compensation packages have become the norm. Actuarial regulation has changed to incorporate lessons learned from pension fund failures. The goal of the regulatory changes is to decrease risk to consumers in contemporary actuarial products.

That’s about as deep as I can go on this topic. I’m not an actuary, by a number of my friends are and actuaries talk about lessons learned from failed pensions like engineers talk about lessons learned from failed software development projects. Evidently, demonstrating knowledge of those failures and the resulting controls is a key element of earning the title of professional actuary.

You don’t understand what a pension is so are reaching misinformed conclusions. A pension is deferred compensation. The employee earns the compensation while working, but agrees to receive the money later. If a person were a car, a pension plan is like paying monthly payments for a car rather than paying the full price of the car at the time of purchase. A company failing to pay a pension is analogous to a person failing to pay a car payment.

A pension is deferred compensation. It’s money employees have earned that they agree to receive later in life in order to smooth their tax burden over time and benefit from pooled financial management by professional investors.

Pensions have failed because they were mismanaged. They are not “Ponzi schemes”.

Great observation!

Example: I met a person who started in a job like janitor and ended his career setting up video calls for the CEO. Seems likely that 50+ year career arc was possible because of employee training and all those jobs being in-house.

I’m certain renaming GIMP would make a tremendous difference. The name is perceived as offensive & that makes it impossible for people to take seriously, especially in a corporate setting. Edit: As someone who has tried to get people using it because it’s such great software.

Thank you for sharing this excellent article and the work you described in another comment to help create the FAQ.

It seems CC0 may have simplified this now. The issue used to be that software enters the public domain after copyright expires & different countries interpret that different ways, which can become complicated without an explicit license document.

“Using CC0 for Public Domain Software” https://creativecommons.org/2011/04/15/using-cc0-for-public-...

“CC0 FAQ” https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/CC0_FAQ#May_I_apply_CC...

Stumbled upon this today and found it quite interesting that DoD now considers Open Source Software to be a subcategory of Commercial Software.

> As explained in detail below, nearly all OSS is “commercial computer software” as defined in US law and the Defense Federal Acquisition Regulation Supplement, and if it used unchanged (or with only minor changes), it is almost always COTS.

This should have the effect of making it easier to consider Open Source Software in make/buy trade studies.

Side note… the most interesting thing I learned today is that DoD (and probably other agencies) consider “Open Source Software” to be “Commercial Software”. This is a great development and likely means it will be much simpler to include OSS in make/buy trade studies. See “Is Open Source Software Commercial Software”, https://dodcio.defense.gov/Open-Source-Software-FAQ/#q-is-os...

Enterprises are (slower than I’d hoped) learning the value of contributing to the open source projects they use. More companies are establishing Open Source Program Offices and I expect the rate of contribution to go up. Most contribution from companies will go to software licensed under MIT/BSD/Apache.

US government policy is that software developed with public funding is a public good. Current policy encourages government software to released under the most permissive license possible (ideally Public Domain, but practically permissive licenses like MIT/BSD). GPL is farther from the Public Domain than licenses like MIT/BSD. To enter the rabbit hole of material on this topic start at https://code.gov/about/overview/introduction/.

Link to the actual source code download page: https://info.computerhistory.org/apple-lisa-code

Released under APPLE ACADEMIC LICENSE AGREEMENT

Lisa OS Software version 3.1

What hardware can this run on?

That is the more interesting article.

Found this dry press release via Jason Snell’s Six Colors RSS feed, https://sixcolors.com

Thanks for cross linking to the better one.

Just saw the discussion from 7 hours ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34440757

If you create an account on Wikipedia then you can go into preferences and define custom CSS styles.

I wrote a quadratic equation root solver based on one I found, but optimized for UX & more efficient use of built-in functions :-)

Also, a game where the player tried to catch a bird that hopped randomly around the screen. Somewhere I’ve got those programs written on paper.

Analyst

Researcher

Artist

Analyst meaning a person who works with something like Jupyter Notebooks or VBA in Excel to do non-recurring work. Researcher meaning an academic or corporate researcher who tries experiments in code to prove our concepts. Artist meaning a person making fun things like art, cosplay, entertainment, games that can’t hurt people and don’t need high reliability.

Unreal Engine can (or at least used to) compile games to WASM and render on canvas. There used to be an excellent demo based on Infinity Blade.

Study GitLab. They’ve done a great job of creating a product that enterprises buy. Their strategy has evolved over the years. Because so much of what GitLab does is public you can learn from them instead of having to relearn everything yourself.

Give yourself time. One of the key things enterprises look for is the maturity of the company that supports a product. You’ll need to mature into a governance model, support model, and long-term viability that enterprise buyers recognize and feel comfortable with. Enterprises also make purchasing decisions slowly. It can take years to make a sale.

How did you type the superscript footnotes?

Edit: Wow, this is game changing. Markdown parsers need to implement superscript ascii character support!

Lowercase ⁽ᵃ⁾ Uppercase ⁽ᴬ⁾ Numbers ⁽⁹⁹⁾

> how do you update that you did a thing

Your second question is a little vague. Can you give us an example of “a thing”?

Solving scaling issues is solving a problem. You’ve allowed the company to increase revenue by adding users. You can brief “increased capacity by X%” as an accomplishment.

You can also agree on service level metrics with your manager and then status those metrics. Things like uptime, time to recover.

Notes/Highlights:

“To learn is more important than to be right”

Discussion on the importance of surrounding yourself with different thinkers and creating space for debate.

Steve Jobs had a daily list of people across industry he’d call for input.

Fluid movement between curiosity and resolve.

Importance of elevating vision above problems.

The importance of a simple product story that can be told in the space of 30 seconds.

Kara Swisher’s story about Steve Jobs taking the time to discuss adoption with her & that his experience is that it’s the parents that raise you and what you make of yourself that matters.

My comment about CA being in the middle band assumes the states were divided into 5 quantiles, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantile, and that the upper (>=1.10%) and lower (<=-0.50%) quantiles are the extremes.

This chart summarizes % change by state. CA population change is in the middle band and doesn’t seem particularly notable.

https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/2022/comm/perc...

Here’s a US Census chart of population change across all 50 states (shown as percent of population). It sounds like a lot of people, but as a percentage of total population it doesn’t seem like California is particularly notable.

https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/2022/comm/perc...

From the Overture FAQ…

> “Overture is a data-centric map project, not a community of individual map editors. Therefore, Overture is intended to be complementary to OSM. We combine OSM with other sources to produce new open map data sets. Overture data will be available for use by the OpenStreetMap community under compatible open data licenses. Overture members are encouraged to contribute to OSM directly.“

The article didn’t answer this, but hinted at a few possibilities (I’ll be checking out the Overture Map project to see if it’s possible to confirm any of these: more corporate friendly governance, different data model, additional standards for map features.

One way to gauge the impact might be to keep any eye on what Meta does with its Daylight Map Distribution project (a clean OSM), https://daylightmap.org/.

Great! You’ve got a lot of time to find and talk with agriculture experts. Should be a fun journey, whatever you decide to do.