pjlegato

Indeed it is. "Phone addiction" is the "smoking" of our time.

In the 1950s, people around the world smoked furiously whenever awake. And why not; it made them feel good! It let them bond with others over shared cigarettes!

Even at that time, there was strong initial evidence of smoking's harmful effects. It was largely ignored in favor of short term feelgood outcomes.

Perhaps in 2080 or so, we will look back upon today's era of always-on connectivity the way people now look at chainsmokers in 1955: "Wow, how could they ever do that? Didn't they know this was so obviously bad for you?"

Yes.

Formally, saying "that's just the way it is," or "that's what society is now," is an example of a logical fallacy called "begging the question," where the original criticism is simply repeated as if it were a response to itself:

Replying to "society has this problem X" by saying, "Well, X is just the way society is now."

is not responsive to the proposition. It is merely repeating it in different wording.

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

ANY school shooting, whether people are shot or injured or killed, or whether the shooter simply misses and nobody is struck, is extremely rare in the United States.

That is to say, it almost never happens.

The few incidents that do happen garner outsized media attention because they are unquestionably tragic. That repeated messaging makes them feel more common than they actually are.

For comparison, fatal car crashes on the way to or from school are FAR more common than school shootings (while still rare.)

There is a large and growing body of evidence indicating that pervasive phone connectivity has led to large increases in psychiatric issues among all demographics, and particularly among younger people who have now grown up immersed in a phone culture.

More informally, smartphone usage by children promotes a short attention span, a lack of any sense of presence where actually situated in the physical world, as well as less and lower quality interaction with others, leading to poor social skills, anxiety, social isolation, and a focus on superficial social signaling over meaningful human interactions, ultimately producing the mental illnesses referenced above.

See e.g. https://kagi.com/search?q=summary+of+mental+health+outcomes+... -- there are far too many sources to even list here.

Yes, that is "almost never" in a country with 340,000,000 people.

Besides which, "having access to a cellphone" did not alter the outcome at all in those tragic incidents.

Moreover, when a kid is perpetually glued to a screen absorbed in a group chat, they are much less likely to interact with others who are physically around them and ever develop any actual mates.

The fact that many people have decided to do something which causes objectively harmful externalities does not somehow make it OK to jump on the bandwagon and do that same thing, too, just because "everyone's doing it."

Perpetual phone connectivity is the "smoking" of our time. The best outcome here will be that in 50 years or so, we all look back on the current brief period of "keep each other updated" at all times the same way that we now look back on "chain smoking" in the 1950s -- a brief social fad, which nobody realized was harmful at the time, because they were exclusively focused on the positive portions and ignored the negatives.

"Surveillance parenting" -- which is "helicopter parenting" magnified through technological tools the Stasi could only dream of -- seems likely to foster long-term dependence and anxiety that far outweigh the positive effects.

Yes, it's OK to not know exactly where a responsible older child is down to centimeter-resolution lat/lon coordinates at all times. Most humans, including most alive today, lived like that for all of history.

The fact that many people now develop anxiety if unable to use a phone for even a very short time is a part of the problem.

The phone has become a pseudo-appendage for most people now. Even those who spent most of their lives blissfully phone-free quickly internalized the need for connectivity.

Raising children from a young age to expect and demand access to phone connectivity at all times is making this problem much worse.

No, you do not need to have a phone at all times "for emergencies" that almost never happen. The negative effects of perpetual connectivity are far, far worse.

Almost all humans (including those alive today) managed just fine to live life without a perpetual phone link. Teach children to do the same. The phone is a nice-to-have, not a necessity to merely venture out of the house on a routine trip to school and back.

The point isn't that black swans don't have causes. The point is that nobody is expecting those particular causes at all when the event happens, due to prior assumptions being wrong.

Old New England houses had a "keeping room" attached to the kitchen, a small heated seating area for people to sit and chat with the cook while cooking.

Real pots of liquid do not heat uniformly like they do in the physics textbook equations.

"A very slow boil" does _not_ mean the _entire_ mass of liquid is near 212 F.

It means that _one very small sector_ of the liquid is near 212 (hence the 'bubble at one point'), and the vast majority of the liquid is considerably colder.

A thermometer is unnecessary.

The problem with that arrangement is that it doesn't scale: a tiny number of popular critics become the gatekeepers. Success in the field then depends entirely on somehow gaining the notice -- and good reviews -- of one of these few critics.

Countless other pieces of art are never noticed by anyone, countless talented artists are forced into day jobs and eventually abandon art -- no matter how high quality (for whatever definition of "quality" you prefer) -- simply because they were not able to catch the attention of one of the elite critics, for a variety of reasons, almost all unrelated to the quality of the work itself.

MacOS is Unix -- a BSD-derived Unix operating system called "Darwin" underlies the user interface.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin_(operating_system)

The issue is that many Lisp programmers are .. not great at choosing and naming abstractions. Even when they are, the goals of the program will shift over time, leading to leaky abstractions and macros with names and semantics that no longer exactly match.

In such cases, there's a lot of work required to essentially learn the entire new mini programming language built within Lisp.

That said, there are cases where nothing else but a macro will do. These tend to be abstractions related to the language itself more thain DSLs. Where to draw the line is an art rather than a science, and it can work well -- or go horribly wrong -- on both sides.

Most use an IDE such as Emacs (paredit-mode and rainbow-parens) that handles automatic paren matching for you, so it's really a non-issue after the first week. The editor takes care of indentation, matching (so you don't have any dangling parens ever), and optionally colors matching pairs in the same color so you can easily tell what level they're at.

This is a fairly typical look: https://ericscrivner.me/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/rainbow-d...

That doesn't address the argument at all. You claimed that although her views on one topic seem reasonable, you believe they should be canceled, no longer promoted in society, buried.... because you strongly disapprove of her views on an unrelated topic.

Are you prepared to extend this practice universally? Are you aware that practically nobody can survive this sort of puritanical Maoist cancel culture? Look at what happened in China or Cambodia for recent examples of how that goes.

In brief, Lisp's S-expressions (the parentheses) are a straightforward instantiation of the abstract syntax trees to which all other languages parse.

You can manipulate that tree easily and directly in Lisp, whereas other languages (that are not variations of Lisp) hide parts of it, to varying degrees.

All other languages are either equivalent to Lisp, perhaps with a different superficial syntax (there are very few of these; one is Mathematica) or expose only a strict subset of this capability (most other non-Lisp languages.)

In particular, Lisp makes it trivial to do (real) metaprogramming -- programs that write other programs, including the introduction of entirely novel syntactic constructs -- via macros. Lisp macros can create new language syntax that controls when and how code is evaluated, perhaps rewriting it.

Non-Lisp languages can't do that fully, only subsets of it. Ruby metaprogramming, for example, is clever syntactic sugar. You can give methods clever names and use clever calling conventions so that they read more similarly to English, which is called "metaprogramming" in Ruby; but you don't have universal control of the parsers from the level of ordinary Ruby code, and you can't completely control when and how code evaluation happens.

Now, how practical or useful is all that? Opinions vary, from hardcore "you should invent a full DSL with unique syntax for each particular application" Lispers, all the way to those who say macros are a fun but dangerous toy with limited practical value.

Are you advocating for comprehensive moral purity tests -- if a person holds a particular view that you disapprove of, they ought to be canceled in general and everything they've ever said or done banned, no matter whether their other work is good on its own merits?

It seems there are very, very few people in the history of the world whose work would survive. Perhaps none.

Perhaps a better formulation would be: "Making games is hard. Marketing games is even harder."

While some necessary factors about what makes a pop hit are known, even with that knowledge -- and a huge marketing budget -- the vast majority of songs written even by the very top producers and songwriters flop massively, all the time.

They know this, too. They budget so that their 1% massive hits pay for the 99% that nobody cares about.

Other way around -- grog wasn't so much diluted with water as the grog was applied TO the fresh water as an antiseptic.

Fresh water on ships had typically been sealed inside a barrel for months or even years before it was consumed, growing all manner of unhealthy pathogens. Pre-germ theory people read this as "it smells and tastes bad," which is a pretty good first-order approximation of germ theory.

When you cut that contaminated water with alcohol, that greatly reduces illnesses from drinking it, especially in those whose GI systems are already somewhat adapted to tolerate the pathogens. Strong spices in grog such as cloves also helped mask the taste of drinking years-old barrel water.

If you like CL, try Clojure -- all the Lispy goodness, but with access to modern, industrial-use libraries.

Common Lisp is largely abandonware at this point -- e.g. there's no standard way to open a TCP socket!

Investors don't operate charity funding to accrue value for the mutual collective benefit of some global system.

Investors MUST accrue ROI to their own account and/or that of their own investors, the limited partners. If they do not, they're done. Going bankrupt personally while providing huge value to the world at large is a TERRIBLE outcome for any investor.

Tesla invented great things that provide huge positive ROI to the global electrical system, yes. Nonetheless, giving Tesla 150k was a rather poor investment for JP Morgan. If Morgan had made many more such bad investments, he'd be bankrupt, and unable to fund any further value for anyone.

Who gets to decide which specific sorts of evasion of law enforcement are acceptable?

Should we consult your personal moral preferences for that, as applied to each of the 200+ countries on the planet? Why do your preferences overrule those jurisdictions' decisions?

You said giving a fake name at the ER was the only option for poor AMERICANS to obtain healthcare.

That is categorically false, and testifes to some sort of deep seated bias against our own country profoundly embedded in your worldview -- one which extends all the way to glib counterfactual promotion of verifiably false information about the country and its supposed moral shortcomings.

2) Texas has a much larger population than 49 of the other 50 states -- about 30 million, higher than any state but California. Of course the number of uninsured residents will be higher than the national average. You didn't control for uninsured per capita.

Why are so many uninsured if it's possible (I didn't say easy) for them to get coverage? Probably, a large part of the reason is people who go around promoting the (completely false) common trope that "poor Americans just can't get health coverage, the government does nothing for them."

Sounds like your issue is with Texas, then, not with America.

Why perpetuate crude and inaccurate stereotypes that smear and disparage America in general? America is spending a huge amount of money every year precisely on providing healthcare for the poor.

Besides which, it looks like Medicaid does indeed operate in Texas, which is discoverable in less than 10 seconds of Internet searching: https://www.hhs.texas.gov/services/health/medicaid-chip/abou...

And, seperately, Obamacare's marketplace works nationally, including in Texas: "More Texans than ever before enrolled in ACA health plans in 2024"[1]

[1] https://www.texastribune.org/2024/01/24/texas-aca-health-ins...

> give a fake name to the ER, and if you're poor in America, what else can you do?

The American government spends something approaching a trillion dollars annually on Medicaid, "a government program that provides health insurance for adults and children with limited income and resources."[1]

Seperately, Obamacare[2] created a private health insurance market where low income people can obtain free or heavily discounted private health insurance coverage, according to their income.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medicaid [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affordable_Care_Act

"Google ad revenue stalled, so they made SERPs worse on purpose"

Jobs' terrible attitude is at this point widely known, dissected and discussed to death here and everywhere else. Calling it out does not adding anything new or insightful to this discussion.

His terrible attitude is also entirely orthogonal to his product management sensibility. The fact that he was a jerk does not mean he must be generally canceled and his unique product development theory and insight ignored. The two are not directly related, and it is possible to appreciate one while condemning the other.