rmah

Sounds like Niven and Pournell's Moties civilization cycle from "The Mote in God's Eye"

If you think the next generation will be any better, I have bad news for you...

Well, then they're not easily replaceable. Which implies those workers have other options. And thus employers that treat workers worse than other employers will see workers leave and/or find it harder or more expensive to hire. So it all works out.

The key phrase is "the broader labor market has not experienced a discernible disruption".

While I have not read the quoted book, the first quote "Because European colonialists saw no jails, police, lawyers, judges, or courts in African indigenous societies, they mistakenly concluded these cultures had no way to address social conflict and wrongdoing" is more than odd given that most Europeans didn't have most of those things either until the 1800's. Thus, people would have been alive who remembered days before police and jails (as punishment, not holding before judgement/punishment). The first police force (as we would understand it today) in the world was formed in London in 1829.

The second quote, "In Western culture, we are socialized to believe that the desire to inflict counterviolence upon or retaliate against someone who has hurt us or a loved one is innate and that justice has always been done and will always be done in this way. In fact, far from universal or natural, this adversarial vision of justice is a relatively recent cultural and historical construction, arising around AD 1200 with the dawning of the nation-state and racial capitalism [my emphasis]." is also a strikingly bizarre take. I don't understand how anyone could think this.

newsflash: permeable materials are permeable

Has anyone used both kson and hjson? We use hjson as a more forgiving json-like config format and really like it. kson seems more feature rich, but I'm a bit concerned about things like embedding code in configs. So any thoughts vs hjson?

There are herds of wild deer a half hour outside NYC. Deer seem to be able to thrive anywhere as long as there aren't many predators.

The continental US (i.e. excluding alaska) has some 20+ mil wild deer, 200k bison, 1 mil bears, 3-4 mil coyotes, 13,000 wolves, 5 mil alligators, 10k+ mountain lions, etc, etc. Yes, most are in the vast western states. But deer and bears are common even in areas a just a couple hour drive outside of NYC. Thankfully no gators near NYC (except in the sewers, of course :-)

I have to strongly disagree with this. From what I've seen, it's very rare that positions espoused by those being called "nazi" have anything to do with fascism.

Calling people who hold beliefs you find wrong "evil" is, IMO, counter-productive and will lead not only to conflict but to worse outcomes for yourself (even if your side "wins"). The root of cultural differences (both within and between societies and sub-cultures) are differing beliefs of what is right and wrong; what is morally good and morally bad.

What you view as hateful, others will view as loving. And what you view as loving, others can view as hateful. Painting the opposition in simplistic terms like "evil" and refusing to even try to see why they feel they way they feel solves nothing and empowers extremists. And when groups led by such people "win", the majority still lose.

IMO, any side of any belief, be it individualism vs collectivism, atheism vs religion, sexual openness vs sexual restraint, free speech vs censorship, capitalism vs socialism, etc, etc. can easily morph into something harmful. You may have discovered "evil", but after many decades, I've come to see that most people's hearts are in the right place. But there are always a significant fraction on any side of any issue that, for whatever reason, cannot regulate their emotions and seem to need to strive for the extremes.

Compromise can happen if you reject extremists. Solutions can be found if you understand that the extremists on your own side are as much the opposition as the other side of an issue. Purity of belief always seems attractive on the surface. But moderation is not a cop out, it's pragmatism. Moderation is the practical philosophy through which solutions can be found. Fundamentalism, extremism, dogmatism, are approaches that lead to worse outcomes. Moderation leads to better outcomes. History has shown this again and again.

The 70's isn't really a fair comparison because PC's did not exist yet. Thus, it was very rare to find programmers with experience anywhere.

I'm in my 50's and I feel smarter than I did in my 20's. I'm less energetic certainly, but I can focus better now. And I feel like my knowledge and understanding of mathematics, politics, economics, sciences, history, people, etc, is much better.

What the hell?

Software distribution control didn't start with phones, it started with game consoles.

The random website cannot access arbitrary files on your computer's file system and send it somewhere else. An html file with javascript running locally, if trusted, on a typical personal computer could do that.

This is exactly what I meant when I said I was mystified.

The other religious texts you mentioned are not part of the western civilization canon and did not have much effect on western literature. Thus, while I think they should certainly be available in school libraries as they are important works, they need not be required reading.

On the other hand, in different areas with different cultural traditions, each of those books should be required reading as they were central to their literary tradition. And, one assumes, are.

To deny that contemporary American culture has its roots in European culture (i.e. western culture) is to deny reality. And honestly, it mystifies me why so many seem to want to be ignorant of their own cultural roots.

To me, it's disheartening to see this sort of knee-jerk reaction to the grandparent posting (and to see that post be down-voted). What btilly wrote is not a defense, it's reasonable and, more importantly, practical advice in combating tyranny. Moreover, IMO, if you actually want to reduce or put an end to tyranny, you need to understand the root causes for the desires of your opponents. That's empathy. Empathy is not agreement, it's not sympathy, it is understanding. Screaming at others that they're bad people will not change anything. If anything, IMO, it causes them to dig their heels and makes change harder.

If you set a recurring meeting, every Friday at 10:00AM, New York time, the time in UTC varies (either 14:00 UTC or 15:00 UTC) depending on the date. Further, what is displayed depends on the viewer's location (because daylight savings times change differently based on location/date). IOW, the time of the meeting occurs on TWO UTC times, not one. You can't just store UTC and be done with it. You need the originating timezone too. In other cases you may need the date the item was created as well.

More sophisticated calendar software will take into account holidays or use offsets from month start/end. i.e. "we'll have a meeting at 9:00pm Tokyo time, every last business day of each month".

Isreal proposed international peacekeeping forces in Gaza, but Hamas has rejected it. If I may quote Izzat al-Rishq, a member of the Hamas political bureau, "We stress our people's rejection of the presence of any non-Palestinian actors on our land." [https://www.anews.com.tr/world/2024/04/02/hamas-says-no-to-i...]. They only accept aid organizations.

Yet the left (democratic party) nominated a self-avowed socialist for the next NYC mayoral race. One who literally talks about seizing the means of production and opening city-owned groceries that won't have to pay rent. Let's see how it goes.

One of the key components of metal movable type printing presses is an appropriate ink. The concept of using a press to print on paper was well known for 100's of years across the world from China to Europe. Movable type had even been invented earlier, often using wood or ceramics instead of lead. Getting the ink right to work with metal type was not simple and recipes used by various printers were considered trade secrets (though obviously leaked as printing spread widely and rapidly).

Many inventions are like this. They seem simple in hindsight, but at the time, required putting together tools, techniques, materials and insight from multiple sources. There's an old BBC TV show called "Connections" that explores the origins of many modern technology and the often strange paths that led us there. For example, without people loving perfume, internal combustion engines might have taken decades longer to have been developed.

Why should they help media companies?

Apple did this back in the mid 1990's (before OSX) with AppleScript. Every application was supposed to ship with metadata that described its object model along with methods that could be invoked on them. AppleScript was an sort of a protocol or interface standard that allowed scripts to automate application actions (and more) without having to use GUI macros. Scripts could be written with a variety of syntaxes. It was pretty cool. However, it turned out that providing an object model and API surface was a pretty heavy lift for application developers and most just half-assed it. And while a fairly robust community developed around AppleScript, it was too small to generate any noticeable uplift in sales for either Apple or independent software vendors. Thus not really commercially viable.

And Microsoft has had OLE -- which is sort of analogous to the object-model portion of AppleScript -- for ages.

War. It's called war. In ye olden days, military forces pillaged farms (for food) and sacked cities (for loot). Rarely, there have been short eras of formalized military v military conflicts within various cultures, but this was not the norm. In more modern times, military forces destroys enemy infrastructure to degrade their ability to make war directly target civilians to reduce the # of enemies and hurt morale (supposedly). While sad, one of the facts of life is that war leads to civilian deaths. Usually far more than direct military deaths.

This article is full of guesswork and supposition unsupported by evidence. I don't understand why people upvoted it.

Further, the author doesn't seem to understand that "the state", with its institutions, legal systems, etc as we understand it simply did not exist in Europe during medieval times. Or even during the Roman empire era. For example, he writes "taxes were voluntary". It's just laughable. Moreover, during that era, "tax" was synonymous with "rent". It's where the term "landlord" comes from, after all. Even concepts of ownership were somewhat different from today.

Was society decentralized during the so-called "dark ages" of europe? Sure. But it was also decentralized during the Roman era and pretty much all eras before high speed communications. It sorta had to be for society to work.

The primary problems with tag-based organization are that 1) tags are difficult to organize hierarchically and 2) discoverability of existing tags tends to be poor.

However, if you have multiple overlapping hierarchical organization, common operations such as "moving" and "deleting" become overly complicated.

IMO, there's no best way, only different pros/cons and compromises.

We (humans) have not only survived but thrived. 200,000 annual deaths is just 7% of the 3mil that die each year. More (as a percentage) probably died from access to the best health care 100 or 200 years ago. The fall in birth rates is, IMO, a good thing as the alternative, overpopulation seems like a far scarier specter to me. And to bring it back to AI's, an AI "with a pathological drive to maximize an arbitrary metric" is a hypothetical without any basis in reality. While fictional literature -- where I assume you got that concept -- is great for inspiration, it rarely has any predictive power. One probably shouldn't look to it as a guideline.

In my experience, contract software development client acquisition is based mostly on reputation, referrals and personal contacts/networks. The biggest risk that clients face is not the cost of the project per-se, but missed delivery and/or poor results. So, in a sense, what you're really selling is not technical acumen, but trust and reliability.

Yes, project failure can often be laid at the feet of the client. But, IMO, good professionals contract developers are responsible for pushing back on vague and/or changing requirements. Part of your job is to look underneath what the client says to discern what he actually needs. The goal should be to and deliver something that is both useful and fulfills the client's goals. All of this is, of course, easier said than done.

Hospitals in the US already use specialized washing machines that use much higher heat levels under OSHA and FDA guidelines. There are also special procedures for what gets washed with what and when.