sam-s

Gawain uses his sword to cut the ropes and free himself.

Then he appears to be running around without the sword.

Why?!

PS. I understand that he is somewhat of a moron, but leaving an excellent weapon behind and running around unarmed goes far beyond common stupidity.

(https://movies.stackexchange.com/q/116489/7154)

Is it possible that the causality goes in the opposite direction - hormonal levels affect job selection?

I find it fascinating that no one dares even to mention IQ, either here or in the original article.

I learned that "garbage collection" is not just a memory management technique but also refers to big trucks removing the content of trash cans when I took a "nerd test".

The US nationality is listed as "American" between "Tuvaluan" and "Ugandan".

Nice joke.

Why can't the server inherit the clipboard from the program being shut down?

(unless the program crashes, it should go through the "official motions" and one of them should be notifying the server which then can request the clipboard. this should be done early in the shutdown process, of course)

They are not hoarding anything people need (like food or clothing). They are not even hoarding anything people don't need (like gold or diamonds). The "money" (they don't hoard cash either) they accumulate is _investment_ which translates into _power_ to change the world.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power:_A_New_Social_Analysis

Everything is possible.

Feasible is a different issue.

It is hugely expensive (give CO2 escape velocity) and wasteful (CO2 is a valuable substance, containing 2 important elements).

American civilians are being murdered by the police all the time - with complete impunity.

This will continue until (1) the courts eliminate Qualified Immunity and (2) police unions have to carry liability insurance for all its members.

It is easy to get outraged at the military, but the police is way more harmful here.

Nope. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/21/technology/google-surveil...

What if a therapeutic bacteriophage (mutates and) attacks symbiotic gut bacteria?

Note that 10% of a human's weight and 90% of the cell count are those symbiotic gut bacteria.

It was fashionable in the USSR to blame all problems on the legacy of WW2 ("we suffered so much destruction and made so many sacrifices, this is why we are so poor compared to the West").

I think blaming Apartheid for the current ills 30 years after its end is not right.

The Institute for Justice (https://ij.org/) has a podcast (https://ij.org/podcasts/short-circuit/) were they regularly discuss these kinds of issues.

It is hard to summarize the situations briefly, but, essentially, the government can do whatever they want and the courts hardly ever slap them on the hands.

(IJ also _fights_ these issues in court pro bono - they are a law firm! - so supporting them looks like a good idea. disclosure: I am not affiliated with them in any form, just a podcast listener and a very minor donor)

> ...companies can’t expect to capture most of the value they create...

One does not have to capture "most of the value" to be profitable.

In fact, aiming to capture _most_ of the value is what creates customer ill will because _some_ of the value has to go to the customers.

> A dialect of Python with more explicit blocking instead of whitespace sensitivity would be excellent.

It's called Scheme ;-)

Cultural imperialism is part and parcel of Russian literature.

Brodsky derided the Ukrainian quest for independence 30 years ago just like Pushkin did the same for the Polish one 150 years before that.

This is perfectly rational for a writer concerned about his audience size: why should Poles or Ukrainians read inferior poetry in Polish or Ukrainian when a vastly superior poetry is available in Russian?!

1. Lotteries are not taxes because the participation is voluntary (unlike the soviet lottery/got's bond combo).

2. People buy lottery tickets just like they buy movie tickets - it is a form of _entertainment_. They heard many times that they should not expect to win - just like they heard many times that what they see on the silver screen is not real. Nevertheless they keep dreaming.

I am surprised no one mentions the elephant in the room - rent control.

It makes it harder to discover the true rent (one has to pay a large lump sum to the previous tenant to get a rent-controlled apartment) and it discourages rental housing construction.

Do you really think that these effects are best observable indirectly, as rent and construction?!

at that speed, the angle does not matter, the crater will be circular because the impact vaporized the rocket.

You (almost) never have to do pushups in RL, but you do them in a gym. Examples and exercises in textbooks are for _conceptual learning_. They have to be simple - and thus unrealistic.

I am surprised no one has mentioned the awful [garbage collector](https://stackoverflow.com/q/14580233/850781).

The R garbage collector is imperfect in the following (not so) subtle way: it does not move objects (i.e., it does not compact memory) because of the way it interacts with C libraries. (Some other languages/implementations suffer from this too, but others, despite also having to interact with C, manage to have a compacting generational GC which does not suffer from this problem).

Same reason Gulag prisoners were released. It's a bureaucracy. The law says that this "crime" warrants a 15 year sentence. So he is sentenced to 15y. He is kept in the same labor camp with thieves &c. If he survives, he walks, because that's what the bureaucratic protocol says. Sometimes there is a separate rule that people like him are to be given an extra, say, 5 years for some "regime violation". However, the point is that if _all_ political crimes warrant a life sentence, then the deterrent value of prison disappears.

One might consider the fate of Salvator Lombardo at Cornell University... No "aristocratic tutoring", just a self-driven genius, who was denied a stipend because he has the wrong skin color and genitals.

While I can commiserate with the author's feelings and dispute some of his observations, as others already did, I want to make an orthogonal observation.

Software development differs from other engineering disciplines dramatically: a blueprint/spec for a car or a bridge or a building is not in the same ontological category as a car or a bridge or a building: you cannot drive it or live in it.

However, a spec for a computer program is a kind of a program. It just requires "a truly smart compiler" (an SDE). This conceptual connection might explain the shape of the learning curve for software vs other engineering disciplines.

I can offer two salient datapoints:

1. bug [New windows/tabs should inherit current page, back button/go menu history](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=18808): `Opened 22 years ago` and `Updated 14 days ago`: they can neither implement nor reject a feature in 22 years?!

2. "We need more than deplatforming" blog post that promotes suppression of Free Speech. Would you trust a _browser_ that wants to _limit_ what you can read?!

CLASH: CLisp As SHell http://clisp.org/clash.html