schmudde

> They told us all about this during our first day or two of classes - the infernally-named "onboarding".

Curious - why is "onboarding" an infernal-name?

> Proprietary software vendors were able to condition users to execute programs they could not inspect or modify. They also attempted to prevent copying with DRM, but an active cracking & piracy scene stymied that. So people were now blindly executing modified applications.

Interesting analysis. But free software is demonstrably more secure. Are you claiming that proprietary vendors intentionally mislead people with FUD?

Or was it a cultural zeitgeist in the era of shrinkwrap and slow telecom where free software was simply harder to find? i.e. it’s hard to experience more secure software if you can’t find it.

The public internet backbone (NSFNET 41) was officially decommissioned on 30 April 1995. This essentially marks the birth of today’s commercial internet.

The ground was set by the Scientific and Advanced-Technology Act on October 2, 1992. This passed Congress with almost no debate. However, there were innovative politicians who attempted to allocate a certain amount of bandwidth for a public right-of-way.

The United States has very little publicly-owned internet infrastructure and few advanced digital public services. The USA also happens to lag behind other nations in simple metrics like the speed that ISPs deliver. Maybe it's a coincidence that many of these nations have more robust public services.

This is the most illustrative analogy. I suppose the answer is a little bit of both.

Python numeric performance is a really interesting case. Those folks would certainly drop down to C. But my casual observation is that they would build the bridge when they came back above water. A lot of work went into this because Python performance has historically been quite bad for a Data Science/ML language.

Part of this is the size of the community.

But what is we also consider the Common Lisp community? Common Lisp is incredibly performant. A lot of work went into the underlying C libraries. Perhaps most of that was when the community was more vibrant. But still, a casual observation is that CL folk live in CL.

This is absolutely brilliant. A) Notebooks are a great way to explore ideas. B) Serverless tech shouldn't be so damn difficult to experiment with. So it's checking two boxes.

Extra points for the emphasis on Live Coding in the docs. Bravo.

I use emacs restclient as well. It's not just good - it keeps you in the flow. No context switching to a different environment, just a quick cut 'n paste of the path and data you're working on.

You are willfully ignoring my quantitative statement and logical conclusion.

> people in Musk's category of wealth have been increasingly effective at consolidating their wealth over the last 60 years

This is an empirically observable fact.

> His effective tax rate hovers around 5%

This is a quantitative statement.

I combine these two facts with a theorem - these realities do not emerge by accident. They are the byproduct of an intentional effort.

Therefore:

> It is not an accident that someone can accumulate wealth and find ways not evade taxation through measures not available to other people in society.

No innuendo. Also - I explicitly refuse to inject innuendo into the argument, admitting that the "goodness" or "badness" of this sort of manipulation is difficult to prove. I think his 5% tax rate is a problem. You do not. Fine. But before we can even talk about solutions, we need to accept a baseline of reality.

There is no innuendo. I explicitly stated the lowest hanging fruit - he barely pays taxes - as a simple example of how wealthy people use their influence to distort social systems. If you don't think that his effective tax rate hovers around 5% is a problem - well that's fine. I don't really want to debate the qualitative impact of vast concentrations of wealth on social systems and markets.

Quantitatively speaking, we can see that people in Musk's category of wealth have been increasingly effective at consolidating their wealth over the last 60 years. At least within North America and Western Europe. It looks like a deliberate effort to accumulate power - but it seems that you see this differently.

This concentration of wealth is certainly not necessary to launch a car brand. It has happened too many times over the 20th century to be true.

Exactly. This is how the system works. It is not an accident that someone can accumulate wealth and find ways not evade taxation through measures not available to other people in society. Even if you consider Musk's "effective tax rate," it's a pittance.

Every single metric shows that the wealthy are increasingly effective at concentrating their wealth. This has been the trend in the United States since the mid-20th century. It's undeniable that they are deliberately and effectively doing this. The only question is whether or not this concentration of wealth is good for society or bad for society. Due to the complexity of societies, this is difficult to demonstrate empirically. I grant you this.

If you think that these conditions haven't generally lead to the formation of strong kleptocracies throughout history... well I guess we'll simply disagree.

I guess all I can do is grant you the fact that political science has had a difficult time proving the impact of money on policy in representative democracies.

But I also know it is not an accident that someone as wealthy as Elon Musk paid no federal income taxes in 2018 and pays very little in many years. As wealthy people concentrate more power, they bend the system to their favor - distorting both social systems and the markets.

Agreed. It doesn't mean buying things, it means exercising disproportionate influence and solidifying a dangerous concentration of power. But the ability to secure countless of dollars in government subsidies - over and over again at every level of government - is pretty hard to illustrate. Let's hope this person's next project does a better job at capturing what being a billionaire means.

Krell looks pretty cool. The article talks about using storybook.js, but I'd love to see it used with clojure.spec. The latter is such a nice way to vet business logic with domain experts.

This is based in rural Denmark. "Rural" in Central Europe and rural in Wyoming are so dramatically different, that I can imagine this suggested paradox being extremely regional.

Anecdotally speaking, I have encountered a level of paranoia in the high plains (such as Wyoming) and rural Appalachia that I've never encountered in Central Europe. I've also lived in Iowa and found it to be the friendliest place on Earth... so I think it varies a lot.

> One way to look at where things are today is that the circumstances of the Internet forced the web browsers to be more and more like operating systems, but without the design and the look-aheads that are needed.

It's hard to imagine developing in Smalltalk and then developing in ChromeOS. sigh

The classic, 'Is mathematics "discovered" or "invented"'? Or even more for this crowd, were computers discovered or invented?

That quote on English is a great find! I added it to the article and made sure to give you credit. Thanks.

Certainly analog. The collaborative video/audio features would not have been practical in 1968. But all of the interactive computing concepts were indeed happening in real time.

That's a fair point. I added this footnote to the piece in the same spirit:

> The report helped popularize the term “Von Neumann architecture” as a way to denote computers that store programs in memory. The term and the original paper are both controversial because they both fail to acknowledge Von Neumann’s peers and predecessors. Although this seems to be an accident of history, the influence of Von Neumann’s first draft is undeniable.

Sound good?

I think it's a good law, for what it's Wirth.

Indeed, there is some controversy, but many have identified this post as the 'oldest on the net' and couldn't resist the urge to reply: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/net.general/yJn8WHlzc7...

I guess it's motivated by the same urge people have when the decide to etch their names into the Colosseum in Rome.

"Good job, Mike. Your post not only solves the problem but also makes the rest of the posters look like defensive hotshots."

Hah - don't mess with Nate.

That is awesome. It's too bad the Wayback Machine doesn't archive those .wav files from 1997.

What percentage of revenue do App Store apps generate for Apple?

It seems like an unusual hill to die on for a high-margin business like Apple. It's definitely making the experience worse for everyone and highlighting all the drawbacks of having a single source of software for your device.

OP here. Stretch is an interesting machine that can claim many firsts. The 8-bit byte, CPU look ahead, an interrupt system, and error checking amongst other modern features.

It had 3/4 of a megabyte of random access memory. A colossal amount at the time.

I want to make sure I don't overplay Harvest's keyword search ability. The NSA would physically walk down the street and grab reels of magnetic tape every day from ITT, RCA, and Western Union. So they're working with relatively structured data from international telegram cables.

Still impressive, but much more limited.

Your analogy seems appropriate and the activity is fundamentally very similar. The repeated violations of the constitution demonstrates the natural inertia of such an entity.

Well - all the options are part of the problem. I use Pop!_OS because it was the balance between getting things done and spending hours tinkering with my machine.

It's not that I don't enjoy it. It's just a question of where I need to be spending my time.

Indeed. I'm curious what Python 4 will do to Python 3.

It's social norms and perceived value (which are interrelated). From sampling music to quoting literature - there is case precedent and fair use.

Software is no different. When Compaq reverse-engineered the IBM PC BIOS, the standards were incredibly high. If I violate a GPL license or steal some copywritten Unity code for my game - I'm probably pretty safe. Unless, of course, a bunch of people agree that my software is valuable. I could be in big trouble if that's the case, even if I give it away for free (as in beer) and never make a cent off it.

> How do we get public perception and public discussion of energy and climate centered around evidence-grounded models, instead of tips, soundbites, factoids, and emotional rhetoric?

> Furthermore, the point of embedding a model is that the reader can explore scenarios within the context of the document. This requires tools for authoring “dynamic documents” — documents whose contents change as the reader explores the model.

I've long-appreciated Victor's perspective in this article. But the general public understands very little about how models work and what they promise. I've seen little evidence that making them explorable in the New York Times has done much to move the public (and thus lawmakers) in the United States to move on gun violence or climate change.

Technologists can build better tools for storytellers and whistle-blowers. This mostly involves facilitating the disclosure, formatting (cleaning), and analysis of data.

What do you use for version control? Do you version your data as well?

Wow. This is the perfectly self-referential Wikipedia entry that post-post-modernist plebs want and deserve.