taeric

This feels apples to oranges. There has to be a "cost of inventory" consideration that applies to non digital goods far far stronger than to digital ones. To the point that expecting electronic book sales to give any insight to durable goods feels farcical.

Similarly, the marginal cost of a new release has to include all of the creative production of it to that point. Authoring and editing. Not just the marginal cost of replication of a completed work.

That is, the marginal cost of a new release is creating the new release's content! Which is very very different from the marginal cost of just making a copy of it months later.

The numbers just don't support this, though? Social media remains at an all time high in engagement numbers. And climbing.

What is also growing is the number of people signaling that they are out of it.

This is extra pernicious because the people that are staying in control of these environments are maintaining a large amount of leverage over everyone.

I confess it has been awkward to see the pearl clutching on this one. Like, the folks that were flat out proud of the implications are now offended at being tied to them. Just, what?

That isn't really addressing my question, I don't think? The assertion is that most of the Arab mixing into region came at the same time as the later invasions. Yes, they would have remained fewer in absolute numbers. But they weren't even there after the earlier raids.

Is NYC the first just because every city in California does it by state rules? I'm confused.

Legitimate question, in the early days was this a large distinction? Specifically, my understanding was that the earliest raids where this distinction is most accurate, they didn't actually change the local societies much. Mostly were raids for resources and did not stay.

That is, until the Islamic raids started, the indigenous groups took losses, but were not nearly as transformed. Is that not accurate?

If it helps, https://taeric.github.io/CodeAsData.html was my attempt at exploring "code as data" and what makes lisp different here. My specific focus was more to point out that "eval" in lisp doesn't just take in a string. But I think the same general points remain.

Largely agreed.

I do think it is worth highlighting how many advanced parts of hot-reloading have already been covered in Common Lisp. Same with highlighting how the REPL is largely not used to directly type into, but is instead a very powerful interface for tools to interact with a running image.

But, again agreed that simply these existing are not that notable today.

To be fair, this is no different than any other thing people might want to do more of. Increasing the amount you can bench press, cycle, run, read, write, cook, whatever. Most will allow you to progress at something that most people don't care about. Nor, necessarily, should they.

By far, the best thing to learn when learning to progress at something, is learning to be satisfied with your own progression.

Largely fair. This is one where the specific goals, I think, work against people. I know most coaches will attach "attainable" to goals, to combat that.

To that end, if your goal is just to read more, there is no reason to worry about how substantial your books are. However, if you goal is to read more substantially, you should start by aiming a bit higher than where you are. Achieve that, then adjust target.

Progress, then, can come either in more volume of reading where you are; or in more substantive reading. Either are valid, to me.

To take this to the exercise. If your goal is to do a fast mile, agreed that just walking the dog is unlikely to help. If your goal is to be physically active, simple walks punch well above what people think they do.

To add to this, it isn't "doing it bad" if you aren't out there reading deep texts. Just as it isn't "doing it badly" if you can't run a 4 minute mile.

As you say, you get better at what you are doing. If you want to get faster, at anything, you don't really have the option of skipping the slow phase.

Wow, it is hard not to immediately think of that meme. There are indeed dozens of them!

I've become a huge fan of the secure knot. Holds easily as well as any double knot I have ever seen, with the massive advantage of easy release.

Right, but you are just relying on a different form of random, there. The whole point of making controls and then building experiments on changing them, is to get more power from fewer observations. No?

Again, it is off to think that one is automatically superior to the other. Certainly to the exclusion of the other. And that is what feels off with the framing of the parent post. I am perfectly fine saying you should use both observational and controlled trials. But I think it is also wrong to think you don't have to build experiments to test interventions.

This is why you put metrics in your service code. So that you can observe them behave and look for things to change. This is also why you do test cases on your code, so that you can specifically target your change.

Now, I fully back the idea that just A/B testing something doesn't automatically mean you learn something true. But neither does observing a strong outcome on uncontrolled data.

This feels off. In medicine, any evidence can also be blinded by confounding factors that are far easier to miss without adding specific controls. Really, in any field this will be the case.

Should we demand an RCT before we accept evidence? Of course not. At some point you do have to make a choice on things.

And it should be noted that most drugs do have early cutoff criteria if the evidence is strong enough that it is working. It isn't like people are wanting to withhold good treatments from the world. Adding controls and randomizing them, though, has proven to be highly effective at helping progress.

Everything that grows does this, to an extent? Consider software that gets more development effort. If it is getting more updates, it is likely getting "stronger" than that which is not getting updates.

Now, you can also argue that software is likely to get vulnerabilities if it grows too fast. But, that is also true for living things. Trees that grow too fast for their roots fall. Animal populations that grow too heavily will destroy their food sources and become more vulnerable to plenty of problems.

Thanks! And yeah, I knew a few markets were tanking. I was hoping there was evidence that people were starting to offer SRO style places.

Alas, I think there is such a heavy anti-landlord attitude around that nobody wants to be said landlord. Worse, towns don't like having apartment complexes. Worse still, we don't do anything to incentivize moving back to these neighborhoods for the people that do move away to work.

Right, I should have been clear that my assertion was not that there is lack of demand. My assertion is we don't build and offer this style. Outside of school dormitories. And even then, there is still a preference for bigger.

Would love to see more on the correction you are referencing. So much of the discourse I see focusing on "starter homes." Which, these are not that.

When I was younger, this was only doable in larger US cities if you had roommates. And was quite common in that scenario.

Doesn't change that it would be nice to have such offerings without having to navigate all of the extra stuff that comes from having roommates.

Apologies, on that I agree. What we don't seem to have, is a willingness to build and offer these places.

That is, I was specifically saying there is a lack of appetite to offer these. Not that there is lack of appetite to buy/rent them.

I mean... You are looking at a place that is about 250 square feet? There isn't an appetite for offering units that small in the US.

The stats on "living paycheck to paycheck" are notoriously rough. With some people that make 300k a year claiming they fit that category.

Don't get me wrong, I sympathize with your given scenario. I actually lost my car when I was younger. Was a rough few months while I got used to commuting without one. And I was lucky to have a roommate that kept my cost of living down.

And I remain a proponent of increasing pay to service providers. As well as finding ways to provide cheaper living conditions. First time home buyer programs are great, but seem unlikely to be relevant for the workers we are talking about? I see the median age of home care nurses in rural areas drifts up to 51-53. Which, granted, I see the median age of first time home buyer is drifting up. I don't think it is as high as those workers, though.

I do think there is a problem here. I just don't think it rises to "half the nation lives in abject poverty."

I would fully get behind us paying service providers far more than we do. To wit, it baffles me when people are upset about how much we allocate to pay for services that go to older people, but then we don't do any effort to make sure the services are provided by younger people. Indeed, we seem to go out of our way to make sure the people providing these services are, themselves, low income. It is baffling.

But even this feels like it is overstating things. You say folks are one car repair away from being homeless. And there is a lot of polling that shows people would struggle to pay for repairs. But full on homelessness? I can only assume that you are describing towns/cities that offer no transport assistance at all, that lands people into being so dependent on a car. I believe it, but I struggle to think this is literally half the nation.

I'm going to go on a limb and say half of the US is not living in abject poverty? Nor can I get behind the idea that quality of life for folks is on the down trend.

Absolutely! I always have worries when posting on my personal doubts on any technique, as I genuinely look forward to people making progress in spite of my doubts.

I'm not entirely sure what this is showing people don't understand? Especially when going with such silly ill defined concepts as "financial conservation". Just what?

Now model in that it was shipped, but an earthquake caused the delivery truck to be destroyed. Or it was shipped, but the person that ordered passed away before delivery and the estate is refusing to accept packages.

People will want to somehow transfer the model of an online order as similar to an in store purchase. Does that mean that as soon as a customer takes an item through the door that the store is free of any and all obligations on the item?

The answers in all of these will have to be that there are processes in place to be executed. Some may require overrides on state of execution that have to be applied to get things back to a resolved status.

Now, do we want to make sure that normal execution of some code does not leave us in an unresolved status? Of course we do. And many people want to think they can find a way to model the world such that no contested states can exist. I have my doubts. But I welcome efforts to make it so that we surprise ourselves fewer times with some outcomes.

As described, the Apple version is that they won't remove local copies you already have? They just can't facilitate copying a new instance to your device.

I still think this is crazy, mind.

Apologies for not responding earlier. I am honestly fine with where this conversation ended and was worried about it never ending. That said, I also find it fun to discuss. :D Conflicting feelings! (To that end, fully understood if this is fully dropped, now.)

I do not at all contest this. Would largely expect it. It is a common enough trap that people introduce complications to something expecting it to be faster.

I do expect that the largest reason, in this case, is simply volume/network effects. More people lean on floats than on fixed decimal. Therefore, it is not that surprising that more optimization has happened there. This is exactly why I somewhat lament there is not more fixed point work out there. My assertion is if it was more standard, there would be more standard optimizations.

For that last point, I would still expect you could pick constants more for multiplication so that you didn't have to do the shifts as often. Probably even preferring classes of numbers where if you have a set of X values that you often multiply with Y values, if you can limit yourself so that all Y values have no decimal part, X*Y is always just an integer multiplication.

Now, I also fully grant that systems start to crash when someone didn't realize exactly why no Y values had a decimal. They decide they really need one, and then update the code with a massive performance hit that they didn't even pay attention to.

My humble apologies on missing this way back when. Checking my init, I seem to just have:

    ;; TODO: Remove?  Maybe.  For now, trying the following.
    (icomplete-vertical-mode 1)
    (setq icomplete-delay-completions-threshold 0)
    (setq icomplete-compute-delay 0)
    (setq icomplete-show-matches-on-no-input t)
    (setq icomplete-scroll t)

It has been working fine. Took a bit of getting used to it not defaulting to arrow keys, but not that hard. And I think I see you can enable that, now.

I think the trick is to make sure the compiler knows you are doing the math with a constant and such? They likely won't branch on arbitrary numbers to sometimes do it as a shift and other times do the multiplication. But compilers for a long time would propagate constants through and pick a faster option for basic a*2.