JasonFruit

I see you've never worked your way through a manuscript by Donizetti.

He should. His work has political and cultural significance, and only that: no literary value. I say that as someone who put too much time into reading Bloom County when I was younger.

That's generally agreed to be once so far, so maybe not the highest bar in resurrections? Even JR Ewing matches it.

I'm baffled by all the people saying this is good writing. This is self-indulgent, showoff writing by someone who cannot maintain a consistent voice. If you liked it, give the credit to Béla Bartók, who provided the topic that held your interest, and to the Transylvanians who have conserved and preserved an ethnic culture that provides endless fascination.

My immediate reaction is to doubt some of this: isn't it what you'd expect to read about someone who agrees to testify against a well-funded, well-connected defense contractor? It was a time when the press was the undisputed king of information. But then I read that the case against General Dynamics fizzled and the one against Veliotis did not; maybe I should look at it as a caution against excessive skepticism.

I'm old enough to have thought, "Hey, this Visual SourceSafe is a pretty great idea!"

Or a fundamental difference in billionaire tendencies, don't forget that possibility.

I love to see people doing things I've never even thought of that embrace history and culture, and that they take pride in doing. This is exemplary of the respectful attitude we ought to have toward more of our activities.

Société Pour L'Aviation et ses Dérivés

LEGOs makes sense; a LEGO is an indivisible entity, of which you can have a certain number. Calling the material simply LEGO makes it sound like an undifferentiated mass, like sludge, or cheese.

That sounds like a you problem, not a keyboard problem. A good mechanical keyboard should last better than that. Excessive force doesn't code faster.

Unless I want that effect, I should avoid that.

You can make exactly the same case about tonal voice leading rules too.

You really can't. They aren't laws of nature, but they are based on observation: "When I have two voices proceed in parallel fifths, it's as though one voice ceased to have an independent character. Unless I want that effect, I should avoid that." "When I frustrate a leading tone, it makes the harmonic effect less clear."

Schoenberg's system starts with the arbitrary: pick a tone row and use it! But there are rules based on observation there, too: if you use tonal constructions in atonal music, it frustrates the listener's expectations, so don't do that. The ear can recognize the rows when transposed, reversed, and altered by other techniques, so those are good. Serialism is less fully-developed and lacks the deep cultural background of tonal music, but it's not entirely arbitrary either.

James O'Keefe's minor infractions seem out of place on this list. It sounds to me like Forbes might be disappointed in him for other, more philosophical reasons.

Mark Twain, for all his qualities, was a humorist.

But if that ML tool is trained on modern video, depending on its capabilities it may subtly modernize aspects of the video in ways that lessen the "past is a foreign country" effect, leading us to believe that the past was more like the present than it in truth was. It's a trade-off between removing technological barriers between us and the person, so we can connect to their recorded legacy, and removing sociological barriers, which we probably want to preserve.

From the title: "Lisp with native code speed".

That's an amazing test, if what you want to evaluate is the candidate's immersion in the wellspring of Western culture (and some math). I'm struck by how little fluency the Greek test requires, though: it looks to me (with my "small Latine and lesse Greeke") like it's mostly grammar work, since the difficult words are all supplied.

I would have loved living among people whose elites valued Western culture so highly.

I wonder how much the actual average level of education has changed, though the topics may be different. Could those 4th-grade dropouts read and understand a newspaper, calculate how many pounds of barley it takes to plant the south field now that we cleared that new area, and work out a 1-in-10 slope for the new shed roof? I bet most of them could, and that a lot of the time the average person spends in school now is not as well-directed toward their likely life needs — which may be less easily ascertained.

The fractious minority is here, yes, but also a large number of people like me who don't care about display quality, "desktop interaction semantics," or surface consistency at all, but care deeply about being able to use their computer as they please.

I think the final picture adequately expresses Cash's response to your suggestion.

After reading the article, I'm struck by a single thought: while that was imaginative and at points interesting, what did the writer actually say? It was a little like the sticky guy at the coffee shop who keeps talking, changing subject multiple times without finishing any, and won't let you get a word in edgewise: you like him well enough, but the conversation was for his own benefit, not yours.

What would an absolute frame of reference with regard to political opinion look like? I'm having a hard time conceiving such a thing, since not only does the range of opinion shift over time, but issues move into and out of relevance unpredictably.

If you think that's "pretty far to the right," I'd wager you haven't met many people on the right or spent much time reading their thought. There's a whole world of interesting political variety on the left, the right, and elsewhere that will never appear in the newspaper.

Then let's handle it like we do race: the average cop is a bastard. This is not necessarily true of all individuals, but it's statistically predictive.

Some of his music reviews were pretty good: Arnold Dolmetsch really was a revelation, and surviving recordings suggest that Joseph Joachim playing Bach really was like an attempt to scrape a nutmeg on a boot sole.

But Shaw strikes me a lot like Twitter. He spoke and wrote less because he had something to say than because he wanted people to hear how well he said things, and his reach increased because people enjoyed how well-put his remarks were and how stylishly he put down objections, rather than because of the quality of his opinions.

George Bernard Shaw, as the kids say, said a lot of things. He probably meant some of them, too.

But they did cost what we considered unreasonable at the time. Some of us still do.

Please keep saying this over and over. Even people who get that it doesn't work that way don't seem to grasp the danger of others relying on these tools in inappropriate ways.

They could have been unwittingly cooperating with each other.