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Willwhatley

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; I call this "Tilde opens Notepad" after yours, devindotcom.

; It is made in Autohotkey2.

  `::  ; Tilde key 
  {
  If WinActive("Untitled - Notepad") or WinActive("*Untitled - Notepad")
   WinClose
  else
  
  If WinExist("Untitled - Notepad") or WinExist("*Untitled - Notepad")
   WinActivate
  else
   Run "Notepad"
  }
Spain Is Doomed 14 years ago

Without meaning to be tedious, Daniel do you mind explaining what a metric (a measurement?) is, what a structured observation is, and (if not immediately clear) add a sentence or two on what the difference between the two amounts and why they might be confused? (I didn't get very far into reading Wittgenstein.)

The States are not a democracy. They are a democratic (all citizens) republic (government by proxy vote). See nitrogen''s reply.

A democracy would indeed find it easy to change such things as the TSA. Unfortunately a democracy would also find it easy to, say, change the rules of evidence governing proof of your guilt, because their perception of you is that you are bad and need to be punished, and the court system is one way to do that.

It is the tragedy of democracies that it is easy to make major decisions hastily whose consequences are either not understood well or understood all too well by a few for their own advantage.

It's a point on a subjective continuum of how responsive the car ui is. If cars are not your preferred tool, you likely don't care and won't notice differences that would stand out to a self identified 'driver'.

I like fountain pens. I process using a good steel or gold nib as a sensual satisfaction similar in degree (although not kind) to a good backscratch. Some pens are fun to write with. Some ... .

My understanding is World War I. Apparently passports and visas were an innovation inspired by the militarism and nationalism that swept Europe at the beginning of the twentieth century.

However governments rarely divest themselves of power once acquired, and so although many, many more folk are internationalist these years, there exists this relict of national control.

/stills rant about how in the United States, the Social Security was promised never to be used as a universal identifier.

What a pity (well, not really) that race, whatever that is, is a false proxy for the diversity of outlook desired. What a shame it is far more likely to be shown by e.g.: personality type, communication style, preferred role in group dynamics, rich/poor, city/country, literate/numerate/ten other things, musical/not, and so on.

For the same reason that pizza delivery drivers (ahem) do. The Internet is wide open, and even aspirational hackers and wantrapreneurs can benefit from lessons learned. I read pg's essays starting in 2006.

I've wondered about variants on democracy. The parliamentary and constitutional forms seem to me to incentivize (for those who want power) going along to get along. Sophists, flatterers, demagogues; there is no good incentive to vote, only the strong disincentive of some other party's bums overseeing you rather than ones you know.

There's a Twain short story about folks who get more than the initial vote, in proportion to their accomplishments. So a propertied or moneyed man is so much more enfranchised, a doctor of philosophy has a couple more votes, and so forth. The incentive there for demagogues would seem to weight one even more firmly than presently in favor of the rich and the academic guild. I don't support any scheme that brings us closer to a plutocracy than we already are--merely mention this as a starting point.

And then there is government by lot; the next dogcatcher, etc. to be selected in some randomized fashion, perhaps confine the pool to certified catchers of dogs, treason for tampering, and so forth. The incentive becomes enormous to raise the general quality of the citizens in proportion to how broad the pool of candidates is; and, of course, to monkey with the criteria for candidates to benefit oneself and disadvantage one's adversaries.

I do not suppose it to be possible to accuse anyone of anything in a civil manner. Accusation belongs to prosecutors, mothers in law, schoolteachers and other beings that are clearly on a higher plane than one.

Civility is a difficult, but simple, art, necessitating primarily that one should wish to get along with another: onan does not seem to be going out of his to make himself agreeable to pg or anyone else in this exchange.

Except that it sounds terrible if one was brought up according to a different light. English already has a third person personal singular.

I'm nobody! Who are you?/ Are you nobody, too?/ Then there's a pair of us--don't tell!/ They'd banish us, you know.

How dreary to be somebody!/ How public, like a frog/ To tell your name the livelong day/ To an admiring bog!

Howdy,

I scored a little over 40k on this, and did well on other verbal tests for the general population when I was still taking tests.

I attribute much of my facility to 1)reading fantasy and 2)looking up words I don't know. Since I loathe interrupting the flow of a story, I read with a pencil and make a list of words to batch learning later.

Best,

Easing into SICP 16 years ago

I consider this comment unlikely to be part of the front page, and am commenting so that I might find this later.