pliftkl

I didn't really remember the "blow up the moon", but he sure posted a lot about "Time has Inertia" on sci.physics.

This was my reaction as well - every article I've read seems to call out "changes the way we think they navigated because out of sight of land", but this may be a perverse form of survivor bias (ships tried this and sank), or as you point out, it could have been blown off course where it then sank.

The fact that this is completely unmentioned in the article really surprised me. The physicians may not have done insurance fraud, but they absolutely committed medical malpractice, and they did so for the sake of personal profit.

This is a common practice at many large companies, though it isn't explicit, and it's rarely transparent. Managers try to find roles on other teams for their worst performers in order to get them out of their organization, because that's frequently easier than using a PIP to fire someone. Unfortunately, the way you get another manager to accept your poorly-performing employee is to talk up their skills and talk about how they have career development dreams that would be perfect for this other role.

Not the author you quote, but Christopher Schwartz, who runs Lost Art Press (which printed what you quoted) can also write a heck of a wood-working book:

"The journey to the summit of Mount Vesuvius has all the romance of visiting an unlicensed reptile farms..." - opening line to _Ingenious Mechanicks_, which is a history of early workbenches.

(One thing I found fascinating about this book is that it uses religious art to infer details about workbenches, because Yeshua Bin-Maryam was thought to be a "carpenter", and medieval artists drew contemporary medieval workbenches in pictures of the child Yeshua.)

It's a weird collection of topics, all in the same dry style. Definitely AI.

I have a Mormon neighbor who did his missionary work in Thailand. My wife is Thai, so he came by to chat with us once with some missionaries who had visited us. I spoke to him for a while about his experience in trying to evangelize to a country that is 90+% Buddhist, and in which Buddhism plays a huge role in Thai culture. What I found fascinating is that in Thailand, a Mormon missionary was pretty much on a level playing field with any other Christian missionary. If a Thai person was considering a flavor of Christianity, the Mormon church isn't particularly "fringe" in the way it might be perceived by a Christian who is listening to a Mormon missionary in the US.

Well, the punishment for Facebook is twofold: (A) they probably spent 10's of thousands on fighting this in court, and (B) it sets precedent that they are liable for this sort of thing. If they start getting sued regularly in jurisdictions all over the country, then the "pay expensive lawyers a lot a few times" vs "pay some humans to look at complaints many times" may start to come out in the consumer's favor.

Thank you for posting this and giving me an injection of nostalgia. :)

I loved these books as a kid, and have probably not thought about them in 40 years. Unfortunately, my own daughter is probably too old to enjoy them the same way I did.

If you're really talking about universal rights in the modern sense, that really didn't happen in the US until the 1960's in practice (unless you were white and had the correct chromosomes). Women couldn't vote until the early 20th century, and you could not marry interracially in some states until the 1960's.

Depends a lot on the jurisdiction. In Austin, the police will declare "no-refusal" weekends (typically holidays) in which they declare in advance that they'll get a warrant for a blood draw in the case of refusals. If you look at the DUI arrest stats for those weekends, about half of them involve warrant based blood draws after breathalyzer refusals.

In case you take it up as a retirement project: what I'd love to see is an avatar builder's kit. Create the core engine, a basic level, monster, item, and class editor, and let people mod it. The basic party mechanics and att/def model could be standardized, but let people create their own game based on their own data. Create the hooks for people to add additional gameplay (ingredients, etc). Let people self-host.

Like you, I think about doing this every couple years. :)

I loved the avatar gameplay and the fact that it wasn't a "massively" multiplayer dungeon crawl, but rather something small enough that you knew most of the players. I'd trade a lot of the scale and graphics of modern gameplay for a return to the deliberate party based run of modestly updated avatar.

Becoming disciplined enough to use the CPAP every night was a real struggle for me. Ironically, what ultimately helped me was starting to take modafinil during the day. Taking that as a stimulant in the day gave me enough energy in the day that I could make good decisions about other things that influence my sleep (exercise, sleep discipline). Something of a virtuous circle for me.

If you tell a police officer that you did a crime, then your words are admissible as evidence against you. If you tell a police officer that you did not commit a crime, you can't have the police officer testify in your defense that you told him that you did not commit the crime.

Witnessing things is a completely different matter.

"By then Alexa was getting a billion interactions per week, but most of those conversations were trivial, commands to play music or ask about the weather. That meant less opportunities to monetize. Amazon can't make money from Alexa telling you the weather — and playing music through the Echo only gives Amazon a small piece of the proceeds."

I get that Amazon doesn't make money on those things, but those are the things that I value. I might be willing to pay them to stop saying "Did you know that I can also <thing I don't care about>? Would you like to try that now?".

I would absolutely be willing to pay a monthly fee for a Facebook that wouldn't serve me ads or "suggested" things in my feed, and only showed me things that I explicitly said I was interested in. I'm curious how much I'm actually worth to FB under the advertising model, since that's going to dictate how much fee they would need to ditch advertising.

[Speculation] The issue is probably not the upkeep of the services, but rather the servicing of debt that they took on to get here.

One of the things that made F# "click" for me was Wlaschin's "Domain Modeling Made Functional". It's largely a focus on how to think about the underlying data, and getting in that mindset helped tremendously in feeling more comfortable with F#.

I'm 52, and probably watch more youtube than any other content provider. However, that only started when I got premium and no longer had to deal with ads. If I had to deal with ads, my watching would drop like a rock.

I picked up wood working in my late 40's when I was on a soul crushing IT project, and could no longer code recreationally in the evening. Wood working uses a different part of my brain and feels very cathartic. I don't think I'm "world class", but I'm decent and continue to improve.

"I believe that in general, some people are more allergic to wood dust than other people. Some people seem to breathe in pine dust all year long and are fine. If I sniff a single crosscut of pine, I'll get stuffy and snotty for 3 days and I won't write code very well afterwards."

This may be true, but allergies aren't the reason that woodworkers should be careful about dust collection. The guy who breathes pine dust all year long might be "fine", in the same sense that you can smoke cigarettes all year long and be "fine". The risk here relates to the long term damage of depositing very small particles of wood in your lungs. I'm glad that your allergies are driving you to do this - I did a lot of woodworking for a few years before taking dust collection seriously, and I may regret that when I'm older.

While I don't do enough C to comment on some of the other items, the global static variable named "last" seems likely to collide with a variable name that would be commonly used.

There are many bad outcomes to unattended children that don't involve kidnapping (think uncommon but normal childhood injuries of kids on playgrounds).

That being said, none of the facts presented here indicate that CPS action would have been warranted.

Ah - but the population of people-travel-days is also probably quite high, and while it doesn't impact a "whole population", it impacts a subset of the population frequently enough to be a comparable order of magnitude to the population as a whole.

(Potentially bad) back of envelope calculations follow: 1. The entire US population of 330 million is impacted by a 1 hour shift twice per year (of which one shift is probably more impactful than the other to sleep health). 2. On a typical year, there are about 1 billion airline passengers in the US alone (domestic plus inbound/outbound international). This counts everyone on a flight as one passenger. Let's assume that people take on average 2 legs in one day (probably a slightly high estimate). That's 500 million people, but we should halve that again since people have outbound and inbound trips. So we're down to 250 million people being impacted by travel. 3. Some of the travel is in the same time zone, but other travel spans many time zones (inbound international flights or transcontinental flights). We can call that a wash, though we could probably get to actual data if I weren't being lazy. I'd also argue that the travel is going to be much more disruptive to sleep schedules since in addition to the actual time zone shifts, travelers have to deal with early departures and late arrivals. 4. Many of the people who travel are being counted multiple times here, so we don't have a true collection of 250 million people impacted, but it's not clear that 1 person experiencing jet lag 10 times should only be counted once, since this is a recurring 1-2 day issue. 5. We're not orders of magnitude off here in terms of people-days impacted by normal travel vs the great DST debate.

From article:

"Sleep is also necessary for the body to heal and repair heart and blood vessels. Lack of sleep has been linked to an increased risk heart disease, kidney disease, high blood pressure, diabetes, obesity and stroke, experts say."

I don't think that's a particularly controversial statement, but is it germane to a discussion of a twice yearly switch in sleep schedules? The general consensus for travelers is that it takes 1-2 days per hour of time difference to get past jet lag. There's a decent argument to be made based on accident avoidance, but the rest of the "health impacts" seem harder to justify.

One area that senior developers can have significant advantages over junior resources is in having much stronger understanding of their business domain. I know plenty of developers in their 60's who will likely be able to keep working for as long as they want simply because they understand the equipment leasing business extremely well. That expands the job description somewhat and requires some ability to work with business stakeholders. The older developers that I know who struggle to find work tend to share some of the same characteristics: didn't work very hard to develop new skills, don't have deep domain knowledge, and/or really have trouble having a conversation with a non-technical business stakeholder.

While I realize that this particular drug is just an example, we could run some numbers here. The current owner of the drug made $27M in sales this year in the US. At $10k per 30 day supply, that implies that there are at most 2700 people in the US who use this drug (if all of them used it only once per year). If this is a drug that most of its users take all year, then we're now talking about a drug that is taken by very few people every year. The $5 French price point wouldn't be worthwhile for any US based pharma company to take on. This isn't a defense of anyone's pricing model, but I could see very easily why pricing models for very rarely prescribed drugs would naturally start to shoot through the roof in the US. Why is it tolerated? Most people don't feel like they are impacted by it.

As an older guy this made my smile, and also a little nostalgic for the flame war that this might have ignited 20 years ago.

Personally, I've written zero lines of production Haskell code, and expect that this will still be true when I retire. Despite that, learning Haskell was probably one of the best things that I've ever done. The learning process sent me down lots of interesting rabbit holes of language design, and certainly made me a more disciplined developer in other languages. The lambda calculus and predicate logic discussed in this article was one of the enjoyable rabbit hole trips induced by Haskell, but it was only one of many.