DocSavage

I would say the Republicans under Trump have made horrible policy decisions that have erased constitutional norms, severely hurt international standing and alliances, caused more inflation, and sent the US backwards in recruiting the best minds in the world.

Some examples:

- Starting a war with Iran even after being warned about consequences including the Strait of Hormuz and having the US in a worse position now than before.

- Deciding to end birthright citizenship, allowing race-based stops, and a slew of unconstitutional actions that are helped along by a GOP-appointed SCOTUS majority. This includes rulings under shadow docket so they don't have to explain themselves.

- Literally pretending the 2020 election was stolen and creating legislation like forcing states to provide voter data and targeting election results in a very partisan way.

- A hodgepodge of tariffs that seem to change at the whim of Trump and exert significant complications downstream including inflation.

- Undermining public funding of US research in the sciences in what seems to be an unconstitutional manner. Examples include withholding granted funds based on political interference.

- Completely politicizing DOJ and many other critical government departments to the point that even conservative career government employees resign noting politicization of their offices. This is one reason we see such obvious corruption -- because the watchdogs can't investigate let alone prosecute people favored by this administration (e.g., Epstein files).

- Degrading US health care policy substantially with RFK Jr and bad appointments in a number of positions.

All of the above are well-supported by court cases, investigative reporting, and even official declarations by this administration. What happened to the fundamental belief in the GOP of executive restraint, state vs fed power, fiscal discipline, free-market trade, rule of law, and democracy?

Aside from the better versions of what AI is visibly doing now (software dev, human language translation, video gen, etc), many of the AI bears are dismissing the potential impact of hooking AI up with automated experimentation so it's able to generate new types of data to train itself. The impact on drug discovery, material science, and other domains are likely to be very significant. The Nobel Prize in Chemistry for AlphaFold is just a glimpse of this future.

Nice collection. I'd suggest adding an unsubscribe option to your initial email, particularly if people reflexively login via Google, etc.

Very nice. I'd suggest adding another deluxe bundle for non-Guitarists without the guitar theory. I'd pay extra for the ear training + the base package.

Packt is hit & miss but some have decent authors and good reviews.

"Machine Learning with PyTorch and Scikit-Learn" by Sebastian Raschka et al.

"In-Memory Analytics with Apache Arrow" by Matthew Topol.

65 is the new 45 :) Sounds like there's a perfectly logical reason to do the 3rd startup: you're passionate about it. Best of luck!

He's a professor at Caltech and did Nobel laureate-level work. He might be less productive than his prime and still be competitive with other professors, particularly since he brings deep understanding of the history of approaches in his field.

Then maybe you shouldn’t generalize your one viewpoint to say that early Ruby/Rails was not a worthy community for professionals or of use to people who practice jointly valued skills like entrepreneurship.

It’s also odd to see your long rant of whimsical vs professional when some of the most well-known companies were built with that community of so-called non-professionals. We have a difference in opinion on what constitutes “professional”.

I think you're missing my point. The early Ruby and Rails community I remember was a collection of very smart and explorative programmers who wanted to build cool stuff with this interesting language. People were trying out DSLs -- sure they could've used LISP -- but Ruby's metaprogramming was inviting and was a reason for the succinct Rails syntax which was a selling point compared to say Java's cumbersome approach.

The speed of trying stuff out (even if it wasn't super efficient) why startups used it. So it was a community of highly productive people sharing their love of building new things. That's my memory of that time period.

> I would much rather participate in a community of professionals who've organized themselves around sufficiently overlapping shared intents

I thoroughly enjoyed my involvement with early (US) Ruby and Rails folks from the first Rails conf to _why's unusual entertainment to Matz's calm and humble demeanor. People bounced ideas off each other and just enjoyed coding up interesting things. Dave Thomas and the Pragmatic Programmer group wrote what many of us used, not so much _why's guide which was still a fun read. I moderated a Ruby panel at the old Odeo HQ just before they pivoted. I didn't know the group gathering at that Ruby SF meeting would include not only Twitter but Github founders as well. At the time, tweets seemed pretty absurd to some of us but guess what happens when you try out ideas in a community that was into exploration?

Yes, you are correct that I should’ve said symptomatic infection (or COVID-19) because they were only trying to power the study for what they needed to clear EUA and not measuring ability to block transmission. The second paper I linked made the same mistake in its table header.