JohnStrange

In my experience from organizing conferences people who self-identify as vegetarians eat milk products and eggs, though sometimes reluctantly. Vegans don't.

It will make things way worse, since politicians from now on can and will plausibly deny any video evidence about them. Candidates will literally rewrite history instead of merely suffering from amnesia and any real evidence will end up in battles between one TV show 'expert' against another.

On a bright side, young aspiring actors can make porn movies to get some cash early in their career without necessarily having to fear it will ruin their career many years later - those movies will exist anyway.

Interesting blog entry but I was a bit disappointed not to hear about Solomonoff induction, as it is often taken to determine quite rigidly what is in principle learnable by induction. What's the connection of the approach mentioned in the blog post to Solomonoff induction?

Insecure defaults are always bad. The other way round would be the right choice. Let users downgrade their security for performance, if they insist.

It contains all the information you need, loads immediately, etc. It's a perfect web page.

I'm changing my system soon and I can tell you that I'm very, very happy that most of my games are on Steam. I remember that manual installation from DVD used to take minutes to hours, and I just don't have the time for this any longer.

Right now, my biggest nightmare are VST plugins. They are in fact the reason why I didn't upgrade my PC from an i7 920 for years. I estimate it will take me at least a week of full spare time use to deinstall them on the old machine and re-install them on the new machine. Steam would make many people a huge favor if they managed to enter the pro audio market, which still comes with their own installers, licensing schemes, DRM, spurious hidden support services, etc. All the bad stuff, exclusively for honest customers.

That's correct, and I should mention that Schadenfreude can sometimes even be used with a positive connotation, namely when a bad person suffers some misfortune due to his own wrongdoings.

What about microwave beams? Wasn't one of the theories that these could have been used for surveillance and caused brain damage with similar symptoms?

Gmail also drops sent mails occasionally for no apparent reason. They don't even bounce back, they simply disappear and never reach their destination.

Yandex is pretty good but I haven't found a use case for DDG yet. Whenever I set it for "privacy" reasons (not that I really believe them), I have to go back to Google to get reasonable results. I can confirm the memory loss, though, ego-surfing confirms it for me. Much of my older stuff is gone and all the top links for my name are related to my current work. (So in my case, it's kind of beneficial.)

I believe Brexit is a loose-loose deal. It's bad for the UK because it causes a lot of complications without producing real benefits. Basically, the UK will loose lot of political influence and control while having to abide to the EU's trade rules anyway. It's bad for the EU, because the union may loose cohesion, as it may turn out that the UK is doing not so bad after all and local anti-European socialist and nationalist movements will capitalize on that a bit, because the EU looses influence on the US without the UK, and because the UK provided a counter-balance to the axis France-Germany and now smaller countries fear that the EU will move forward faster than they wish for.

My prediction is that the net result will make everyone a little worse off in 10-20 years from now than if the UK had stayed in the EU, but the effect will not be very noticeable and overall hard to quantify.

I wish they would still make calculators as beautiful as that one instead of all the cheap plastic we get today. All the Casio FX-880P would need is a slightly faster processor and a slightly more modern programming language with structures and hash tables. There is even a guy in Germany who still makes PC connection cables for them - although only as a hobby and he's booked out for months in advance.

You mean those eternally scrolling pages whose main purpose is to hide content that belongs to the user in the first place? These sites are a pest.

I can speak for CommonLisp, scheme and Racket. Someone else will have to answer for Haskell. Generally, LISPs are extremely flexible, reasonably fast, compiled languages with macro systems that allow you to develop a domain specific dialect. Some of them, like CommonLisp and Racket, come with a pretty huge set of libraries, tooling and ecosystem.

> Why aren't they used?

They are used a lot.

> Is it because they are too hard to use, or to difficult to approach for a beginner?

They tend to be easy to learn but difficult to master for writing idiomatic code, i.e., have a relatively long flat learning curve.

> Is it possible to hear bad things about those languages?

Sure. In my personal experience, their biggest downside is the same as their biggest selling point: their flexibility. Code is generally hard to maintain and read by others. You can invent some incredibly hacky spaghetti code monstrosities in LISPs if you want to. More disadvantages: high memory use, dynamic typing and dynamic dispatch can suck big time (e.g. Racket OOP methods are mostly checked at runtime, which can lead to testing nightmares if you're not careful)

Overall, CommonLisp and Racket are pretty good 'batteries included' languages, whereas some scheme implementations are extremely fast and evolved small extension and scripting languages.

Ahhhh ... it doesn't suffice to simply do your work without slacking, we need no less than the best and brightest for mostly boring office jobs in the government!

Maybe some groups within the NSA need the best and brightest, but the government in general doesn't. A lot of government work concerns accounting and administrative tasks that are neither intellectually challenging nor do they have a clearcut equivalent in business. Most government agencies cannot be run like businesses, because there either is no market to speak with or the markets for their 'products' are not free and open.

All you need is people who get their work done.

> but we must also make it easier to fire people (or manage them downwards) for incompetence

That only works if you start at the very top. If you get what I mean.