ivancho

Yeah, you can look in the contributors' dashboard, they stopped around 2019. As any documentation, its fate is to wither and fall into decay. But hey, he got a book out of it.

So we'll have expensive artisanal software for rich people? Self-assembly takes a whole new meaning for the rest of us.

That's a pretty narrow view of software too. The nature of building software systems is not always towards being able to mass-produce them. What would be the point of copying and distributing 10K copies of my script that runs migrations for one legacy database in a very specific way?

It's complete nonsense. "The total number of moves in the game is equal to the number of stones initially in the pile, which is 5000."

Similarly on the Martian question "If we transform 1 red and 1 green Martian, we get 4 blue Martians. This changes the parity of red and green Martians from even to odd, and the parity of blue Martians from even to odd." - is complete nonsense too.

"the sum of the digits of a number k modulo 2 is equivalent to k mod 2" - 12?

Basically all "solutions" are regurgitated techniques from math competitions which are used completely incorrectly but with a lot of confidence

So, "it is really mostly a matter of luck", and just do so much work that they decide to fire someone else... sigh. If only there was some way for the workers to negotiate collectively for working terms that avoid mass layoffs whenever the interest rates go the wrong way.

I think the anecdote highlights that there's no incremental way to approach gRPC, it's not a low risk small footprint prototype project that can be introduced slowly and integrated with existing systems and environments. Which, well, it is a bit of a fault of gRPC.

My model was not to demonstrate that utility doesn't go down ever, it was to show that it can do that extremely slowly, which makes the utility argument about why we discourage it societally a bit weak - we're clearly not very good at discouraging any other behaviors resulting in long-term bad outcomes (for society or the planet), and we reward all sorts of risk-taking.

I think the simpler explanation is that gambling is seen as addictive and destructive on an individual level, and there is no need for total utility to explain why that's undesirable

This is a bit of a stretch from what I said - 1% drop after the entire population has gambled through 10x their net worth is not meaningful. I also pointed out other speculative activities which we encourage, presumably because they compensate by growing the economy. Insurance might preserve or increase equality, but it also might extract so much rent that the overall utility is lower. There is simply no cut and dry explanation - for some parameter choices things work the way you say, and for some they don't

Ok, take 100 people, with $100 each, and have one round of $1 coin flips between each 2. A significant number of bets overall, 4950. Each person has wagered 1% of their net worth 99 times, something that we all agree sounds quite scary. And yet there will be no busted people, most will likely be between $80 and $120. Repeat this 10 times, a ridiculous amount of gambling - still most likely no bankruptcies, and the total utility, if we assume log, has barely dropped by 1%.

I simply do not believe that we are making such a subtle societal optimization by frowning upon gambling while encouraging all kinds of other risk taking, like investments and properties.

And the other scenario where insurance just acts as a drain on the overall system seems to indicate that it is not inherently positive for utility either

You haven't demonstrated most of these assertions. For example, if everyone gambled against everyone else every second, then that system has a pretty good chance of staying close to equilibrium for a long time, whereas your model indicates that the total utility would be depleted almost immediately. Whereas if everyone was fully insured for absolutely every risk in their life and immediately received a replacement of the exact same value on any loss, then the overall system would just steadily trend to all the money ending at the insurer, which doesn't seem like increased total utility

Ah, a brilliant idea, design all languages so people who only know C can make small changes to existing Ruby code without getting confused. Definitely don't want to enable different abstractions or models of computation. Are these core principles in codebases you mentioned mostly "how to write stuff using C paradigms"? After all, "the Real Programmer can write FORTRAN in any language"

Even more so then. Simplify, simplify, simplify!

What is your certainty that that statement is true? What if it was a calculation which takes decades on a supercomputer?

Their "proof" that there are only 12 solutions to 8 Mutually Non-Attacking Queens on Chessboard is just "That there are only these 12 can be proved by brute force." :/