lucas_membrane

In the USA, the history of assuming that the national government will support power to the people the way FDR, PWA, BPA, TVA, ... did has given the national government quite a bit of leverage to keep the states in line. I'm figuring that this auction will be used by the executive branch to buy power at a high price in the auction, then allocate it to areas in need according to a plan approved by the powers that be. If they do a good job, nothing to see here. YMMV.

About 30 years ago, buying compilers retail went from the common route for beginners to more expensive than most beginners wanted to spend. And specialized professional software engineering became pretty damned expensive, too. The first of those changes made python comparatively attractive to every programmer starting out before the last 30 years who did not yet work as a programmer. The second of those changes made python comparatively attractive to every domain expert with a computer already on their desk working in an organization of any size who could not get their desired or imagined super simple and easy high-value application funded by said organization. Inevitable.

Compare the causes of death in midlife now with the causes of death in midlife 50,000 years ago. What is total over all causes of the lesser of the % of deaths by that cause 50,000 years ago and the % of deaths by that cause now? My guess is that total overlap is way less than half. So the things that kill us are mostly modern. The things that we evolved to survive are mostly ancient. And we are a species controlled by the brain, mostly by the subconscious brain, which is basically a collection of ancient survival mechanisms and ancient survival inhibitions. Our brains are proud of removing us from our roots and strive to accelerate our separation from what we are prepared to deal with, which introduces just a few changes that appear to our conscious brains easy enough to mitigate in the long run. But our brains are much better at handling the short run and are absolutely confounded by choices involving both the long run and short run. IOW, we live by deep myths and the myths are dying.

Coroners will almost never classify death by motor vehicle or aircraft collision or impact as suicide.

I just found out that if one is developing a wxPython app, this:

menuFont = wx.Font(12, wx.DEFAULT, wx.NORMAL, wx.NORMAL) # 12pt font

Will be flagged as an error by ty, wx.DEFAULT and wx.NORMAL being some kind of wxPython place holder that wxPython can interpret into a value later on, not a value just yet. Can you get past that kind of late binding?

Not exactly. For example, Major League Baseball has been granted an anti-trust exemption by the US Supreme Court, because they said it was not a business. In some cases in which firms have been found guilty of violating the anti-trust laws, they were fined amounts minuscule in relation to the profits they gained by operating the monopoly. Various governments in the US outsource public services to private monopolies, and the results have sometimes amounted to a serious restraint of trade. The chicanery goes back a long way. For the first decade or so after the passage of the Sherman Act, it was not used against the corporate monopolies that it was written to limit; it was invoked only against labor unions trying to find a way to get a better deal out of the firms operating company stores and company towns etc, etc. Then Teddy Roosevelt, the so-called trust-buster, invoked it under the assumption that he could tell the difference between good and bad monopolies and that he had the power to leave the good monopolies alone. 120 years later, we are in the same sorry situation.

Except that both the number of commercial minutes and the number product plugs in each hour have quadrupled in my recent memory, which is not even so good anymore since the Dumont network vanished and Ed Murrow took that government job.

A functional program is an a self-contained expression -- an isolated system following its own rules. The foremost example we have of such a thing is the universe itself, but the universe is not a good example in this discussion, because we have plenty of reasons to think that the universe contains pure (not pseudo-) randomness. Beyond that, isolation , when it matters, is not an easily proven proposition, and is a deplorable fantasy when assumed in many of the other science and engineering disciplines.

Not for me. I spent a few weeks a few weeks ago trying to use it. Much I liked. Much I didn't.

I like FP, so that was not a problem. But I found that lots of stuff was pretty hard for me as just an old guy trying to write some fancy little GUI apps to assist some of my other spare time activities. The project system, dune, was puzzling to me, and when I looked for clarification on-line it was pretty clear that I had lots of company. Not wanting to pass time writing code and seeing many potentialy useful packages available, I downloaded quite a few (actually, I downloaded not too many, but the dependencies required for those multiplied rapidly). Then I found myself managing multiple environments, because the different versions of this and that do not always work together so nice.

Some library code has to get imported some ways, some other ways. Etc, etc. Many tutorials teach the toplevel interpreter, but that's not recommended for projects of any size, and the other environments will choke on the code that works in the toplevel.

What I liked is that the OCaml ecosystem doen't look like it wants to control or ought to fear the next big thing. It's what you get when you have a lot of smart creative people who get inspired and do their best according to their own motivations and their own conception of quality. I admire that. I'm glad that I tried it.

Seeing all those SRFI's listed, etc, on that page (63 of them), is astounding. How long would I have to work with scheme to get to comprehend what each represents without looking them up Captain Wimby's Bird Atlas of Nomenclature? What percentage of the people who take the time to read that page, for example, if they are trying to learn if Chez Scheme might fit their needs for a language implementation, are going to get a good idea about anything by scrutinizing that list? Isn't that like a bookstore filling its advertising with a list of ISBNs? I have tried to do some stuff with scheme at times in years past, and when I saw such lists galore with no plain-language information attached while trying figure out which tool to grab, it gave me some idea that the scheme community was a somewhat isolated ethnocentric culture of its own.

I believe that you have a fine understanding of the issues involved. The risk is two-sided. One part of it is that AI may somehow become smarter than us. The other side is that humans have developed mathematics, which encourages us to treat the universe as an optimization problem, which encourages us to think that the best optimizers are the best people and that they deserve great rewards for optimizing, which leads to competition at optimizing optimization, serious negative feedback for the losers, single winner systems, and all the winners realizing that the more they resemble their enemies, the less likely they are to be targeted as a resource to plunder. Perhaps we are not able to figure out if any of this is wrong, but the emphasis on convergent thinking will make our species easy to fool and sabotage, if our species doesn't win a Darwin award first. AI will be able to avoid the blame. It may be optimizing the fire department and selling fire insurance when civilization burns down, but the fire started millennia ago.

> "good enough" sound

40 or more years ago, the big hifi brands were racing to get total harmonic distortion down to 0.05% or less. The average person is unlikely to complain if it is 5.00%.

There was once a hifi show at which one of the most revered hifi reviewers gave a talk and played some samples for the audience. Almost all the audience noticed at once that his samples had a defect, a loud high-frequency tone somewhere around 10,000 Hz. He didn't hear it.

The concept of good enough has won. Many consumers still think that HD radio is high-definition. It is hierarchical digital, a standard developed to be good enough that most people would not complain. And, speaking of HD, lots of HD TV buyers were perfectly happy even though they were unaware that they have not got their TV producing HD pictures.

Some other factors were pretty important:

1. In the modern family, everyone wants to listen to something different. In the family of the 1960's to this was not possible, because too many kids, not room for so many big speakers, etc, etc.

2. Now, the speakers are there to carry the audio, status is derived from the size of the video screen. The screens crowded out the speakers. And you need 5 or more speakers now, which makes a set of big speakers exceptionally unfashionable.

3. Speaker size is inversely related to potential big box store volume because of the huge warehouses and sequesterd listening rooms that large speaker retailing would require. Buying without listening first makes does not fit with the idea of spending big on something that you need because your are elite afficianado.

4. The middle class is dead. In the 1960's, 1970's, or early 1980's, a 'good' stereo would cost about a month's net income for a median income worker. Today the good stereo still costs about a month's net income for a median income wroker, but the median median income worker is two weeks net pay away from homelessness or moving back in with his parents. And in that supposed golden age of stereo, the 'good' stereo was expected to last about 10 years and many of them did. Some are still working, many have been in the repair shop several times and keep going. Today, no one expects anything to outlast its warranty by much (except maybe a car), and competent repairs for anything more complicated than shoes are a not easy to come by.

Trying to keep up with new software at that site got a lot a easier for me a few days ago. The experience is now a daily "Spotted nothing, installed same."

I see that they had a major failure a few months back. Is this another, even worse?