papaver-somnamb

Bravo! If only Clojure(Script) did this. There is a real need to reduce the size of compiled JS delivered to the browser and eliminate legacy dependency on goog.

After reading their newspaper (their label, not mine) for years, I've come away with three revelations: A) More than gaining insight and staying abreast of events, what I was really purchasing was the /feeling/ of being in-the-know. B) Whenever I met with "certain" people, they were likely to also read The Economist which turned out to be another, tremendously handy means of anchoring conversation. C) The trade balance tables on the inside back page were always interesting, sometimes jaw-dropping.

I feel this is closer, but still not equitable. More people owning less, but what about the vision that holds the ship together and leads the org to the goal? In the case of SpaceX, it's Elon and to a lesser extent Gwynn by way of osmosis that hold the light aloft. We force division of wealth, then what about the leadership and direction? SpaceX is what it is because the vision is much less tyranny of the masses, and much more damn the torpedoes no one can stop me.

Billionaires are characterized as such due to their net wealth. They don't actually have that amount in cash silently rotting in bank accounts.

What wealthy people, and people more generally, do have is ownership of assets and debts, where the grand sum >= +1B$. Case in point, Elon owns significant portions of valuable companies.

Patent nonsense such as

> So we can take a million dollars to be about 1 lifetime's worth of money. Elon is currently sitting on 817,000 lifetimes worth of money.

belies a gross misunderstanding of these valuations. No, Elon is not sitting on whatever money. He might only have 1Ks or 10Ks splashed throughout several accounts. If he is mid-transaction, then that figure may come into play, but only briefly. Some billionaires, sure, they may actually have cash of that magnitude on hand ready for deployment. For plenty of even more down-to-earth wealthy folk, even 2K burns a hole in their pocket because they haven't found where to invest it yet.

And so what is Elon and others like him supposed to do? Divest his "money" to the general population in search of equal outcome (and not equal opportunity)?

We need a few people to rise to pinnacles, this is one effective path to creation of markets. Allowing them to concentrate such power and wealth unchecked, though, is a great mistake. And that's on us, the people.

10GbE adoption feels different from the successful string of standard speeds that came prior, since the market congealed around one standards family per Ethernet speed circa say 100Base-TX. We've heard stories as horrific as RJ45 assemblies heating up to a degree such that thermoplastic would flow.

Was some threshold crossed where 10Gbit over CAT6-whatever cabling is crossing physics thresholds? Or perhaps 10Gbit was brought to market when tech supporting copper connections wasn't yet mature enough?

I recall someone (name escapes me at the moment) defining WW3 as ignition in 5 flashpoints between belligerent groupings: - Eastern Africa esp. Sudan, which we all nearly universally ignore - Israel Iran - Russia and a neighbor which we know today is Ukraine - Pakistan Afghanistan India - China Taiwan Plus Plus

Attributes that distinguish WW3 from previous world wars were IIRC: Contained conflagration, short targeted exchanges, probability of contamination low, material possibility of nuclear escalation. Case in point: North Korea developed nukes without being invaded, and now that they have nukes, other countries are watching and seeing that NK won't be invaded. What lesson do those other countries draw? And what of a world in which many potential belligerents hold nukes? Hiroshima weeps.

I'd like to add an important attribute here: The revolution will be live-streamed, more-or-less. And essentially none of us will know the truth, even the reasons. I predict this fact will not distress many people, such is the state of humanity.

So to the 7 or so decades of stability we and our ancestors enjoyed, here's looking at you, going down me. But Brettonwoods serves the present the least of any time since its creation. Case in point, w.r.t. eastern Africa, the geopolitical bounds of those ~4 countries seems likely meld to a degree. If we are indeed heading into WW3, I expect the world map to be redrawn afterwards, and the only lessons learned is how to win better in future.

And if we are, while disgruntled old geriatrics go at each others throats via their youthful proxies, I greatly prefer the nukes rust in peace.

Reminds me of Blaise Pascal's quote: 'All human evil comes from a single cause, man's inability to sit still in a room.' Aspiration, you gotta take care man, it just might kill ya.

Oh looky looky some of my fondly-remembered UIs: Platinum circa Macintosh OS 8. MacOS X lickables refined circa 10.3, 10.4.

I also fondly recall OpenLook on SunOS/Slowlaris and NeXTStep/OpenStep UIs and peak Microsoft Windows right on 2000 before the playskool never-ever-mix-orange-and-green Winblows XP. IRIX and plenty of Motif-esque joy on SGI.

UI elements were almost always distinct, understandable, consistent. If I was to actuate a standard UI control, I always knew exactly what I expected to happen before, and it happened exactly as I expected after.

Making them customized, themable, replaceable, more cool, well, that's what we have today, kind of in exchange I suppose..

Perhaps narrow your role and allow someone else to be responsible & accountable for driving the business side of things?

Take an honest assessment of how you can meaningfully contribute and concentrate on that, and pass the reins over to someone else who specializes in handling reins. Where are you best? Pushing forward on a long-held vision, planting a flag in the ground and rallying everyone to it, while ignoring petty concerns like a positive balance sheet? Great! Delegate that latter one to someone who specializes in it and then cooperate & thrive with them.

On the other hand, the plastic industry needs reform. Only about 1/3 of plastic produced is recycled in practice, and even then only once. Hardly the recyclable miracle that the plastic lobby has been messaging on since at least the 1990s. And what is the industry's response? Increased production YOY! Want truly recyclable materials, in practice? Glass. Steel, and some other metals. Fibers, like paper, to an extent.

That being said, I see a need for "base-load" plastic. Plastic is useful and we may forever need it, until at least something better comes along. Particular in key single-use applications like health services.

There was an interesting debate where Chomsky took a position on intelligence being rooted in symbolic reasoning and Asimov asserted a statistical foundation (ah, that was not intentional ;).

LLM designs to date are purely statistical models. A pile, a morass of floating point numbers and their weighted relationships, along with the software and hardware that animates them and the user input and output that makes them valuable to us. An index of the data fed into them, different from a Lucene or SQL DB index made from compsci algorithms & data structure primitives. Recognizable to Azimov's definition.

And these LLMs feature no symbolic reasoning whatsoever within their computational substrate. What they do feature is a simple recursive model: Given the input so far, what is the next token? And they are thus enabled after training on huge amounts of input material. No inherent reasoning capabilities, no primordial ability to apply logic, or even infer basic axioms of logic, reasoning, thought. And therefore unrecognizable to Chomsky's definition.

So our LLMs are a mere parlor trick. A one-trick pony. But the trick they do is oh-so vastly complicated, and very appealing to us, of practical application and real value. It harkens back to the question: What is the nature of intelligence? And how to define it?

And I say this while thinking of the marked contrast of apparent intelligence between an LLM and say a 2-year age child.

At risk of high-jacking this thread, some Merchants of Record (i.e. Paddle) require biometric authentication of company majority owners, which I find too invasive. Are there any Merchants of Record that don't?

Sure, they handle taxation amongst many other conveniences. But despite their assertions of security and safety, we identified dumps for sale on the darknet of such biometric DB data exfiltrated from (continuing the Paddle example) Onfido. It left a sour note in our mouths and a lingering feeling of distrust, especially after we were recently the target of a spearfishing campaign using data obviously sourced from such auth providers.

Yes cultural fitness reasons. Everything off the top of my head (drawing from experience) are exactly that. Two quick examples: Conflicts of character between them and their uppers along the report line. Being tossed aside for failure due to reasons out of their control.

But the staff member is still damn good at something, and is in need of a different venue to shine.

This shedding activity is referred to as the child's playing-card game "baba-nuki" (Old Maid). You are drawing a card from the other company's hand but don't know what card it is because they aren't showing you the face side. There is an emotional element to it (as with nearly everything else here) but also, maybe most importantly, Japanese society is quite fluid this way, it's one of the country's strengths. Everybody can understand if it is explained to them.

On the point of Japanese companies shedding staff .. There is a friendly, win-win way to move skilled staff out of your company, but my impression is it's not widely known nor often occur.

When a company finds that a particular staff member "isn't a good fit for the company" they will add this person to an informal list that is traded through back-channels with other companies. At some future time such personnel might be directly approached by headhunters on behalf of inquiring companies. Of course the current employer overlooks the poaching activity, they want the member gone. The only clue the office gets is one day out of the blue that member shows up to work wearing full interview attire, and might soon after announce that they are moving on.

For the managerial tier and above, they frequently socialize and will have a sense of when it is time to move on, in accordance with societal expectations. Given that the managerial profession comprises a relatively smaller group in Japan, they can expect to land their next gig soon enough.

As for the rest, I've heard of plenty of tactics used to induce (eventual) voluntary departure, "black" or otherwise. I don't advocate for them myself, but the culture, market, and law is what it is..

The primary intended use case of this in contrast to say Extensible Data Notation (EDN) seems to be for faster machine processing. The necessitating of prefixing datums with their lengths (Pascal string style) alone is the clue. So an advantage here is it is much easier to place a hard bound on memory and CPU for reading this format, and confers security properties like systemically reduced possibility of buffer overflows. Good for hard real-time, for example guidance systems that do all allocation only at startup.

Beyond lists and string atoms (or whatever the actual list is), this format also makes an affordance for custom types, but as TFA points out, you still have to roll your own other / higher order data types. Data types that you almost definitely have on hand. Now we are talking about needing to do additional processing on the decoded output, just to interpret common data structures like associative arrays and sets. And as a machine-first serialization format, if you are interchanging with other people or with yourself in the future, sure hope you have full agreement on those custom types.

So what do you do: Add libs? Roll your own? Well, competing alternatives already offer that complete picture as mature, battle-tested solutions. So I'm inclined to view Canonical S-Expressions merely as a way-point on our path of technological evolution, worthy of fleeting, mild curiosity.