Recent submissions

Comment · 3 months ago
Open meeting laws say people are welcome to be there.

Constitution protects polite free speech, unambiguously.

Comment · 3 months ago
It's not disingenuous. Clapping politely is Constitutionally protected free speech.

Rule of law on violating an unlawful request in a situation like this one is not complex. It's the same as when an officer asks you to stop filming.

Comment · 3 months ago
That's not quite the lesson.

Earnings did come, and the outcome of the internet include Google, Amazon, and others -- several of the ten biggest companies in the world.

In 2000, there was no sane way to predict who the success stories versus failures would be, timeliness, or otherwise.

AI will be a big change. We don't know how big, when, or who the losers and winners will be yet. Everything could be grossly overvalued or undervalued. We'll only know in hindsight.

Comment · 3 months ago
Flatten plus debt is bad.

Debt presumes future growth.

Comment · 3 months ago
You're a racist.

The way to tell between that and factual / culturally-fluent: were you able to any strengths of other cultures? Weaknesses of your own?

Or did you go off on an (in this case ill-informed) rant about "they bad"?

The way to cure it is a mixture of reading: business books on culture (like Meyer and Hofstede) and NATO ones. Those are places people need to work together, as opposed to woke ideology.

Then, application. Travel is good here.

Comment · 5 months ago
I think these people do have our interests at heart, but that's largely irrelevant. Their point is that capitalist free markets don't let them act on that.

Capitalism and democracy are becoming obsolete. It's not clear what's next.

Comment · 6 months ago
Neither existence nor nonexistence is obvious. Ergo, differences of opinion. Militants on both sides are problematic. I strongly dislike Dawkins, in the same way as I do people knocking on my door trying to convert me to any other religion.

At least the zealots who knockon my door. I've had a few good conversations.

Ditto for LLM sentience. We have no evidence either way.

Comment · 7 months ago
No, Numerical Recipes isn't better. Or worse. It's a different book on a different topic, with there topic very clearly advertised in the title.

It's a series of... numerical recipes. Nice descriptions of many numerical algorithms sufficient to use them.

It's not focused on physics. It's also not rigorous.

The Sussman / Wisdom reference is rigorous.

Why would you post about a book you haven't read?

Comment · 7 months ago
Should be modernized to Python or similar.

In 2026, I don't want to do numerical programming in C. That was fine 30 years ago, but today, I expect to have garbage collection or to be able to multiply a matrix as A×B.

Comment · 8 months ago
License is a big deal, and not just for cost and openness, but also for practical use in pages like docker, ci/cd pipeline, cloud deployments, or other places licenses need to be dynamic.
Comment · 8 months ago
Scmutils from MIT does a very good -- arguably better -- job for correctness. No symbolic integration by ideology and not identical. Sussman and Terman. Amazing attention to detailand correctness. Claude could probably bridge Scheme to Wolfram.

I'm not sure how important but- for-bug identical output really is.

Comment · 8 months ago
Reality shows that the outcome are centers with a television on 24/7, or where kids are given drugs to sleep. That's not the exception but the rule. That's why inspections and licensing came in.

The longterm costs of that -- crime, mental health, etc. -- explain why subsidies make sense. Every rich country has universal public education for a good reason.

Market forces, as you point out, will drive your enterprising person making 72k out-of-business very quickly, and the market becomes a cesspool.

Comment · 8 months ago
Cost of living for staff and lawful child to caregiver ratios. If you assume 1:4 or 1:5, that's around 100-125k per caregiver in tuition.

With reasonable overhead numbers (space, management, compliance, licensing, taxes, etc.), that's a poverty-level income for preschool teachers.

There is a strong argument for subsidies, at least in countries which have low birth rates and care about longterm social outcomes.

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