talkingtab

The terminology is the issue - "A bailout".

But this is really socialism. It was not a bailout of banks, it was socialism for wealthy. Did the people lose their houses? Yes! What about the people who made obscene profits from lending money to people when they should not? Did they lose their money? No. We - the taxpayers, the ex home owners - gave them money.

What about socialism for the egg industry? When the centralized chicken stocks got a disease, we people who were paying usurious prices for food, also provided payments to ensure the wealthy owners did not suffer.

Socialism for the wealthy === good, socialism for the poor === evil. Hmmm. Oh no that can't be so lets call socialism for the rich "a bailout".

Since we force people on food stamps to work now, maybe with this "bailout" we should force those people to work minimum wage jobs?

The big problem with the internet - which is very dysfunctional - is not censorship but propaganda. Everyone on the internet is selling something because that is the only way to pay for being on the internet.

If the people who pay for the internet are not the users then who will the internet serve? Not the users. and since corporations are known soully (as in that is their soul) what would you expect? If people who want to profit by targeting people with lies pay for the internet, is that censorship? Well sort of - but maybe worse.

We need a community internet task force. Lets start one. Request for comments.

In the past we had communities. They provided us with a context of meaning for our lives. We have lost that. So the context people have for their lives is either money, or just themselves.

Many people have not even experienced community these days. Imagine where you feel part of something bigger than yourself. A gestalt, where the whole is greater than the sum.

We People grew being in that situation - we would hunt, farm, fix things, make things - better not just for ourselves but for our community. It became our nature, just as it has became the nature of sheep dogs to herd.

Imagine a sheep dog who lives a life with no sheep. They have all that built into their nature and never get to be that. That is you and so many other people. So there is your challenge.

"Just strip the types bro"

In my opinion TypeScript is not a feature. Why? 90% of the benefit of TypeScript can be obtained by using `foo({duck, clock})` pattern. And at 90% of the cost and time. TypeScript, like Java, is beneficial in situations where an error is catastrophic. That is not my situation nor the situation of what 90% of programmers?

So to the bro who wrote the otherwise interesting article I say "Just strip the types bro". You can do it!! You like it? You do it!

[Rant of course, but if you had wasted as much of your life writing types in Java you would probably rant as well. Recipe thinking sigh.]

Time to F*$k the internet. The whole concept of anonymous IP addresses was broken but worked for a long time. Now it is just stupid. Just like domain names. (Are more names used by squatters than real?). And email as identity? Time to engineer solutions and create a new protocol layer.

This is not a hard problem. It just requires that someone build a certification wall. The IETF should have done this long ago, right?

What I am proposing is that community email servers can talk to each other. I have email servers setup - all the hoops - for my community. I want others to set up community servers and be able to interoperate. My server can send and receive from other communities. No corporations, no tracking. If your sever spams it gets dropped from the federation. Yes it is more complex, and there will be problems and issues. But hey, if we can have crypto currency why can't we get emails?

Email has been turned into a by-the-corporation, for-the-corporation service. Corporations need DMARC so they can control email and the ability to spam. The spam I cannot block is spam from Google.

If you decide to think about this, you will quickly realize that email is f*ked and needs to be forked. Perhaps we need a Community Email Initiative that blocks corporations and only allows Community members.

Trust is the one thing you can't buy on the Corporate Internet.

I am sure many people will be offended and down vote this comment because they cannot conceptualize an internet without Corporations.

Do not bother with the youtube video.The essential ideas is that Putin could scare European Countries into surrendering Ukraine. This video legitimizes that scare tactic. Nor does it deal with the underlying issue, which is that like Hitler and Nixon, Putin believes he is infallible. As a result the world as he sees it and the world as it is will continue to diverge.

Words limit our understanding of words because they are intrinsic to a particular kind of understanding. yes? no?

In "Notes on the Synthesis of Form", Christopher Alexander talks about how we can know something is wrong even when we do not know how to make something right. He was talking about this I think

=z==

as opposed to

+|+|+

or

+|+|+|

I happened upon the word "entanglement" and it seems an interesting alternative to the order that is inherent in words.

Our language is all about Actor-verb-object. Entanglement provides a fundamentally different concept. I cannot say "I drove my car on the road" with entanglement. Or at least with entanglement I can say something equally valid like "the road moved my car with me inside."

And entanglement works for the + and | things, at least for me. There is some kind of entanglement (degree) that creates a gestalt.

At least that is the best I can come up with.

I got 502 bad gateway. Then a register page. With a section about "Cyber Resilience Act".

That section is worth a read in my opinion.

"it’s proof that the rot has been rooted out of Apple’s software design team"

I know little about Apple, but have quite a bit of experience with how software products get "designed". Goofy and offensive things happen when corporations decide not to pay attention to customers.

The decision to ignore customer and focus on market wow is not the software design team. It is a systemic and structural thing.

Hunting good bugs is something every good software developer should experience. A good interview question is "tell me your favorite bug". Bugs are about reasoning, not intelligence. And I will take someone who can tell me what is wrong over what is correct any day. It requires a focus on getting things actually work.

I have two favorite bug stoies. The first is from a printout from the run of an IBM 360 assembly language program when I was just learning. Someone asked em why their program failed to run. I glanced quickly at the front page of the printout and it said "Too Long". So I told the person that was the problem. Something was too long. He looked at me very strangely, so I looked back at the page a little more closely, only to notice "Too Long" was in the name field of the person running the program. He was Vietnamese and his name was Too Long - literally. There is a powerful lesson (at least one) there.

The other happened when I was implementing some AppleTalk protocols - NBP to be exact. (Don't ask). I would capture the working packets then compare all the checksums, headers, constants, length fields in the packet my code generated and fix any problems. I was stuck on one failure. I just could not see any difference as I went through byte by byte, time after time. It was late and time to go home so I decided to print off each packet on paper and compare them later - certain I was missing something. The problem was instantly obvious. One printout took a page, the two pages. I had been appending junk data in the packet. Sigh

Interestingly, as a result of this discussion, I have a much better understanding of the whole artificial intelligence issue. This:

There is a strong distinction line the ability to think (intelligence) and the ability to reason. (just ask google!).

There is lots of "intelligence" in this discussion. Reasoning? Not so much. Some how - and perhaps this is partly from how I phrased things - there was some impression that I meant storage of food caused cancer! But apples are indeed affected by storage. Just ask google!

And "just ask google" is the problem. You may be intelligent, and your comments may be perceived as intelligent, but does that mean they are reasoning? Nope.

And for all the people out there wanting to know whether you will have a job, and what the future with AI will be:

If you are only intelligent you are out of luck! If you can reason, there is a huge opportunity! Just ask google.

What I find interesting is the concept of dead food versus live food. This is just something I wonder about. For example a dead apple is one that was picked a year ago, sold today, kept in storage until now. Long shelf life - is the crucial change in our eating that I can see. When was the last time you had a fresh apple? Does the food industry want us to consider the health benefits of a dead apple versus a living apple?

Let think twinkies! You can open a package of twinkies and let it sit out for a long time. A long time. A long, long time. They you can eat it. Long shelf life means it does not succumb to digestion by random microbes etc in the environment. Does the twinkie then succumb to the random microbes in your gut? I think not, but what do I know.

Then there is living food. You can take milk, put a culture in it and let it grow for 10 hours. Instant pot, heating pad, whatever. Then you eat it. It is now filled with living cultures. It tastes better to me than any store bought yogurt, costs exactly the same as the same quantity of milk. With a chopped apple, cinnamon and a tiny bit of sugar it tastes better to me that most of the faux ice cream you get these days.

What is funny to me is the conversations we have about "ultra processed food" do no address this aspect of the issue. I keep wondering why.

Here is the fundamental issue. We use the word "intelligence" for different things. Can you follow a recipe for making sour dough bread? Pretty easy. Can you make sour dough bread? Not so easy. Does following a recipe require "intelligence"? Yes. If something can follow a recipe can it also make bread? Not necessarily.

And another question, perhaps the most important. Can you determine that a recipe is flawed? In immediate terms, if I tell you to feed your sour dough starter every day, can you determine why, how or if that might be bad advice?

My conjecture is that there are at least three types of intelligence, as outlined above. And you have to remember that AI is by definition "artificial". Not in the sense of being unnatural but in the sense of artificial sour dough bread. It is not the real thing. (at least for two out of the three definitions of intelligence).

This is not to argue that AI is not useful and extremely beneficial in some contexts. Unfortunately our whole system of education has trained us to be "follow the recipe" kind of people. Uh Oh! So if your only skill and ability is to follow recipes, you might want to focus on developing your other kinds of intelligence.