ajarmst

44 ms·

391.
by ajarmst 9y ago
I appreciate your recognition of my plea for a refresher in middle-school science. Most people can't perceive my pain in the midst of the sarcasm.
392.
by ajarmst 9y ago
I don't think that's a very good analogy, but I'll bite. The economy doesn't really need David to have a good shot at defeating Goliath. It does need David and Goliath to compete on the same field, with the same rules,
393.
by ajarmst 9y ago
You don't have to see competition as some sort of "holy grail" in order to perceive it as almost invariably better than its absence (from a consumer perspective) in a market economy.
394.
by ajarmst 9y ago
Dear God, do you realize what we've done? We've invented evaporation! (Sorry, the title struck me as funny.)
395.
by ajarmst 9y ago
I know there's some complexity here, but let's just take a minute to marvel at the phenomena of Walmart complaining about another company's excessive dominance and potential to apply monopolistic power.
396.
by ajarmst 9y ago
Just to get this straight: people were OK with the abductions, assault and stalkings; opposition research and personal threats against journalists; distasteful and probably illegal practices against competitors like booking fake rides; ille
397.
by ajarmst 9y ago
You seem to have very strong opinions about this issue. I'm not convinced they are well-supported by either experience or data. "Task 4. Determine Characteristics Required for Lint Ignition Lint that accumulates on the heater hous
398.
by ajarmst 9y ago
But the dryer knowing that it, and most of your possessions, are about to cease to exist isn't really useful information. It doesn't remove the obligation that it be supervised. Dryer fires start quickly, often due to lint build-u
399.
by ajarmst 9y ago
Well, if you equip it with a halon suppression system in a sealed and heavily sensored room, it might. Of course, now your dryer is your single most expensive possession by an order of magnitude. Which always seems to start being the prob
400.
by ajarmst 9y ago
Maybe you don't, but most people care---a lot---about the temperature of their dwelling (yes, to the resolution of a degree or so). And your friendly neighborhood microbiologist will be happy to discuss the implications of fridge temp
401.
by ajarmst 9y ago
Absolutely. But I think that, when those programmers do decide "hey, now I want to write some custom code for Emacs", they don't then think "but not in Elisp".
402.
by ajarmst 9y ago
You're postulating a population that are willing to take on the cognitive burden of learning Emacs but who are unwilling to do the same for ELisp. I think that's a smallish population, almost entirely composed of people who want
403.
by ajarmst 9y ago
Dear God, no. No. Please, just give me Guile. Please. We've been so good. So patient. Guile.
404.
by ajarmst 9y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenspun%27s_tenth_rule
405.
by ajarmst 9y ago
While the described system has some powers of 2, which is interesting, it is a far cry from positional binary. It most certainly does not prefigure the system described by Leibniz, nor the application of arithmetical operations to logic, w
406.
by ajarmst 9y ago
Yes. But more and more, you can easily photograph and OCR it.
407.
by ajarmst 9y ago
It's the same argument for putting Republicans instead of Democrats on the bench. Whether or not you find that argument compelling doesn't really affect whether you find another one similarly structured to be similarly so.
408.
by ajarmst 9y ago
Or, you know, an actual notebook .
409.
by ajarmst 9y ago
There's another plane on which the analogy fails: the first generation of PC enthusiasts were working with a genuinely new thing. The consumer/hobbyist-grade hardware that the introduction of the 4004/8008/6502 made pos
410.
by ajarmst 9y ago
I was there for the first generation of the PC revolution (and my father was a mainframe programmer---he and his colleagues LOVED Apple IIs and TRS-80s). There are echoes of the conflict, but it (as always) is more complex. The problem wi
411.
by ajarmst 9y ago
I've made the argument that the Arduino is great for quick and dirty projects (a colleague builds stuff for Escape Rooms that only ever exist for a few months using them), and for trying out ideas when you already know what you'
412.
by ajarmst 9y ago
That's a fair point, (and +1 for PlatformIO). And that is sort of the argument I sometimes find myself making: the Arduino Hardware is delightful. It's the ecosystem that has emerged around hobbyists that is problematic. It m
413.
by ajarmst 9y ago
My colleagues have developed a "spitting noise" ritual after any utterance of the word "Arduino" (<hock> ptui). As embedded developers attempting to teach others, they're not enamored of Arduino's burgeo
414.
by ajarmst 9y ago
I find it hard to take a post that accuses someone of engaging in an unwarranted "vendetta" and smear campaign that includes the unsupported hearsay alleging the perpetrator has a bad reputation and is an "arrogant dude"
415.
by ajarmst 9y ago
Just going to go ahead and assume that Air France is using this to harvest bank account pins and luggage combinations in a creative bid to ensure they meet revenue projections this year.
416.
by ajarmst 9y ago
I find anything but plain text irritating when writing (I dislike attempts to merge the creative process of writing with the only peripherally related creative processes of orthography, layout and printing). The WYSIAYG editor "revolut
417.
by ajarmst 9y ago
I don't care what you use, as long as Org-Mode can export to it and Pandoc can consume it.
418.
by ajarmst 9y ago
When I teach this stuff, I try to distinguish between (1) Returning/Exiting/Excepting because of a legitimate error condition (2) Returning/Breaking early because there's either no work to do or something necessary to d
419.
by ajarmst 9y ago
Heh. They should go with the Strong CT Thesis and end up proving that every patent on a computer is a patent on the universe. As a follow up, they could petition the Supreme Court to grant personhood to any process that can pass the Turin
420.
The Pi Manifesto(thepimanifesto.com)
2 points by ajarmst 9y ago|0 comments

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