jhbadger

23 ms·

481.
by jhbadger 2y ago
Lots of things. Neither Medicare (1965) nor Medicaid (1965), which provide healthcare to millions of impoverished, disabled, and elderly people, didn't exist in 1950. Nor did NASA (1958) and the US space program. The NSF (1950) which f
482.
by jhbadger 2y ago
It's just the bare facts from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. This WP article has a graph -- basically, at its height (the New Deal/WWII) the federal workforce was about 7% of the workforce and have been going downward since then
483.
by jhbadger 2y ago
>"We" decided that Tuskegee was bad enough that it should be stopped before harm is done, and that there is no appropriate or sufficient "punish[ment] in retrospect" for the fallout. The thing is, although you and the
484.
by jhbadger 2y ago
Also, in the Renaissance, scientists and writers often wrote ridiculous and over the top praises of their patrons who funded their work like Galileo did for Cosmo de Medici. Of course the way scientific funding is going, we might have to go
485.
by jhbadger 2y ago
Most airports in Canada work similarly when flying to the US. It's actually an advantage because you go through US customs on departure and can fly into any US airport, even smaller non-international ones that don't have customs.
486.
by jhbadger 2y ago
Here's an example. I'm interested in obscure conlangs like Volapük. I can feed a LLM (which had no idea what Volapük was), a English-language grammar of Volapük and suddenly it can translate to and from the language. That couldn&#
487.
by jhbadger 2y ago
I was an Apple ][ (well, Franklin Ace, technically) guy back in the day, but my high school used mostly C64s. The slow speed of Commodore floppies infuriated me. And they even had their own CPU inside the drive! By all rights, they should h
488.
by jhbadger 2y ago
Personally I liked joysticks and never understood why d-pads became the standard after the NES. They remind me of playing games with cursor keys and just seem less fun.
489.
by jhbadger 2y ago
This is really well done. While I've seen other simulations of hand-held games, I really appreciate how they even include the instruction booklets with many of them. It really gives the feeling of actually having these games, some of w
490.
by jhbadger 2y ago
While I agree that we should be skeptical about the reasoning capabilities of LLMs, comparing them to chess programs misses the point. Chess programs were specifically created to play chess. That's all they could do. They couldn't
491.
by jhbadger 2y ago
I think the stories inspired by KiY, like James Blish's "More Light" are better than the ones in Chambers' book. Chambers' genius was in the creation of a work (the eponymous King In Yellow play) that induced insani
492.
by jhbadger 2y ago
Yes, it is always fun to read things set in a future time from the author's perspective long after the future date is past. I remember plenty of SF growing up in the 1970s about the "future world" of the 1990s or even the yea
493.
by jhbadger 2y ago
Or for that matter, Armed Bear Common Lisp (real CL implemented in the JVM rather than Clojure which is more like Scheme mixed with its own ideas). Still, it's a neat trick, running Java classes on a Lisp that isn't in the JVM its
494.
by jhbadger 2y ago
Back in the day, lots of people did read GEB, although we often missed the point. Apparently (as he wrote in an introduction in a later edition) the point of the book was to encourage people to study AI (at a time when it wasn't popula
495.
by jhbadger 2y ago
While I agree that the book presents a fairly negative view of science and scientists (it reminds me strongly of Margaret Atwood's more recent Oryx and Crake ), the idea of a substance with the properties of ice-9 isn't that ridi
496.
by jhbadger 2y ago
I remember reading a French translation of John Crowley's AEgypt and there was a part where a building on a college campus is described as looking like "a Christian Science church" (referring to Mary Baker Eddy's movemen
497.
by jhbadger 2y ago
That's a pretty weird description of the British Museum. Yes, I know people can (and do) criticize the collection they have as the spoils of colonialism, but in no way do they present their collection as "merely aesthetic objects&
498.
by jhbadger 2y ago
There are now a ton of competitors to it though -- it's become a new format for gaming PCs. Whether or not the Steam Deck itself is the winner, I think the form factor is here to stay. And I can't imagine why (as an owner of a Swi
499.
by jhbadger 2y ago
Unfortunately, "Gaming" and "Gamers" only refer to video games and their players in modern usage.
500.
by jhbadger 2y ago
In the 1980s/early 1990s when HyperCard was king, that would have made sense. And in the late 1990s/early 2000s when Applescript was a thing people cared about, too. But yes, for the last twenty years or so, English-like programmi
501.
by jhbadger 2y ago
For a while I was into a trivia program on my phone. It was kind of easy, so I decided to set the language to Catalan, a language which I never studied. I was still able to do well, because I could figure out the questions more or less from
502.
by jhbadger 2y ago
If you play a version of the original MIT Zork (often called "Dungeon"), you'll find it isn't exactly the three games put together. There really isn't much plot in the original -- like Zork I it is just basically a
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by jhbadger 2y ago
Exactly. 64K only seems tiny to people who didn't use home computers in the 1980s.
504.
by jhbadger 2y ago
Basically houses in Japan are treated like cars -- as something that doesn't appreciate in value as in most places but rather depreciate over time. Some of this is maybe cultural from the time when houses in Japan were literally constr
505.
by jhbadger 2y ago
Exactly. I've even gone to the trouble of getting ebooks of physical books that I have in some cases. I vastly prefer the size and weight of an e-reader as compared to most books, plus the ability to change the font size to something I
506.
by jhbadger 2y ago
That style of book led to one type of solo adventure -- the "numbered paragraph" type that is basically a choose your own adventure book except that combat and other such situations are resolved using the RPG rules. Those still ex
507.
by jhbadger 2y ago
If the mistake happened in the typesetting stage, printed books could spread errors much more efficiently, as in the infamous "wicked bible" of 1631, where a typesetting error made the ten commandments contain the amusing phrase &
508.
by jhbadger 2y ago
Indeed. Even Gutenberg had his Bibles touched up by artists after they were printed (illuminated capital letters and so on) because even he believed his printed copies were inferior to the hand-made ones.
509.
by jhbadger 2y ago
One of the growing trends these days is solitaire RPGs -- where people play alone as both player and Game/Dungeon Master. Typically this isn't done by AI but by rolling on various tables (sometimes called "GM Emulators")
510.
by jhbadger 2y ago
What does it mean to be a "fictitious module"? I thought at first this meant that it isn't really defined as a module but through other means, but the linked source code has a "module Crystal::Macros" line, so it lo

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