lucas_membrane

7 ms·

1.
by lucas_membrane 9mo ago
In the USA, the history of assuming that the national government will support power to the people the way FDR, PWA, BPA, TVA, ... did has given the national government quite a bit of leverage to keep the states in line. I'm figuring t
2.
by lucas_membrane 9mo ago
About 30 years ago, buying compilers retail went from the common route for beginners to more expensive than most beginners wanted to spend. And specialized professional software engineering became pretty damned expensive, too. The first o
3.
by lucas_membrane 10mo ago
Compare the causes of death in midlife now with the causes of death in midlife 50,000 years ago. What is total over all causes of the lesser of the % of deaths by that cause 50,000 years ago and the % of deaths by that cause now? My guess
4.
by lucas_membrane 10mo ago
Coroners will almost never classify death by motor vehicle or aircraft collision or impact as suicide.
5.
by lucas_membrane 10mo ago
I just found out that if one is developing a wxPython app, this: menuFont = wx.Font(12, wx.DEFAULT, wx.NORMAL, wx.NORMAL) # 12pt font Will be flagged as an error by ty, wx.DEFAULT and wx.NORMAL being some kind of wxPython place holder that
6.
by lucas_membrane 10mo ago
Not exactly. For example, Major League Baseball has been granted an anti-trust exemption by the US Supreme Court, because they said it was not a business. In some cases in which firms have been found guilty of violating the anti-trust la
7.
by lucas_membrane 10mo ago
Except that both the number of commercial minutes and the number product plugs in each hour have quadrupled in my recent memory, which is not even so good anymore since the Dumont network vanished and Ed Murrow took that government job.
8.
by lucas_membrane 11mo ago
A functional program is an a self-contained expression -- an isolated system following its own rules. The foremost example we have of such a thing is the universe itself, but the universe is not a good example in this discussion, because
9.
by lucas_membrane 11mo ago
Not for me. I spent a few weeks a few weeks ago trying to use it. Much I liked. Much I didn't. I like FP, so that was not a problem. But I found that lots of stuff was pretty hard for me as just an old guy trying to write some fancy
10.
by lucas_membrane 11mo ago
Seeing all those SRFI's listed, etc, on that page (63 of them), is astounding. How long would I have to work with scheme to get to comprehend what each represents without looking them up Captain Wimby's Bird Atlas of Nomenclatur
11.
by lucas_membrane 1y ago
I believe that you have a fine understanding of the issues involved. The risk is two-sided. One part of it is that AI may somehow become smarter than us. The other side is that humans have developed mathematics, which encourages us to tr
12.
by lucas_membrane 1y ago
> "good enough" sound 40 or more years ago, the big hifi brands were racing to get total harmonic distortion down to 0.05% or less. The average person is unlikely to complain if it is 5.00%. There was once a hifi show at which
13.
by lucas_membrane 1y ago
Some other factors were pretty important: 1. In the modern family, everyone wants to listen to something different. In the family of the 1960's to this was not possible, because too many kids, not room for so many big speakers, et
14.
What Happened to Freshcode.club?(freshcode.club)
3 points by lucas_membrane 1y ago|1 comments
15.
by lucas_membrane 1y ago
Trying to keep up with new software at that site got a lot a easier for me a few days ago. The experience is now a daily "Spotted nothing, installed same." I see that they had a major failure a few months back. Is this another,
16.
by lucas_membrane 1y ago
I have the same trepidations. It's getting damn near impossible to get a haircut or a surgical procedure or a parking place without carrying a cellphone. The trend is toward all technology that is permitted becoming mandatory, and all
17.
by lucas_membrane 1y ago
I think I've found ways to dodge the problems you describe. I am a person who is has been addiction-adjacent in my search for novelty for an absurdly long time. I've been quite devoted, however, to physical exercise very much li
18.
by lucas_membrane 1y ago
Fun fact (???) wayback about 40 years ago Central Point Software was humiliating Microsoft with its suites of utilities for Microsoft's OS's, which included file managers for Windows (and MS-DOS IIRC), and was a top rated #1 best
19.
by lucas_membrane 1y ago
I've been using the free VSCode editor on linux, and it has recently started hinting that I ought to install some version of Copilot. I'm an old retired guy who just programs hobby stuff for myself, and I try to separate my leisu
20.
by lucas_membrane 1y ago
You make a fine point. My simplified version of it is that there is no such thing as an isolated system. Things change. A system optimized for one environment is likely to fail when things change. Most of the hugely successful firms of
21.
by lucas_membrane 1y ago
I was thinking of Player Piano, which might be the best of Vonnegut's novels, as I thought over this article. Vonnegut said that all of the stories we believe are lies, because we are not smart enough to know the truth. Where do you
22.
by lucas_membrane 1y ago
Teddy Roosevelt, a man anxious to do good things, probably gave the idea that people who know things should control things a big boost by promoting science, public health, and reasonable regulation of businesses. This succeeded so well tha
23.
by lucas_membrane 1y ago
Anyone here know anything about where and how the cotton for bandages for the Union wounded was obtained during the US civil war? India and the Middle East being so distant, I'm guessing that some kind of smuggling or trading happened
24.
by lucas_membrane 1y ago
Few things that the article missed. 1. Software products had a huge physical size. Sometimes a single application or development environment would have 3 to five kg of serious mass. You could get it much faster by going to a store than b
25.
by lucas_membrane 1y ago
That kind of statement is made to warn the investors and potential investors about the contents of the financial statement to which it is attached. The statement will include amounts representing the 'value' of the firm's as
26.
by lucas_membrane 1y ago
A couple of weeks ago, I asked google, ordinary google search, how many times the letter r is found in preferred, and it told me 2. This century has taken quite a bitter turn against those of us who think that the 'enough' in &#
27.
by lucas_membrane 1y ago
There are problems with late night network TV as a business -- it has lost most of its audience about twice in the last decade, it has struggled to hold its audience in between the really bad years, and only a very small fraction of the au
28.
by lucas_membrane 1y ago
Yes. With Bach, microscopes, portable and naval artillery, and a patent system that rewarded people for thinking up stuff that worked, paper money (1690) was the last thing needed to make everything since a foregone conclusion.
29.
by lucas_membrane 1y ago
Sorry, not that I know of. They never let me near that stuff, and the various really important standards bodies are monopoly providers of information, so they inevitably charge more for copies of their standards than non-subservients lik
30.
by lucas_membrane 1y ago
My recollection, contrary to TFA, is that development of PL/I or PL1 (both names were used) started in 1964 or a bit earlier with the intention of coming up with a replacement for Fortran. I think some referred to it as Fortran V o

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