pjlegato

7 ms·

31.
by pjlegato 2y ago
Indeed it is. "Phone addiction" is the "smoking" of our time. In the 1950s, people around the world smoked furiously whenever awake. And why not; it made them feel good! It let them bond with others over shared cigarette
32.
by pjlegato 2y ago
Yes. Formally, saying "that's just the way it is," or "that's what society is now," is an example of a logical fallacy called "begging the question," where the original criticism is simply repeated as
33.
by pjlegato 2y ago
ANY school shooting, whether people are shot or injured or killed, or whether the shooter simply misses and nobody is struck, is extremely rare in the United States. That is to say, it almost never happens. The few incidents that do happen
34.
by pjlegato 2y ago
There is a large and growing body of evidence indicating that pervasive phone connectivity has led to large increases in psychiatric issues among all demographics, and particularly among younger people who have now grown up immersed in a ph
35.
by pjlegato 2y ago
Yes, that is "almost never" in a country with 340,000,000 people. Besides which, "having access to a cellphone" did not alter the outcome at all in those tragic incidents.
36.
by pjlegato 2y ago
Moreover, when a kid is perpetually glued to a screen absorbed in a group chat, they are much less likely to interact with others who are physically around them and ever develop any actual mates.
37.
by pjlegato 2y ago
The fact that many people have decided to do something which causes objectively harmful externalities does not somehow make it OK to jump on the bandwagon and do that same thing, too, just because "everyone's doing it." Perpe
38.
by pjlegato 2y ago
"Surveillance parenting" -- which is "helicopter parenting" magnified through technological tools the Stasi could only dream of -- seems likely to foster long-term dependence and anxiety that far outweigh the positive ef
39.
by pjlegato 2y ago
The fact that many people now develop anxiety if unable to use a phone for even a very short time is a part of the problem. The phone has become a pseudo-appendage for most people now. Even those who spent most of their lives blissfully pho
40.
by pjlegato 2y ago
The point isn't that black swans don't have causes. The point is that nobody is expecting those particular causes at all when the event happens, due to prior assumptions being wrong.
41.
by pjlegato 2y ago
Old New England houses had a "keeping room" attached to the kitchen, a small heated seating area for people to sit and chat with the cook while cooking.
42.
by pjlegato 2y ago
Real pots of liquid do not heat uniformly like they do in the physics textbook equations. "A very slow boil" does _not_ mean the _entire_ mass of liquid is near 212 F. It means that _one very small sector_ of the liquid is near 21
43.
by pjlegato 2y ago
The problem with that arrangement is that it doesn't scale: a tiny number of popular critics become the gatekeepers. Success in the field then depends entirely on somehow gaining the notice -- and good reviews -- of one of these few
44.
by pjlegato 2y ago
MacOS is Unix -- a BSD-derived Unix operating system called "Darwin" underlies the user interface. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin_(operating_system)
45.
by pjlegato 2y ago
The issue is that many Lisp programmers are .. not great at choosing and naming abstractions. Even when they are, the goals of the program will shift over time, leading to leaky abstractions and macros with names and semantics that no longe
46.
by pjlegato 2y ago
Most use an IDE such as Emacs (paredit-mode and rainbow-parens) that handles automatic paren matching for you, so it's really a non-issue after the first week. The editor takes care of indentation, matching (so you don't have any
47.
by pjlegato 2y ago
That doesn't address the argument at all. You claimed that although her views on one topic seem reasonable, you believe they should be canceled, no longer promoted in society, buried.... because you strongly disapprove of her views on
48.
by pjlegato 2y ago
In brief, Lisp's S-expressions (the parentheses) are a straightforward instantiation of the abstract syntax trees to which all other languages parse. You can manipulate that tree easily and directly in Lisp, whereas other languages (th
49.
by pjlegato 2y ago
Are you advocating for comprehensive moral purity tests -- if a person holds a particular view that you disapprove of, they ought to be canceled in general and everything they've ever said or done banned, no matter whether their other
50.
by pjlegato 2y ago
Perhaps a better formulation would be: "Making games is hard. Marketing games is even harder."
51.
by pjlegato 2y ago
While some necessary factors about what makes a pop hit are known, even with that knowledge -- and a huge marketing budget -- the vast majority of songs written even by the very top producers and songwriters flop massively, all the time. Th
52.
by pjlegato 2y ago
Other way around -- grog wasn't so much diluted with water as the grog was applied TO the fresh water as an antiseptic. Fresh water on ships had typically been sealed inside a barrel for months or even years before it was consumed, gro
53.
by pjlegato 2y ago
If you like CL, try Clojure -- all the Lispy goodness, but with access to modern, industrial-use libraries. Common Lisp is largely abandonware at this point -- e.g. there's no standard way to open a TCP socket!
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by pjlegato 2y ago
Investors don't operate charity funding to accrue value for the mutual collective benefit of some global system. Investors MUST accrue ROI to their own account and/or that of their own investors, the limited partners. If they do n
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by pjlegato 2y ago
Who gets to decide which specific sorts of evasion of law enforcement are acceptable? Should we consult your personal moral preferences for that, as applied to each of the 200+ countries on the planet? Why do your preferences overrule those
56.
by pjlegato 2y ago
You said giving a fake name at the ER was the only option for poor AMERICANS to obtain healthcare. That is categorically false, and testifes to some sort of deep seated bias against our own country profoundly embedded in your worldview -- o
57.
by pjlegato 2y ago
Sounds like your issue is with Texas, then, not with America. Why perpetuate crude and inaccurate stereotypes that smear and disparage America in general? America is spending a huge amount of money every year precisely on providing healthca
58.
by pjlegato 2y ago
> give a fake name to the ER, and if you're poor in America, what else can you do? The American government spends something approaching a trillion dollars annually on Medicaid, "a government program that provides health insuran
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by pjlegato 2y ago
"Google ad revenue stalled, so they made SERPs worse on purpose"
60.
by pjlegato 3y ago
Jobs' terrible attitude is at this point widely known, dissected and discussed to death here and everywhere else. Calling it out does not adding anything new or insightful to this discussion. His terrible attitude is also entirely orth

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