pjlegato

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61.
by pjlegato 3y ago
The comic is Creative Commons licensed - can you or someone else put this up on a hosting site?
62.
by pjlegato 3y ago
Only the v1 naive customer service bot will attempt to be helpful at all times. The better product managers will quickly pick up on the (measurable) user frustration generated that way, and from there it's technically trivial to alter
63.
by pjlegato 3y ago
It's a long way from "this factory keeps tearing children limb from limb" to "there are too many car washes in this town." I specifically said externalities are real problems that bear addressing. The problem is tha
64.
by pjlegato 3y ago
While acknowledging the reality of those externalities, it's also fair to point out that empowering politicians to attempt to override the market and deliberately police the negative outcomes of those externalities in favor of supposed
65.
by pjlegato 3y ago
Telegraphic ciphers and codes were common, both to save money through compression, and as it was well known that many people would be reading and re-transmitting the message as it worked its way through the system. There were various standa
66.
by pjlegato 3y ago
More and more people have begun to feel that carrying around a smartphone, being pervasively connected to the Internet at every moment, is a large net negative in their life. It detracts from immediate experience of one's actual physic
67.
by pjlegato 3y ago
Those cases are well served by Clojure, which gives you the macros + a modern, professional, battle-tested standard library (via Java).
68.
by pjlegato 3y ago
> Try passing these paternity leave policies as a law These policies have been the law for many years in the United States, both at the federal level and (additionally and seperately) at the state level in nearly all states: https:&#x2F
69.
by pjlegato 3y ago
Netscape didn't invent the web, its open protocol, or even the first browsers. They did not make the web happen. Netscape had a business model (charge people for browser software.) Netscape also went bankrupt. It was a colossal failure
70.
by pjlegato 3y ago
Copyright does not last forever (even if it lasts longer than you may like.) Mickey Mouse entered the public domain a few weeks ago: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/01/arts/public-domain-mickey...
71.
by pjlegato 3y ago
They hired smart people not to monetize their genius, but to tarpit it: to eliminate the small chance that one of them might work at a startup and build something that threatened Google's cash mashine.
72.
by pjlegato 3y ago
Socialism rewards psychopaths even more than capitalism does. In that system, the psychopaths quickly become the ones who define what those "guardrails" are, for their own personal benefit; and then use the full weight of state en
73.
by pjlegato 3y ago
That's the point. The economic growth rate that EU residents demand is NOT supported by its current economic structure and degree of financialization -- hence mass social unrest, which is getting worse every year. The current system ca
74.
by pjlegato 3y ago
That's all well and good until your economy stagnates, GDP suffers, and all the vaunted social welfare programs are no longer affordable -- never mind covering the staggering actual costs of the EU's own defense against Russia, in
75.
by pjlegato 3y ago
If the "deep tech industry in Europe" refers to bloated, bureaucratic legacy enterprise software like SAP, European tech is doomed. They only continue to exist because of cronyism, forced sales to large organizations through perso
76.
by pjlegato 3y ago
> in the US ... people here hardly read This is not true at all. The empirical evidence shows the exact opposite: Americans tend to read far more than almost all other countries. This "we Americans are a bunch of ignorant louts who
77.
by pjlegato 3y ago
Yes. The American Chestnut Foundation has been working on that for several decades; not quite there yet, but it's probably possible. More at https://tacf.org/
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by pjlegato 3y ago
They are a third sort, European chestnuts. They are generally held to be better flavor than the Asian varieties, but not as good as the nearly extinct (but not quite) American Chestnuts.
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by pjlegato 3y ago
Parents looking for screen alternatives: Check out the book "Playborhood" by Mike Lanza. His neighborhood had no kids playing outside, so his kids didn't want to play outside. He did something about it, and he tells us how to
80.
by pjlegato 3y ago
Merely disagreeing with liberal or progressive viewpoints does not, in itself, render someone "a bigot."
81.
by pjlegato 3y ago
Ha, agreed fully that the "old internet" was far more of a cesspool than most care to remember. We look back with rose-colored glasses. We remember the good and forget the bad. USENET was not only every bit as bad as the worst of
82.
by pjlegato 3y ago
The ones who are power-tripping are bad. The ones who genuinely believe that their rules-lawyering is actually good and beneficial for the whole community are even worse. “Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its
83.
by pjlegato 3y ago
Twitter is not dead; it rather caters to a different and broader audience segment now. What happened is that it is no longer an institutionally governed "safe space" where only leftist progressive views are allowed to be voiced in
84.
by pjlegato 3y ago
That's rather eloquently romantic, but doesn't actually seem to mean anything beyond "it requires some ineffable quality of vague goodness that just FEELS right to me, I know it when I see it." What can be done besides &
85.
by pjlegato 3y ago
This problem has recurred throughout history. The issue with the "study this person who does it well, take notes, it takes a village!" approach is that that quicky ossifies into a bureaucratic morass of petty tyrants who don'
86.
by pjlegato 3y ago
The cost of living varies widely in different areas. In many parts of the United States, 100k is a very low salary, due to extremely high living costs. For example, the government classifies a family of four with an income of $149,100 as &q
87.
by pjlegato 3y ago
That would be theoretically possible, yes; but all proposals along those lines so far have been met with staunch and bipartisan political opposition. Attempting to alter the retirement age seems to be political toxic waste.
88.
by pjlegato 3y ago
Too many people here use the drive-by "downvote" as a means of expressing their disagreement. This comment is a perfectly rational and polite contribution to an on-topic intellectual discussion of retirement, yet has received a la
89.
by pjlegato 3y ago
This is a common and fundamentally incorrect misconception about Social Security. Many subsequent policy debates are then misinformed. Your money is not ever saved for you. Your retirement is NOT funded by your own past taxes. Your retireme
90.
by pjlegato 3y ago
This is a common stereotype, but wholly inaccurate on both sides. We in the West are coming out of a long cultural period several centuries where that sort of analytic, rational style has been particularly popular, so it's easy to mist

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