SquibblesRedux

I once held a company retreat at Mammoth Cave. Although the company went bust, we did many really cool things along the way.

We used PCs in a kiosk form factor (circa 2009). We were using Flash for some games and Unity for others. Three games we did for a museum were Cryptogram, Cypher Express, and Navajo Code Match.

We didn't stick with making games for kiosks. Managing both the software and the hardware was too much overhead, and at the time I didn't think it was a tenable line of business compared to other opportunities.

https://www.nsa.gov/Press-Room/Press-Releases-Statements/Pre...

I have used both AWS and Azure, and ended up settling with Azure. The services all seem to hang together much more cogently. The service ecosystem also seems to move slower and feels less experimental, which is a positive when I am faced with supporting enterprise solutions.

Regarding support, I have found Azure support to be very good, albeit I subscribe to paid support. For those who claim AWS support is better than Azure support, are you paying for a service plan or are you referring to free tier support?

I think Lemoine needs to watch Ex Machina and then take a sabbatical to reflect on the implications of systems with obfuscated state.

The whole chapter, excluding the first page: https://sci-hub.se/10.1007/978-1-4614-8800-2_3

"This hardware platform comes along with different simulators that allows to test parallel programs on regular computers. Both the hardware platform and the simulators are described in the following sections." [0]

[0] https://www.google.com/books/edition/Smart_Multicore_Embedde...

I do wish async would go away and never come back -- in every language. Some days I long for the NMI: non-maskable interrupt.

I have been coding since the late 70s -- the latter half of the last century. After all I have seen, async feels wrong.

For me, nothing beats the act of creation. I will always be willing to make all sorts of extreme sacrifices in the hope of creating something enduring.

While custom-tailored games may be interesting, it seems like such a thing would be socially fragmenting and isolating. People need shared experiences to relate to each other. I'm not sure the world would be a better place if people gradually have fewer and fewer shared experiences.

I think many people give too much credit for intelligence, which is generally interpreted from an anthropocentric perspective. Fitness for successive reproductions has nothing to do with a Turing test or any other similar measure of human likeness. Before there are any claims to the inevitability of AGI, I'd like to see a convincing argument that AGI is not an evolutionary dead end.

Speaking from experience:

- If you believe in what you are doing, then keep going.

- Yes, it can be difficult and depressing. Yes, your audience may not understand the value you are pitching. Just keep going, learn over time from the experiences, and revise/experiment when there is a possibility of making a little more traction with your audience.

- Always work to improve both your product and your pitch -- neither will ever be perfect, and both will need revisions and improvements for tomorrow's world.

- Collect testimonials from your customers to help validate to yourself and to others the value in what you are doing.

Good luck, and hang in there.

Perhaps not bad, but certainly undesirable for many. Concentrating economic power into a governing class can address many of the ill effects of extreme wealth disparities. However, concentrating the economic power in one place makes a society very vulnerable to corruption and surprise catastrophes. While traditional capitalism also concentrates economic power, a healthy capitalist society usually has those with wealth competing with each other on various fronts. However, one could argue that while either perfect capitalism or perfect socialism could yield a happy and prosperous society, neither has achieved perfection in practice.

Does anyone know of an infographic that bluntly shows where the Russian oligarch wealth comes from originally and how it is aggregated and concentrated?

I would like to see the essay revisited in a more cogent way. There are massive differences between local business disappointments and global business disappointments. The essay is too unfocused to draw actionable conclusions and would benefit greatly from concentrating on more specific issues. I would recommend focusing on one specific point of advice and tailoring everything to support that one point.

With Chrome Desktop, and a fairly wide browser window (1475px in my case, required by many web applications), the text is small with minimal margins, and practically illegible. If I shrink the browser width considerably (to a minimum width) then the text does look good, like an ebook.

Typesetting matters.

Personally, I enjoy all things computer science and I find learning new things, researching new ideas, or working on hard problems very enjoyable. When I want to take a break, I engage in activities that let me get into a flow state. It could playing a fact-action video game, or hard physical labor outdoors.

> The idea that 3 days away is life and mind altering is deeply concerning to me.

I agree. I was left with the impression that the author could benefit from a therapist. It is a strange and unsettling concept to me that someone should be so emotionally vested in being connected to the Internet as much as possible.

I had the same thing happen. I thought it was just me and my old eyes, but I imagine there is some sort of afterimage effect occurring. (Although I am sure my eyes are not without some amount of blame.)

Restoring these photographs is a perfect project for machine learning. Does anyone know a grad student or researcher who would be willing to take on a restoration project for these damaged photographs?

I want to see LinkedIn written in Prolog. We could call it "Logical Connections."

Perhaps we should praise the benefits of naps. [0]

- Increased alertness

- Attitude adjustment

- A creative mindset

- Cash saver (because the cost of drugs adds up)

[0] https://www.heart.org/en/healthy-living/healthy-lifestyle/sl...

I like that -- Guaranteed minimum income for anyone willing to sign up for big-tech free services. I think that is an experiment worth conducting.

In the 1990s I was building, among other things, web-based controls (in Java) for backend systems. People were completely blown away with what could be done. (The major competing technology was HTML forms and HTTP PUT with Perl CGI.) With the exact same language I was also able to build a high-performance peer-to-peer file sharing system for backend systems. (2+GB files to personal workstations across a large geographic area through ATM -- practically in real time compared to the NFS alternatives.) There was every reason to believe that Java's portability and just-in-time technologies would dominate the computing landscape. I think we can look to Sun Microsystems (and now Oracle) for reasons why Java was eclipsed[0] by other technologies. I have no idea what kind of longevity WASM will have, but I have seen so many technologies come and go over the decades, I know technical excellence is not the primary predictor of what stays or goes.

[0] Yes, there is a pun buried in there.

Reading the article, I felt like I was back in 1996 reading about the Java bytecode compiler and the JVM plugin for the browser. Java had such great promise for web page-hosted code, that would be portable, performant, and safe. Why would one think WebAssembly will succeed where Java failed? (Well, Java did not exactly fail, but its purpose and typical usage radically changed over the years.)

Some ideas that may or may not pan out:

- Get a pet.

- Volunteer for a non-profit organization.

- Go to church.

- Visit and talk frequently with family members.

- Join an online dating service.

- Talk with or visit your neighbors as frequently as feasible.

- Every time you go out shopping, make a point of engaging in light conversation with people who work where you shop.

- Take music lessons at a music store. Make a point of engaging in light conversation with anyone you see there.

- Take night courses at a college. Any subject. Make a point of engaging in light conversation with anyone in your classes. Suggest that you study together.

What you need are random collisions with other people. More random collisions means a higher probability of meeting someone you get along well with.

The paper in The Lancet is most definitely science. What is not science is leaping to any conclusions based on the findings documented in a single paper. Science is slow, unfortunately. Given sufficient time, science will, with a high degree of confidence positively correlated with the time we wait, enrich our understanding of the natural world.

I highly recommend visiting the Museum of Science in Boston and attending a lightning show. https://www.mos.org/live-presentations/lightning

The lightning show (with Tesla coils) is absolutely wonderful.

That video was incredibly inspiring. Time to dig out the spare chicken wire.

Thanks - you have just improved my programming life. Just the ability to see the implicit types is awesome.