WalterBright

Those are fairly recent companies, and they replaced the earlier giants. Like IBM.

Nobody has discovered a limit to prosperity under a free market.

I didn't pay a cent for any of the software on my Linux machine. Free Open Source software is everywhere.

In the 1990s, the Seattle Times wrote that there were 10,000 Microsoft millionaires in the Seattle area, excluding the value of their homes.

Charles Simonyi became a billionaire as a Microsoft employee.

A painting has a 3 dimensional texture to the paint, while a poster is inevitably flat. Different paint compositions will also reflect light differently, while a poster won't.

So, yeah, having the real painting has additional value.

I wouldn't pay much for a painting anyway. I have several paintings and posters up on the walls, and they're interesting for a time, and then I just don't see them anymore. They're just part of the wall.

People in the 1980s thought it was inevitable that IBM was going to take over the world. They offered the same arguments you have.

> Lack of regulation in tech causes real harm, like addiction, social issues and misinformation,not to mention issues with cyber bullying and suicide in teens.

None of those had effective regulation.

Regulation against fraud does work, but the job of government is to prevent crime, enforce contracts, and stop fraud, in a free market.

> And by that measure we are still cavemen.

Government is not going to fix that.

> Do some people make out like bandits with billions or millions of dollars, sure but I don't think that's a good barometer for progress or prosperity.

In the 1800s the US lifted scores of millions of people out of poverty into the middle class.

History shows us that the more free market an economy is, the more prosperous it is.

For example, the software industry. It's pretty much completely unregulated. Prices for software have gone to zero. Software engineers routinely become millionaires, and some billionaires.

How do you know that it would all evolve to a handful of companies? I hear your sentiment all the time, people just assume it is true.

So what happened to Sears, IBM, RCA, GE, Kodak, etc.?

Why are the biggest companies of recent origin?

The employees can (and do) hire attorneys on contingency.

This is why companies (in a free market) do not grow big enough to take over the world. "The Innovators Dilemma" is a good book on the topic.

The best path is always save up enough for at least 6 months of runway if you get laid off, at a bare minimum.

I would expect oil lamps.

Yes, all the nwcpp.org presentations are recorded and posted online.

"rent-stabilized" is just another word for "rent control", which is the government setting the prices.

Hal Finney wrote a BASIC interpreter for the Mattel Intellivision in about 2K of ROM.

Of course, Hal was a genius.

You would have to, which is why D allows code to be prefixed with `debug`, as in:

    debug printf("I made it this far before crashing\n");

which turns off the purity checks for the dependent statement.

AFAIK I am still the only person who has implemented a complete C++ compiler, compliant with C++98, including preprocessor, optimizer, and code generator.

Anyhow, I'll be speaking at NWCPP soon:

THURSDAY, Nov 19, 2026 at 6:30 PM to 8:00 PM

Elegant D - There’s More to Programming than Getting Code to Work Bellevue City Hall, Room 1E-121 450 110th Ave NE Bellevue, WA 98004

nwcpp.org

Please come! All are welcome!

That's because you inserted the word "all" which was quite absent from what I wrote.

Please try again.

P.S. google "how many unoccupied apartments in nyc"

> As a kid, I didn’t even own a console

As a kid, I played games with a board and counters. Sometimes I made my own board and counters. And there was only one channel on the B+W TV.

Haha, look at the old B+W Perry Mason TV episodes. He drives all kinds of different cars. Those cars were definitely product placements.

Consider "The Red Queen" by Ridley book. It's premise is that evolution constantly improves a species, but since other species also are improving, the species runs and runs but stays in the same place.

It's the same thing in business. One has to relentlessly decrease the cost of doing business, because your competitors are doing it as well. You run and run and stay in the same place.

I haven't read the cited article, but the professor would need to show that industry profit margins are increasing to make his point. I haven't seen any evidence that margins increased in general.

People don't usually re-run the bad stuff from years ago.

The economies that have collapsed are the socialist ones.

The government heavily interferes in the housing industry. Hence, the higher costs. It's the same for everything the government interferes with - such as education and health care.

For examples:

1. there are 57,000 unoccupied apartments in NYC because city regulations on rents make them unprofitable to rent out.

2. the glacial pace of issuing building permits for burned out homes in LA.

3. the sudden influx of many millions of immigrants pushes up the demand for housing, resulting in higher prices

It's a great question. The answer is `pure` came along after D was already established with a lot of existing code. Making it the default would break pretty much all of it.

Part of the problem is `pure` is transitive, i.e. a pure function calling an impure one is not allowed. This makes it hard to incrementally make the code pure.

But when one succeeds at it, it is very satisfying.

There is an escape hatch, however. Prefixing a statement with `debug` allows the dependent statement to be impure. This is very handy when one needs to insert some print statements to debug a program. (Calls to printf are impure!)

D has a nice feature where a function can be annotated with `pure`, and the compiler will check that the function is pure.

It's fun trying to reorganize your code to make it pass the `pure` checking.

I've converted three large programs written in macro assembler to C, so it could be ported to another platform. It was extremely tedious.

I read some years back that the houses Habitat For Humanity built were highly resistant to having their roofs blown off by the wind. It turns out the roofers didn't know what they were doing and used lots more nails.

There's no such thing as a disaster proof home, but disaster resistant is very doable and can substantially reduce your insurance premiums.

> Having lived through several natural disasters

Wow! I've been through two (tornado, and a windstorm that took out the power for 2 weeks).

> it absolutely sucks when everything else gets trashed.

True, but insurance won't help with that. At least you have a clean place to sleep.

If you choose to live in a high hazard area, you're going to have to pay for it one way or another. It's cheaper to do some hurricane upgrades to your home.

Just like if you live in a fire hazard area, it's cheaper to spend a few bucks clearing the vegetation away from your house, investing in a metal roof, etc. When my asphalt roof wore out, I had it replaced with a metal one. Very happy with it.

If you choose to live on a flood zone, either put your house on stilts, or on a mound, or accept that it's going to get flooded. My dad lived in the midwest, and consulted flood maps when looking for a house. Never got flooded. Washington is subject to earthquakes, and I hired a soil geologist to screen the property for slide risk.

If a large tree is close to your house on the windward side, hire an arborist to trim back the "sail" on it, or just have it removed.