fallous

If, as a humorist, you are concerned about whether you can publish your humorous book you can be certain that you live in a cursed timeline. Additionally if you think there are two kinds of jokes: those that were once funny and those that were never funny, then I suggest that your jokes were at best lazy. The human condition is pretty constant throughout the ages and those jokes that are aimed at such universal experiences continue to amuse for centuries or millennia.

Understandably the humor of the inexperienced 20-something will differ from that of the 40+ year-old. The simple and absolute world that we believe to see and understand in our younger years tends to vanish from our grasp as we become older and attain the wisdom of experience. Perhaps the author's belief that "it has been done already" reflects some of that wisdom, and just maybe those of a certain age at the time of the publishing of "Crap Towns" felt exactly the same way about his book. It seems, after all, that every generation believes that it is the first to do or discover a thing without considering that humans have been doing human things for an awfully long time and that the observation "there is nothing new under the sun" has some merit.

"We do our best with the worst."

Indeed, microbial life did not have technology and yet fundamentally changed the environment to the point that it produced mass extinctions. That was my point. Humans are not the only form of life to fundamentally transform the environment, nor is technology required in order to do so.

Life has fundamentally changed the environment multiple times. The reason you live in an oxygenated environment is due to the waste produced by life.

Snake oil ain't gonna sell itself!

Wait'll you discover that different CPUs use different word lengths, and not just your expected 8-bit X power-of-2 of current modern processors). 36-bit native word with a 9 bit databus and a 16-bit address bus with 64 kilowords of memory... welcome to the fun of early digital computing.

Yes, one of the things that often gets overlooked about aging is that if you live long enough everyone you knew, and knew you, from certain eras of your life are gone... and that tends to make your life more ephemeral. Even the settings of your life are slowly removed, be it the house you grew up in, schools you attended, parks and other areas you played in with friends, businesses, styles, products, and technologies. One day you may find yourself looking around and finding nothing and no one that anchors you to the present.

This inevitability is something you should stave off as long as possible. Meet new people, add new experiences, learn new things while avoiding the siren call of nostalgia and the comfort of limiting yourself to the familiar.

Yes. A mature and well-understood tool does not cease to exist nor cease to be useful simply because new tools exist.

Simply being "new" does not mean "better," except for those who merely seek novelty.

Not really. In the corporate realm there was the well-known phrase "no one ever got fired by buying IBM." Such was the aura of IBM at the time.

Users "optimize output to maximize favorable responses" but favorable to whom? The social platforms define "favorable" as "maximizing attention/engagement" and incentivize accordingly, while users may have a different standard for "favorable." The prior can lead to perverse incentives and aberrant interactions between users.

This is true for every field. Everyone has had to step into a field that was built upon the hard-won experience of others and had to get up to speed, and the easiest way to do so is to recognize that fact and take advantage of the wisdom of those who came before.

Your description of use-cases for Lua reminds me a lot of the use of Forth in the 80s and 90s.

I know I moved into the LCD monitor era kicking and screaming because the CRTs I used with my computers were far superior for text sharpness and didn't cause me near the eye-strain when doing long programming sessions.

No, "first" infers a sequence and is associated with the beginning of that sequence. In the case of a relative heading, the existing heading is 0 degrees. Any change is relative to that origin point. Zero is also not the absence of anything, that would more properly be considered a NULL or NaN.

There are 360 degrees in a circle, and the first entry is 0 degrees. The first time element of a day is 0:00:00(and enough 0s to satisfy whatever resolution you require). These were not established in the 1970s, and somehow pretty much everyone understands and works quite well with these systems.

Obviously you can avoid all of this by buying your Linux-compatible PC only from a True Scotsman.

Yep, the old WaveLAN stuff. I had a parallel port adapter version of that back in 1997 for an old Compaq Pentium laptop that I used for portable web browsing and telnet sessions.

Regarding the city divided into service areas, if you are in the US many cities provided franchise rights to cable providers that gave them exclusive monopoly rights to provide services in exchange for the cable provider spending all the money to install the lines and infrastructure. Most of those franchise deals were done in the 1970s or early 1980s, essentially mimicking the agreements that were in place for AT&T (or RBOCs).

"I think that the right model for content discovery is either crowd sourced by a like-minded community" and now you've re-created the original Yahoo search, which was killed off in the original Search Engine Wars by the likes of AltaVista and later Google because it didn't take long for the amount of new content on the web to overwhelm the manual curation process.

A manually curated system can only truly work with a constrained domain of content/subject matter and tolerance for high lag regarding new information. Wikipedia is an example of what that kind of system would look like.

How much do you think the MITI Fifth Generation Initiative negatively impacted the Japanese software industry by side-tracking so many educational and corporate initiatives?

An important part of leadership is explaining decisions so that everyone has sufficient understanding of the goals as well as their contributions necessary to achieving said goals. This also invites feedback that may improve the process of achieving the desired outcomes, or reveal that the decision conflicts with other initiatives.

I have a predictable response to leaders that cannot explain decision-making but instead hide behind hand-waving statements like "it's a gut feeling" and that response is "well then let's get a scalpel so we can share that with everyone else."

Nearly all hunger-related deaths are due to the political environment they live in (including wars). Of course such environments also disproportionately include those who cannot gain access to antibiotics as well.

You could argue that vaccines would be hampered by the same environmental issues, but the window of stability necessary to vaccinate a person for life is much smaller and easier than the repeated stability moments required to gain access to antibiotics in a timely fashion for those infected with Strep A.

The question of prioritization of resources is not merely dependent upon the number of those affected, the creation of an effective vaccine is unpredictable. You're better off taking a broad approach in order to maximize the likelihood of success.

YES! The Inner-Platform Effect is exactly what I was trying to dig up through my fossilized neurons. Thank you.

This article really does remind me of an old Law of Software that we used to invoke: Any sufficiently large and long-lived application will eventually re-implement the entire software stack it runs on, including the operating system.. and it will re-implement it poorly.

I'm unsure of the source for this Law, but it certainly proves correct more often than not.

It's always a bit disheartening when I see someone from the engineering, product, or marketing sides of the business not understand the most basic of principles that salespeople learn at the beginning of their careers... people mostly make decisions based on needs, and if you don't ask and understand their needs you won't make the sale. Also, the more painful the problem that drives a need the more likely you will make the sale.

I had the benefit of learning this before I ever went to University by working sales jobs while in High School, and boy has it made my life easier not only as a programmer but also in nearly any collaboration with co-workers.

Don't recite features and benefits, that's just lazily hoping the person you're trying to convince will do your job for you. Take the time to ask enough questions to know and understand their needs. If the thing you're pitching can at least fit, and preferably help solve, some of those needs then you have a good chance of getting them to buy in. If, on the other hand, it doesn't address a need they have then you're going to struggle to convince them... and perhaps that may also be a clue that your solution may not actually be the best way to go.

So expensive? It has never been cheaper to create movies thanks to digital cameras and non-linear editors, digital audio workstations, etc. You are no longer encumbered by the costs of film, development, renting an edit bay, requiring an audio editing studio to mix audio and maintain a tape library of special effects or hire foley artists, no need for an optical printer to layer visual effects, etc.

You already can produce a movie in your basement, many of which can be found on YouTube.

An interesting idea but I'd imagine you would have to operate within something like the "100 year flood" boundaries that insurance companies do in order to define a constrained domain such as the Shannon Bound. I suspect you would also have to define the scope of this principle within the company and/or deal with the compounding effects of the multiple layers of the system and its "effective inefficiency."

Yes, just-in-time supply chain systems often become over-efficient and brittle... usually because each link in the chain assumes that someone else is taking on the burden of inefficiency by having excess inventory in order to absorb shocks to the system.

Yes, historically religion provided not only a means of understanding one's place in the social system in which one lived but also provided a sense of self in a much longer historical aspect. Successful religions existed on the order of centuries, if not millennia, and set the foundation for one's understanding of self, membership within the group, morality and ethics, legal frameworks, and an explanatory model for the universe in which all these operated.. all of which had outlasted rulers, systems of government, nations, etc.

Indeed, the more efficient you become the more brittle you will be. You must depend upon the present being static and the future being perfectly predictable based on the events of the past. The present and the future don't merely need to be dependable within your own domain but also in the entire world.

The flexibility necessary to succeed in a real world requires a certain level of inefficiency.