“She Faced a Life-Threatening Miscarriage. Under Arkansas’ Abortion Ban, Even Calls to the Governor’s Office Didn’t Help.”
That's from this morning, reported in ProPublica.
https://www.propublica.org/article/arkansas-abortion-ban-mis...
1,939 karma · joined February 14, 2008
That's from this morning, reported in ProPublica.
https://www.propublica.org/article/arkansas-abortion-ban-mis...
Innocent bystanders of gang violence.
Factory workers killed by industrial machinery.
That chemical tank in Los Angeles that is about to explode.
Woman in Arkansas with ectopic pregnancy. (Abortion is illegal in Arkansas.)
Now you think of one.
Computers are finite machines. There is a theorem that although a machine with finite memory can add, multiplication requires unbounded memory. Somehow we muddle along and use computers for multiplication anyway.
More to your point there is a whole field of people who write useful programs using languages in which every program must be accompanied by a proof that it halts on all inputs.
(See for example https://lean-lang.org/ or David Turner's work on Total Functional Programming from about 20 years ago.)
Other examples are easy to find. The simplex algorithm for linear optimization requires exponential time in general, and the problem it solves is NP-hard, but in practice works well on problems of interest and is widely used. Or consider the dynamic programming algorithms for problems like subset-sum.
Theory is important, but engineering is also important.
“Honestly, since we're going towards socialism, we need to abolish child support. Women have the right to get an abortion because it is their body their choice. A man has to use his body …”
That was enough for me.
“If you have a certain sort of mind, you might think ‘no, people respond to incentives; if the grid paid for every efficient lightbulb, we’d save more electricity.’ If you have a certain, not unrelated, sort of mind, you might think ‘well, if nobody is getting paid for installing these lightbulbs, maybe I should get the money.’”
If the employer wants an employee they can feel proud of, well, that's a service too, and one they can purchase with money, if they choose.
Now when I put something aside I know there's a chance I might pick it up again in ten years. There wasn't much evidence of that when I was twenty-five.
It's been one of the best things for me about middle age.
1. The story is promulgated by a long-retired ex-FBI analyst
2. Fox News picks it up and runs with it
3. Fox News watchers get excited about it on social media
4. Someone behind a desk at the FBI is assigned to pick up the phone and say tiredly “Yes, yes, we're investigating it all very seriously”
5.The FBI waits for the new Flavor of the Week to distract the Fox News people, then closes the investigation
Meantime, CNN reports on phase 4.
“Anthony Chavez, 79, worked at Los Alamos National Laboratory until he retired in 2017. He reportedly disappeared on May 8, 2025.”
Typical example: “In the years since, several others connected to JPL have also died or disappeared: Frank Maiwald, a specialist in space research, died in Los Angeles in 2024 at 61.”
When my kid, now almost 22, was very small, she would sit on my lap in front of the computer, with XV displaying a picture of Elmo. “Green Elmo!” she would demand. I would adjust the sliders to turn the reds green, and we would laugh uproariously at green Elmo. Next it would be “Purple Elmo!”, and we would laugh even harder.
This kept us both amused for quite a while.
(Update: Here's a picture of what that control panel looked like. The turn-Elmo-green control is top center. https://xv.trilon.com/manual/xv-3.10a/color-editor-1.html)
* I couldn't sell our product because our competitor's has a certain feature. How soon can we have that feature? * I can't make any new sales, but prospective customers keep telling me they need a solution for a similar problem. Could we expanded our product line? * Some customers could be using a certain feature of our product, but they find it too confusing. What could we do about this? * A big customer told me they have a problem our current product doesn't solve, so I told them we would be able to solve it by the beginning of next month
As you say, the sales department is the driver of development work, not vice versa.
Where are these businesses that only ever want to sell the same amount of the same stuff forever?
If a dev produces value for the company, and then the company can automate away the least valuable part of the dev's job, the dev is now more valuable. Why would tbe company get rid of them just at that moment?
Well, some will, because some companies are badly-run. Others will take advantage of the opportunity.