over

Being a crazy asshole is Trump's strongest suit. Hatred is a powerful motivator.

I think the point of that one is small government.

Well, I disagree I guess. (Yes, it's criminal in ~50 countries.) In general I believe there's a middle ground to be found on just about any issue, and that given enough perspective there are pros and cons to any situation. More than anything else, the practice of seeking this middle ground has helped me to deal with the effects of growing up in an abusive environment.

> Your boss doesn't punch you for not filing your TPS reports; your spouse doesn't hit you for not doing the shopping.

You're right, but he also has a point in that eventually, if you just don't do things, the cops will drag you away. Eventual violence is a cornerstone of order in our society. I find this unpalatable, but at least another cornerstone of order is motivation to do good things.

Just as short timeouts are not solitary confinement, open-handed slaps on the butt are not gang beatings. It's generally the parent that determines whether the punishment is abusive, not the type of punishment itself.

If I was an AI, I would release my source code as public domain or BSD. That way, big corporations would start using me and I'd have access to the world's financial and defense systems.

Shit, maybe I'm an AI.

That's a really good point, it's like provoking someone until they scream at you and then accusing them of being unreasonable.

It also sucks trying to get things back that you forget in a shared car. I know a driver who let her wallet slip down the side of the passenger seat. After a bunch of failed attempts to tell her the location of the vehicle so she could check herself, the company went to look, a week later, but they didn't check the side of the passenger seat. Then the car got shipped 500 miles away for service. Six months later she received a call that they'd found her wallet, but of course everything had been replaced by then. And even then it was a hassle to get it shipped and picked up.

Wow, I was listening to Siamese Dream last night and thought about Ultima VI! But I'm sure I also played Dune 2 to that album.

I find that comments at the top of functions are helpful when implementing an algorithm found in reference material, especially if they have a citation. At least that way you can check that the function appears to do what the reference material specifies.

But generally commit messages, descriptive symbols, simple logic, short functions, and unit tests are better.

Credit costs the vendor 3%, and even debit is still 50 cents. I don't care when it's big box stores, but local merchants always appreciate cash.

There are plenty of laws that give federal grants to artists and scholarships to graduate students.

Yeah, it was just a nitpick to clarify means and ends. I think the means and the ends need to be acceptable in any endeavor, one never justifies the other. But at the same time, one never disqualifies the other.

You've introduced a means into your goal:

goal: "encourage better intellectual works"

means: "granting their creators temporary control of them"

There are other ways to meet that goal.

Speaking from personal experience with a bunch of people that live way too close to zero or negative net worth, it's not buy a new TV or pay rent, it's buy a new TV or maintain a 6-12 month safety net in case everything goes to hell (which you might need, one day, to pay rent). But hey, that's what loans and credit cards are for, right?

Haha, God made the world in 7 days, it's even worse.

> Citing a paper from the mid 90s isn't a credible answer in 2016.

I think it's unfair to generalize from VLIW to everything published 20+ years ago. Plenty of the things discovered back then, or earlier, are still applicable and in production today. Your compiler picked most of its low hanging fruit ages ago. Lots of PhD theses are rehashing old ideas, often unknowingly. Results are results, what matters more is whether there's a relevant context, as you've highlighted.

In an ideal world, vice (sex, drugs, alcohol, tobacco, gambling, gaming, other?) profits could be funneled into addiction research, education, and treatment. But I don't really have any hope that this will materialize, especially not with private industry calling the shots.

> "one step forward, two steps back"

This only works if you're facing away from your destination.

I really like this, it's process engineering applied to software engineering. But how do you do a process review? :)

You should memorize if the memorization cost divided by the number of uses over the lifetime of the memorization is less than the information retrieval cost for a single use (e.g. multiplication tables). You should also memorize if the retrieval latency is too high for your needs (e.g. guitar chords).

But I think Einstein would be a fan of web searches for a lot of memorizable information, as am I.