troupe

Is Fastmail in any way similar to what is being described here? Fastmail looks like a replacement for Gmail or maybe Gsuite.

There is a certain amount of overhead in servicing an account whether it has $5 in it or $500,000 in it. A $5 account doesn't give the bank much to loan while a $500,000 gives the bank lots of money to loan out. So the bank would rather have 100 $500k accounts than 100 $5 accounts. The fees help make the bank willing to maintain the $5 accounts.

For example, Amex Platinum comes with $400 Dell credit each year, and several other similar perks.

When it comes to banks, there is also a tier where fees are waived for high value customers. For example, checking, atm, wires, are free if you have $50k or more in your checking account.

There is a very big difference between a bilingual school and a school where half the kids don't understand the language that math is being taught in.

ADHD and autism are diagnosed based on behaviors. This might work for cases at the more extreme end of the spectrum, but when it comes to trying to identify more mild cases, you are going to start seeing a lot of overlap in behaviors of the larger population. Couple that with extra funding for kids who can be said to have ADHD and autism, and you get a recipe for overdiagnosis.

Maybe it is worth it to try to make sure fewer kids with the issue slip through the cracks at the expense of diagnosing kids who don't actually have it. Maybe it's not, but it makes sense why it can happen.

That may be less true than it was 20 years ago. Even free resources like Khan Academy can go a long ways in helping parents educate their kids beyond what they know themselves. And for parents willing to spend even a fraction of what the public school would spent on education, they can pick and choose curriculum, tutors, or even online live classes with teachers well beyond what they would have in their local high school.

That said, parents without much of an education themselves may tend to set the bar too low for their children, but that often appears to be an issue in the public school as well.

I think the idea is that it is a numbers game. If you have a way to inexpensively generate a much higher click-through rate than doing it manually, your success rate will go up with a lower investment.

> people are choosing the least-worst option in terms of employer

Doesn't that mean people are choosing the best employer that wants their skill set?

Well, they were giving them jobs where they could earn money as well as providing for most all the things that a homeless person is going to need. But the return on investment from people just giving handouts is hard to compete with.

> When people aren't using the services there's always a reason.

That is what I was saying. There is the perceived return on investment of using the services designed to help get one out of homelessness, and it is being weighed against the perceived return of going back to the street. If you can bring in several hundred dollars a day on the streets that you can spend on alcohol, the effort of being in a place that is trying to help you change your situation might be hard to justify.

But a big piece of the equation is how easy it is to just get cash from well-meaning people on the street.

I'm not disagreeing with you about needing help with addictions, but there are two sides to the equation.

> until we can figure out a way to convince other americans that everyone deserves a home

I helped get a homeless person into a place that provided him with an apartment, food, and work that he could do, with a path to helping him become independent. He quickly left because on the street he had a better system for getting money that he could spend on drugs. It sounded like there was a large percentage of people the charity tried to help that ended up taking that path. There were some who were able to get back on their feet. The charity basically felt it was worth giving everyone a chance in order to reach the ones that were actually trying to get out of homelessness. However, as far as providing free housing is concerned, that is what this place did.

Unfortunately (at least for this person), the well-meaning people who were always willing to give him money on the street meant what the charity was offering wasn't of interest to him.

I've tried to help some homeless people get into a place where they are provided with housing, jobs, etc. to try to get them back on their feet. They often didn't last very long because they knew that on the street, people would give them money that they could spend on drugs and alcohol. So the difficulty with giving them money for alcohol is that it might make it harder for them to stick with a place that is actually able to help them in the long run.

(And I don't mean to be critical of your position, just pointing out that it might not be neutral in the long term.)

I initially thought it was saying we should not expect to have the results of the election sorted out until the 8th.

> when you need to generate a massive amount of randomized data.

Even faster than Clojure: Open VIM for a VS Code user and ask them to exit.

Common Lisp: A Gentle Introduction to Symbolic Computation might be useful for the context you are describing. https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/LispBook/

I would argue that a shared corpus that everyone has read is a key foundation to a society with rich and nuanced social intercourse. That doesn't mean everyone has read the same books, but there would be significant benefits in kids coming out of high school or college having all read 50 or 100 of the same great books (plus anything else they wanted to read).

I've had the pleasure of listening in on some discussions from high-school students that study classics meeting each other for the first time. Their discussions tend to be very different from what you'd hear from a typical high-school student. While other students might share the language, the ones who have read the same 50 or so great books tend to have a shared vocabulary of ideas at their disposal that doesn't seem to be there without the shared books.

The Do Nothing Scripting [1] is an approach that I feel recognizes the difficulty of automation by starting out with a script that just tells you what to do like a checklist. Once you've used it to fully document all the exceptions, etc. you can then start building the automation.

An approach like this seems to give more weight to the fact that just figuring out a way to document exactly what needs to be done is often the hardest part and if you get that right before you start writing automation code, it might make make the automation much more efficient.

[1] https://blog.danslimmon.com/2019/07/15/do-nothing-scripting-...

Can you give any examples of someone whose idea formation was not improved went they undertook the task of writing their thoughts down?

I agree with the overall idea of the article, but it is important to recognize that our modern assumptions make us think there is a particular version of a fairy tale that is the "correct" or "original" version. Stories handed down orally are likely changed in each telling to better fit their audience, so in that sense, the way fairy tales were told almost always included some type of sanitization or embellishment depending on who was listening.

The relevant sentence from the link: I would very much like to reach the point where we are able to provide access to some digital surrogate of the game while keeping the original disc in storage in the same way that we provide access to digital surrogates of our film and video collection fiberoptically to terminals in the Moving Image reading room.

> (e.g. like the US library of congress)

Does the LoC do something like this?

I think this is a lot less clear than just a yes or no. Imagine you have a library where you can't touch the books so you have to look at them through glass and turn the pages with some type of robotic arm. That probably wouldn't be an issue. What if you replace the glass with a computer monitor? So you are sitting in a room next to the book you are viewing. Then what if you extend the wire and sit in the building next door? What if you replace the wire with the internet? At what point did you start infringing on the copyright?

Imagine a video rental service where you can go in, and they will play whatever movie you want on a DVD player in the back room. How long can that wire be between the DVD player and the person watching before it starts being copyright infringement?

> I agree strongly with the bit about not including memes and jokes

It probably matters if it is related to the talk or not. A slightly related joke or funny picture at the beginning that introduces where you are going and then comes back with a deeper meaning at the end is very powerful.

Dijkstra's blog posts were handwritten with a fountain pen and distributed by being photocopied. :)

> I'm not sure it is the win you're suggesting. I had brief stints with CVS and TBH it really sucked.

What had you used that was better? CVS seemed like quite a step forward compared to RCS and the other available options.

Going to the IRS and saying, "This is how we plan to benefit humanity and because of that, we shouldn't have to pay income tax." and then coming back later and saying, "We decided to do the opposite of what we said." is likely to create some problems.

Getting paid $500k, while it is a lot of money, is not at all the same as someone benefiting from the profit of a company and making 100s of millions of dollars. $500k doesn't at all seem like an unreasonable salary for someone who is a really good executive and could be managing a for-profit company instead.

If OpenAI became a non-profit with this in its charter:

“resulting technology will benefit the public and the corporation will seek to open source technology for the public benefit when applicable. The corporation is not organized for the private gain of any person"

I don't think it is going to be hard to show that they are doing something very different than what they said they were going to do.

So you live in a region that has significantly less snowfall than what can be expected based on the normal variation that occurred 25, 50, or 100 years ago?