jrd259

7 ms·

1.
by jrd259 1y ago
I'm so out of the loop. What is the new, special sense of Rationalist over what it might have meant to e.g. Descarte?
2.
by jrd259 1y ago
In his book Cows, Pugs, Wars and Witches the anthropologist Marvin Harris tries to ground the pig taboo as a protection against the tragedy of the commons. As per Harris, pigs require excessive water, a scarce resource in the region. A fl
3.
by jrd259 2y ago
This is an insult to the doctors I know who deliberately chose to do primary care because they were more motivated by service than money or prestige. For that matter, I know a developer who chose to work in IT support for a cancer resear
4.
by jrd259 2y ago
The ability to search the code base is one reason I insist on correct spelling even in comments when doing code reviews, and also keep adding to my IDE's dictionary so it will catch my spelling errors.
5.
by jrd259 2y ago
The example of low and high data-ink (from Tufte) is switched. I wrote the author to suggest it be fixed
6.
by jrd259 2y ago
You might also want to discuss Fitt’s law. Difference between a diagram (Tufte) and a GUI is that we only look at a diagram, but a GUI we interact with, which means we need to ensure people can actually click/tap/select the eleme
7.
by jrd259 2y ago
All fair points about zero. Sorry, I acknowledge now I was overly influenced my metrics dashboards I use for alerting. I've seen people panic at a seeming steep rise in error rate or increase in latency because the chart was not show
8.
by jrd259 2y ago
I'd argue that the zero value should always be shown. Otherwise you get different impressions of the rate depending how you scale and subset the Y axis.
9.
by jrd259 2y ago
I'm disappointed by the somewhat ad-hominem attack on Silverbook for being a porn producer: "Aaron, based on his previous work as guy at a rationalist nonprofit, videogame producer, and porn producer, decided to recreate Hillman’
10.
by jrd259 2y ago
The other issue is that it requires the driver to read a screen while driving. in 1988 at the MIT Media Lab I built a system called Back Seat Driver that provides spoken driving directions, allowing the driver to keep their visual attent
11.
by jrd259 2y ago
Indeed, what's up with the "mad scientist" bit?
12.
by jrd259 2y ago
John Varley had a short story with that idea, too. A spacefaring race that is only conscious when needed. Good sarcastic lecture about how consciousness is overrated by those who have it.
13.
by jrd259 3y ago
Ted Nelson's vision (in "Dream Machines") was strongly focused on micro-transactions for this reason.
14.
by jrd259 3y ago
Suppose we did get 100 year advance notice of some catastrophe. How many people would call it "fake news", or perhaps even interpret it as part of "God's plan"? Let's suppose, through some miracle, a substant
15.
by jrd259 3y ago
based on Larry Niven story Inconstant Moon which won the 1972 Hugo Award for best short story.
16.
by jrd259 3y ago
"This is the way", perhaps?
17.
by jrd259 3y ago
X window system?
18.
by jrd259 3y ago
The company that employs me has a stack ranking system that determines raises, but does not mandate PIP even for the lowest-ranked, unless they genuinely are not meeting expectations. I would advocate looking for a more employee-friendl
19.
by jrd259 3y ago
There's also such a thing as over-building. Robustness, per se, is good, but it comes at a price, including the opportunity cost. My city, Toronto, has never known a serious earthquake, though there is a fault zone in nearby Ottawa.
20.
by jrd259 3y ago
I'm at Amazon and am the senior developer on my team. For the last few months an "away" team has been adding a feature to a service I own. It's only n of 1, but the process worked well. I did the high level design and
21.
by jrd259 3y ago
If the comment was in code you touched, this seems right. Typos affect searchabilty. If the typo was outside (but close to) the block you modified you shouldn't be required, and the team ought to have rules of engagement to state this
22.
by jrd259 3y ago
Certainly the Ted Nelson vision for hypertext was all about annotation, in particular as a means of correcting half-truths and distortions in the mass media. In 1995 Dan Huttenlocher and I created CoNote, which supported annotation on web d
23.
by jrd259 4y ago
I can't explain the downvotes. Visit https://www.yadvashem.org/righteous.html for a chronicle of some of the people who saved some of my people.
24.
by jrd259 4y ago
No doubt someone will submit a version of Asimov's "Someday" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Someday_(short_story)
25.
by jrd259 4y ago
Well, Amazon for one.
26.
by jrd259 4y ago
I hope you mean you were offered money for fake reviews, but declined.
27.
by jrd259 4y ago
That is not supposed to happen! You need to contact customer support, it's a bug.
28.
by jrd259 4y ago
It did well on ""Eyes of the World" Grateful Dead finding some artists with similar vibe I never heard from. It did poorly in "Heart of the Sunrise" by Yes and "Nautilus" by COVET https://maroo
29.
by jrd259 4y ago
This is about class, not luck, except in the narrow sense that being the child of affluence is luck.
30.
by jrd259 4y ago
If the moon uses a different time than UTC, it will also be necessary to define the switchover procedure and a boundary for spacecraft from Earth, which presumably launch using a terrestrial clock.

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