tumba's comments

What CO2 sensor do you use? Any recommendations?

You're not the only one!

I believe you are incorrect about the US Army’s percent of the federal budget. Total defense spending (all branches) represents around 15% of the budget.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expenditures_in_the_United_Sta...

APL is not so much a model of computation as a new notation for semantics which already exist. The real semantic explanation of APL is set theory and traditional mathematics.

Probably the best deep ground-level explanation of APL is Iverson’s paper “Notation as a tool of thought.” [0]

The bootstrapping explanation you describe sounds a lot like what Paul Graham did in “On Lisp” [1] and in a much more complex fashion, Queinnec in “Lisp in Small Pieces” [2], both highly recommended.

[0] https://www.jsoftware.com/papers/tot.htm

[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/onlisptext.html

[2] https://www.amazon.com/dp/0521545668

In Zero History, the purpose of the shirt was not to fool the algorithm, but to trip a deep "gentlemen's agreement" between intelligence agencies to make invisible anyone bearing a certain pattern in order to protect the intelligence apparatus.

It will always be difficult to sustainably defeat recognition algorithms and I expect this to be an arms race along the same lines as other counter-surveillance techniques.

Gibson's suggestion that deeply coded and secret exceptions to mass surveillance might be used to protect state actors seems to me a plausible and concerning aspect of these developments.

Some of these aren’t bad. The Goal, for example, is a great book for helping you build intuition about constraints. But by far, the best manufacturing book I’ve read is Factory Physics, but Hopp and Spearman. It rewards study with a mathematical understanding of how value chains work.

https://factoryphysics.com/factory-physics-3rd-edition

Internet Archive copy of the IATA publication on boarding pass barcodes referenced in the Krebs piece.

https://web.archive.org/web/20120324074139/https://www.iata....

Here is a relevant interview with journalist Steven Pearlstein in which he suggests that current conditions only support 7-9 global journalism outlets worldwide, with only 2 or so non-partisan and fact-based, mostly for the upper classes.

http://review.chicagobooth.edu/economics/2019/article/capita...

> But at that time APL was not running on any computer; and he stoutly insisted that it was unnecessary that it ever run on a computer. It was for him a notation with which he could express algorithmic concepts; and for him at that time, that seemed sufficient.

Indeed. Because both APL and Lisp began as languages for describing computational ideas, it stands to reason that they would be particularly fit relative to languages that evolved under other fitness criteria.

I was intrigued to not the opposition to APL mentioned in the article by Djikstra and others on the basis of a different mental model of computation.

> I am firmly convinced that APL and LISP are related to each other along an important axis of language design and that acquiring simultaneous expertise in both languages is possible and desirable for the beginning student. Were they unified, the set of tasks that succumb to terse, flexible and expressive descriptions will enlarge enormously without overly increasing the intellectual burden on the student over his initial 16 week contact period.

In the context of setting the objectives for education in computer science for general students, I like the idea that the objectives are to (a) understand the limits and potential of computation and (b) achieve fluency in programming such that one can conceive of and describe computational processes for a wide range of tasks.

He explicitly suggests that fluency in using other people’s programs not be an objective. Perhaps this is a bit idealistic since most programming in the wild today consists of glueing together other people’s programs. But it seems like the right objective when possible—-in some ways it is a view of computer science as a liberal art.

  > My advice is this: as you learn Common Lisp and look for 
  > libraries, try to suppress the voice in the back of your 
  > head that says “This project was last updated six years 
  > ago? That’s probably abandoned and broken.” The stability 
  > of Common Lisp means that sometimes libraries can just be 
  > done, not abandoned, so don’t dismiss them out of hand.

I have found this to be true in my own experience. The perception of stagnation is, however, a common initial objection to folks working in CL for the first time.

This is understandable, given the fact that this is from Deloitte, who would like to sell consulting services.

I would also highly recommend the Thorne Miniature Rooms at the Art Institute of Chicago.

http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/thorne

These do exist. They are used all the time for land-based oil rigs. Search for oilfield temporary roads.

That’s a bit reductive. For example, many anti-depressants affect serotonin reputake, which is now known to be integral to gut function. Further, often these off-label uses are at doses far below the levels required for anti-depressant effects.

A more accurate TL;DR might be something like: allowing off-label prescription is a two-edged sword. One the one hand, it has enabled innovation and the discovery of clinically effective treatments. On the other hand, the benefits are unevenly distributed because few doctors know about them, we know less about the side effects, and knowledge about effectiveness versus placebo is limited.

I would comment that many off-label treatments using anti-depressants do have significant double-blind studies behind them.

Buffet is well-known for this and I often hear tech people dismiss his views as a result, but I think some people misunderstand what he is saying.

Buffet is concerned with companies that will have a long term competitive advantage and thereby generate stable and growing cash returns over long periods. He doesn't generally invest in technology stocks because he says it is hard to determine which companies have a competitive advantage that will be durable enough to produce long-term returns.

Look at Netscape, MySpace, or Yahoo! for companies that looked valuable but ended up not having a competitive advantage. It doesn't have anything to do with "understanding" technology---the question is the ability to pick the winners in advance.

For anyone interested in index card systems, the idiosyncratic method of Niklas Luhmann [0] is a fascinating example. Many additional interesting opinions on notetaking and modern database translations of classic note taking ideas maybe found on the website of the translator, Manfred Kuehn [1].

Another interesting and radically less complex example that I have personally found useful is the Pile of Index Cards system. [2]

  [0] http://luhmann.surge.sh/communicating-with-slip-boxes

  [1] http://takingnotenow.blogspot.com/2007/12/luhmanns-zettelkasten.html

  [2] http://pileofindexcards.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

I agree the future is hard to predict, but I don’t know about your claim the US engages in similar trickery.

Economic statistics for the US with fully disclosed methodologies are readily available. US military spending in 2016 was 3.3% of GPD, according to the World Bank. [1] New York’s economy is more industrially diverse than average (ranked 17 out of 51) with Long Island as the most diverse county in the state. [2] I realize that fed report is out of date, but as of 2016, the NY Metro area itself had a GDP of nearly $1.7 trillion, making it one of the larger economies in the world. [3]

[1] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/MS.MIL.XPND.GD.ZS?end=2...

[2] https://www.newyorkfed.org/medialibrary/media/research/regio...

[3] https://www.bea.gov/newsreleases/regional/gdp_metro/gdp_metr...

This article is mostly a review of the book The Invention of Nature by Andrea Wulf [0] which traces the origin of our concept of Nature to the Prussian explorer Alexander von Humboldt and his millieu of scientists and explorers.

After reading Wulf's book last year, I also read a historical novel about Humboltd by David Kehlmann called Measuring the World [1] which I highly recommend to anyone interested in these ideas.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/dp/0345806298

[1] https://www.amazon.com/dp/0307277399

I'll just offer a contrary anecdote. A few months ago, I had a catastrophic failure of my X260 failure (hard crash--would not power up) while on site for a client in a manufacturing facility on the south side of Chicago. I called support and within 3 hours, a tech was on site with a comprehensive set of tools and parts. The technician had been repairing ThinkPads since the late 1990s and still wore his original IBM badge along with his newer one. He ended up nearly completely disassembling and re-assembling my machine in the temporary cubical I was sitting in to replace the motherboard, but was gone within two hours and the machine has worked fine ever since.

I'm sure service varies, but I always purchase the same day, onsite, four hour warranty option and try to be a little savvy about who the contracted service firm is. You can use Lenovo's website to find the certified repair firms and suggest that your ticket be dispatched to one you want.

I have been buying a new ThinkPad every couple years for about 15 years. I have ambivalent feelings about the newest generations, but still find them to be the most ergonomic and comfortable option for me (TrackPoint, keyboard quality, matte display, extended battery options).