Viewing profile — johngossman

Look, I understand. There is a ton of low-value writing in the world: legal boilerplate, press releases, most documentation. That writing can and will be replaced or supplemented b…

Sorry but I think this essay is largely wrong. First, there is tons of evidence that working your thoughts on paper, word by word, helps develop the idea and exercises the brain. S…

Fun. I studied Japanese for two years, let it slide and now every Kanji is like "Hmmm, I've seen that before but..." I can still read kana though, which is nice to know.

I think you are confusing the scientific process, in particular Popper's falsification principle, with science's purpose, which is to find the truth, or at least sort things into t…

Ironic that you should question if the commenter talks to regular people and then cite people who work on laptops from the coffee shop, use Slack etc.

They wrote a lot of letters to each other. That's effectively how the Royal Society started, as the formalization of a network of letter writers

According to William Rosen in "Justinian's Flea," this plague also led to an agricultural revolution and population explosion in Western Europe. One cannot, of course, “know” this …

Lots of serious historians disagree. There are whole books on the topic. Here's just one paper as an example https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-demograph...

Fwiw, in 1900 my grandfather taught school in Washington State. He was 16 years old. I don't know how good he was, just saying it wasn't so long ago.

Go look at the demographics of the last election and then tell me which groups shouldn't be allowed to vote.

Wait...aren't you quoting the Boomers from the 60s?

If only the olds would die we could build more datacenters! More seriously, why wouldn't older, longer-lived people be more likely to address long-term problems like climate change…

"The default setting on phones is to save storage by only using 12 megapixels, so unless you've changed settings, the 200 megapixel phone loses 94% of its megapixels as soon as you…

Welcome to my rathole: Venetian history. To expand on your thesis, the Council of Ten was the executive power in Venice, but the Doge and minor council attended the Council of Ten …

Average is probably not what you need to worry about: I'd bet David Attenborough and Mel Brooks still have IQs considerably higher than the average 25-year old. And I'm not convinc…

While I mostly agree... Venice was run by very old men. It was common for the Doge to be in their 80s. Meanwhile, many of their neighbors had kings who were very young, sometimes t…

Businesses are risk averse and in the current environment they are all looking to secure their supply chains, whether to reduce their dependence on silicon from Taiwan, oil from th…

While I generally do not trust information from "advertisements", in this case I don't see how this is any worse than including a list of sources in the bibliography. What this cou…

Good list. It does not include "Silk Roads" by Frankopan, which I agree with. That's a good read but much more a history of world trade (hence the plural) and strangely western-cen…

I got it. And I've played a 1905 Martin and you can still plug a 1950s telecaster into a 1950s amp in turn plugged into wall power and everything works. Just saying, that is not th…

I can understand why one would want to move from Kindle to another device, but this article starts by complaining that support is being dropped for devices from before 2013. I can …

That is correct. Biology uses the term fit slightly different than the general public

In the late 1990s I went to a RealNetworks developer conference and Andreesen, then at Netscape, was a keynote speaker. I was curious and open to his insights, but his talk was so …