Viewing profile — jrd259

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?

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 requ…

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 deve…

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 catc…

The example of low and high data-ink (from Tufte) is switched. I wrote the author to suggest it be fixed

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 ensu…

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 …

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.

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…

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 di…

Indeed, what's up with the "mad scientist" bit?

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 h…

Ted Nelson's vision (in "Dream Machines") was strongly focused on micro-transactions for this reason.

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, thro…

based on Larry Niven story Inconstant Moon which won the 1972 Hugo Award for best short story.

"This is the way", perhaps?

X window system?

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 expectatio…

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 earthq…

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 …

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 th…

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 Huttenloch…

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.

No doubt someone will submit a version of Asimov's "Someday" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Someday_(short_story)

Well, Amazon for one.