Viewing profile — lucas_membrane

In the USA, the history of assuming that the national government will support power to the people the way FDR, PWA, BPA, TVA, ... did has given the national government quite a bit …

About 30 years ago, buying compilers retail went from the common route for beginners to more expensive than most beginners wanted to spend. And specialized professional software en…

Compare the causes of death in midlife now with the causes of death in midlife 50,000 years ago. What is total over all causes of the lesser of the % of deaths by that cause 50,000…

Coroners will almost never classify death by motor vehicle or aircraft collision or impact as suicide.

I just found out that if one is developing a wxPython app, this: menuFont = wx.Font(12, wx.DEFAULT, wx.NORMAL, wx.NORMAL) # 12pt font Will be flagged as an error by ty, wx.DEFAULT …

Not exactly. For example, Major League Baseball has been granted an anti-trust exemption by the US Supreme Court, because they said it was not a business. In some cases in which fi…

Except that both the number of commercial minutes and the number product plugs in each hour have quadrupled in my recent memory, which is not even so good anymore since the Dumont …

A functional program is an a self-contained expression -- an isolated system following its own rules. The foremost example we have of such a thing is the universe itself, but the u…

Not for me. I spent a few weeks a few weeks ago trying to use it. Much I liked. Much I didn't. I like FP, so that was not a problem. But I found that lots of stuff was pretty hard …

Seeing all those SRFI's listed, etc, on that page (63 of them), is astounding. How long would I have to work with scheme to get to comprehend what each represents without looking t…

I believe that you have a fine understanding of the issues involved. The risk is two-sided. One part of it is that AI may somehow become smarter than us. The other side is that hum…

> "good enough" sound 40 or more years ago, the big hifi brands were racing to get total harmonic distortion down to 0.05% or less. The average person is unlikely to complain if it…

Some other factors were pretty important: 1. In the modern family, everyone wants to listen to something different. In the family of the 1960's to this was not possible, because to…

Trying to keep up with new software at that site got a lot a easier for me a few days ago. The experience is now a daily "Spotted nothing, installed same." I see that they had a ma…

I have the same trepidations. It's getting damn near impossible to get a haircut or a surgical procedure or a parking place without carrying a cellphone. The trend is toward all te…

I think I've found ways to dodge the problems you describe. I am a person who is has been addiction-adjacent in my search for novelty for an absurdly long time. I've been quite dev…

Fun fact (???) wayback about 40 years ago Central Point Software was humiliating Microsoft with its suites of utilities for Microsoft's OS's, which included file managers for Windo…

I've been using the free VSCode editor on linux, and it has recently started hinting that I ought to install some version of Copilot. I'm an old retired guy who just programs hobby…

You make a fine point. My simplified version of it is that there is no such thing as an isolated system. Things change. A system optimized for one environment is likely to fail whe…

I was thinking of Player Piano, which might be the best of Vonnegut's novels, as I thought over this article. Vonnegut said that all of the stories we believe are lies, because we …

Teddy Roosevelt, a man anxious to do good things, probably gave the idea that people who know things should control things a big boost by promoting science, public health, and reas…

Anyone here know anything about where and how the cotton for bandages for the Union wounded was obtained during the US civil war? India and the Middle East being so distant, I'm gu…

Few things that the article missed. 1. Software products had a huge physical size. Sometimes a single application or development environment would have 3 to five kg of serious mass…

That kind of statement is made to warn the investors and potential investors about the contents of the financial statement to which it is attached. The statement will include amoun…