Viewing profile — ndriscoll

It's not really telling on oneself. Like you said, the easy stuff (e.g. basic business process automation i.e. constructing simple database queries) happens to be economically high…

It's doubly crazy to me that someone would let a machine take their time like that. An inanimate object, and they give it any amount of respect instead of fixing it to do what they…

At least in the US, bagged popcorn uses synthetic "butter" flavoring that can cause lung damage. Look up popcorn lung.

With machine automated formalizations now feasible, I wonder whether git repos (which would automatically include attribution) wouldn't make more sense as modern journals. e.g. you…

Perhaps we should not grant century+ long monopolies for out of print books, and even make copyright require a fee that the Library of Congress uses to add the material to a perman…

One obvious way to tighten such loopholes would be to ban indefinite licenses. It is either permanent or has a fixed, stated term. A permanent license must either entail no DRM or …

Hendrix has been dead for twice the length that copyright originally lasted, and for longer than the copyright period at the time he was alive (i.e. during his life when he was ass…

The referenced config setting is apparently literally just whether to have the server authenticate accounts with Microsoft, so pirate and nonpirate players can play together on a s…

That's why the nerd technical stuff isn't all that interesting to me; it's likely useless. But the idea that more democracy = better is an insidious one that I see often. Democracy…

Why do all individuals need to be in one network? There are literally zero decisions about my life that I want to allow people in China or Iran to vote on. I should hope they feel …

Nerd stuff aside, no voting system for socially significant decisions needs to scale to the planet. Democracies don't (or rather, shouldn't) scale. e.g. if the US and China or Indi…

You don't really need the Internet. Tons of documentation is available for download (either as a zip, or with the documentation site as its own git repo). Wikipedia is available fo…

Corporate offices are low trust environments where people do not really openly speak directly in any negative way (for basically the reason you've illustrated), so I wouldn't use t…

Why would we believe it would destroy economic growth? Typically monopolies are bad for the economy (e.g. most of the big software companies and more recently even hardware compani…

Didn't Nex Playground pretty much just do that? I saw them on display last time I went to Costco, and they apparently outsold Xbox during last year's Black Friday sales.

In a sense, that already exists. e.g. spotify or youtube premium. In practice only extremely exceptional individuals are going to see anything from it because creative markets are …

Wrong framing. "Intellectual property" has only been a concept for ~40 years. It's an invention inflicted upon us by our current elders. It can just as easily be done away with in …

The problems with micropayments are 1. The market for lemons. In fact sites trying to "monetize their content" are the most likely to be lemons, so just asking is a signal that you…

The law is what the people say it is. As the previous generation that created this system dies their successors can repeal eternal copyright laws and institute consumer protections…

As an aside, the "every type must have a zero value" is another level of insanity akin to pi must be 3: tempting to want it to be true but disastrously wrong. You're basically maki…

I agree the ? proposal seems bad, which is why I didn't speak directly to it (but gave do notation as an example of a better solution that addresses the concern about special synta…

Functions exist first to give names to conceptual blocks, and should generally be defined by "level of abstraction." i.e. you give a name to some task that then perhaps calls some …

That's just pointing out another layer of noise Go introduces. Here again in Scala, you can get stack traces for free with no extra syntax with value-based errors. There are alread…

In the overwhelming majority of cases, you want to trivially send the error up the stack to be handled, so you don't want to incur the noise in the middle of your business logic (a…