Viewing profile — prewett

I believe that according to Catholic and Orthodox thought, God is Being itself. If you're familiar with Plato and Aristotle, God is the Form of Being. If not, I guess you could say…

A six week retreat to Bali might alleviate the surface boredom, but it will just self-medicate the emptiness that causes the boredom, though.

Money buys convenience and comfort, but it does not buy friendship, belonging, love, virtue, or purpose. The latter have usually been seen as more essential to the good life. You c…

Maybe even something like a small LCD display, and it could be touch sensitive so you could switch directly to an agent? Like ... the Touch Bar? :) (I always liked the idea of the …

Technically the first two are still true... No one has seen the edge of the earth because a sphere has no edge. No humans have ever flown, although we have created metal machines t…

Using LLMs for hobby programming is like using a computer to solve sudoku puzzles. The whole point is to do it yourself. Personally, I find that when I start thinking "hmm, I wonde…

Whether that is true depends on what kind of place you want to buy and the amount of the loan. In Boston's north shore, the only available apartments are triple-deckers where you c…

Early in the Industrial Revolution people voluntarily moved from the countryside to the cities despite all that, so apparently a lot of them thought it was an improvement. Some of …

> Neptune's inner moons may be the only place in the solar system where we can directly observe that material [from the insides of a past moon] Clearly this means that we need a Ne…

You could try contracting. Perhaps you would like places that are not pure software (some kind of hardware, either electrical or mechanical, that needs software for UI). I'm at one…

Because confusing two people because of having the same name is much less likely for European names than for Asian names (there are only about 100 Chinese family names, for instanc…

Not the GP, but I have one non-partioning AIX trivia I discovered by accident. Turns out that malloc(0) returns NULL on AIX, but non-null on Linux, SunOS, and Irix. (I was surprise…

Do they see coming the predictable failure-modes of left-wing economies, though? History seems to suggest not. Also, did "the entire left-wing" see specifically a debt crisis throu…

I hope you've taken a good look at the alternatives, because historically they've been terrible. Unless you mean "not capitalism but still market economy", or "European market econ…

(somewhat tangential) We've got too much subtle deception going on, let's call it what it was: the Panic of '08. Because there was definitely some panic going on. Solvent companies…

But were the internet companies of 2000 the ones who became the most valuable? GOOG, yes. Netscape and Yahoo, not so much. Amazon yes, pets.com, not so much. Sun is no more, Cisco …

Listening to "Fiddler on the Roof" and klezmer music unsettled to me the idea that major is happier than minor. I still think minor tends to sound "sad", but those wedding songs an…

The scoring is the same as a project from a year or two ago that used AI generated videos, I wonder if this a rework of that? I think this is a definite improvement, if so. I think…

I guess I'm not impressed that some totally different alloy is stronger than steel. You can't change both method and alloy and claim that the method is better. Presumably the paper…

It's in the beginning of the Prose Edda. It's part a genre one could call "universal history", which is tying your group's history into the narrative of the world. It was pretty co…

Spending is also a noun. A gerund used to be the way you nounify a verb. “Ad spending” is perfectly grammatical, unlike “ad spend”. This seems to be part of a broader trend, not ju…

I think it is used sort of the same way that fundamentalist Christians take the Bible "literally", as in, there's just the literal meaning of the words, no deeper symbolic meaning,…

Who's defrauding poor people? The risk/reward is much better for defrauding rich people...

Landlords of Adam Smith's England and what "landlord" means in contemporary America are two different things. None of my landlords have charged to use pre-existing natural resource…

I think the original notepad.exe was just a Win32 Edit control (whatever it was called) with a window and some menus. I expect that Apple's TextEdit.app is just a wrapper around th…