Notices by Brian Marick (marick@mstdn.social)

@dimsumthinking @inthehands @heidilifeldman A lot depends on three people on the Supreme Court deciding, "OK, this has gotten out of hand."

Maybe the Great Man theory of history is passe¹, but the "failed to rise to the occasion" theory has legs.

¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_man_theory

@dimsumthinking @inthehands @heidilifeldman Haven't read the details yet, but I expect "we'll figure out what to do with this man sent in error to a hellhole in maybe a few months, maybe a year or so" should make Roberts fear the judgment of the God I guess he only pretends to believe in.

This is an affecting story of what it's like to be one of the casket carriers for soldiers killed in foreign lands.

https://charlotteclymer.substack.com/p/trump-picks-golf-over-dead-american

(via @charlotteclymer, @inthehands)

@wolfsbruder @inthehands I wouldn't assume that Venezuela's Interior Ministry reporting on this topic is any more credible than Musk, say, reporting on fraud in the Social Security Administration.

@inthehands @ajsadauskas @tomquinn.bsky.social Worked for Solomon, except this time both petitioners will say, "Sounds great! Can we watch?"

@ajsadauskas @inthehands @tomquinn.bsky.social You have to retroactively take Rupert Murdoch back, first.

...
Stop the presses! @jmeowmeow has a much much better epigram for the idea:

Nouns, like gems, shine best in a setting.

I've had a few epigrams that were sticky, most notably "An example would be handy right about now" and "you have to go slow to get fast."

How's this for one:

"Nouns should be like quarks: rarely found in isolation."

I sing today of the noun phrase. When thinking of users, think "overworked accountant," not just accountant. (Hat tip: Jeff Patton). A "neighborhood" should be a "searchable neighborhood."

A bare noun shrieks "unexpressed assumptions."

In 1950, the American Political Science Association's Committee on Political Parties published "Toward a More Responsible Two-Party System," in which they called for the Democratic and Republicans to become more different.

I guess they didn't notice the monkey's paw curling in the desk drawer.

Fast forward some decades. "Everyone" now includes self-confident twitter trolls who think tagging themselves "bigballs" on social media projects an attractive swagger. Dumbasses, in other words, working for the biggest dumbass of all. (2/6)

One such dumbass sees a report with some dates of birth showing as 1875. A non-dumbass might think, "That date appears oddly often" and ask for an explanation. Our dumbass, though, has a brain thoroughly pickled by social media conspiracy theories. And is tasked with finding fraud. (3/6)

In computers, dates are commonly represented as integer offsets from some fixed date. Nowadays, that "epoch" date is usually January 1, 1970. In Cobol, it was 1875. (Both are semi-arbitrary choices, made for historical reasons.)

A problem is that there's no way to represent "unknown." But the field has to contain *something*. So Cobol programmers used the epoch, knowing that everyone would know to interpret 1875 as "unknown". (1/6)

'Hawthorne warns of the arrival of a technology so powerful that those born after it will lose the capacity for mature conversation. They will seek separate corners rather than common spaces, he prophesies. Their discussions will devolve into acrid debates, and “all mortal intercourse” will be “chilled with a fatal frost.” Hawthorne’s worry? The replacement of the open fireplace by the iron stove.' [Nathaniel Hawthorne in 1843]

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/01/27/the-sirens-call-chris-hayes-book-review

The state of Washington (USA) is debating a bill that would require some schools to increase their "lunch hour" to 20 "seated" minutes. WTF?

https://www.king5.com/article/news/investigations/investigators/washington-considers-minimum-lunch-time-for-school-kids/281-c40cedc7-a50d-458c-a9fc-4eb88de7b400

My son (born '95) had "about an hour" for lunch. Has that gone away, nationwide? Jesus Christ on a pogo stick.

"Street medicine providers and homeless outreach workers who travel into Las Vegas’s drainage tunnels have noticed an uptick in the number of people living underground."¹

Any other Olds noticing how much the vibe today resembles the dystopian "New Wave" science fiction of the late '60s and '70s?² Rather more than the later Cyberpunk genre.

¹ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/people-living-in-las-vegass-tunnels-urged-to-get-medical-treatment/

² https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Wave_(science_fiction)

@alpha @inthehands Maybe the money isn't as important as the flattery, the acknowledgement that one has power, is a Big Man.

An instance of something we see in software: a US health insurance company tells anesthesiologists that it won't pay them if surgery takes too long.

This is pretty similar to managers telling software teams how long the software will take to finish.

Physicians have historically been resistant to outsiders telling them how to do their job – and have had the clout to make their opinion stick. I suspect that clout has been eroded to nothing over the past 30 years.

https://www.asahq.org/about-asa/newsroom/news-releases/2024/11/anthem-blue-cross-blue-shield-will-not-pay-complete-duration-of-anesthesia-for-surgical-procedures

@amszmidt It may have been a higher optimization setting (I seem to remember you could, for example, turn off detecting overflow and converting a fixnum into a bignum).

But I really do think the Maclisp/Common Lisp folk were pragmatic about the realities of efficiency: function calls were *expensive* back then, and tolerated differences in behavior between compiled and interpreted code in a way that seems very foreign today.

@amszmidt It's been more than 40 years since I spent my time disassembling Lucid Common Lisp's compiler output (to find out the clever efficiency hacks they used, in service of Gould Common Lisp), so I can't be sure, but I'm sure that it compiled a large set of primitives into inline machine code, with no level of indirection through a lookup table.

So you couldn't affect the interpreter by redefining `car`.

That's what I was (clumsily) alluding to.

@amszmidt @luciano You're right. But: I was looking for trivia to highlight that human language has no mechanism for protecting old definitions from new changes. Specifically, consider how "literally", "awesome", and "sublime" mean different things than they used to. Suppose a dictionary changes its definition of "awesome." That will change, subtly probably, the meaning of every definition that uses that word. (1/2)