Notices by Brian Marick (marick@mstdn.social), page 3

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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)

That's different from how, in Ruby, you can change `Integer::+` and have it not affect all the additions the interpreter does (because, in this case – I believe – all the additions have been compiled to machine code).

In early Lisps, there was one namespace, so people could easily stomp on functions used by the interpreter. Same effect as compiling to machine code. (2/2)

What commonly-used programming languages have a single global namespace, such that you can redefine core functions? The only one I can think of is Emacs Lisp.

(Whereas you can redefine `+` in Ruby, that doesn't override the `+` the actual Ruby runtime uses. That's what I'm getting at with "global namespace".)

@luciano I think so. You can redefine `+` in Ruby and not blow everything up because you don't have access to the "real" definition (compiled in). Method swizzling sounds like what you can easily do in Emacs Lisp: which is stomp on a defined function.

But I think a core distinction I ignored is the difference between definitions that are compiled into machine language (`+`) and those that are not. The question was not a good one.

This interview with the author of /Adam Smith’s America: How a Scottish Philosopher became an Icon of American Capitalism/ is not bad on how Smith’s thought has been distorted: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/revisiting-the-father-of-capitalism/id1081584611?i=1000665865388 https://geekdom.social/@FantasticalEconomics/113153115118145867

@donaldball @inthehands @dimsumthinking I don’t know the rules around this. When I read “bike trails”, I thought of the kind of trails mountain bikes are for. Do people try to keep ebikes off of side-of-the-road, in-town bike lanes? That seems wrong.

(And are there jurisdictions that actually *enforce* rules on bike lanes? Here, we all – ebikes, bikes, skateboards, are constantly dodging cars parked in the bike lanes.)

@inthehands @dimsumthinking I might look more carefully. I may be missing discrete assistance.

The Kids These Days all seem to ride powered skateboards or weird balancy things or scooter-type ebikes rather than Real Bikes. Or they ride buses. The city mass transit buses don’t collect fares at campus and nearby stops, so buses are packed between classes and the bike lanes are mostly empty.