costigan

Could you say a bit more about your workflow? I'm used to having source code files open in emacs (or zemacs) and a lisp REPL in another buffer. I edit the source files directly and then recompile changes into the running lisp. The code stays in sync because the text code files are the master copy and the running image is updated (when I choose) to reflect changes. Program state (e.g., large data structures) isn't generally kept in the source files. If what's in memory needs to be preserved, then I need to have serialization and deserialization methods, or a database, or I need to save the running image to a snapshot file. I've probably so internalized this process that there are problems with it that are invisible to me.

The commenter's point was to disagree with the previous comment that "souls aren't real". Lack of evidence either way means we don't know. Occam's razor, while a good heuristic, is a heuristic, not a theorem.

It hasn't been limited to probationary employees. Here's one example: https://www.science.org/content/article/nih-ban-renewing-sen... Agencies have also been directed to make plans for "significant reductions". For example, EPA plans to cut 65%. Fish and Wildlife and the Bureau of Indian Affairs are preparing for up to 40%. These latter cuts haven't happened yet, but they're very likely.

It does. That's what the negotiation on overhead rates is for.

Didn't the NIH freeze the review meetings in this year's proposal review process, putting all grant funding that would start next fiscal year in question? This is separate from the change to the overhead rate.

Doesn't he own four private jets with another on order?

Only if the organization with the money wants to do that. Flip it around. Do you think the sports program at any major university pays for physics research facilities (or any topic outside of sports medicine)?

The federal workforce, as a percentage of all jobs in the U.S. was 4% in the 50's, decreased steadily to 2% in 2000 and has held roughly steady since then. (The source is https://usafacts.org/articles/how-many-people-work-for-the-f... second figure, and I'm taking total jobs as a proxy for the population that the workforce serves.)

The end of that period of reduction was Clinton's Presidency. Clinton's National Performance Review (NPR) started at the beginning his term in '93. It had goals very similar to the stated goals of this efficiency effort, but it was organized completely differently. He said, "I'll ask every member of our Cabinet to assign their best people to this project, managers, auditors, and frontline workers as well."

GPT4o: The NPR's initial report, released in September 1993, contained 384 recommendations focused on cutting red tape, empowering employees, and enhancing customer service. Implementation of these recommendations involved presidential directives, congressional actions, and agency-specific initiatives. Notably, the NPR led to the passage of the Government Performance and Results Act (GPRA) of 1993, which required federal agencies to develop strategic plans and measure performance outcomes. Additionally, the NPR contributed to a reduction of over 377,000 federal jobs during the 1990s, primarily through buyouts, early retirements, natural attrition and some layoffs (reductions-in-force or RIFs).

Source: https://govinfo.library.unt.edu/npr/library/papers/bkgrd/bri...):

The recommendations that involved changes to law, the GPRA, were passed in both houses of Congress by unanimous voice vote.

I don't think the stated goals of the current efficiency drive are controversial. The problem is the method. I want to understand the basis for people supporting those methods, the "we've got to break some eggs" crowd, when the example of the NPR exists. In my opinion, it didn't cause conflicts between branches of government, didn't disrupt markets, and was wildly successful. It also caused much less disruption in people's lives, because the changes were implemented over several years with much more warning.

I, personally, don't think the real goals of this effort are the stated goals, but that's a different issue.

Let's take one example. The Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS) is a two-year post-residency program that trains health professionals in applied epidemiology. These officers are crucial for on-the-ground investigations of disease outbreaks. It's a 2-year program, with 50-60 doctors in each year. All of the first-year doctors in this year's program were fired by DOGE, so far, for a capacity reduction of 50%. Both years are in the 'probationary' civil servant category, so the jobs of the rest of them are still at risk.

I asked ChatGPT 4o for other examples, and it generated a list of 40. You can do that for yourself, if you're interested.

Research funding awarded to universities and to performers internal to NASA (back when there was a reasonable amount of that) had overhead rates that were similar to the NIH rates. When I worked at Xerox PARC, we would perform research for other parts of the company and charged overhead too, although the rate was a little lower (around 40%). Institutional overhead has been a regular feature of how research has been organized and funded for 60 years. Change is fine, but most of the costs are legitimate, and it takes time for the rest of the system to adjust to changes in one part of it. Doing it abruptly is damaging the system and will negatively impact the careers of many students and young researchers.

This equivalence between a company that provides one app that, if it were to disappear, would hurt no one, and a government that has thousands of functions, many of which are life-and-death in both the short and long run, is just ridiculous.

I don't know. Mark Hamill is a voice acting chameleon. James Earl Jones was himself, which was great for many roles and impossible to improve upon for some. Their strengths lie on different axes.

My understanding is that they do need to follow the treaty requirements if they launch from a country that has signed it or, maybe, are incorporated in such a country.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetary_protection From the article: Category II: Any mission to locations of significant interest for chemical evolution and the origin of life, but only a remote chance that spacecraft-borne contamination could compromise investigations. Examples include the Moon, Venus, and comets. Requires simple documentation only, primarily to outline intended or potential impact targets, and an end of mission report of any inadvertent impact site if such occurred.[16]

I was in the south bay, and walked and exercised outside frequently after about the first month. Santa Clara County had a similar policy concerning separation distance outside, and I never had an unpleasant experience. I'm sorry you did, and I won't defend rude or overly fearful behavior. However, I draw a distinction between unintended consequences and weaponization. I've seen no evidence the officials who instituted the policy weaponized anything or directed it toward any specific group or groups, and you have presented none.

My belief is that they were collectively responding to an uncertain, rapidly changing situation, were incentivized to be very conservative given the early experience in Italy, didn't adjust their approach sufficiently when new information revised the case fatality rate downward, and did a poor job overall of balancing the broad spectrum of risks and costs. I don't think any of these mistakes were intentional. And none of us, including those who criticize these policies in hindsight, really know what would have happened had the policies been more lax, especially early on.

Was it Twitter's policy or not? (Of course it was, as we see by how easily it was changed by the new owner.)

I think you misread the article slightly. The 26% of zombie papers are inside the 44% of papers that contained at least some flawed data. Look at the figure just below this quote where the blue bar, indicating papers he thought were ok, covers more than 50%.

That may have been the purchaser's expectation, but their deal was with the seller (and bank), not the community in general. In none of the legal papers I signed when purchasing my home was any arrangement with the city constraining future construction nearby. That's done with my vote (so without much effect) and any political action I can spur.

> NIL is an empty list.... It isn't. It has none of the mechanics of an empty list in Python etc.

I can see how NIL is confusing when coming from Python, but I think this comment has it backwards. The idea of lists as chains or trees of pointers with a distinguished termination value predates LISP by a few years. Moreover, this kind of list predates Python's use of the term by more than 35 years. If you treat lists as just a particularly useful subclass of trees of CONS cells, then they and NIL make perfect sense. Python's lists are fine too, they're just a different kind of thing.

Stolen is a vague word. If there's evidence she believes there was sufficient fraud to have changed the result, I would be interested. If she was referring to the stolen Podesta emails and Comey's statement right before the election, then those things happened. You may think those things didn't matter, but it's no surprise she does. And then there's the whole storming the capital thing she didn't do.

The excess deaths are quite possibly attributable to both the virus and the vaccines if, as one plausible but very unproven example, they're due to inflammation and/or micro-clotting caused by the spike protein. But in an environment where everyone will be exposed to the actual virus eventually, with uncontrolled initial exposures, it comes down to whether the benefit of getting vaccinated is worth the risk. The data I've seen says that it is.

The canonical references (e.g., http://www.ai.mit.edu/courses/6.834J-f01/Williams-remote-age...) are pretty good. If you are interested in diving very deeply into the topic, I think you'd be better off going through the work that Brian Williams has been doing since he worked on Remote Agent (https://people.csail.mit.edu/williams/Web%20site/papers.shtm...). While this more recent work reflects his individual perspective and not the ideas of his remote agent collaborators, it is a rich and detailed body of work that can be studied. Brian's collaborators at NASA Ames mostly left Ames and went on to work on a wide variety of other interesting projects. At JPL, some of the ideas in Remote Agent went into a large project called the Mission Data System. I only know about this from a distance, but my impression is that this was a rethinking of how to build spacecraft flight software from the ground up to have the flexibility that Remote Agent sought while also sticking close to JPL's software development and testing methodology. It's described here: https://mds.jpl.nasa.gov/public/

I think lisp is still used in various nooks and crannies of NASA. As a small example, I was the payload software engineer for the LCROSS mission (a robotic mission in 2009 that demonstrated there was water ice near the moon's south pole). The software that ran on the payload computer was in C, but there was a very simple, ad hoc scripting language provided by the company that provided that payload computer. Because this language was very simple, I wrote a higher-level DSL and a simulator of the computer in common lisp and then wrote all of the instrument command sequences in that DSL. Lisp's simple, flexible syntax and macros made it easy to express patterns of commanding and timing for this. What the commands did is described in the last (topmost) blog entry here: https://blogs.nasa.gov/lcrossfdblog/ . These days, I'm working on the VIPER rover, and the commanding approach for it is very manual, as Ron described. VIPER will be a moon rover, so the turn-a-round time for commanding is much shorter than it would be for a MARS rover, and teleoperation from Earth is a very reasonable and lower-risk solution than autonomy. Still, some of the systems used in self-driving vehicles today to evaluate the environment around the vehicle will be used by VIPER, but to provide advice and situational awareness for the drivers. No lisp involved.

You're certainly right but still missing the point. The 10 injuries were most likely not due to a vulnerable part of the sub. They were likely due to a sudden change in the sub's motion, which wouldn't have occurred had they hit a container.

Just to be completely clear, this was satire. The professor who wrote it is very well-regarded by his students.