hasmanean

Plumbers are paid well because of the way they organized.

-They restricted the number of apprentices. That limited the number of people in the field similar to medical school.

-They could bar substandard workers from practising in the city of London.

-They kept their craft knowledge in house and it was never written down. Apprentices swore oaths never to reveal the “secret of the mystery.”

If you look at programming we do everything the opposite. It’s no wonder salaries will collapse. In fact the only question is why didn’t they collapse sooner.

It was declared untrue in 1818 by Johnson’s dictionary.

But that’s just 1 vote. ;)

Because alchemists were afraid of people stealing their recipes. Jabir bin Hayyan (aka Geber) the father of chemistry wrote in his own shorthand which is named after him—-gibberish or jibberish.

So Lead, gold, and quicksilver were not the substances their names suggest. They were codenames. The real processes have never been revealed.

I think there was a bbc documentary where they showed a manuscript of Newton or Kepler with a geometric proof and compared it to one by Al Jazari. They were identical.

In fact even the vertices were labelled the same, and followed the order of Arabic letters.

Shoulders of giants indeed. Shoulders of jazari.

We have YouTube plumbers. Has destroyed the industry? No. But it’s made plumbing accessible to a whole range of DIYers.

Maybe AI will be just as productive.

Seriously YouTube has been amazing for the world of self learning. AI could learn a lot from it.

Expensive quixotic adventure.

Perhaps that is the experience he was after for his billion node graph.

The length of common LLM responses is perfectly able to fit on a sheet of paper.

If you had a ham radio connection and wanted to broadcast emergency bulletins to people, radio fax would be quite useful.

It’s push rather than pull like the web. Email works too, but fax has more utility in an emergency situation. Beats having to download adobe acrobat on every computer….

They talk about so little because that’s what the fcc rules limit them to. Can’t blame people for behaving like Elmer the safety elephant all the time.

What can you do with a license? Jam live music with other people over the air, in full duplex mode. Thats something only analog radio can do—because the latency is so low.

Yes, discussing politics or broadcasting music is not allowed over ham radio. Basically all we can do is exchange call signs, locations and details about our signals and stations.

I have wondered if you could use the fact that analog radio over short distances has latencies measured in the microseconds, so you could have a jazz band with players scattered over an entire city, but they can play like they are in the same room. Internet comms have too much latency (measured in the milliseconds).

Does it have to be pneumatic? Electric propulsion would be simpler and not need a tight fit in the tube.

Maybe we need scientific sculptors. 3D printing and cnc machines will allow some interesting 3d forms to be generated.

I spent my life looking for such an elegant tome. If I had discovered it when I was 15 maybe my life would have been happier.

Utilitarian programming is like utilitarian food. Programming should be seen as an act of worship to the god of simplicity. If the artificial world intrudes and makes the program complicated, this is what leads to suffering. Ultimately it is the world which should be changed.

If I could look down mid-flight and see what was happening below…ancient battles, modern news events…that would be a truly educational inflight experience.

So is that what all the visual cues are in real life, things like fashion accessories, uniforms etc.?

Not everybody understands English 100%.

The guy in the old west who drew his gun and said “them’s fightin’ words?” He probably didn’t enough English to understand the whole sentence but picked out a few words which meant to him “fight.”

If they had used polygonal mirrors instead of flat ones they would not have lost any data.

And how does a stampeding herd coordinate to move around a fence?

Buffalo will run off a cliff in the hundreds because those in the back can’t see what’s in the front.

How to you make a fenced off ranch when 30 million buffalo decide to stampede through?

Actually the grasslands of the Great Plains had immense amounts of carbon sequestered in their roots which extended several feet down.

Buffalo, by grazing and fertilizing, helped the grass.

Now the USA has 87 million cattle.

Private cattle ranches could never have competed with 30 million bison owned by nature, free for anyone to take.

Wrap it in a second function that parses out quotes and bit-stuffs the commas with something else.

Assassins are a step too far, but maybe advertising…let the public choose whether to buy the real deal instead of the parasitical imitators.

That’s still multiple lines of code.

Here’s one in c++ that uses only a single line of code (excluding function headers)

// How do I format this as code?

vector<string> split( const string& s) { return accumulate(s.begin(), s.end(), vector<string>(1), [=](auto acc, char c) { if (c == ‘,’){ acc.push_back(string()); } else { acc.back( ) += c; } return acc; } ); }

I think Compute is a gerund (a noun derived from a verb, like “swimming” as in the activity.)

Stick the gps data in a binary file. Store then filename in the database record.

And yet…somehow some other issue always manages to capture the lion’s share of worry. Sugar gets a pass all the time.

Yes you acknowledge it’s bad. How long before you throw birthday cakes out the window?

Well at least you can tell if there’s a party going on in room 106.

21 +- 13 is stretching the definition of “almost constant.”

You would need live routing of messages. And the ability to reroute, filter, inject messages dynamically into code.

Why must everything be done as a function call? You can’t change anything without recompiling the code.

Today everything is implemented as a function call. Need to send a message? Call a function named “snd_msg” or something.