In the movie, America and the Soviet Union have both developed an AI. The two AIs are linked, and they rapidly shift from speaking human languages, to speaking in sequences of numbers that the onlooking humans can't understand.

Spoiler alert: this all goes horribly wrong for humanity.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossus%3A_The_Forbin_Project

I figure that it's basically making notes for itself, when it has to revisit the same code in a fresh session.

It's a Substack that reports good things happening around the world, divided into sections like "Conservation and Restoration," "Climate and Energy," "Medicine," etc. And they also give part of their profits directly to projects in those categories.

(I'm not affiliated with them, I'm just a subscriber.)

Their pitch is like, "we take your COBOL code, and all the real-world data you can give us. Then we model your COBOL program as a graph, where each node has inputs and outputs. Then we use AI to port each node, making sure that it has the same (input => output) mapping for all the test data you gave us."

And that's not a problem that's solvable with military might! "Investors around the world are declining to buy US government bonds" can't be bombed the way an oil refinery can be.

For video stores, there's Retro Rewind: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3552140/Retro_Rewind__Vid...

There are also games like that for trading-card stores, video arcades, and record stores.

(I'm probably going to buy the record store one, "Wax Heads." Being a music-genre nerd and recommending bands to people is a fantasy that I was born 10 years too late to do in real life.)

IANA formal methods guy, but my understanding is: yes, you're shifting the correctness burden from the code to the spec.

So why is that better? Because the spec is much shorter and more focused -- it strips out all of the implementation details.

It's bad to say "you have to trust this 100,000 line program." It's much better to say "you have to trust this 100 line spec, and the code that verifies it."

It's a policy where, if you become disabled to the point where you can't work, it pays out $X per month, every year until you're 65. And if you're partly disabled and have to cut back your hours, some policies compensate you for those lost wages.

These LTD policies are expensive, but they DO give you peace of mind about this possibility.

* Medicare in the US (single-payer, private providers)

* Medicare Advantage in the US (government provides capitated payments to competing private companies, which then do all the administration work)

* The Singaporean system (complicated, but revolves around mandatory payments to HSAs)

etc.

It's interesting: 3 states (Vermont, Colorado, and Massachusetts) did recently try to make state-level single-payer systems. https://www.thirdway.org/report/single-payer-health-care-a-t...

I would say that the ACA is on the free market-ish side of the design space: individuals purchasing (subsidized) insurance from private companies.

The "Bismarck model"[0] describes a family of healthcare models where people pay into a central healthcare fund, and that fund then pays medical providers -- which can be private businesses.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bismarck_model

(If Americans are thinking, "huh, that sounds like Obamacare / the ACA marketplace!" then you're right.)

It's funny that he (accurately) quotes the Cato Institute as being opposed to employer-provided health insurance... and then implies that the sole alternative is the NHS. Um, I'm pretty sure that's not what the libertarian Cato Institute was suggesting!