Only if you want it to.

But first, the diabetes patent cure ads: Did you know that a space parasite is attached to 9/10 pancreases, causing Bread & Wine disease and doing the devil's work for pharma companies? But there's a Biblically proven remedy. To receive the details just tap the malware dispersal button.

Okay, now you're in and ready for the good stuff about influence...

Old white male narrator:

Have you ever wondered why you keep seeing the same talking points on yer right-wing agitprop feeds?

It's the jooos!

The right to die humanely is the single most under-regarded and under-valued aspect of life hygiene.

So it's to be expected that Pascal has serious limitations for engineering a whole computer system and that Kernighan was sensitive to these limitations.

I was taught programming according to Wirth, and there was a lot of fraternal bitching about the hazards of C in my classes.

After learning to think about programming in Wirth's way, C/Unix felt like a revelation of expression with a total architecture manifestation that Pascal (nor Modula) could ever reach that resolved the conflict between top-down design and bottom-up engineering approaches.

Props to Alan Kay's OOP aspirations for new abstractions founded from the insights of Church, McCarthy and Sutherland and to all the esoterica.

And props to Stroustrup: it's hard work to make a rich windowing system in C without abstraction at the level of Stroustrup style OOP, even as C++ turned out to be a cut through architectural bone.

As higher levels of abstraction will always called for to endow new applications, I am struggling to welcome to the sea change and baffling emergence of genAI.

I'm not troubled by the prospect of an AI retrieving binaries from an archive, where those programs have been "proven" by formal methods.

When I hear about the prospect of AI "generating" machine code I get queasy.

Arg... I'm babbling my perspective and regards for the tuple of VAX, C, and Unix as a lovely architecture that will stand the test of time.

—

Reg: Romans have bled us white, the bastards! They've taken everything we ever had! And not just from us, but from our fathers, and from our father's fathers!

Stan: And from our father's father's fathers.

Reg: And what have they ever given us in return?!

Revolutionary #1: ...The aquaduct?

Reg: What?

Revolutionary #1: The aquaduct.

Reg: Oh. Yeah, yeah they did give us that. That's true, yeah.

Revolutionary #2: And, uh, sanitation.

Stan: Oh yeah, the sanitation, Reg. Remember what the city USED to be like.

Reg: Alright, I'll grant you the aquaduct and the sanitation. The two things the Romans HAVE done.

Matthias: And the roads!

Reg: Yeah, well obviously the roads! I mean, the roads go without saying, don't they? But APART from sanitation, the aquaducts and the roads...

Revolutionary #3: Irrigation?

Revolutionary #1: Medicine.

Revolutionary #5: Education?

Reg: Yeah, alright, fair enough...

Revolutionary #5: And the wine!

Francis: Yeah! Yeah, that's something we'd really miss, Reg, if the Romans left.

Revolutionary #6: Public baths.

Stan: And it's safe to walk in the streets at night now, Reg.

Francis: Yeah, they certainly know how to keep order. Let's face it -- they're the only ones who COULD in a place like this.

Reg: Alright, but APART from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh water system and public health... what have the Romans ever done for us?

Revolutionary #1: ...Brought peace?

"does trump lie a lot in an official capacity?"

Response:

Yes! A lot! Egregiously! Well documented!

U.S. doesn't need to be dispensable or indispensable.

U.S. can and will change politically as a reaction to Trump, and economically as reaction to over-financialization.

War will continue to be further relegated towards history, while catastrophes will again be endured.

What has been seen as separate objectively, culturally, territorially and economically will be re-seen as combined.

"Externality, finitude, commons and cooperation" are watchwords for the 21st century.

A great generational crossing is underway and empires are dying, yet Rome is eternal.

Due to the very diffuse statistical nature of the mapping of the input to the output, some will be experiencing extraordinary appropriate useful results while others will be experiencing crap. And due to the subjective nature of quality and quirky topographies of the internal terrains of these systems and the haphazard control protocols, the spread of resultant value (so to speak) of these appliances may not be understandable as a normal distribution. Scenarios we might judge as lying close to each other on the input terrain may generate very peculiar bumpy results of output terrain.

One of the most damning considerations of this technology is that gross uncertainty about result quality may be manipulated by the appliance maker leading to wild patterns of exploitation without any prospect of accountability.

As there's no pretense of formal function, there can be no verification, and so there's no methodology for determining quality: a presumably working appliance may appear reliable until it isn't with no way to understand the inflection. Those with insider control and information can game customers with no chance of accountability, but the system can't be understood.

The problem with magic beans is guessing what they'll grow into.

Meanwhile, the seismic movement of business towards these private and completely mysteries silos of "knowledge" (which is a grotesque misnomer) may arrive at dead ends from which they can't retreat.

This is a far greater danger than a malicious bot because a great migration into the dead end is not just well under way, but regarded as a brilliant prospect which we must run into at all deliberate speed.

//When she and her colleagues experimentally boosted mitochondrial output in the rats, the neurons recovered, and the animals showed fewer signs of anxiety. In a subsequent study, she and her colleagues showed that a commercially available supplement (opens a new tab) produced the same positive results. “It restored everything,” Sandi said.//

What is Picard's theory? That energy boils from the surface of the sun, emanates through space, shines on the earth, induces life, then a bad mood happens, which can be detected by a specialized measure of a mitochondrial energy quotient and fixed with a patent elixir?

//“They have to pay a 180-calorie tax every day of life,”//

And after all they end up dying just like everyone?

Death and taxes, omg!

//...said that the chamber study shines a light on the “control systems in our bodies regulating the calories we burn each day — systems we have yet to fully understand.”//

There's a lot more that's not completely understood, like gravity...

//“Picard and his team have helped open the door on these systems and set the stage for future work in metabolism and health,” he added.//

"Shine a light, open the door, set the stage"! Look for a subsequent article titled The Gorgeous Metaphors of Science.

The biggest attendant factors are vision or hearing loss. Note that these factors are merely attendant, not stated as causative.

There are no significant pharma treatments.

The "surprise" finding was that the examination regime produced improved cognitive "scores" in both the mediated group and the control group. And these improvements persisted until death. In other words, the study is a complete mess.

Takeaway: the mind is going to go along with the body.

The appearance of  in unicode is weird.

The Googlez say that Steve Jobs rejected the use of  on Apple keyboards as a "overuse" of the brand, which led the use of ⌘ (place of interest, St. John's arms, Bowen knot) for the "command" key.

Generally typefaces are not subject to copyright.

The proposition that Apple can impose its discretion on others' use of unicode is unreasonable by the intention, definition and nature of the code.

I find that the more thought I give this, implications of such constructs expand far beyond this particular use case.

For example, consider other other brands which are a re-use a character, X being the most notable.

At what specific points in digital systems does a number become regarded as an IP asset? Whose choice is it to regard a number as IP (when is a number just a number)?

The questions continue to unfold with further thought.

What's even more dumbfounding is that the magic beans may actually just "fix the app".

Why doesn't this kind of article strike terror in the heart of the industry?

It's a canary-in-a-coal-mine and the bird has died.

Perspective of view always totally wrong.

As screens age they'll drift or fail and not match each other, looking very fake.

No actual window is a channel for the view outside, so once placed, no one need ever further decide the view. The simple possibility of changing channels is destructive to the idea of a window.

But other than totally destroying the idea of reality, fake windows will be very "realistic."

Add UBI. What keeps it from also being eaten by increasing rent?

> A hexagon is the most efficient shape in nature because it maximizes area while minimizing perimeter.

The hexagon is not the most efficient shape for area to perimeter, it's the circle.

Honeycomb is not hexagonal, it merely appears that way by virtue of packing uniformly sized cylinders.

As an empty honeycomb analogy is the only idea offered for a new "Popular Front" media— noting a thousand words submitted to summarize some approach— and that the claim of a hexagon as proffered is simply wrong, this article reads like someone announcing yet another way to milk some millionaire rubes from their money in a vein like The Lincoln Project, which are a forlorn sector of right-wing ideologues, alienated due to the rise of MAGA, but still reflexively classist and Republican.

Maybe Substack can't figure out any other way to grow revenue than become expressly political propagandists?

How do you verify that it works?