I'm sure it felt very real at the time.

Theuth: "This invention, O king, will make the Egyptians wiser and will improve their memories; for it is an elixir of memory and wisdom that I have discovered."

Thamus replied: "Most ingenious Theuth, one man has the ability to beget arts, but the ability to judge of their usefulness or harmfulness to their users belongs to another; and now you, who are the father of letters, have been led by your affection to ascribe to them a power the opposite of that which they really possess. For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them.

You have discovered an elixir not of memory but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant and hard to get along with, since they are not wise, but only appear wise."

Which is to say: "All this has happened before, and will happen again."

> Even a normal spreadsheet is fairly complex beast. But the novel thing about bidicalc is the backwards solver. Mathematically, updating a spreadsheet "backward" is a (potentially underdetermined) root finding problem, because we are trying to find a vector of unknowns such that , where F is the function computed by the cells formulas, and G is the objective value entered in the cell. Note that F is not necessarily a single formula, but the result of composing an upstream graph of cells into a single function.

> The actual root-finding solver is a custom algorithm that I made. It a general purpose algorithm that will find one root of any continuous-almost-everywhere function for which a complete syntactic expression is known. It uses a mix of continuous constraint propagation on interval union arithmetic , directional Newton's method and dichotomic search. It is of course limited by floating point precision and available computation time.

But that really doesn't answer your question. I see no reason why the solver wouldn't decide every time it had a two-variable summation that ADD(X+Y) doesn't reverse to X=-90 and Y=100.

The article is an interesting philosophical situation where you know the intent is good. But maybe, they took it too far without any of the necessary caveats.

> Overall, these ideas lead me to believe that the open source movement needs to see itself as in a larger social context. Can we shift the balance of power away from massive companies and their massive harms? Can we prevent Nazis from using our software? Should we even try?

> I know my goal: shift the default in open source from “it’s free for anyone to use” to “please don’t use this if you’re evil”. I don’t just want to do this for my little project; I want to slowly change the discourse. I’m not sure how to do that effectively, if it’s even possible.

Because if what this guy is saying is reasonable, then it immediately follows that it's also reasonable for every ideology and religion to exclude the ones they don't like. For example: how does an antisimetic software license strike you? Because that would be a perfectly reasonable license for some people to enact, and fully justified by this article's logic.

Do unto others, and all that.

  - XP was good
  - vista was bad
  - 7 was good
  - 8 was bad
  - 10 was good
  - 11 is .....drumroll please.... bad.

Lesson in here somewhere. Something about about a toaster representing the local intelligence maxima?

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/ulez-cameras-van...