more language diversity is more fun. common languages are boring. folks should learn more languages, rather than less. its good for your brain too. here's to another babel moment!
Learning a lot of complicated things is good for your brain, like programming in various languages or playing various musical instruments. It's fun too.
But having a multilingual globe comes at a massive, immeasurable cost.
One of the greatest forces to improve economic opportunity and equality in the history of the world would be if everybody suddenly agreed on one simple, terse, expressive human language and switched to it, in all contexts except home life and shared spiritual or community services.
No more IELTS tests, no more spelling bees, no more "why is 'wherefore art thou' not about Romeo's location?", no more notarized translation costs everywhere in the world... everybody gets equal access to all media created in all places (although of course there'll still be place-specific references in that media), etc
If you were designing an ideal human world, the last thing you'd want to do is build a Tower of Babel on it.
I feel like the next major advancement in spreadsheets is nested hierarchy.
Specifically, iTunes (especially the older interface from iTunes 5 to 10) allowed for Playlist Folders and Smart Playlists.
Workbooks can have several sheets, but not in a nested structure. Same with SQL databases and tables. If I want to organise data (e.g. Country > Social group > Friend name/email/phone number) then it's easy to do in iTunes but difficult with typical Contacts apps.
Web browser bookmarks are pretty good, but the end object has only 2 fields (name and URL). So what I do is I have a fake-radio track object in iTunes, with all the extra tags. Double-clicking it loads a page on localhost, which launches a PHP script that then opens a URL in my browser (for the friend list) or document.
Things are getting better. I was aware of them, but jupyter is the 600 pound gorilla in this area.
I wouldn't use observable, as you are tied to their web service, and I've had too many companies close to use such a service for important data. Pluto is promising, but (I believe?) Only supports Julia, which is growing but still not that popular, or known.
True, but you have access to whatever Python libraries are installed, and your output is web-based. So you can potentially output anything a browser can display, including interactive 3D graphics and widgets. You also have access to the command line in Jupyter, so you can run whatever shell commands you like.
Because the data is inside a data structure like a table or dictionary that you can output, iterate and map over however you like with the various Python and library methods or functions.
i'm not anti-social at work. i'm friendly and it can be fun to shoot the shit, but i've rarely had workmates turn into real friends. i don't know why, but the people i tend to connect with don't often work in the same industry. i know how to keep work and home separate (i have a couple of ways of setting work context for myself so i have a way to leave when i'm done).
the only good thing about working at an office is the free food, but food isn't terribly expensive anyway. i could probably use transport savings to buy myself a nice food every week or two.
generating electricity will also create waste products. i'm not sure that part can actually be avoided. biological systems can repair themselves (within limits) and make use of a wide range of energy sources. silicon based life certainly sounds interesting, but it would probably end up being a lot more biological than you're expecting.
well, solar power is abundant both on Earth and in the vicinity space. The waste product just happen to accumulate at Sun's core where there are enough space for 5 more billion years.
depending on how you capture that energy there will be waste of some kind that is created either in the manufacturing/growing process for the capture system or as a byproduct of converting solar energy to another form that is more easily stored. one of the advantages of diverse biological systems is that you can have cycles of organisms that process waste back into energy sources using solar energy + reactants as input. a self-sustaining silicon-based life-system would probably end up following a similar pattern to process waste back into useful resources, because waste products probably cannot be avoided.
You're absolutely right. Silicon based 'life' system does have the advantage that it would not be restricted to Earth environment - it can probably also adjust itself in way that biological beings here on Earth cannot easily achieve (genetic engineering are almost always generational, software engineering is the complete opposite).
there's also the whole racism thing. north american settlers basically wanted nothing to do with the natives, except to claim their territory. we have a folktale of the one time a white guy and a native girl got together and it was "a big disaster". latin america has its own racism problems, but there was way more race mixing which is probably a more important diver of assimilation than who controls the power.
> unclassified version of the report is expected to be released later this month
so has the report been released? i would like to read it rather than continuous speculation about its contents. also, i'd love to see a leak of a more classified version of the report (if one exists), just to see what they consider sensitive information and not. the more info the better really.
i always hope that new exciting companies will work towards a sustainable business model that can exist without a buyout from some mega. i understand that its difficult to start a business, much less a sustainable one, but its sad to see such promising companies grow into a pitch instead of a business.
maybe its a good thing i didn't get hired for their SLC office, because i would have quit over this.
to me this move indicates weakness. its a fine exit for the early employees and the executive team, but there's no reason to sell if you have a solid business plan and a realistic vision for future profitability. maybe the only vision for the future they want to pursue involves some expensive investment or the business was built on massive debt that can only be paid of in this way.
i want to be a part of building something that can survive as an independent entity. selling is an admission that this is either not a goal or not possible given the current position of the company. both of these are against my ethics. why should i stay at a company that has openly admitted that they are incapable or unwilling to pursue independence?
At this point, what difference does it make? Visa can survive as an independent, profitable entity by your criteria.
> but there's no reason to sell if you have a solid business plan and a realistic vision for future profitability.
They had 5.3 billion reasons to sell. With an acquisition offer that high, it's not about the company's ability to survive independently. It's about doing what's in the best financial interests of the company and employees.
> i want to be a part of building something that can survive as an independent entity. selling is an admission that this is either not a goal or not possible given the current position of the company. both of these are against my ethics. why should i stay at a company that has openly admitted that they are incapable or unwilling to pursue independence?
Your distinction is a bit arbitrary. Plaid wasn't a fully independent company after they took significant money. Take a look at their board of directors. Only 2 out of 5 board members were Plaid executives. They had already "sold" part of the company when you applied.
i didn't say "fully independent" i talked about a willingness to pursue independence. that's the difference that i care about. i value independence more than money. you do need a certain amount of money to be autonomous, but its about end goals. i don't agree with the end goal of "make the best business deals for the biggest amount of money". besides, long-term you make way more money if you are independent. i have respect for visa and i'd work there because they do value independence, but i wouldn't work for a subsidiary who couldn't hack it as a competitor.
i run a bunch of services for some online social clubs and foss projects that i'm involved in. i've floated between a bunch of different service providers (Digital Ocean, Scaleway, Hetzner, Joyent Public Cloud, Vultr, and Linode to name a few) and now i'm working on setting up some colo infrastructure. i'll probably keep some of the cloud stuff around for failover and maybe some edge cache type stuff, but you don't really need cloud unless you have extremely variable loads on your system.
i won't say cloud isn't nice, i've been able to learn a lot by playing around with cloud servers. just good to remember that cloud isn't the only option for a lot of workloads.
