Practically that would be very likely to be the case to the reader, but grammatically no, it's still ambiguous.

> They went to Oregon with Betty, a maid and a cook.

Betty could be both a maid and a cook. So there is still ambiguity.

What's much more sensible than taking an IQ test is looking at your experience with math to date.

Yes.

Apart from the fact that IQ tests are racist bunk, there's no need to do some fancy self-discovery journey or anything to determine whether you're cut out for pure math or not: if you have to ask, then it's not for you.

Or more. Actually some of them seem inverted. Simple compiler takes 3 months but a GameBoy emulator takes 2 weeks? That’s not my experience at all.

I was wondering if that was time spent toying with the thing, not necessarily time to a complete or even functional result.

Yes, exactly. The point is to make a toy that proves the concept and gives you insight into the overall design, not to build something with polish!

C++ has indeed added many features that help with memory safety, at the cost of getting increasingly more complicated and harder to work with.

I think the idea that Lisp was so much more productive than other languages originates from a much earlier time. But now the most important features of Lisp - like garbage collection - are commonly available in most languages.

I always thought calling it Xbox One was the most bizarre choice in the history of branding and marketing. Given how common it is to retroactively refer to the first item in a series as "One" (Rambo 1, Rocky 1, Playstation 1, etc), it seems intentionally designed to cause confusion.

This is beyond being bizarre. I have never owned an Xbox, and always thought that Xbox One was a re-release of the original Xbox, similar to the Original PlayStation -> PS One. I am hearing it for the first time here that it was a third generation device.

I find that name even more baffling when the reason they apparently branded the previous one Xbox 360 was so that they wouldn't go against the PS3 with an Xbox 2. Somehow it was now fine for an Xbox One to go against a PS4.

I tried to use a CPAP machine for a while. I honestly could never figure out how I was supposed to breathe with it. At all. It seemed to be physically impossible. I'd try for a while each night, then get frustrated and stop so I could get some sleep. Completely useless to me.

Fortunately I was able to just return it, but if I hadn't been able to, why should that mean insurance wouldn't cover it? I was prescribed this device and it didn't work for me.

Insurers don't want to pay for unnecessary treatments, including equipment. Maybe your provider could have done a better job selecting the right mask or settings for the CPAP? Maybe they could have trained you in their office?

I'm not saying the surveillance and payment-held-hostage model is the best, but it does at least attempt to provide some useful incentives.

CPAP makes breathing harder than normal. It's antiquated technology, superseded by something called bilevel-CPAP (BiPAP) which has the quality that it makes breathing actually _easier_. It's slightly more expensive than plain CPAP so insurance and doctors withhold it from the patients and try to keep it a secret.

CPAP is NOT "antiquated technology." It has different indications from BPAP. Some people tolerate one better than the other. We are not "keeping one a secret."

I'm sorry to hear you had that problem, you're not alone. I hope you found some alternative treatment that works for you! It's possible to succeed with CPAP even if it's hard at first, too, with various adjustments. I hope you've found a way to get a good night's sleep.

Big O notation deals with asymptotic behavior of a function - in other words, as N goes to infinity. If we're accepting the premise that N has an upper bound, the rest of the discussion is meaningless.

Presumably the argument is an abstract one, not applying to any particular machine that actually exists.

Big O notation is often used with assumptions like adding numbers is always constant time. You can't physically build a machine where addition between any two numbers is constant time, but that doesn't matter.

It depends what you mean by "numbers": all integers or just 64-bit ones?

My point is relevant to additions that are the same type as n as n has no upper bound. n will never be a 64 bit integer.

> Working at an office sucks because of some combination of {long commute, open office plan, team not being there}

Working at an office sucks because it is a massive constraint on where you can live, even if you can tolerate a long commute. If you live with a partner who also has a career your options are even more constrained. I find it miraculous such a situation works out for anyone.

And yet for millions of people and many years, it has worked out.

There are tradeoffs, sure. But there are a lot of jobs in a lot of fields in a lot of places.

The venn overlap is not tiny.

>it has worked out.

Hardly. This is actually kind of insanely tone-deaf statement to make. People have uprooted their lives, spent lots of their wealth in expensive real-estate markets due to artificial demand, given up time with their families, etc etc.

Saying it's "worked out" is a really bland dismissal of the entire conversation.

What alternative do you have even for many highly-paid professional jobs like doctors?

Doctors are somewhat unique in the fact that they can live and practice in a wide variety of places. Anywhere there’s a hospital, you will have them. Where they will choose to work/for how much is a much wider decision matrix than it is for many white collar organizations which would have no reason to exist (physically) in a small town of 20,000 people. Such a town would require at least a single hospital employing many medical professionals, depending on how far it is from other forms of medical care.

What was artificial about demand?

In the context of the modern American nuclear family, the concept of both adults working is relatively new. The traditional arrangement was one breadwinner, one homemaker, and ~2.5 kids.

Which is still common these days, but not to the point of exclusivity: I work remotely, but my partner works hybrid.

Trends happen a lot faster and make people miserable than you can definitively say "it's working out".

I think I'll grant that there are more educated and competent people than there used to be.

But broadly the gap between scholars and "the public" is as massive at it's ever been. Meet a few members of "the public" socially, outside of tech or academic circles or however you usually meet people. Go to some random bar or club or whatever and make some friends. I think you'll find, like I do, that most people basically don't know anything. They can sort of do 3rd grade arithmetic, but struggle to apply it, and don't know anything else about mathematics - most people don't understand how to use negative numbers or what they're for, for instance. They don't know anything about history - they don't really know what the Renaissance was, or when the Roman Empire was, or when and where human civilization began, or anything else. They absolutely know nothing about physics - they are completely unaware of the idea that acceleration due to gravity is not dependent on mass, which I see as the starting point of teaching physics.

I think your characterization of "the public" outside of tech / academia (and I'd add medicine, finance, a few other professions) is pretty accurate in terms of academic knowledge.

Swap the places though and send someone who's held various mechanic, repair, manufacturing roles to a high end cocktail bar full of academics and let them ask questions on topics they know, and they'll be shocked (or maybe not) at how most of these academics basically don't know anything about how the nuts and bolts machinery that keeps the world running actually functions in real life, and certainly couldn't do most of the work themselves. They'd probably also come away thinking they'd rather have a random person from their dive bar in Nebraska help them for a day at work on a hard project than one of the people in the fancy bar.

Without being able to rely on these masses of the un-academic "public" to run the world they live in, the academics would largely be helpless and their knowledge useless as they starved to death as the world crumbled around them.

Specialized knowledge and training is amazing, and it allows us to advance as a civilization, but I don't think the average "academic" is much more intelligent or capable in the raw sense than the average person in "the public". Both are needed for society to function and progress. Without the academics there will be no progress, and without the public it will all break down.

Of course, there are also people who have little useful knowledge / skills / motivation either practical or academic. These people can however just as easily exist in the social / family circles of the elite, as in those of the public, so I don't think it's fair to throw them in either group for judgment.

The idea that blue collar and white collar workers are equally intelligent on average might feel good, but is easily disproven as intelligence has been shown to be highly correlated with educational attainment.

Huh I always thought acceleration due to gravity is a combination of both mass and distance. That is why gravity is so much stronger on earth than on the moon.

The force on the object is proportional to its mass. Acceleration, being (force/mass), is therefore not dependent on mass. (Ah least, for a small object being attracted to a much larger body)

Indeed it is, but the second body's mass may be neglected if it is orders of magnitude smaller than the larger body. Or at least that's how I understand it (I'm not a physicist).