Lisp lost because none the the Lisperati came down from on high and deigned to explain how to use it for tasks running on the 1980s microcomputers.
Lisp also lost because the 1980s Lisperati spent all their time explaining lists and recursion over and over instead of explaining hash tables, vectors, and iteration.
Somehow, Lisp lost out to pathetically slow BASIC interpreters and C compilers that you had to swap floppies continuously for hours. That is a stunning level of fail.
Amazon had better return policies. I suspect that is gone. I'll probably buy even less from Amazon, anymore.
I've gotten 2 different "You didn't return the right item" because I presume some underpaid, overworked contractor at the Amazon return site lost it or stole it.
Fortunately, the second one is very well documented, so Amazon is going to lose badly if they don't figure out what is going on.
A bit of engineering and a lot of myth and degradation due to time.
The engineering seems to be a combination of genuine construction advances and the usage of wood that was abnormally dense due to having been grown during a big drought.
This, of course, contributed to the "myths" around the Strads with the varnishes, techniques, etc. supposedly being "The Thing(tm)" that made Strads so much better.
Finally, wood degrades with time--period. It doesn't matter how much you try to preserve it, it's just fact. The current Strads are either "Ship of Theseus" type violins, or they are heavily degraded.
At this point, modern luthiers create better instruments than even a Strad in its prime. They have access to better woods, better glues and finishes, better tools and training, better analyzers and better players than anyone in the time of Stradivarius.
When played as close to double blind as is possible, the data comes back with modern players preferring modern violins made by modern luthiers over the old Strads.
> We should give up with the idea of databases which are 'open' to the public, but you have to pay to access, reproduction isn't allowed, records cost pounds per page, and bulk scraping is denied. That isn't open.
I disagree.
Even if you simply made the database no cost but such that an actual human has to show up at an office with a signed request, that is fine. That's still open.
The problem isn't the openness; it's the aggregation.
> The only people who think that destroying useful items is a good idea are those who would stand to lose money from it; either by having to pay a tiny fraction of their massive annual revenue for responsible recycling services
Some of us like the intent of the law but are wondering what the consequences of the law are.
We have already seen all the schemes that corporations use for greenwashing. We have already seen all the recycling that isn't. Most of us assume that these corporations will simply do the absolute minimum they have to do to comply with the letter of the law. That likely means "selling" crates of these clothes back to some country willing to discard or destroy them.
In addition, we already have a ton of problems from Always Late Inventory(tm), and this seems like it's going to add to that. Are you even slightly outside of the normal body shape? Sorry, no stock for you evermore.
I think the law is a good idea, but, sadly, laws mean nothing without implementation. The devil is in the details.
> Ageism also just one of these shitty unproven biases
You might be right, if we were talking about anything except chess.
Chess, unlike everything else, has a clear ranking system and lots of records for people to analyze. And unfortunately, the record is very clear: chess ability decreases after a certain age.
However, the decrease is more likely due to stamina than mental decline. Chess tournaments take a long time, and stamina definitely decreases with age. However, pro athletes demonstrate that you can probably go until around your early 40s before it becomes a real issue.
Having said that, it will be interesting to see how this generation does in the blitz formats as they age. Those will be less dependent upon stamina and a better measure of mental acuity for chess.
He’s got a point. If the measure works for age, then let’s run it for sex, race, and religion. Then we can make conclusions about these categories and test if we’re willing to accept them. If we’re not, but we’re willing to accept them for age, then the balance of chance is that we’re ageist and just blinding ourselves to it because we are ageist.
I think looking at the data you’d have to conclude that women can’t play chess as well as men, that black men can’t play chess as well as white men, and that Judeo-Christian (and perhaps Hindu Brahmins) beliefs are just as indicative.
If we deny those conclusions as bigotry of immutable characteristics, it naturally leads to the age question.
> I think looking at the data you’d have to conclude that women can’t play chess as well as men, that black men can’t play chess as well as white men, and that Judeo-Christian (and perhaps Hindu Brahmins) beliefs are just as indicative.
Actually, chess data suggests that all of them are as good as one another. As soon as you have enough candidates in the pipeline, magically, any specific group suddenly becomes as good as any other.
On the women's side, the Polgar sisters are both exemplar and counterexample. Clearly, given sufficient training, women CAN be rated highly (Judit cracked 2700). The fact that the women's side hasn't exploded just like the men's side can mostly be tracked to the fact that chess isn't considered a "feminine pursuit" worth putting the time into (that finally seems to be changing slowly in recent decades).
In the history of the sport one woman made the Top 100 of the sport and this is supposedly evidence. And how many black? Count them out. They form at least a sixth of the world population. Now how many old? And perhaps then we find out that we can invent reasons for the defence of the old: traveling is hard, they have more responsibilities with children, they are more senior in primary career.
> The fact that the women's side hasn't exploded just like the men's side can mostly be tracked to the fact that chess isn't considered a "feminine pursuit" worth putting the time into (that finally seems to be changing slowly in recent decades).
A defence that doesn’t pass for software engineering, amazing. This old canard. The girls just don’t like engineering. It’s not feminine enough. Damore got whacked for this.
The first generation of programmers counted more women than men. Chess would have more women than men if it was taught to more girls than boys. Simple as.
> The first generation of programmers counted more women than men.
I have heard this before, but you need to back that up with more qualifiers.
There were a lot more female plug technicians because women were trained as phone operators. There were a lot more female keypunch operators because women were trained in typing to be secretaries. However, most people would not refer to those as "programmers" like we would definitely say for someone like Margaret Hamilton.
What I'm talking about is that the news tries to tell you what to think. You can read headlines on Google News about the same story, and see the bias of the publication in the headline pretty often.
Instead of reporting just the facts, they include opinions, inflammatory language, etc.
Reuters writes in a relatively neutral tone, as an example. Fox News doesn't, and CNN doesn't, as examples of the opposite.
If you don't notice, I doubt you're reading the news. It's part of the offering. Fox does it on purpose, not accidentally.
Newspapers in my country always were blogs before the internet existed. Its why they are still around and doing quite well- they don't just bring news.
Lisp also lost because the 1980s Lisperati spent all their time explaining lists and recursion over and over instead of explaining hash tables, vectors, and iteration.
Somehow, Lisp lost out to pathetically slow BASIC interpreters and C compilers that you had to swap floppies continuously for hours. That is a stunning level of fail.
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