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What do you find strange about someone saying they defined a function?

Just curious. I can't find anything strange about the wording or conceptual understanding likely behind such a statement.


Not "I have defined a function", but "I have a defined function". As if they think that "defined" is part of the terminology.


The early death of smokers tends to save a long, expensive period of end-of-life care. I believe smoking deaths reduce health care costs, ironically enough.


It does, there is even a study on it. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9321534/

Smokers also help keep pension/social security costs down since they pay into it but don't collect out of it or do for much shorter period.


That study is almost 30 year old, has there been more current research? I also wonder if externalities like trauma on friends/family are factored in, I could imagine there are some transitive effects?


That sounds like sour grapes from a CEO that only and very simply got out-played at a CEO's main job of overall strategy. Even every employee working 80 hours a week still couldn't paper over complete CEO strategic failure. He's seriously going to plead that Google didn't have the man hours or resources to win with their PhD head-count and bankroll? Ridiculous.


I went with this in the other thread about Google's "struggles":

How tiny a violin does it take . . . ?


"It is impossible to separate a cube into two cubes, or a fourth power into two fourth powers, or in general, any power higher than the second, into two like powers. I have discovered a marvelous proof of this, which this margin is too narrow to contain" - Pierre De Fermat


> It is impossible to separate a cube into two cubes

Later disproved by the Banach-Tarski theorem. ;D


That's too reductionist to be an useful model. Humans are extremely complex systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_system . You're describing them more like a complicated system.


I can't say I enjoy large software systems written in Python.


I can't understand why anyone would decide to write anything complex in Python.


> Physical health is the most important thing in society, one should not live in a country that doesn’t promote their individual health, growth, strength and power.

That seems like a questionable assertion. Poverty aside, I don't see how/why North Korea couldn't prioritize health, which wouldn't solve the largest problems in that society from my perspective, no matter how healthy they got.


One big difference, if I understand correctly, considering that I think I understand Tao better than Logos, is that Tao is definitely purposeless and kind of pluralistic, which seems rooted in Chinese culture, whereas Logos seems to me to lean more toward purposive and not pluralistic. Like, Chinese culture has a big thing for filial piety--one's ancestors, as your creators, with the lack of a 'central power', seem to catch up some of the sovereignty that logos would attribute closer to the divine. In Chinese culture, it's not some weird divine abstract thing you owe existence to, it's just your ancestors.

Taoism seems to talk of 'heaven and earth', but 'heaven' seems like the collective of little sovereignties like the emperor, your parents, and simple the pattern of nature itself, the pluralistic part. 'Heaven' doesn't seem like a monolithic entity.

In regard to being purposeless, purpose seems acknowledged as emergent, and subservient, like 'the way that can be named is not the eternal way'--there's naming, purpose, and then subservience. It's harder to think of more concrete examples, and it's a bit easy to confuse an acknowledgment of pattern with purpose, but taoism seems rather critical of purposive action on the whole.


The dead people.


I used to really like dCOM , Directory Commander, by Dave Frailey / DAC Microsystems.

It mostly used single letter commands modelessly on the keyboard, if I recall, like 'd' to delete files, I think, probably with a confirmation like 'y/n' after you hit 'd'. It was written in ASM. I'm not 100% sure, I just remember how amazingly fast and frictionless it felt after getting used to it.

it was dual-pane. it was probably influenced by other commander/shells, like the Norton Commander, but when I got good with this, it was so fast. It was like using vim purely in edit (not insert) mode the friction of switching modes for managing your files. And you could use the mouse.


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