Perl requires more brain power than most coders have, especially nowadays.
Perl has never disappointed me. Many years ago during just 2 weeks I'd written a few clever automations and orchestrations in Perl that had lasted with 100% availability for a decade after I changed that job. Even though my superior, the self-proclaimed "top coder manager all-in-one god" despised it (and me), he was incapable of comprehending and rewriting that. It was not because I obfuscated the code, but because of what I wrote in the first sentence above. In the end he hired a consultancy and got a monstrous solution in Java. But finally it was "his".
>For millions, one failed Austrian painter did it by writing a book. From my understanding,
You've all received memetic inoculations to that though. Unlikely, anyone will ever be able to write a book that does the same again. (Never mind that the book didn't do the damage, he did, the book was just a side effect. Never mind that it only worked in one peculiar economic environment which hasn't been repeated since. Never mind that zoomers are on the verge of never reading books again.)
Sorry if this seems obvious, but I grew up in the UK which liked to think it was "America's greatest ally", and I don't think this number is of the UK?
> You've all received memetic inoculations to that though. Unlikely, anyone will ever be able to write a book that does the same again.
I wish it were so, but even the memorial stones and constitutional bans on the party and its symbolism didn't completely stop the original memes, let alone things which rhyme with them: https://cybernews.com/security/afd-email-datat-leak-germany/
> (Never mind that the book didn't do the damage, he did, the book was just a side effect.
The book was kinda a big part of how he gained the power.
> Never mind that it only worked in one peculiar economic environment which hasn't been repeated since.
He's hardly been the only genocidal monster to rise to power, even in that century; just one of the more infamous ones.
> Never mind that zoomers are on the verge of never reading books again.)
So the next one only needs to tweet a lot? This isn't an improvement.
>So this attitude that they should just lose a bunch of money and be backstopped by the taxpayer, when mail is less critical than ever, is an recent idea
There is a union involved, a union which can be counted on to vote loyally. For this reason, the USPS will exist 900 years from now.
I would be just as happy if it were dissolved and no longer existed. It is as obsolete as the Pony Express. If your counterarguments are "but it delivers Amazon!", then you are subconsciously admitting that its purpose has already ended.
>As much as various folks like to bang on about declining birthrates, the global birthrate is positive
Sure. Imagine that central Africa (the only place with positive fertility rates) somehow never changes in that regard. What will happen? Will they be able to power the entire world's population replacement, they who made no AIDS medicines of their own. They make no John Deere tractors. No industry at all, really. Will they even be able to feed these people they are creating?
I think once the developed world goes extinct, so too they.
>There's nothing particularly sinister going on either
Functional human extinction in 120 years, absolute human extinction in 350 (or fewer). Technological stagnation (no new advancement) in fewer than 50.
>very little reason for reproducing above replacement rate.
That's not even the argument. The argument is, why isn't everyone terrified that we're well below the replacement rate (where population neither grows nor shrinks), and that we could raise it back up to the replacement rate if we wanted to.
> Functional human extinction in 120 years, absolute human extinction in 350 (or fewer).
I would love to see your basis for claiming this, because I don't believe a word of it.
My personal take is that, as population declines, we eventually won't be able to produce birth control pills (or plastic, if you believe that microplastics are the cause). A couple generations after that, the population decline will halt.
> Technological stagnation (no new advancement) in fewer than 50.
This I could at least see. Society requires a certain level of specialization in order to advance, and that requires a certain number of people. More technologically advanced societies may get by with fewer people, but there's still a lower limit, below which technological progress halts (or at least massively slows down).
>My personal take is that, as population declines, we eventually won't be able to produce birth control pills
Sure. That goes away, and relatively soon. But it doesn't help. You lose all the benefits of modern technological civilization, not just birth control pills. For every slight uptick you get from unplanned pregnancies, it's wiped out with child/maternal mortality. And unless you haven't noticed, the primary driver of fertility decline in the younger generations isn't birth control any longer. Behavioral changes have locked in. You're operating under some animal model of population change... but the moose on the island never had their fertility decline, only their population count.
>> As much as various folks like to bang on about declining birthrates, the global birthrate is positive
> Sure. Imagine that central Africa (the only place with positive fertility rates) somehow never changes in that regard. What will happen? Will they be able to power the entire world's population replacement...
> ...they who made no AIDS medicines of their own. They make no John Deere tractors. No industry at all, really. Will they even be able to feed these people they are creating?
I think their high fertility rate has a lot to do with them being poor and underdeveloped. And there are serious ethical challenges with keeping them that way so those populations and provide the rest of the world with needed workers.
Once they hit higher levels of development, their fertility rate will decline like everywhere else. There's no getting around this without dealing directly with the fertility problems western-style development causes.
> That's not even the argument. The argument is, why isn't everyone terrified that we're well below the replacement rate (where population neither grows nor shrinks), and that we could raise it back up to the replacement rate if we wanted to.
I think it's ideological. A lot of people hold very dear to many of the social changes that have fueled the drops in fertility, and to admit that fertility rates are a problem means admitting their ideology is wrong (and perhaps their opponents are right). A lot of people are so focused on winning these short term ideological fights, they see everything in terms of them.
Also there's also the hangover from the previous overpopulation scare(s). It's hard to shift your outlook based on new data.
> Functional human extinction in 120 years, absolute human extinction in 350 (or fewer). Technological stagnation (no new advancement) in fewer than 50.
This is one of the most comically insane predictions I've ever witnessed. The population would have to halve 24 times for the population to be too small to sustain itself. That's 24 generations of less than one child per woman. That's taking our existing birthrate, nearly halving it, and then imagining that nothing would change that number as the amount of available resources per person doubles every generation.
>and then imagining that nothing would change that number as the amount of available resources per person doubles every generation.
This is not correct, as resources are a function of number of young, able bodied workers. So far, the evidence shows the elderly like to claim a lot of societies’ resources, so I don’t see a reason to think young people will gain access to more resources with higher and higher ratios of non workers to workers.
Some resources are, others aren't. Land allocation and consequent rent extraction is one of the big issues right now.
Look at Berlin after the wall fell and everything was in chaos, to see how awesome it can be when half a city's real estate is abandoned and nobody knows who owns it, not even the owner. Yes the physical buildings were worse, but the people thrived in this massive adult playground where they could do what they wanted without any higher authority trying to take all their money away.
They've been correcting it over time, as they dig up paperwork from the 1920s saying a certain person owns a certain building, and then that person's heir sells the rights to some development company who comes with pepper spray and batons and kicks out whoever's been living there illegally for 106 years, and turns it into a WeWork.
I think the process is just about finished by now, and the city is just turning into every other big city. In the news recently, Berlin's only remaining shop for electronic components is closing at the end of this year because the landlord quadrupled the rent even though they are currently profitable.
You're describing the capitalist principle of comparative advantage like it's inherently a bad thing.
Comparative advantage means that different places specialize in what they do best. It's why all the tech's in the USA while all the manufacturing's in China, and France makes all the wine and the Middle East makes the oil (or did, until a certain guy blew it up).
>I hear CourtListener (a free legal research tool) is working on a citator--hopefully it's competitive with the paid services.
Even if. it's not just the citation graph. No headnotes. No restatements. They're about 100 light years away from being close to usable, even if the citator was complete and comparable.
I've been scraping Overdrive for the last few months, so that I can identify every book/magazine title they hold. About halfway done (13 million ids to check). I can slurp down full magazines from their preview function. Books I can only get through my local library's Overdrive service, and they only have a tiny subset of those.
Definitely not newspapers. I would love to, but the scope creep would kill me. I estimate there are 100 million magazine issues published over the last 200 years across the world. That will keep me busy enough :)
Overdrive has a pretty limited amount of back issues for magazines, which is why I generally ignore it, except if I want to quickly read something on my Kindle.
Do you have a plan for all the data once you have it?
I'll probably download all the magazines. They keep releasing new issues (for the few titles still printing). They claim that they only keep the back issues for the last 3 years... but all they do is make those impossible to find with their search/browse features. If one has the ids for the individual issues, they seem to have 100% retention. So I'll be able to get those... there are 4 or 5 titles I can't get current issues of otherwise.
I think your estimate of magazine issues is high, but I commend your effort. I wouldn't mind hearing about which you've managed to complete. I keep finding that I can get all the historical issues, and I can get all the recent issues, but there's this hole in the middle from about 1985 through 2005 that is usually impossible. It's irritating.
I might test if I can pull audio books down too, though those will be limited to the ones appearing in my own local library (every municipal library seems to have access to the full magazines though, if you know the magic urls).
For me, it's about 30% of my pdfs just showing blank/white pages... when I drag them to a Firefox tab, they render perfectly. It's Preview, not the pdf that's the problem.
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