When did we first get an idea that masks work? This is when I got the message. March 30. Watch the video. I got my mask on the 31st. Imagine if we had all listened. How many people would be healthy who are sick. How many people would be alive, who are now dead.#
People debate whether there is such a thing as "cancel culture." I don't think there's much debate that Al Franken got canceled. Woody Allen. You could debate whether they deserved what they got, but not really that they got it. #The tech industry is like pharma, they only make products that have huge financial upside. That means there are lots of drugs for cancer, arthritis, high blood pressure, diabetes, chronic diseases, ones that might not kill you right off, but require lifetime use. This is like virality and lock-in in tech. Tools that don't bring in other users, or get you addicted can't make a ton of money. They might be worthwhile though, they might help someone figure something out that saves humanity, for example. #
The reason came to me in a dream. The politicians and their masters aren’t saving our lives because there’s no money in it for them. But pharma sees big bucks in a vaccine and even more in a treatment. I hear the vaccine might require a booster every few months. They must love that. Every human on the planet would need it. Think of the enormous cash flow for the holder of that patent. #
I went back to UW-Madison for a visit a few years ago and got a tour of a new building created to generate patents. But it didn't appear it was used for much. Extravagant and luxurious. Very unlike a typical utilitarian campus building at a large state school. I learned they built it to recruit a professor who generated billions from patents, and I guess they felt was likely to continue to do so. The money apparently flows to the university, but the professor gets to work in a Taj Mahal of campus buildings. Not sure. But it was very impressive, and surprising. #
If you read this blog you should also follow me on Twitter. People say Twitter is bad, and of course they're right, but it's also good. It's an integral part of how I write this blog. Of course the really important stuff shows up here too. And I would like a Twitter that was just for my friends. And I think that'll happen too. 💥#
- This is a language design question, not a coding question.#
- This bit of code comes up all the time.#
- It would be interesting to try to come up with a clean way to say that so it would still be obvious what's happening, but would save you from having to check it so often.#
- Basically I want to call the callback if the caller specified one, otherwise, do nothing. #
- Just putting that out there, not offering a solution to the puzzle. #
- Later...#
- How about this syntax#
- if possible callback ();#
- Where possible might be a new keyword that's something like a try but not as serious. In other words, don't get upset if this doesn't work. On the other hand, it's not much more concise than the original expression, and it doesn't say anything about what you expect not to work about it. Really for anything other than undefined I probably want an error to be thrown so I can find the problem and fix it. #
- I'm not an Applescript type person, I think programming can't be a spoken language, but I also don't go so far as to say programming is like linear algebra or differential calculus (both of which I took in college). I like words that mean something when I read them, both in human language and programming language.#
- Another random thought, not a big fan of using let as a new kind of declaration. I imagine they chose it because that's what BASIC used, but why would a nice Algol-like language use BASIC as prior art. I actually like how we did it in Frontier:#
- fileloop (f in "tmp/")#
- fname is only accessible in the body of fileloop. #
- local is the keyword for declaration. It says fname is declared here, in this scope, and it is only accessible here. I think it does a better job of explaining itself than let. #
- Even later...#
- Allen Wirfs-Brock suggested via email, that JavaScript already has this feature, he sent a link to the docs, and I couldn't make heads or tails of it. I said how the hell do you pronounce that? That's where the comment about linear algebra and differential equations came from, above. #
- Well he started a thread on Twitter asking how people pronounce this feature that as far as I can tell does not have a name? It's an instant classic of course. #