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Er, I agree it's incredibly old, but also has been treated as societal ill and subject to regulation for its entire history.

Should cannabis and other currently illegal substances remain as such?

There's degrees of harmfulness. Weed is on the mild side along with alcohol (possibly even less harmful than alcohol).

They should be extremely tightly regulated, which is all anyone is asking for here as well.

I mean, I don't think we should legalize Fentanyl.

You can regulate the supply of a substance. Gambling is a human behavior. It's a normal human behavior. I don't understand the pearl clutching around gambling honestly.

Wanting to control the non-violent actions of others is also a social ill. Just one most haven’t woken up to yet.

I enjoyed FiveThirtyEight back in the day, but does anyone actually go back and look at the old posts? They were very much of the moment. I'd imagine the vast vast majority of the traffic to them is robots.

I can see why they wouldn't be a priority to keep up. For archival purposes, I'd think everything is still in the internet archive?

Nate seems to try to justify this a touch, saying he personally was looking for a specific article. Kind of a special case there…


> For archival purposes, I'd think everything is still in the internet archive?

I encourage anyone who thinks this is true to actually look for things in the internet archive and report back success. If you have the original exact URL you might be able to easily find something in the wayback machine, but if you have only a vague inclination that something existed and a general timeframe, it's a needle in a haystack. The wayback machine is, also extremely slow to retrieve data.


You’re confusing iOS and Mac OS here.

The Mac never used WebKit for NSTextField rendering. When iOS was first written, WebKit was used as the text renderer everywhere initially, including in UIKit controls (the “sweet solution”). This proved to be too heavyweight / cumbersome and the coretext/appkit text rendering approach was brought over.


Also NSAttributedString would invoke WebKit under the hood if you went to render an HTML string.


On what platform? It invoked WebKit always on iOS in the early days, html or not. On Mac, AppKit could import html to attributed strings before WebKit existed.

this is the correct answer


The native Apple libraries are terrific at rendering rich text, it’s one of their strongest assets.

The poster’s issues seem to be specifically because they want to use markdown as the backing. The native rich text backing for native Apple views is attributed strings. They could translate the markdown to attributed strings, but seems like they don’t want to.


..where did you get that impression?

The web also requires you to convert to html. I don't see how this is different


I have this impression because I know the native controls are terrific at rich text, so for some reason that support isn't done in a way the author wants to use. The source code of the TextEdit app on Mac is actually published as an example project for the frameworks. Everything in there is provided by the native framework controls.

It would make sense, for example, if you wanted to allow editing of the rich text and have the markdown be directly accessible by the user. The conversion of markdown -> attributed strings -> markdown would not produce the same raw text, which is a problem if the user can directly edit or view the markdown. The user hitting cmd-B in the text view to make something bold might end up scrapping some explicit formatting they did to the raw markdown.


Markdown can contain arbitrary HTML. It only makes sense to use an HTML viewer for what is essentially a dialect of HTML, aka a browser engine.


I worked at Apple for a long time. The OS gets fully recompiled regularly.

A simultaneous total world build is relatively rare (is that needed here?), but it does happen. Sometimes new compiler versions or features need this.


Hm that leaves more questions for me. Why does this path not have bounds checking, is think perhaps a limit of the clang flag or is it more simply a mistake of omission on apples part. Either way it seems like a bad look. I wish we’d get a post mortem


I dunno if that's sensitive information, but how long did a build usually take?


I wasn't close enough to that to know how long a world build took. Didn't seem like it was too crazy though. Incremental (non-world) builds of the OS come out every day.

Most people making this argument aren’t saying they were incapable of doing the project without AI, they’re saying the cost benefit equation was unfavorable because it would take too long.


Ok, but not what this article is about at all. Six figures is for undergrads. The issue here is that PIs don’t have the money to support graduate students, who are typically fully supported.


> The issue here is that PIs don’t have the money to support graduate students

What happened to all the money the undergrads are paying?


Great question! Mostly it goes toward maintaining the campus and paying the admin folks. PIs are paid to teach, basically, and are expected to pull in the money to support their own research (and maintain their facilities and pay the admin folks).


It goes towards MIT’s endowment, which is valued at over $27B, and grew $3B last year.

There is no shortage of money.


> There is no shortage of money

This is a general theme in the last decade. There is a lot of money, but it is more and more ending up in the pockets of the extremely wealthy.

I'm really no communist, but we've reached a point where the system starts to crumble because of it.

It also can't be in the interest of the billionaires. They also want to live in a safe country and use working public infrastructure (roads, airports, air traffic control). They even need a functioning academic ecosystem if they want their children to receive a real education, not just access to a few famous professors they can buy.


Until last year, the share of wealth by the 1% had been basically flat at 31% for a decade

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WFRBST01134

Your expectations aren't matching reality


I am looking at your link and thinking I took crazy pills.

The graph shows just under 23% in 1989, going up past 27% by 1996, then dipping a few years later only to go up to 29% a bit before 2008, then another dip and rise to almost 32% today.

Am I misreading the graph? If not, the percentage of wealth owned by the 1% is on track to have increased 50% over ~40 years. (23% --> 34.5%)


True, but GP had scoped their original post to the last decade, and if you look just there (2016-2026) it does appear flat.


I don't see why a shift from 23% to 34% should produce a qualitatively different result.

The annual US federal budget is around $7 trillion. The remaining Gates fortune is around $100B. So the feds are chewing through about 70 Gates fortunes per year. And that doesn't even account for state and local spending.

The idea that the system is crumbling because all the money is ending up in the pockets of billionaires does not pass the sniff test.


You’ve got some copium in there. Why wouldn’t billionaires want a few famous professors they can buy to teach their children the same way Alexander the Great was taught by Aristotle.

You don’t have to share the education time for your kids with the poor and think of how exclusive and how much status is advertises.

As for everything else you said about it not being in the interest of the billionaires. Even if you are 100% correct they have enough money to pay someone else to deal with any frictions in life and not think about it.

On top of that, if you look at their behavior, there’s a lot of similarities between the wealthiest in society and how they treat money, and how addicts treat heroin. Addicts frequently engage in self destructive behavior for the next hit.


This is not true. Billionaires rely on public safety. To fly their private jets around the world they need ATC and airports. They need police, so angry people don't buy rockets and shoot their planes down.

They also want to chill at their pool, without hundreds of people outside rioting. They want to drive their sports cars somewhere.

They don't want to live their life in a zombie apocalypse shelter.

And how good will those bought professors be, if they didn't work at a good university?


No, what you are describing are billionaires using public money to subsidize their lifestyles.


The idea is that everyone pays taxes. Those things are paid by tax money.


> Billionaires rely on public safety. To fly their private jets around the world they need ATC and airports.

> They want to drive their sports cars somewhere.

If you weren’t aware the first car capable roads were laid by the rich to go racing around in their new technology called the “automobile”

> They also want to chill at their pool, without hundreds of people outside rioting.

We already have evidence of Zuckerberg buying up multiple houses to make a ring of privacy, or Bezos leaving his hedgerows higher than allowed around his property and just paying a fine. Or musks baby mama compound to handle his breeding fetish. For the physical security they already pay for armed guards.

> And how good will those bought professors be, if they didn't work at a good university?

Who cares how they are produced if there are millions of people around the world who could be classified as professors and they could just hire the best?

To be clear I’m not saying these viewpoints are viable, but they fit the behaviors we are seeing from the ultra wealthy and I already said, addicts don’t always act rationally.


Why wouldn't it be in the elite's interests? You're acting like we don't have an entire written history of elites throughout time immortal making terrible decisions that ended up killing 100s of millions of people from things like colonialism or slave trade or selling weapons of death.

There is no reason for billionaires to play nice with the public because they will never be held accountable under the current system.

You have to stop relying on their nonexistent "better angels" and actually start resisting and fighting back. Every single right or benefit that workers have gained was because they died fighting for it.

We have to continue this fight going forward because we're finding out that no one will save us except ourselves.


Perhaps you could clarify your view. Here is my understanding:

* The reason MIT has such a big endowment is because wealthy elites gave MIT money.

* The reason MIT is short on federal funds is because poorly educated voters (working-class) put their man in office.

Since you reflexively believe elites are the big bad, you should be happy with the new tax on big endowments like that of MIT. Soak the rich. Perhaps the endowment tax should go even higher. Power to the people.

Sound about right?


I agree with you to some point. I just wouldn't frame it in a Marxist way, working class vs. everyone else. It concerns nearly everyone, not just the working class. Limiting it to the working class, excludes many influential people who are more wealthy, far away from being billionaires, but still suffer from the current developments.

We've seen such cycles before. Elites getting too wealthy and influential, until they are stopped. Long ago it was feudalism. But even early capitalism had such an example with the Gilded Age in the US. After WW2 it probably reached the state of being mostly reversed, only to start redeveloping. Funnily enough the Gilded Age was ended by Republicans.


Almost none of that goes into research funding.

Researchers are funded largely by government grants.


someone has to pay for administrators!


> someone has to pay for administrators

Turns out, this is also research grant money. Half or more of every grant usually goes straight to the university.as "overhead."

The universities could change this so more finding went to researchers, but they have zero incentive to.


Much of that overhead is not going to admin salaries (although, as stated elsewhere in the discussion money is fungible) but covers things like the cost of buildings, labs, maintenance, etc.


I had no idea the on-going costs of physical things did not decrease over time, what an interesting thing to know. Here I thought that after you build the building and paid off the building, then for funsies also bought all the land surrounding the building, that at some point it would drastically cheaper to maintain it; but what you're saying makes so much sense!


You have clearly never owned a home. The older the building, the more maintenance it requires.


That absolutely does not justify in taking a 50% vig, good lord.


However is maintenance($) > demolishing and building new($)?


Same issue with grad school… the value isn’t there for this to make sense. Folks are better off just going right into them private sector.


The value absolutely is there. The NSF and NIH were both very cheap and have had huge ROI. The cuts to academic funding have been monumentally stupid.


Brass tacks, if an institution has an overwhelming political leaning toward faction X and works to undermine faction Y, is it really surprising that when Y gets into power it attempts to damage the institution? This is precisely why publicly funded institutions should maintain agnostic political posture.


What fantasy world do you live in? I want to be there, the world I'm everything granted to the public is always under constant attack and threatened to be destroyed and their proponents destroy and their benefactors humiliated.


How do you do this when belief in science, which is important to academic institutions, is unpopular with one faction?


When it no longer becomes science and becomes social. There are MANY examples, even in this thread, of this happening.


When and where did this happen before a year and half ago?


I mean, is it political when you write a paper that concludes that vaccines are effective or that fish die when streams are polluted?

The answer seems to have become "yes", so this is a rhetorical question, but ideally _information_ would be apolitical.

We also see the current administration politicizing things like the federal reserve, which has tried VERY hard to be apolitical.


Well there's absolutely the value in a lot of what those PI's teams are doing, what there is no longer is the political will to invest in those endeavors.

I think longer term this will mean we start to see a kind of "rise" of places like TUM and Tsinghua. (If that could even be seen as a "rise" at this point? Pretty sure most people already acknowledge their primacy.) At root, MIT was only MIT because of the teams it could collect together. If it can't do that anymore, I don't think people stop putting those teams together, those teams just stop being put together at MIT.

The search for fundamental clarity in humanity's great aporias will continue. Just a speedbump.


Do grad students make enough to live and make payments against the principal of their student loans? If not, then that's robbing Peter to pay Paul.


I mean, this is semantics. Production is not the same thing as "important", but to me production code means customer facing. Internal tooling isn't production.


> No pure managers: Every leader at Coinbase must also be a strong and active individual contributor. Managers should be like player-coaches, getting their hands dirty alongside their teams.

What's the theory on this? It seems to be common conclusion, but I don't understand why AI changes the situation here.

I understand that AI means you can do more with fewer people. Fewer people means less coordination overhead and fewer managers and fewer layers. What I don't get is why you want your managers to be doing IC work more so with AI than before. I don't see why anything changes about needing roughly 1 first line manager for every 6-8 people, or why it would be more beneficial now that the managers have production programming responsibilities.

Both before and after AI it's important that managers have real technical knowledge of the codebase. Having managers do actual production IC work in my experience has been a bad allocation of resources, though, and I don't see why AI changes that.

(a) Someone has to do the management tasks. Why do we think that isn't a full time job anymore?

(b) When managers do production IC work, in my experience it increases the load on ICs in review, because the manager one would _expect_ to not be _as_ expert as pure ICs on the codebase, and yet they are perceived as "senior". ICs then have overhead in having to manage that power imbalance in review. I have known a few extremely productive manager/ICs… but the effect on their teams was not super great. It made the manager into something of a micromanager and the actual ICs lacked autonomy.


Getting rid of middle managers has been the game plan for every headcount reduction for the last 50 years. They always seem expendable until a few months later when senior managers get overwhelmed and staff get confused and they end up making the same org they just destroyed.


Exactly, it's too easy to overlook the balancing that good middle managers do.


This has existed since the first version, except it needs to be signed with a valid apple cert.

A .pkpass file is a zipped directory that has a json file and some assets. There's no need to have a more limited version, a pass is already very limited.

The issue is spoofing. Major event ticketers are unwilling to publish passes if there's nothing to stop someone else from publishing a pass that is indistinguishable from their's and thus is an avenue for fraud.

The difference with events is that an ics file is not something someone's going to try to sell you or that you'd want to buy. But anyway, all Apple would have to do is stop checking the signing.


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