How feasible is it in practice? In the US, it's possible in practice to remove officials via impeachment as well as amend the constitution, but in practice they are almost impossible to achieve. In practice the legislature is almost deadlocked for most non-budget bills as well, so the executive ends up running the country, with an assist from the judiciary.
Only as a brief aside (don't have the timestamp right now) to talking about Smalltalk, which he mostly discusses to argue that Smalltalk was not different from C++ in seeking (most of the time) to model programs in terms of static hierarchies (according to the primary source documentation from the time of Smalltalk's design):
> And another thing is if you look at the other branch,
> the branch that I'm not really covering very much
> in this talk, because again,
> we don't program in small talk these days, right?
> The closest thing you would get
> is maybe something like Objective-C.
> If there's some people out there using Objective-C,
> you know, like Apple was using that for a little while,
> so Objective-C kind of came
> from a small talk background as well.
Objective-C is basically Smalltalk retrofitted onto C, even more than C++ was Simula retrofitted onto C (before C++ gained template metaprogramming and more modern paradigms), so it makes sense that Muratori doesn't go much into it, given that he doesn't discuss Smalltalk much.
@gwern, did you mess up your inflation calculation here?
> I couldn’t get all the ones Nguyen highlighted from LuckyScent and some sampler packs were sold out, but I settled for 39 samples total on 8 February 2021. (Which cost $153 [2021; $190 in 2025], so amortizing to $3.90 [2011; $6.03 in 2025] each.) At that point I felt I had gone a bit overboard, so I didn’t do an additional order from CB I Hate Perfume, which Nguyen praises for doing the most interesting ‘abstract’ perfumes, to pick up ones that LuckyScent didn’t have in stock.
Modern Egyptians are primarily Arab. If anyone is a descendant of the Ancient Egyptians, it’s the Coptic Christians, who still use a descendant of the Ancient Egyptian language as a liturgical language and mostly don’t have any Arabic ancestry (since the child of an Arab Muslim and a Copt would almost always be considered an Arab Muslim).
- In a steady state where you're spending the same amount every year, the tax burden of amortized vs. unamortized accounting makes no difference. It only matters for R&D - i.e., new products.
- I read once, although I have no idea how accurate this is, that a company could classify maintenance expenses (i.e., paying SREs and some SWEs to keep the service running and fix bugs) as non-R&D and therefore be able to amortize. That's another advantage to mature services over new services.
> Yes we did build steam engines before understanding thermodynamics but we still understood what it did (heat, pressure, movement, etc.)
We only understood in the broadest sense. It took a long process of iteration before we could create steam engines that were efficient enough to start an Industrial Revolution. At the beginning they were so inefficient that they could only pump water from the same coal mine they got their fuel from, and subject to frequent boiler explosions besides.
