“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed”
Yes, and what I outlined is one reasonable way to implement “the consent of the governed”, and still a lot more democratic and inclusive than the system the authors of that statement implemented for the next ~150 years after writing it!
Are you proposing that poor people would not be subject to the laws of the United States, as they would be provided no means to consent? That only the wealthy are to be governed, regulated, etc.?
My test ranked first Daniel Mendelsohn and second Emily Wilson.
I was aware of Wilson's translation, but not of that of Mendelsohn.
This has made me curious to read Mendelsohn's translation, but in general I do not like to read translations of ancient texts, because all coherent translations are far too distant from the original. To really convey the meaning of the original text you need a sequence of explanatory notes for each sentence, not a translated sentence that attempts to have a one-to-one correspondence between words.
What I like to read are the bilingual editions, like those of the Loeb library, where you can read the original, but also compare it with a translation when in doubt, which is much faster than reaching for a dictionary. Moreover, the English text allows you to browse or search quickly for paragraphs in which you are particularly interested, and then you can take your time to read slowly the original in order to understand it.
Another organism that survives pasteurization is paratuberculosis, in milk. It is commonly found in commercial dairy herds. In my opinion, this is alarming.
Many consider it to be a candidate for the cause of Crohn’s disease. Johne’s disease, which occurs in a subset of cattle infected by paratuberculosis, bears many similarities to Crohn’s disease.
When Crohn’s disease was first described, it was believed to be an intestinal tuberculosis, though tests seemed to counter this idea; to this day, it remains difficult to test humans for paratuberculosis infections.
What part of placing a human in the loop requires telling that human what they’re approving, or even that they are approving something? Pressing a button could be as simple as following orders—or giving orders.
Historical precedent: Quickselect, or any other discovery of a surprising algorithmic speed-up.
LLMs haven’t been on the scene for very long. There’s still lots of room for efficiency discoveries. Plus, I keep hearing quantum is going to be a big deal in the next few years.
Super interesting, when Quantum computing would enable really large models, or much larger contexts. But QRAM is even more behind than pure fault-tolerant gates.
The developments of political parties’ positions are themselves newsworthy, as well as the ways in which writers attempt to frame them. You’re right to notice it.
I will say (if you have that first 5-10 years of experience or so), there is real value in becoming an expert in some enterprise technology that was extremely popular 20+ years ago. The COBOL consultants getting $500 an hour right before Y2K might be an exaggeration, but you can build a career on getting businesses out of legacy systems messes.
My father is an expert on the IRS-specific IBM 360 Assembly code base and their tangled webs of attempts to get off of it, and it made for a very comfortable (and well compensated) role for the last 20 years of his career.
I would definitely not suggest COBOL or MUMPS to a 20 year old, but as a niche for a 30 year old for a stable gig? Some of these legacy systems are never going away.
There is lately a lot of buzz about hiring "TENEX Engineers" so if you've got some old-school experience in TENEX, probably time to add it back in your CV!
> but as a niche for a 30 year old for a stable gig? Some of these legacy systems are never going away...
It's not as stable as you would think.
I have some acquaintances at JPMC and GS who have led internal initiatives to leverage foundation models to translate COBOL and other legacy software into more modern frameworks with decent success over the past 24 months.
What else couldn't be done by foundation models was then offshored to their dev teams in India, Poland, and Romania.
Hyperspecializing in a niche and ignoring other newer innovations is also setting yourself up for failure long term as of 2026.
If one cannot be bothered to deep dive into newer shifts in technology in order to both understand their pros and cons, it's hard to justify hiring them.
This is about the MUMPS 1976 standard. I'm not aware of any jobs where this is required. It's purely interesting for historical reasons. The article is part of my anniversary project (https://github.com/rochus-keller/MUMPS/). I neither think that "your career will suffer" if you do Ada, Fortran, Mumps (i.e. M/Cache/IRIS or GT.M/YottaDB), RPG or Cobol projects. Specialists are well paid, particularly with mainframe and domain experience.
My comment is about MUMPS, not a specific edition of thereof. A language is inseparable from its community. The opportunity cost of working with MUMPS is enormous, particularly for someone early in their career.
I know a caboodle/cache admin at $dayjob, and I've never heard them mention chronicles... is it more of an internal codename than an actual function of the db?
Thats kindof complicated... I remember when an EMR only needed one sysadmin and no specialist knowledge... on our old system any errors were handled by the vendor.
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