@pendell @glitzersachen @david_chisnall @zebratale @carbontwelve programmers and CPU designers are just a tad sensitive and insecure when someone points out the calculator makes a mistake and isn't mathematically perfect

@egallager @regehr @david_chisnall A friend of mine used to have a cat and a rabbit who seemed to be best friends (and yes, the cat would constantly groom the rabbit). It should probably be mentioned here that the rabbit was *absolutely enormous* (IIRC he was a French Lop) and probably not something any housecat would think of as prey. He was a bit bigger than the cat, at any rate.But the cat was also very mellow and friendly with other animals, she'd later befriend an Australian water dragon.

@libroraptor @david_chisnall In theory you get rewarded for good learning by getting a good job so you can afford a good lifestyle over those who did not. So-called late-stage-capitalism clearly has a different opinion.

When I was a PhD student, I attended a talk by the late Robin Milner where he said two things that have stuck with me.The first, I repeat quite often. He argued that credit for an invention did not belong to the first person to invent something but to the first person to explain it well enough that no one needed to invent it again. His first historical example was Leibniz publishing calculus and then Newton claiming he invented it first: it didn’t matter if he did or not, he failed to explain it to anyone and so the fact that Leibniz needed to independently invent it was Newton’s failure.The second thing, which is a lot more relevant now than at the time, was that AI should stand for Augmented Intelligence not Artificial Intelligence if you want to build things that are actually useful. Striving to replace human intelligence is not a useful pursuit because there is an abundant supply of humans and you can improve the supply of intelligent humans by removing food poverty, improving access to education, and eliminating other barriers that prevent vast numbers of intelligent humans from being able to devote time to using their intelligence. The valuable tools are ones that do things humans are bad at. Pocket calculators changed the world because being able to add ten-digit numbers together orders of magnitude faster allowed humans to use their intelligence for things that were not the tedious, repetitive, tasks (and get higher accuracy for those tasks). If you want to change the world, build tools that allow humans to do more by offloading things humans are bad at and allowing them to spend more time on things humans are good at.

To put a billionaire in perspective, it's more interesting to think about the income than the capital. You can get a 5% annual return from some fairly low-risk investments (and you can further reduce risk by spreading your money across a load of these). You can often get higher, but 5% is a fairly good baseline.If you start with $1bn and do nothing clever, you can get an income of $50 M per year by doing nothing. Even with the kind of 95% tax rate that we had for the highest income levels when The Beatles sang about it, that leaves you with $2.5M/year in income.That's enough to buy a nice house every year, with no mortgage. It's a daily disposable income of almost $7K. It's enough to take a first-class transatlantic flight every day.And that's just one billion. Even with a 95% tax rate on investment income and a conservative investment strategy, someone with a billion dollars would have a daily disposable income that's more than the monthly income of anyone in the bottom 99% of earners, without having to work.Now try these calculations again with real tax rates and Musk or Bezos' wealth.