https://www.americanheritage.com/prisoners-dilemma

> "In 1950 Life magazine quoted the great Hungarian-American physicist John Von Neumann, co-father of both the atom bomb and the digital computer, advocating immediate pre-emptive nuclear war against Russia: “If you say why not bomb them tomorrow, I say why not today? If you say today at 5 o’clock, I say why not one o’clock?” He was hardly alone. Generals and members of Congress were making the same arguments..."

The fact that all this is getting swept under the rug in this article, as well as in the obviously habiographic bibliographical treatment that it references, doesn't bode well for the future of scholarly historical research in the USA. Past treatments were far more balanced.

I'm a coder who's built a lot of platforms for startups from the ground up. I have some scorn for people who are too good to learn the technical; when I hire a roofer, he's looking at me like I'm an idiot, so same goes. But. I always thought, hey, I've got the coding skill so why shouldn't I have it all - and be fabulously successful from some good idea I cobbled together with nothing but 1's and 0's in my free time? So, I built six or seven apps on my own recognizance, none of which took off, but which were all (I think) revolutionary concepts at the time, and each of which took a year or so to be fully functional platforms.

The other apps I built in the interim, to make money. These I built as a freelancer for people who were very competent in their particular businesses and were using web/mobile apps to basically streamline things and improve efficiency; I would reject anyone coming to me with a job like "I have this idea for an app..." because I have a dozen ideas for apps that are probably better than theirs, and I know how to actually build them, but what I emphatically have never had are a functioning existing business, business model, growth strategy or investment for those things. Ideas are just ideas. Even if you take years to develop the code skills to build them swiftly. In fact, if you do, it's even more painful to watch them vanish after a little while.

1's and 0's are just electrons on silicon, after all. We're writing in sand.

I've come to ...well, not exactly love or respect the fast-talking business guys, but... appreciate that maybe focusing on just how to build things (whether you code them or not) is really not the key. It's a necessary ingredient, for sure. But like I said, I've got a dozen good ideas for apps. Non-technical people have like hundreds of bad ideas for apps, and most of them want to catapult themselves to success with neither a good idea nor a functional business model nor existing investment -- they just want to entice someone like me to work for them on faith/credit, and it's always been this way, for 30 years now.

Sorry to rant. But what does work is when people have a successful business already, or the skills to set one up, which I don't have. When they have domain knowledge in their field, whether that's the food industry or hotels or manufacturing. Then, finding someone to build the software creatively or learning to do it yourself can add a whole layer of value, because you already understand the business logic inside and out.

There will be a few unicorn dream startups that exist only 1's and 0's, in the 2020s... and as sad as I am about how all those things turned out since the 1990s, I'm not totally closed to the possibility of being at the front of one. But that's not where the bulk of wealth will be created. It'll be in building usable software that acts as a multiplier for the capacity of ordinary businesses... and not necessarily in the "take a 2.5% cut" way.

This press release is a bit long, incoherent, and manages an impressive number of buzzwords that I don't normally associate with cellular automata. Can somebody maybe translate this to English, filter out the narcissist self glorification and actually explain what it is this institute is planning to actually do? I bet it's something like cellular automata all the way down.

I work at a small company that has been using Scala for 7 years. Some of the prior employees enjoyed playing with advanced language features and writing libraries for the most general possible case even when that made it hard to understand how they were used for the 2 actual cases we needed to handle. Akka, Cats, and Shapeless were all over the place.

Those earlier employees have churned off to other places and I have successively simplified the code they wrote that is still useful, while encouraging the use of no more language power than necessary in new development. Hands-On Scala Programming is the book I give new hires as a language introduction that shows the sort of style to be preferred. It's much more like super-powered Python than like Haskell.

I have written C, Fortran, JavaScript, Python, and Scala for money. When I started on Scala I had never written Java nor used any JVM language. I have come to really appreciate the rich ecosystem of JVM libraries, the instrumentation and profiling tools I get, and many aspects of the Scala language and standard library. I love Scala's collections and miss their power and ease when I'm writing Python. (Which I still do for certain scripting tasks and for accessing Python-ecosystem libraries.)

[1] https://www.lihaoyi.com/

[2] https://www.handsonscala.com/

Once released from the military these people have no additional obligation to pay for the military more so than people in more tame business - in fact, they might be seen as owed something for serving in the military, rather than the other way around.