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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • It’s not just lawmakers. There’s a bunch of lawsuits trying to use the federal courts to figure out:

    • What is DOGE in the federal government?
    • What is the nature of the “DOGE Temporary Organisation?”
    • Who is in charge of DOGE? (Definitely not Musk, officially…)
    • Why can DOGE make all these consequential personnel decisions up and down the federal government?

    These are all things that have been shrouded in secrecy, obfuscation, and contradiction. Because the truth is that the real answers are not legally sound. The fact that these people are scared to say the real truth is a good sign, because it means they still have some fear of the courts and institutions. Those institutions still have some power to mess up the plan.












  • There are also a bunch of contracting arrangements where the workers are W-2 employees of a private company that has a contract with the gov to provide bulk professional services from said employees.

    Those workers have some room to negotiate salaries and benefits like any private sector worker. Although the terms of the big contract can put some limits on what the private company can offer.

    A lot of national labs and NASA stuff works like this.


  • No. For several reasons.

    Fortran is older than Basic and C. In fact, Fortran is more or less the first high level programming language. The first Fortran compilers date to the early 1950s.

    Fortran was created mainly for the purpose of linear algebra: operations with (giant) matrices. Linear algebra is used to compute approximate solutions to ordinary and partial differential equations, and this is a major part of what people needed computers for (and still do).

    Programming concepts like subroutines, functions, if statements with blocks and else clauses… All of those were not in original Fortran because no one had thought of them. These things entered Fortran over time as they became popular, and goto slowly became less popular. Syntax from the punch card era was replaced in Fortran 90, but it is still available as an option for compatibility purposes.

    Structurally, I prefer to describe Fortran as like C, but with better built-in arrays, and no built-in general purpose pointers. Not having the pointers allows the compiler to do certain optimizations that C can’t. But C is the better systems language, because the pointers let you naturally express all kinds of data structures besides arrays.