I was 10 in 1969. Landing on the moon was a communal and shared event for a large percentage of the population, via one of the three television networks. As was the war in Vietnam.

Many decades later, our institutions are in need of rebuild, for the common good. Maybe this event is a "small step" in that direction.

The Apollo program only barely reached 50% approval during the Apollo 11 landing. They canceled landings because people stopped caring within a couple moon landings.

The popularity of Apollo is fictional. Artemis has dramatically better popularity than Apollo.

I"m not saying it had high approval. I'm saying it had high community awareness, unlike the current mission. I was in a bookstore where they were playing the radio over their speakers as Apollo 13 reported problems. That seems different to our current fragmented, de-institutionalized world, FWIW. Maybe there are tiktok memes that I'm not aware of.

I was an engineering manager for a commercial C/C++ toolchain used in embedded systems development. We, and our customers, examined the generated code continously. In our case, to figure out better optimizations (and fix bugs). For some of our customers, because their device had severe memory constraints or trying to do difficult performance optimizations.

Moving up to an MMU and running Linux was a different (more abstract) world. Although since it was embedded, low-level functions might still be in both assembly and C if not the apps on top.

I understand the value of statistics. But calculus? I say this, as someone who took 6 semesters of calculus in college.

6 semesters seems like... a lot? IIRC getting a math undergrad at my Uni didn't require that many classes of calc.

I think calc 1 and 2 are extremely valuable. The concept of rate of change is fundamental to so many things in life, and understanding "area under the curve" is essential to understanding how many ideas are communicated, including lots of graphs in physics, chemistry, and economics.

Beyond that I feel calculus starts getting into specific applications and is less generally applicable to the populace at large.

6 quarters, not 6 semesters!

Decades later, I wish I had more linear algebra.

I was a manager of engineers and manager of managers. I've never heard the word fun used in conjunction with reviews.

It's a system and process put together by others, with forms and criteria that were flawed. It required real effort to do it even half successfully. It's not clear it ever had much impact on future behavior. and it had to be done on a timeline that interfered with doing the regular job.

If someone had a real performance issue, there were better approaches to the problem.

Yet every company I worked from from tiny startup to large Silicon Valley company insisted on it every year.

> Americans during WWII thought it was a fight for national survival

Right, they did. But in retrospect, was it actually?

If the US had stayed neutral from the beginning, do we think Japan would have bombed America's military base?

Interesting counter-factual.

Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle suggests what would have happened if the US did lose the war. Remaining neutral would have been a different result, though.

I need to reread it but Paul Fussell makes the case that old wealth is inconspicuous and secure (and maybe inherited) versus nouveau riche which is about visible luxury, branding, and showy consumption. I don't remember if he mentions the need to promote ideas.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Class:_A_Guide_Through_the_Ame...

Paul Fussel’s Class was an interesting read

Meh dynastic families which are about as old money as you can get have some of the most ostentatious displays of wealth. They sit on thrones, wear crowns, and preside over public celebrations.

On official occasions.

British aristos tend to be outdoor sorts. Range Rover and a Barbour jacket.

QEII was always in wellies whenever she was off the clock.

Is this a difference in kind versus say the printing press and books? That technology gave some souls a platform.

Then and now, having a platform isn't the same as having an effective and popular platform for force indoctrination...

I think it's the velocity by which you can disseminate that makes it different and more dangerous.

I think this is the right question. My search/chat is now 50% ChatGPT, 30% Google, and 20% Gemini. I have no idea the business implications of this.

For that matter, I don't know the bandwidth and compute cycle tradeoffs between traditional search and AI.

I'm a retired engineering manager so judge me appropriately :-) I've had 1000 good chats with ChatGPT on a wide range of topics. I build personal Excel and Access applications but not any real programming. I don't need workflow automation although I will dabble with Codex. I'm curious why I should abandon what works for Claude.

You shouldn't. No need to rush to buy a TI-84 to do simple arithmetic. I don't use either because I can learn just find from docs and textbooks. And I don't have that many problems to solve with computing.

Good link from the other day about spreadsheet impact on business https://davidoks.blog/p/how-the-spreadsheet-reshaped-america