“And, I wouldn’t be true to myself if I didn’t plump for the Con­TeXt macro pack­age as an alter­na­tive to LaTeX. If you want to write up a struc­tured doc­u­ment, but it’s not for a con­fer­ence pro­ceed­ings or jour­nal, I would say that it’s more worth putting the time in to learn the basics of Con­TeXt than, say, the Mem­oir class in LaTeX. ConTeXt’s way of sep­a­rat­ing form from con­tent feels much cleaner than LaTeX, and I feel like the learn­ing curve for Con­TeXt has a fairly con­stant and gen­tle slope, rather than a hockey-​​stick-​​like bend for when you want to cus­tomise a Class file.”

“This is a very long expla­na­tion, but the punch line is that as these large insti­tu­tions adjust their port­fo­lios and poten­tially aban­don these more aggres­sive strate­gies, the amount of over­all cap­i­tal com­mit­ted to alter­na­tive assets will undoubt­edly shrink. As this hap­pens, the VC indus­try will shrink in kind. How much will it go down? It is very hard to say. It would not be sur­pris­ing for many of these funds to cut their allo­ca­tion in the cat­e­gory in half, and as a result, it shouldn’t be sur­pris­ing for the VC indus­try to get cut in half also.”

“It’s almost hard to remem­ber how big a par­a­digm shift this is. Before the Inter­net came along, most Amer­i­cans never wrote any­thing, ever, that wasn’t a school assign­ment. Unless they got a job that required pro­duc­ing text (like in law, adver­tis­ing, or media), they’d leave school and vir­tu­ally never con­struct a para­graph again.”

“First of a series of chats on lead­ing edge ideas in regional eco­nomic devel­op­ment with Ed Mor­ri­son and Valdis Krebs. ”

“Why do these asi­nine reports jump onto a band­wagon they don’t under­stand and why do those report­ing on them relate with such glee that a ser­vice that was never sup­posed in the first place to be more than gos­sipy tittle-​​tattle and proudly banal ver­bal doo­dling is “fail­ing to deliver mean­ing­ful com­mer­cial or polit­i­cal con­tent”. Bol­locky bol­locks to the lot of them. They can found their own “enter­prise ori­ented” earnest microblog­ging ser­vice. Remind me to avoid it.”

“About the Book: This is an open set of lec­ture notes on meta­heuris­tics algo­rithms, intended for under­grad­u­ate stu­dents, prac­ti­tion­ers, pro­gram­mers, and other non-​​experts. It was devel­oped as a series of lec­ture notes for an under­grad­u­ate course I taught at GMU. The chap­ters are designed to be print­able sep­a­rately if nec­es­sary. As it’s lec­ture notes, the top­ics are short and light on exam­ples and the­ory. It’s best when com­ple­ment­ing other texts. With time, I might rem­edy this.”

“‘The law is built around cause and effect, but it’s bad at assess­ing sys­tems, where each indi­vid­ual part is harm­less but the whole might be harm­ful,’ he said. ‘It’s still in the age of automa­tion, where the role of a human oper­a­tor is well-​​defined.’”

“Lan­guages can be split into two com­po­nents, their syn­tax and their seman­tics. It’s your under­stand­ing of Eng­lish syn­tax that tells you the stream of words “Sleep furi­ously green ideas col­or­less” is not a valid sen­tence. Seman­tics is deeper. Even if we rearrange the above sen­tence to be “Col­or­less green ideas sleep furi­ously”, which is syn­tac­ti­cally cor­rect, it remains non­sen­si­cal on a seman­tic level. With Tree­top, you’ll be deal­ing with lan­guages that are much sim­pler than Eng­lish, but these basic con­cepts apply. Your pro­grams will need to address both the syn­tax and the seman­tics of the lan­guages they interpret.”

“right?”