- With respect to tagged pointers, there seems to be some recent movements on that front in CPython: https://github.com/python/cpython/issues/132509
- There's no base 60 involved, it's the energy available divided by the power delivered:
178.8 Watt hours / 8300 Watts ≈ 0.0215 hours
- I'm sort of the inverse of this author: I have always liked Python and disliked Ruby. It's true though that python has changed a lot, and it's a mixed bag IMHO. I think every language feature python has added can have a reasonable argument made for its existence, however collectively it kind of makes the language burgeon under the weight of its own complexity. "one way to do it" really hasn't been a hard goal for the language for a while.
I'm really charmed by ML style languages nowadays. I think python has built a lot of kludges to compensate for the fact that functions, assignments, loops, and conditionals are not expressions. You get comprehensions, lambdas, conditional expressions, the walrus operator... most statements have an expression equivalent now.
it seems like, initially, Guido was of the opinion that in most cases you should just write the statement and not try "to cram everything in-line," so to speak. However it can't be denied that there are cases where the in-line version just looks nice. On the other hand now you have a statement and an expression that is slightly different syntactically but equivalent semantically, and you have to learn both. Rust avoids this nicely by just making everything an expression, but you do get some semicolon-related awkwardness as a result.
- As far as I know, the science on this is far from settled. There is no consensus and the evidence in favor of a trophic cascade in Yellowstone came predominantly from two studies done by the same team/person. Later studies failed to replicate findings.
Do wolves fix ecosystems? CSU study debunks claims about Yellowstone reintroduction
https://eu.coloradoan.com/story/news/2024/02/09/colorado-sta...
A good story: Media bias in trophic cascade research in Yellowstone National Park
https://academic.oup.com/book/26688/chapter-abstract/1954809...
- There was an article about this journey just recently: https://bigthink.com/strange-maps/portugal-to-singapore-trai...
Unfortunately you may have to wait some time, at the moment the journey is not be completable because the Paris-Moscow express service (and indeed all train service between Russia and Western Europe) is suspended due to sanctions against Russia.
- Dutch banks did this, it is called iDeal: https://www.ideal.nl/en/
iDeal is ubiquitous in The Netherlands for individuals sending money to each other, and for online payments. However it does not support NFC payments in physical stores. Dutch banks decided to go with Google/Apple wallet for this. I believe in the longer term Wero https://wero-wallet.eu/ (and potentially the digital euro https://www.ecb.europa.eu/euro/digital_euro/html/index.en.ht...) is supposed to take over this usecase in the EU.
- > Every meal is a gift from Harber & Bosch + the world order allowing international trade.
Let's not forget Norman Borlaug
- This is generally unknown, of course. However it currently appears that the expansion of the universe is accelerating, i.e. it is expanding faster and faster.
Obviously it can't be ruled at that at some point this would stop and/or reverse. But there's no reason to think so, and if we're considering arbitrary future changes then we may as well consider that the universe might suddenly start heating up again in the future, or more mass will start appearing out of nowhere. Or god appears and hands out free decryption keys to everyone.
- A key (hah!) property of key derivation functions is that they allow you to customize the key that you get out, mainly because you may need a specific length (e.g. 512 bits) for whatever encryption algorithm you're using. bcrypt lacks this functionality: you only ever get 192 bits of hash.
- The proof is not really formal, but you could view the shown system as a minimal subset of an arbitrarily shaped large system.
For the system to be distributed it must have at least two nodes, and to be available all nodes must respond to requests. So however the rest of the system is shaped, the proof still holds.
- They are not. The proposal text itself doesn't mention taxing "the 1% richest" or any threshold at all really. It's quite vague on the specifics:
> Firstly, we call on the European Commission to draft a proposal for a directive establishing a European excess wealth tax, based on Article 115 TFEU.
In any case, the proposal is for a wealth tax, so income is irrelevant. I think the proposed wealth threshold for taxation is supposed to vary by country.
- Unfortunately a shrinking population leads to a situation where there are more older people alive than young people, which makes our retirement and health care systems quite unsustainable.
- Usually on the bottle of lactase enzyme pills it will just say "take before consuming a lactose-containing product." But actual usage will really depend on the degree of lactose intolerance of the person. For example my wife is only mildly lactose intolerant: she can consume hard cheeses and many processed products containing dairy just fine, but soft cheese, milk, cream, etc. will give her digestive problems.
She mostly gets by simply avoiding these things, but she really really loves a good quality burrata so she will take an enzyme pill when she wants to indulge.
- > The JS ecosystem encourages using a million tiny unmaintained packages and that is bad
continuing on this, I wonder if this is a cultural thing or if there are actual technical choices made in NPM that play a role. Could NPM change something in their package management to change this? Should they?
- Overall this looks nice, but I found myself stumbling over the ToSpan syntax:
It feels sort of weird how the first number appears in front, and then all the other ones are function arguments. I suppose if you don't like that you can just write:let span = 5.days().hours(8).minutes(1);
at the expense of a couple characters, which is not too bad.let span = Span::new().days(5).hours(8).minutes(1); - Simply renting out products is not necessarily the same as rent-seeking. Rent-seeking is the extraction of uncompensated value from others without increasing productivity. The classic example is putting up a chain across a river and charging passing boats a toll to lift the chain.
Ostensibly Adobe's customers are paying for continual improvement and support of its product and maintenance costs associated with whatever cloud features they offer. That's not rent-seeking.
- Dating apps have fundamentally misaligned incentives with their customers: customer success implies that the customer will stop paying. For this reason no dating app that charges for access will ever be a good way to find a relationship (note that the same is not true for hookups).
One possible way to remedy this: the dating app is free to sign on, but you pay a fee when you quit. This would incentivize the app to find you a good match as soon as possible. The issue is, how to know when a match is successful?
- I don't feel this is a very good argument to use Emacs. On any bash prompt you ever encounter you can simply `set -o vi` and be on your way.
- That system is just called capitalism, no? The whole point is to employ greed as a (powerful) motivator to achieve desired outcomes.
> Mr Newell, who worked for Microsoft for 13 years on Windows, said his company had embraced the open-source software Linux as a "hedging strategy" designed to offset some of the damage Windows 8 was likely to do.
> "There's a strong temptation to close the platform," he said, "because they look at what they can accomplish when they limit the competitors' access to the platform, and they say, 'That's really exciting.'"
> This is seen by commentators, external to be a reference to the inclusion of a Windows Store in the Microsoft operating system.
Having an open platform is good for consumers, but Valve is primarily looking out for themselves here. Gabe realized that windows could take Apple's IOS route (i.e. https://blog.codinghorror.com/serving-at-the-pleasure-of-the...) and lock down their OS, and everything he's done since has been an effort to protect his company against that existential threat.