QasimK

In the five years I have used Arch, I have not had a single issue.

I don’t know if kids notice, but I can smell the air pollution every time I drive into outer London from outside London. It’s how I know I’m entering London.

My 2002 MINI was ULEZ-compliant.

I agree with you. The idea that ULEZ means people must give up driving is ridiculous and overblown. It does not affect the vast majority of people at all.

Ah, so _that’s_ why the ente photos app feels so “off” - it’s using flutter.

I’ve tried the app a few times over the last couple of years and had a dislike of the UI because it did not _feel_ right, like it was slow or something. I can’t say exactly what.

It is almost certainly because it is using flutter rather than native DOM elements.

(I’ve been keeping track of ente but never quite made the jump - not solely due to the UI though!)

This is what self-hosted software should be. An app, self-contained, (essentially) a single file with minimal dependencies.

Not something so complex that it requires docker. Not something that requires you to install a separate database. Not something that depends on redis and other external services.

I’ve turned down many self-hosted options due to the complexity of the setup and maintenance.

I've been thinking about doing this myself, so it's fantastic to see a project.

I find a files-centric (and more broadly filesystem-centric) approach easier to grapple with than one that focuses on apps (and hiding away the data). It makes it much easier to access my own data for other purposes outside of what the app provides. In particular when the files are in plain-text or otherwise human-editable. I can reuse all of the existing tool that I'm familiar with to search, modify or re-purpose the data.

Super confusing! Through different reasoning I get different answers:

1. More likely to be red because the urn has a greater chance of having more red balls

2. Equally likely by considering all remaining urn possibilities to be equally likely

3. More likely to be green because obviously there is one less red ball than before

I wrote a Python program to simulate the problem. It tells me that the correct answer is (2) - it's equally likely that the next ball is red or green.

I wonder if I've made a mistake, or if that's really the real answer!

    #!/usr/bin/python
    import random
    from collections import Counter
    
    def experiment():
        urn = random.choices(["R", "G"], k=100)
        if urn.pop() != "R":
            return
    
        return urn.pop()
    
    results = (experiment() for i in range(1_000_000))
    results = (result for result in results if result is not None)
    print(Counter(results))

    #!/usr/bin/python
    import random
    from collections import Counter
    
    def experiment():
        num_red = random.randint(1, 100)
        num_green = 100 - num_red
        urn = ["R"] * num_red + ["G"] * num_green
        random.shuffle(urn)
        if urn.pop() != "R":
            return
    
        return urn.pop()
    
    results = (experiment() for i in range(1_000_000))
    results = (result for result in results if result is not None)
    print(Counter(results))

I’ve used Cloud Run and it does allow for background threads.

That’s not right because it implies that only new cars since 2015 can drive inside the ULEZ.

The ULEZ standard requires diesel cars to conform to Euro 6, available since 2015 - the diesel emissions scandal notwithstanding. (The in-practice standards for diesel cars are much much more lenient than for petrol cars.)

The ULEZ standard requires petrol cars to conform to only Euro 4, required since 2005 but some cars manufactured as early as 2001 meet the standard including my 2002 MINI.

This means relatively few people are actually affected by ULEZ, compared to the implication that you need a car manufactured from 2015 onwards.

Do you really think someone is going to read that, start ignoring their doctors, throw all their medicine in the bin, and become some kind of natto evangelist?

It’s a common Japanese food and he just said give it a go.

The idea of societal benefit is very nebulous. It sounds like your idea of it is very different to mine by the fact that you believe in an absolute answer to it.

How do you measure something like societal benefit?

I'm sure we could agree that eradicating disease is very beneficial, but would we disagree about the entire tourism and entertainment industry as a whole?

I can guarantee we have different opinions about the value of things. That's why we should be free to make our own choices. We don't need everyone in the world to help define what "societal benefit" is for them, they can do it every time they pay for something out of their own pocket.

(There is one thing that I think fulfills your criteria though, flights for holidays. They contribute more, and increasingly more, carbon emissions than bitcoin does while delivery little "societal benefit" - whatever that means. However, I'm not arguing anything here because I think it's morally wrong to focus on specific activities that affect a minority of people. And yes, banning taking flights for holidays would only affect a small minority of people globally.)

You're right in a sense. I would certainly notice the change if it happened very quickly. However, I would quickly adapt and think it was just normal. (Mind you, my room is about 17 C at the moment.)

Certainly, if someone told me my room was going to be 2 degrees hotter permanently, I wouldn't think twice about it.

This is useful to understand what this report actually is. It lays out the physical science basis for climate change. The full impacts, and possible mitigations will come in later months as two separate reports. Finally, there will be a summary next September (2022).

Unfortunately, it looks like these won't be published in time for COP26 in Glasgow later this year.

I disagree that it was unavoidable. I said to my family in February that the UK should stop all - absolutely all - flights into the country. The cost of this would have been miniscule compared to what ended up happening.

(Not just flights - everything except essential goods including via trains, ships and lorries. Certainly all people should have been disallowed entry.)

They'll have a choice between two similar products. One is $10 because of a $5 carbon charge, the other is $6 with a $0 carbon charge. What will they choose?

They'll choose the $6 one, and keep their carbon tax dividend in their pocket too.

They won't really be worse off.

On the other hand, the rich will be worse off because they take more flights, consume more resources, and generally cause more carbon emissions anyway from their day-to-day lives.

If my room was 2 degrees hotter right now, I would barely notice. So "2 degrees" by itself actually really does mean very little even to me - and I already know about the catastrophic effects that are going to come out of 2 degrees. I have to think about the sea level rise, increasing heat waves, more floods, more extreme weather, and so on for it to actually have an impact on even me.

The rich will support the burden of climate adaptation because the income from the tax can be used directly to help mitigate climate change.

The vast majority of flights are taken by a small minority of people; they're taken by the richest. Take the United Kingdom as an example: 70% of all flights were taken by 15% of people [0]. It certainly isn't the poorest taking these flights.

So taxing flights will have less direct impact on the poorest than one might think.

Having said that, I think a charge on carbon is more fair than taxing flights directly.

[0] https://fullfact.org/economy/do-15-people-take-70-flights/

The emissions from aviation are increasing every year, the majority of flights are for holidays rather than business, and only a very small minority of people globally actually take flights.

However, I belive the parent commenter was more pointing out the unfairness of picking and choosing what to ban rather than imposing a blanket charge on carbon.

This seems to have been missed by most, even when considering that the parent is likely correct that flights have a greater, and increasingly greater, impact on climate change than bitcoin does.

I was recently thinking about why bitcoin shouldn't just be banned to help mitigate the ongoing climate catastrophe which led to my recent article [0] which equated banning bitcoin to banning ice cream, which I hope helps to illustrate the absurdity of picking and choosing versus just charging for carbon more directly.

[0] https://qasimk.io/2021/bitcoin-and-ice-cream/

COVID has not been cheap either - it has cost hundreds of billions [0]. You could fund twenty crossrails for this amount of money.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/mar/22/a-year-of-c...

You cannot tell from your old meter because it does not submit meter readings every minute (or whatever the configuration is) because it does not have an internet connection.

Arch-TK I absolutely agree with everything you are saying, and I don’t intend to get a smart meter myself for as long as possible.

However, you are incorrect that meters are incompatible between utility companies. You are right that SMETS1 meters _are_ incompatible. However, all new meter installations are SMETS2 and these are fully compatible between energy companies.

SMETS2 has been the standard for a number of years now. There are still old SMETS1 installations still active though.

Incredible. I somehow heard about the NHS opt-out, but not about the GP one. I’m appalled by how much disregard the government has for sensitive personal medical information.

I personally believe it’s a question of when, not if, the country-wide database is hacked or leaked.

It feels like a flaw of the voting system for articles to end up on the front-page, yet we still need to check comments to see if it is worth reading.

Who are all these people upvoting an article that isn’t really worth reading? Why are they doing this? Is it too easy to upvote?

I don’t think the article is talking about sleeping for one hour less. It has examples saying “go to sleep one hour earlier; wake up one hour earlier” - so the same amount of sleep.

I’m not sure I fully understood from the article, but it seems like they were using genetics as a proxy for “natural” wake-up time and something something causation for depression.

I didn’t really get it despite reading the explanation three times. I’m not convinced but that could just be down to this article rather than the paper itself.

I just don’t get how they accounted for something like “depression causes people to sleep later and for longer”.

It would be great if we, the customers, were actually given a genuine, competitive choice. As you say, right now you literally don’t have a genuine choice.

There is precedent for this too. Amazon Kindles came (come?) with two options - one with ads and one without. The latter cost something like $20 more. That was good!

Having said that, I bought the one without ads and they increasingly, with software updates, devoted greater and greater screen space to the Amazon ebook store. I consider that to be an ad too (and arguably worse because of anti-competitiveness reasons).

My first job straight out of university was at Reincubate. I thought I'd share my experience because Reincubate is a small company - you could count us with your fingers when I joined.

It was a fun place to work with nerf guns and rubber balls to throw at each other. You learnt to keep your computer locked the "fun" way. We always went for a team lunch on Fridays - something that I've missed ever since. I enjoyed coming into work every day because of the people.

The favourite highlight of my entire career was there, back in 2015. The whole team of engineers (~6ish) worked together to figure out how to decrypt iOS 9 beta backups as Apple had changed the encryption system. Everyone contributed in some way and I delved into using a disassembler, IDA Pro, from zero prior experience armed with a textbook. It took a whole week from the beta being released, and I believe we were the first (public) company to do it.

The values of the company, as described on the website, have changed, but what they say now still matches up with my time there.

Switching to something more relevant to this article. I was looking for a webcam a couple of months ago for quite a while before it also hit me that my iPhone camera was actually damn good. Since then I've been connecting to Zoom twice (from my phone for the video, and my computer for the audio). It's not a great experience but I never really looked into the "random" apps that could create a virtual camera. Well Reincubate is not random to me and it looks like there's a beta version of Camo for Windows, so I don't really have an excuse :)

Except your computer doesn’t know what the purpose of a cookie is, in order to decide what to do with any particular cookie.

Neither does the user, not by themselves anyway. Only the website knows really.

I’m continually amazed - flabbergasted - by GPT-3. I’ve read stories, articles and HTML written by it and each time I am shocked at how good the output is. This essay made me laugh!

It’s practically indistinguishable from a human. Not a creative, insightful and unique human. But an average human? Yes, I cannot tell the difference.

I must repeat that - I cannot tell the difference!

This can probably completely replace or supplement most online content that I see including news, certainly on the vacuous side of things of which I think there is a lot of content.

Those online recipes with irrelevant life stories before them? Replaced. Those opinion pieces in news? Replaced. Basic guides to tasks? Probably replaceable.

I know I probably only see the best output, and it would be nice if I had more context, but the peak performance is amazing

The twitter video showing GPT-3 generate HTML based on your request? I think there’s a lot of potential. I don’t knew whether it can, in general, live up to these specific examples though.