aaplok

Doesn't the quoted sentence indicate they did? How would they have known it has been updated since otherwise?

I agree that calling someone a bad person for using one of the most common test images is excessive. However, regarding this:

The subject of the photograph merely went along with it.

The subject of the photograph did ask for it to no longer be used. Here's a quote from her:

I retired from modeling a long time ago. It’s time I retired from tech, too.

to defiantly do the opposite.

If the policing comes from third party for virtue signalling, this is fair game. Here, I'd just suggest that respecting her wish is just common courtesy and consider someone who defiantly doesn't as a somewhat rude person.

[0] https://interestingengineering.com/culture/bye-lenna-iconic-...

Because I have personally never seen "jazzes" pluralised and I didn't think of it.

Maths and math are both used, and the reason I used the plural form is not because I insist on anything but because it is the most commonly used of the two. I personally don't mind either forms.

With that said, linguistically using the plural for either is a bit odd, since that would imply you can pick "a" mathematic out of many, or "a" jazz out of many. But linguistic is not math (nor are lingustics maths), logic doesn't always apply.

For me it's about having a distraction-free environment. I dislike having useless information cluttering my screen real-estate.

Even now that I moved away from text-only, I typically work only with fullscreen windows. All I want to see is what I am focusing on at the moment.

Actually I think that maths and jazz have something in common in the general public peception that you have to be smart to "get it".

Nobody will try to perform a deep intellectual analysis of Lady Gaga's or Ed Sheeran's work the way they analyse Coltrane or Miles Davis (or Mozart, or Stravinsky). Those musicians are intellectuals of the sort Einstein is, unlike Lady Gaga or Ed Sheeran (in the collective perception). Jazz is intellectual music.

And when they analyse something, "smart" people use maths.

I am putting scare quotes around "smart" here to insist that this is largely a social perception and expected behaviour. However, maths can sensibly be used to analyse art, just like it's used elsewhere. This is not patronising, it is more that maths provides a useful language to talk about patterns.

There are slightly more women than men on Tristan de Cunha [0].

[0] https://www.tristandc.com/population.php

GP reported on an opinion and called it insane. That's not an ad hominem.

There is a difference between judging an opinion and judging a person. If the response had been something like "what is crazy is to think the world can just switch off its dependence on petrol suddenly", I would not have reacted either.

It doesn’t matter how blue you die your hair

If your intention is honest engagement with people you disagree with, you should refrain from ad-hominem attacks like this. Work with their arguments, not with their tastes or appearances.

If your intention is to ridicule them and convince yourself they are not worth discussing with, then ad-hominem is fine, but not engaging at all is better.

That the credit for the theorem belongs to Cantor is not under question. This is acknolwedged in the article:

The revelation about Cantor’s result doesn’t undermine his legacy. He was still the first person to prove that there are more real numbers than whole ones, which is what ultimately opened up infinity to study.

What he is alleged to have plagiarised are the proofs, or at least one of the proofs. The original article by Goos [0] contains a lot more details about this, including a partial transcription of the letter by Dedekind that Cantor is accused of plagiarism. The story is complex.

1. Cantor's paper has two theorems: the countability of algebraic numbers and the uncountability of reals.

2. The proof of the former appears in Dedekind's letter, and Cantor acknowledges this in his response to the letter. Dedekind mentions in his letter that he only thought about proving this because of Cantor's prompt and only wrote it with the hope of helping Cantor. Dedekind felt that the proof by Cantor is "word for word" his, although it is quite the case. It is essentially the same proof though.

Cantor also felt that Dedekind's proof that the set of algebraic numbers is countable is essentially the same as his own proof of the countability of tuples. It remains that he didn't think of adapting that proof himself, and that Dedekind was the first to prove the theorem is not under question.

3. Dedekind was not the first to prove the uncountability of real numbers. However, he gave a number of ideas to Cantor in that same letter. Namely, he suggested proving the uncountability of the interval (0,1), and it seems that gave a pointer towards how to build the diagonalisation argument, although how this statement was useful to Cantor (page 76 of Goos' paper) escapes me.

EDIT: it's not a pointer to the diagonalisation argument, it is an argument why proving the theorem on (0,1) is enough.

4. Cantor proved the uncountability of reals shortly afterwards, and shared his proof with Dedekind. Dedekind simplified the proof in his reply, and Cantor seems to have come up with a similar simplification on his own. None of these letters are analysed in Goos' article.

5. Cantor published the two theorems; the first proof is essentially the same as Dedekin's, and the second proof is possibly the one Dedekind's simplified version of Cantor's. Dedekind is not acknowledged at all in that paper, due to academic politics.

Goos' paper is very detailed and quite readable. I recommend it. The site is pretty annoying and you can't download the article without creating an account, but you can read the article online.

Even if the most important theorem of the two is unquestionably creditable to Cantor, the first one should likewise unquestionably be credited to Dedekind, at least partially. This is where the accusation of plagiarism stems from. Beyond the question on plagiarism, there is no question that Cantor and Dedekind worked together on this. The lack of acknowledgement by Cantor is certainly quite unfortunate.

[0] https://www.scribd.com/document/977967855/Phlogiston-33#page...

And maybe they will.

We have gone from the industry clamouring that what's being done now is not possible and spending millions of lobbying money against it, to such laws spreading like wildfire.

The next step is the (inevitable) mess up because implementations won't be foolproof, followed by yet more millions of lobbying money being spent to amplify the effect of these mess ups.

Eventually we will come to a new normal. It will take time. But the hope is that the cat is out of the bag and we don't come back to a model that we know hurts children and pretend it's just how it is.

Requiring ID is not entirely the right approach here I think

It is in the sense that it entices the industry to come up with a better approach.

Otherwise they'll just sit on their piles of gold saying that it can't be done, as they have been doing for far too long.

It depends how you define "good writing", which is too often associated with "proper language", and by extension with proper breeding. It is a class marker.

People have a distinct voice when they write, including (perhaps even especially) those without formal training in writing. That this voice is grating to the eyes of a well educated reader is a feature that says as much about the reader as it does about the writer.

Funnily enough, professional writers have long recognised this, as is shown by the never-ending list of authors who tried to capture certain linguistic styles in their work, particularly in American literature.

There are situations where you may want this class marker to be erased, because being associated with a certain social class can have negative impact on your social prospects. But it remains that something is being lost in the process, and that something is the personality and identity of the writer.

The comments suggest to recuse the judges from countries involved, or to remove the lowest or highest scores for each contestant.

If you remove the scores given by the judges from France and the US, the French pair wins. If you remove the lowest and highest score for each contestant, the French pair wins. If you do both of those things the French pair wins.

The individual judges scores can be found here [0].

This really comes across as a smear campaign by sore losers.

[0] https://www.msn.com/en-us/sports/other/why-didnt-chock-and-b...

Neat collection!

Do you have advice on how to use those calculators with modern tooling? For example I remember there were cross-compilers for the hp48 [0], do you use any of that (and how do you transfer data to/from the calculators)?

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20250124204959/https://sourcefor...

The very fact people think they need to read (fiction) books released this year more than ones released before is baffling.

Do they really?

I was comparing rates of production vs consumption. It doesn't follow that what is being consumed on a given year is this year's production.

My guess is that most of the books written are read by hardly anyone. A few authors have a faithful following that will read their books as soon as it's out (which isn't too baffling). Reviewers and critics may indeed be more likely to review new books, which might impact people's decisions (again, not necessarily baffling). Book shops also put new books forward, but all those books tend to be the ones by trendy authors.

Other than the few fashionable books that come out each year you'll find reviewers like the one described in the article who don't seem to focus on new books (e.g. they talk about Dostoïevski), so it is not obvious that people feel that compelled to read new books.

the backlog of books spread across millennia, not a century.

How much I agree with this! Plus, time does such a great job at filtering out the good from the bad (or the exceptional from the mundane). That's where lists of books entering the public domain, like this one [0], are important. Or the reviews [1].

Ultimately, the fact that there is more available to read than is possible even to the most voracious of readers means that most people will rely on guidance on what to read.

[0] https://standardebooks.org/blog/public-domain-day-2026

[1] https://publicdomainreview.org/

Can't they figure out what books to get without being told?

Probably not? People are not "being told" what to read, they are given some opinionated advice which they can then decide to follow or not.

According to Wikipedia, 275,000 books are published each year in the US alone [0]. Most people (even excluding the many that don't read) will read well under 0.01% of that. Deciding which books to read without taking advice from someone more informed would not be optimal.

Sometimes it makes a lot more sense to rely of expert advice than to just make all decisions on your own.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Books_published_per_country_pe...

This quote explains why the author thinks that it is a problem :

with string theorists now virtually unemployable unless they can figure out how to rebrand as machine learning experts.

Their issue is (seemingly) not with the paper, but with the claim that these headlines feed a hype that attribute to string theory capabilities it doesn't have.

To be clear this is OP's argument, not mine. I am not sure I buy it, except perhaps for the fact that every other academic is expected to rebrand as an ML expert nowadays. It has more to do with ML hype than with string theory hype.

Distance education is a tiny percentage of higher education though.

It is about a third of the students I teach, which amounts to several hundreds per term. It may be niche, but it is not insignificant, and definitely a problem for some of us.

Even for distance education though, proctored testing centers have been around longer than the internet.

I don't know how much experience you have with those. Mine is extensive enough that I have a personal opinion that they are not scalable (which is the focus of the comment I was replying to). If you have hundreds of students disseminated around the world, organising a proctored exam is a logistical challenge.

It is not a problem at many universities yet, because they haven't jumped on the bandwagon. However domestic markets are becoming saturated, visas are harder to get for international students, and there is a demand for online education. I would be surprised that it doesn't develop more in the near future.

A limitation of written exams is in distance education, which simply was hardly a thing for the hundreds of years exams were used. Just like WFH is a new practice employers have to learn to deal with, study from home (SFH) is a phenomenon that is going to affect education.

The objections to SFH exist and are strikingly similar to objections to WFH, but the economics are different. Some universities already see value in offering that option, and they (of course) leave it to the faculty to deal with the consequences.

Being obnoxious works well. Obnoxious people get elected to power. Obnoxious companies (and CEOs) generate hype that increases stock prices. Obnoxious youtubers call themselves influencers and make a good living out of it.

Or more charitably it is difficult to be successful without annoying many people.

a bit more time actually parenting

Well, "blame the parents" is as hypocritical as "think of the children". It just displaces the responsibility of excluding kids from society from the community to the parents.

Creating a safe society for everyone is one of the roles of the state/government. That is why they are granted a monopoly on violence. As you rightly say, children are members of the society and therefore they are included in that responsibility.

The Australian government should be rightly criticized for passing a law that makes being online less safe for adults. However, that doesn't mean we should dismiss the alleged aim of the law, protecting children from harmful online content. It is a real problem that deserves serious attention.

You could force kids to read books without forcing which books to read. The issue as always is to find a balance between giving kids agency and making sure they do what's right.

It should be one component of all the tools available to the programmer.

All text editors worth using have a way to open a terminal for that one time you need it.

Is this not somewhat self-contradictory? Having the terminal in the editor or having the editor in the terminal are both about having one tool that rules the others. The only difference is which one you choose to be the ruler.

You got a bunch of responses already, here is an intuitive reason.

In similar triangles all distances are scaled by a factor k, by definition. Then, intuitively the areas are scaled by a factor of k^2, since you obtain an area by multiplying two distances.

So the ratio of the area over the hypothenuse is scaled by a factor of k^2/k=k.

It is not hard to confirm the intuition that the areas are scaled by a factor of k^2, since it is precisely the product of the lengths of the two sides adjacent to the right angle.

Here is a quote from your original message which I have read and suspect others have too:

In general coops are not good at tough decisions and innovation.

Duralex already went bankrupt several times and they are heading for it again. What's in the article is nice but it's charity not business so unfortunately I am not optimistic.

These two paragraphs following each other do make it seem like you are making a connection between the two, coops being unpropitious for hard decisions and this particular coop heading for bankruptcy.

That original comment was primarily made up of three paragraphs criticising coops, and readers naturally assume that the final concluding paragraph (this place is likely going bankrupt) is linked to the first three.

just rush to condemn me for blaspheming.

Nobody has accused you of blasphemy. They just disagree with you. You are not being victimised, and nobody has pretended you were not allowed to think as you think. There is just a discussion taking place between disagreeing people.

Except that these employees had been put on temporary unemployment (chômage partiel) [0] and their difficulties have been going on for much longer than 10 years.

Ultimately all I am saying is that other structures have not fared better than the COOP. Claiming that the potential current failure is because the COOP prevents hard decisions to be made while ignoring the fact that the previous owner lasted 3 years before failing (in spite of the temporary unemployment decisions) is not logical.

[0] https://www.novethic.fr/economie-et-social/business-model-en...

Were they a coop when they went bankrupt?

They were not. In fact they went through series of mass-redundancy episodes that were supposed to save them from bankruptcy, soon followed by yet another bankruptcy.

The COOP might fail. Indeed the call for contributions discussed in the article was motivated by that risk. But it won't fail because it was a COOP, because every CEO who tried also failed to save it. The COOP structure is this company's last chance, literally.

Only half correct. English is roughly 50% French and 50% German.

The article claims different proportions: "Half of all English vocabulary comes from those three Romance roots, compared to less than a third that comes from Germanic sources."

Still only half correct, but based of those proportions it is more correct than claiming English is a Germanic language.

It's not clear where the quite significant remaining proportion of the English language comes from. Colonial languages?

The real point of the essay discussed in the article is that the French origin of (part of) the English language is Norman French, which was distinctly different from Parisian French and has pretty much vanished from Normandy since. So the argument is that English might be as close to Norman French as French is. The influence of Norman French on the English language was downplayed for political reasons, argues the author.

Ultimately words of Germanic origins might be fewer but more frequently used. The grammar is also potentially closer to the Germanic origins than to the French ones? Let the linguists debate this forever I guess.

OP's point is that French prisons are famously derelict. They are overcrowded, dirty, dangerous. Regular prisoners do not enjoy the luxury of a VIP cell.

Sarkozy played no small part in making this happen.

We should absolutely wish for all prisoners to be treated decently, and it is a terrible thing that the matter is only brought up when someone like Sarkozy has to ensure a portion of what regular prisoners endure.

And worst of all, his political followers are all lamenting about the conditions he is in while remaining hardliners for the rest of the prisoners. You are right that OP should not wish ill on Sarkozy, whose distress is real and painful to see. But OP's frustration is understandable to anyone who cares even a little for the welfare of regular prisoners in France.

It is not political play. This is FUD spread by his political supporters.

The "exécution provisoire" is a measure that was introduced when his own party was in power, to make sure that terrorists were jailed immediately. He happened to be condemned for breaching the same law (association de malfaiteurs) that is used against terrorists.

I once read a comment by a lawyer that he was amazed by the number of politicians who ended up being caught by laws they had voted for. This is what happened here.

In fact when he was president he implemented another law, on minimum mandatory sanctions for repeated offenders (peines plancher) which was repelled by the subsequent administration. He would have been caught by that too otherwise.