beevai142

A large part of what makes the first world so productive is its culture

In view of history including colonialism this statement sounds very naive indeed.

That is a consequence of failed premises in the city planning in the US.

Joyce scholarship in some sense seems like mathematics --- the construct is an invention, axioms can be whatever they are decided to be, and the only question is in how productive and beautiful the construction is.

That being said, from this point of view the whole enterprise seems empty and vain. Even if you finally find what the book "means", the whole project seems like a dead end and does not lead to anything else --- you have gained nothing that generalizes beyond a narrow scope, and Joyce is long dead. This means that the work is not beautiful.

known-to-be-flawed academic peer review system

That something is flawed does not mean it is useless.

You can find the fully unmoderated preprint forum at vixra.org and the results speak for themselves.

From the simplest cases like being ignored on PRs

You're not entitled to having your PRs merged, or even having anyone look at them. PRs not of particular interest to those maintaining the project simply get low priority. Especially with volunteer work, time is limited and while your PR might appear large and of importance to you, it may not look like that from other perspectives.

But the stackoverflow answer is right, and accounts for the fact that in the majority of cases the person who is asking a confused question is indeed confused.

If what you are trying to do is to get best performance, make use of work that other people already did, rather than wasting your time on a solved problem.

If you want to learn about how efficient matrix multiplication can be implemented, that is a different problem.

Don't forget that companies are made of people

This is totally irrelevant, because the governance model of a a company is a limited dictatorship, and not all those people are equal. A company is only the people at its top, the rest are chattel.

A company is also not made of people in the legal sense, it is a separate entity.

I have used an ad blocker for the last 10+ years. I don't know how Adsense has improved my internet experience, and I suspect it has had no effect.

Evolution only optimizes for having offspring in the future. Trying to find a rational reason for some evolved behavior is not necessarily a fruitful way to think about it.

Not a surprise and not a disappointment either, when it was clear from the start that all results are within measurement error bars, so that there was neither experimental nor theoretical reason to expect to see something.

It was not "NASA" who indicated something, but a couple of guys working for NASA. Also, the "pilot wave theory" stuff is just idle speculation on topics of which the authors did not appear to understand much.

There is no substitute for you, the person reading these words, to stop accepting plastic bags and as much similar things -- coffee cups, utensils, etc.

There is: regulation by the government, restricting use of items harmful to the environment.

It appears naive to suggest that the tragedy of the commons can be avoided by individual action, when the financial interests are not aligned.

Mercurial?

It's not.

The basic feature set is pretty much the same, and requires similar effort to grok. Some things are much harder to do in Mercurial, and some things are just confusing (multiple heads, pushing branches, multiple branching models, the "tip", etc.). Online platforms are worse (Bitbucket vs Github) in practice.

The problem with stackoverflow is that answering questions sucks in the long term, for most people. It's basically an user support job, and if you are not suited for that sort of job eventually you start to lose patience with fools, of which there is no shortage on the internet.

Another natural language programming language (in Finnish): https://github.com/fergusq/tampio

It's technically somewhat amusing as it runs a morphological parser in order to deal with the Finnish word inflection system, which is then utilized as an integral part of the language grammar. As a consequence, since this allows relaxing constraints e.g. on word order, the resulting code does actually read like natural language.

I hear (but is it true?) that for a philosopher to build a career, it is important to be thought as very smart by other philosophers --- and that this is much more so than in other fields, such as the sciences. If it's true, it would explain why appearing smart is stressed.

Perhaps it is an action boosting EU-based companies? Otherwise they are at a disadvantage in competition, because US-based Googles and Facebooks game the e.g. the tax system in a way that EU-based companies cannot.

The source you link to has its own agenda: http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/JunkScience.com

I don't understand how governments have the authority to make private companies (journal publishers) give-away their product for free.

Nobody is telling publishers what they have to do.

The directives are aimed at publically funded institutions, instructing them how public research funds can be used.

This is about the customer's money, and I imagine also in any capitalist philosophy the government as a customer has the right to decide how its own funds can be used.

When Nature releases an article, they put a lot of work into formatting it for publication so it looks nice. That final product does and should belong to them.

Don't you think that this is of very little added value? Nature could publish the submitted articles as is, and nobody would care. The only value the journal has is the supposed prestige of getting an article published there, which has ridiculous early career effects.

Let's say that you suddely start caring once your library drops subscriptions to journals that you need.

The journal choice is still not fully voluntary. Each field has certain flagship journals, and you are going to publish in them because they have large impact on the prospects for future career. The journals are flagships for historical reasons --- it takes time for a journal accumulate credibility and attract high-quality papers. If the flagships in your field happen to be owned by Elsevier, the you are going to be squeezed. Granted, the existence of arXiv and others alleviates the open access issue, but not the issue of crazy profit margins of the publishers.

Why not term limits for all occupations? 1 year white collar work, 1 year on the farm.

DDT was never banned for use in fighting malaria and other diseases. Its use declined because mosquitoes develop resistance to it, and more efficient methods became available.

Of course, some interest groups like to present a different picture, as usual with environmental issues.

The problem with SELinux is not really in the beginner documentation, but in the documentation of the policy macro packages eg. in Fedora -- which are what you in the end should/need to use for actually writing or modifying policies.

Answers to questions on eg. finding the difference between "userdom_user_application_domain" and "application_domain", or learning that "~/.local/share" has the symbolic name "data_home_t" are very difficult to find. Everything in SElinux has a symbolic name, so there's also at least one more layer of indirection as compared to apparmor.

I expect the article itself is more carefully worded than the press release.

I don't think people in the scientific community in general really care much about the press releases. The publicity is more something that the funding organizations and universities have started to require in recent years --- you may even get some quantified "career points" of some sort from them depending on the grant. The press releases are at best an afterthought for the researchers. As they are also often edited by the PR staff of the university, there may be some standardized level of hype injected.

The code is next to the explanations in the books. Who decides whether your implementation is "completely different", especially if you admit that yours is not a clean-room implementation, since you read the book? Do you want to expose yourself to a legal risk? Or hire a lawyer to determine what the legal risk is?

It is also not that clear all of the algorithms are fully original clean-room implementations written by the authors --- the techniques in the book are well-known and previous implementations do exist, written by other academics. As such, claiming copyright on some the codes is not morally defensible, even if legal.

It's just better to not read the book at all. Since you cannot use the codes as is, if you want to learn about the theory behind it, it's better to pick a different book.

I wrote about the interpretation usually used in published papers, and obviously decoherence alone does not solve the measurement problem as it only shuffles it to the bigger system, you need many worlds / Copenhagen / etc.

I don't bother watching youtube videos of what someone thinks quantum mechanics is about.

This is correct. As it is usually applied in practice in the literature, the measurement device decoheres the quantum system and becomes entangled with it --- and at the end of the calculation, Copenhagen interpretation is applied on the measurement device. It works fine in practice, but in the end it is philosophically just the Copenhagen interpretation.

If something is not accepted by the wider physics community, it's very likely the correctness of the thing in question is not that clear.

If someone wants to fight the "unending hamster wheel of capitalism and technology", then certainly shutting up is a bad strategy. The reasons for making noise about this given in the article are not personal, but ideological. Presumably, it works as intended if it feels annoying.