cycomanic

You conveniently left out the fact that all the "easy" tracks (athletics, legacy, donor) are heavily skewed toward white applicants. It's interesting how everyone is riling about affirmative action, while at the same time nobody bats an eyelid about those nepotism tracks. And those definitely seem to be institutionally biased against black and Hispanics (in particular the Athletic track it seems, considering the proportion of black athletes in professional sport).

When he reported the case to high-ranking officials at Brown, he got a cold reaction. The response from the president, he said, was absolute silence. The dean did not comment either until Serrano took the case before the Academic Code Committee. At that point, he received a note acknowledging that what had happened in his classroom was “a wake-up call.” Serrano, a Madrid-born economist who has been at Brown for 34 years, believes this is not enough. “That cannot be the university’s position before an incident of this magnitude. Academic integrity is a value worth defending. The faculty cannot be left on its own

Is anyone surprised that the academics are essentially being left on their own about is? University management has become increasingly disconnected from the academics doing the work on the ground at least during the last 20 years that I've been in academia. Covid was really an eye-opener in this respect, at our university academics were told with very short notice to make all lectures remote. There was essentially zero support from central management, there was not even budget to buy headsets or cameras and academics were expected to use their research funds.

At the end of the pandemic academics were thanked with two years of 0 and 1% salary increase, due to a tough economic situation. During the same time the president received a 8% raise. The tough economic situation was entirely due to mismanagement, i.e. the university had invested pension funds into fixed interest investments which did not keep up with pension growth (during a time when stock markets were going from strength to strength).

Because software you build it once and can resell it as much as you want, a stick of RAM is only sold once.

Yes exactly, and theoretically if there was a functioning market that should have driven prices way down, because the marginal cost to enter the market is so low. However, the non-functioning anti-trust laws as well as the expansion of ip laws as allowed a few enormous corporations to essentially control the market and keep prices up.

Arguably software is much more difficult to build because it is never complete.

There are hardly any hardware companies where the hardware is ever complete. Disregarding the fact that many hardware products contain some form of software that needs to be updated. In pretty much any field hardware companies need to continue developing new revisions/improvements on the hardware to stay ahead of their competitors, however those revisions/improvements are significantly more complex to put into reality.

It's funny how everyone (especially here on HN) accepted (and expected) extremely high profit margins from software businesses, but now that hardware companies are increasing their margins to match it is suddenly outrageous. The same was reflected in engineering salaries, with software engineering salaries being often a multiple of hardware engineering ones. All this despite the fact that software businesses is arguably much easier, less risky and less capital intensive.

For decades now we have seen the expectations that software businesses (and in particular FANGs) have pushed any hardware margnins to be more and more like commodities, while they were extracting all the value.

If I understand your argument it's ethically ok to destill huge swathes of copyrighted work into a model without compensation, but then it is ethically wrong to use that model without compensation (well actually reduced pricing)?

I don't get the moral framework that you're applying. Could you elaborate?

That's not how electricity markets operate. Say you have 100GW demand (number are not in any way related to reality) and your Nuclear plant has a capacity of 50 GW. However it's a sunny day and solar is producing 80 GW. That solar will be producing at a much lower price, so no one is interested in buying that extra expensive 30 GW from the Nuclear plant (I'm glancing a bit over how pricing works exactly, but it comes to the same thing).

So either you restrict the amount of solar that can be produced or you subsidize the Nuclear prices. Both solutions are increasing prices for idiological reasons. If we do that might as well invest in solutions that are on exponential trajectories, like solar and battery.

The whole baseload argument when talking about renewables is a strawman. Both intermittent (like solar and wind) and constant output (like Nuclear) are baseload technologies, despite working very differently. Both require over provisioning, on demand sources or storage. It does not make any sense to bet on a solution that despite significant subsidise over almost 70 years has failed to produce any exponential count reduction, if the other solution is on an exponential curve right now.

It seems your misinterpreting the quote, it does never says that

“These everyday things that are beloved to us, like food, can take on an entirely different dimension within the context of a dictatorship.”

Is the definition of the banality of evil concept. I would argue though that within the concept you will interpret banal things differently. For a more blatant example, the banal act of putting an approval stamp onto a piece of paper will be interpreted quite differently in the context of a administrator in Reichsbahn in Nazi germanycompared to an administrator at the Bundesbahn now.

If you restrict typat to the basic functionally of markdown it is just as readable as plain text (not surprising considering that typat syntax was inspirered by markdown). However, once we include more unusual things I would argue that markdown becomes more illegible than typst (as for markdown you start adding html essentially).

I'm not sure what you mean. Markdown compared to typst or latex is extremely limited and using it for books or academic papers is very niche. I certainly would (and have for all my previous publications) prefer typst or latex over markdown. I also don't understand your point about not permitting typesetting during writing. Latex and text are the prime examples of separating writing from typesetting.

But by that argument the EU holds all the cards because nobody can do what ASML can do. So everyone is dependent on the EU.

That ignores the fact that there is a incredibly well founded coalition of organisations with idiological (climate change by its nature requires collective action, but collective action is bad...) and economic (big oil, big tobacco...) motivations that has been running a massive desinformation campaign for decades. We know desinformation is much easier than factual information, climate change is almost a poster boy for this. It would have not mattered an iorta if "environmentalists" would have used different messages, in fact they primarily used exactly the messages you proposed, the fact that you remember it as being ”you all have to suffer to save the planet" just shows how powerful the desinformation campaign was. Because that was their prime message, not the one of climate activists.

Ah apologies, that's what I get for skim reading and kneejerk replying. I completely agree with you, undergrads are highly unlikely to know more about a subject than their professor (obviously there can always be exceptions).

Like what? Seriously, nobody thought shouting rockets into space was impossible. Landing a rocket again nobody had thought it impossible. Sure they brought down prices, again nobody thought it impossible. The question is actually is it desirable. Rocket launches are pretty much the worst one can do in terms of greenhouse gas emissions, but somehow all technerds are falling all over themselves how great it is.

It certainly is true in physics and engineering that a PhD student at least half way through their PhD should know more than there supervisor about their topic (and usually much earlier). Even a Masters thesis project student should understand the intricacies of their project better than their supervisor. I'm speaking as someone who has supervised a significant number of both PhD and Masters students.

Can someone explain this statements:

While amusingly as of June 8 Blacksmith’s terms implied that their right to bill you is contingent on you providing payment information, a SaaS app certainly could have terms that obligate users to pay for unexpected overage when on a free trial.

And let’s be clear: our agents run a lot of CI jobs, so we did expect to hit the limits of the free plan. We used the service and got value for it. So it’s not inherently dishonest, just surprising. My read is that they can do this.

So I read this that the terms say "blacksmith will only bill you if you provide payment information" but then they say that blacksmith can bill you if you don't provide payment information. That seems to contradict the terms, which I would assume underlie the "contract" that you agree to when agreeing to the terms.

Yeah it's much better to make your money by enabling the worlds worst dictators to steal money from their populations. In fact it's all the other countries taxes that are paying for the swiss social security, because of all the aid money being funneled into swiss bank accounts.

That doesn't really make sense, you need the ability for significant overproduction before you start thinking about storage. The other way around is just wasting money. We are just starting to get there, but still have significant fossil fuels that we can replace even by just building out solar more and just having more over production.

It's interesting, I'm not a big notebook user myself, but others (and myself rarely) often take advantage of that feature, because it allows you to e.g. get data from an instrument, but then continue exploring the data using different cells in different orders, e.g. trying different ways of analysing things, e.g. I can cell that gets the data a cell that runs a moving average and a cell that does analyses. When debugging the analysis I can choose if I want to run the moving average data or the normal data, just by choosing I run this or that preceding cell.

Once you take away this way of working, I might as well not work in a notebook at all (which admittedly is my default way of working anyway).

That's not what the link says. In fact it is specifically saying it should be working in stereo but tdolby surround has missing channels.

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That's a strawman, nobody is saying that the datacenters are directly turning the water brown. But if adding a single customer (the datacenters) causes the supply not being able to meet the demand and the water turns brown, then yes the datacenters was the cause. Saying it's a supply issue is like if I come to a party at your house and load all the drinks into my car and saying that there's no drinks left is a supply issue

Why? If I was an intelligence agency and designing a VPN I would simply log all the IPs connecting to my VPN and not rely on statistics on exit nodes to identify the users, even more so because they rely on the users to pick different servers.

It's funny how silicon valley bros always talk like making real world things is essentially impossible. I mean walmart or aldi are serving > 200 million customers a week, how do they manage that I can tell you that's much harder than customer support for an online product.

As a side note, how do you make up that billion user number? Claude has 10 million users.

You emphasised the key word yourself, "apparently". And the proof is in the pudding, they left. Now the researchers didn't ask the females obviously, but they would have a lot of experience with the behaviour of the gorillas and know that the females don't like instability and unsureness of the leadership (hinted in the article), so the obvious conclusion is that the instability of moving around caused the females to loose trust.

Note I didn't ask the researchers either and am only deducing this from the text.

The Declaration was right, it was just naively optimistic and severely underestimated its opponent + incorrectly presumed digital natives would automatically be on the "right" side. Now we are where we are. And it's just the beginning of the pendulum's counterswing.

I think you're completely ignoring the premise of the articles argument (as I understand it). The failure of the declaration was a feature not a flaw. In otherw words it was never about the freedom of the individual but the freedom of large corporations.

In the end governments (even totalitarian ones in a limited sense), are vehicles of the people. Unregulated spaces will favor the person with the most resources and thus lead to more concentration of power. It's essentially a information centric continuation of Reaganomics. The article argues that this could have been (and was, e.g. by Winner) anticipated in the 90s, and that in fact this was the intention of Barlow and co.

The other aspect to this is that children's stories were typically highly moralistic essentially telling the kids to always obey their elders, Struwwelpeter is the perfect example, but also the Grimm stories (the tales of 1001 nights maybe less so, but I might be misremembering). I'd argue that this continued well into the 20th century. That's why pipi longstockings became such a success, here is a story about a girl (even), that is super strong, independent and generally self sufficient. It gave kids their own agency which resonated with kids and I guess the time was right that parents did not forbid reading it.

An interesting anecdote, in France Pipi Longstockings was heavily censored until the 90s because it was viewed as promoting disobedience. Naturally that made it so dull that nobody wanted to read it, so French people (at least those who were children then) generally don't know pipi. I only found out about all this when we moved to Sweden and my French partner had never heard of pipi, which I couldn't believe.

Have you tried saving in one of the different SVG formats. I forgot what inkscape calls them, but IMO there are 2 or 3 different SVG formats one can choose when saving. I know I needed that a long time ago, because chrome could not deal with the advanced features in regular inkscape SVG.

We can thank the big oil and western governments for that. For years they have been working against stable democratic governments in these places, because it's easier to get cheap resources from corrupt governments than from stable democratic governments with functioning legal systems and limited corruption. It's something we can see all over the world, pretty much all resource rich countries in the world have been destabilised systematically.

Importantly, it used to be Germany which had all the expertise, until the CDU government destroyed much of the German solar industry over night. It's funny how everyone always talks about Germany stopping Nuclear energy but nobody ever talks about the fact that subsequent German governments destroyed the renewables industry twice (and they are talking about it again), largely due to lobbying from the coal, Nuclear and car industries. Definitely an interesting what if

One of my pet peeves with USB C is that many laptop manufacturers went "great less space occupied we can push the porta closer together to make space for something else", but many USB C devices (particularly USB Sticks ...) have inherited the dimensions of USB A. So there is not enough space for a plug and cable, e.g. I can't use my yubi key while my monitor is connected to the laptop.