dnquark

Yes, but I'll just speak to the part about dancing: it is true that (a) many people find it fun and rewarding and (b) many people don't find it easy and/or natural a priori. However, given the right style, music, AND a few (or possibly many) months of deliberate practice to make it "click" in your brain, many people could move from category (b) to (a). Searching through this parameter space requires time and effort. This is a thread about EDM, and I spent some time trying to like EDM because it was cool, until I realized that it's not for me, and I have zero inclination to dance to it unless I'm on MDMA. On the other hand, swing, salsa, bachata ended up being absolutely my jam -- after months of deliberate practice, as none of these musical styles were super familiar to me at the outset.

For a lot folks, partnered dance forms are nothing short of life changing, and they tend to appeal to analytical introverts; if you haven't tried already, go sign up for your local lindy hop lessons, and keep your expectations low. There's no downside, at the very least you'll get some exercise.

This hits home: "You must become your own health advocate"

To this I will add, if there's an outstanding health issue, even if it seems minor, address it without delay. Pound the phones, demand specialist referrals, and for the love of god don't engage in avoidant behavior or optimism bias.

Timely diagnosis can be a difference between life and death.

What really matters is not how "open" the device is, but the open-ness of its data format, which is where rM epically fails.

It doesn't matter if a gadget is hackable if it locks you into a proprietary file format and doesn't have good interoperability. Exporting PDFs just doesn't cut it; the point of keeping your notes digital is being able to (a) maintain them as living documents and (b) use them on hardware of your choice.

Buying an Android-based device like Onyx Note Air gives you an option to use apps like Xournal/Xournal++ (best-in-class for handwritten notes, but unfortunately still in alpha on the mobile), or Stylus Labs' Write. This means that your notes are available, in their original form, on virtually any platform, in an open format. This is way, way more important than being able to root or ssh your gadget du jour.

Your first link is a months-long back-and-forth between a developer who finished the HSP functionality and PulseAudio maintainers. They aren't on the same page about how to best integrate the code and seem to be very upset at each other. Is the dev being petulant? Are the maintainers being unreasonable? Hard to tell as an outsider, but there's been no progress for 5 months now.

Project management issues like that is the one area where open source continues to struggle.

Hastie and Tibshirani teach a free course based on this book on Stanford's OpenEdX (https://online.stanford.edu/courses/sohs-ystatslearning-stat...). I highly recommend taking this course or reading the book before delving into ESL. IMO, ESL is excellent as a reference, but trying to learn by reading it linearly is not an optimal time investment.

Now if only a similar course existed for Wasserman's "All of Statistics..."

My first dance teacher used to refer to a similar study from 10 years ago in NEJM (https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmoa022252); his commentary is at https://socialdance.stanford.edu/syllabi/smarter.htm

But yeah, getting into lindy hop 15 years ago was literally the best thing that ever happened to me. It's incredible, being able to go to any major city on the planet and instantly finding a community.

Not only are GLMs there, this is far and beyond the clearest explanation of GLMs I've ever seen. If you've ever wanted to learn the theory behind logistic regression, the last 3 lectures are a must-watch.

The Russian and German sign-up page still reflects the old price. Story checks out! (Although I was slightly disappointed that it wasn't a fellow Slav discount.)

But with a name like "five nines software" customer expectations should be implicitly tempered ;)

tl;dr: terminal -> vim == less context switching

Even though I live in Emacs, I frequently use GP's workflow as well. For me, it's often the fact that I am already working in the terminal when I need to edit the config, so going to Emacs is a context switch. Moreover, I often fist do a cd /path/to/config; once there it's trivial to do vim foo or sudo vim foo.

I have an alias that can send that file to emacsclient -- but again, it takes me away from the terminal, and will not work with sudo.

Also, I've tried possibly every emacs package that helps with path completion, but they all seem to get in the way when I already know exactly what I want. Vanilla bash completion (and don't forget about fzf!!) are a better experience for me; YMMV.

SICP is my quarantine project, going through the whole thing taking my own notes in org-mode, doing the exercises, and checking with https://github.com/zv/SICP-guile as I go along. It's been fun!

I'm on chapter 2 now; if you want to form a study group, HMU at <username> at gmail!

Yes, I am thinking mostly about the ease of porting the app to different platforms. This is particularly relevant to Xournal/Xournal++ as they are terrific tools, but the hardware that these tools are optimized for typically does not run GNU/Linux. If you think that finding a good Linux laptop is a challenge, try to find a good Linux laptop with a stylus. And there's nothing in the form factor of an iPad, for example.

This is excellent. I've been searching for ways to use modern hardware with my Xournal/Xournal++ workflows, and this is a promising approach. I am, however, a little concerned about robustness of video streaming.

In an ideal world, Xournal++ would have a modern web-based front-end as opposed to GTK (which currently means it's de-facto Linux-only until GTK resolves issues with Windows pen/inking APIs).

I was about to jump ship to VSCode, but lsp-mode (despite minor hiccups) has extended my Emacs' expiration date.

So if I almost gave up, after having lived in Emacs for the last 12 years, can we really expect much popularity with those that are new to computing?

In 2020, Emacs is mostly just for people that love to build or customize their tools, or for folks that want a better Vim (i.e. Doom Emacs). And to customize Emacs you have to have a basic understanding of modes, hooks, keymaps, etc -- as well as at least rudimentary knowledge of elisp. Getting good at that stuff is a multi-year-long process. Emacs will never be "popular" for the same reason that if you want to have a fun night with friends, (statistically) chances are you'll choose to play Rock Band as opposed to learning real instruments. But as is the case with many niche and challenging things, it's hella fun and rewarding once you've spent a few years doing it.

What's their portability story? I don't want my personal knowledge store to be locked into a platform, particularly one that's not guaranteed to last. PDF exports don't cut it, my notes are living documents.

I'm really sad that nobody has adequately addressed interoperability in the digital inking space; I'd gladly switch to an iPad or reMarkable, but so far I'm still the neckbeard inking in Xournal on an old Thinkpad.

I would say that quality is an abstract value judgement that requires context to be meaningful. That's why it escapes precise definition.

Whenever Pirsig talks about quality, it seems that he is heavily overloading the term. What he is really trying to do is develop a set of guiding principles that makes him feel like he understands the world and his role in it. Most people use religion or science for this, but Pirsig explicitly rejects science as a way of discovering the truth (for his definition of truth), and I think he implicitly rejects religion as well. I ended up reading "Quality" as just a label that he attaches to the personal philosophy he develops instead.

Is there a resource in the vein of the linked review, but that explains the book (and its philosophical content) on a more basic level, for someone with no background in the subject? I was hoping that Pirsig would help me understand philosophy by placing it in a familiar and tangible setting -- that's what the title suggests. I was very disappointed.

Take the idea of Quality, for example. Pirsig talks about it for half the book; this is a concept that drives him insane and is central to his life and to the narrative. I still haven't the foggiest idea of what he is talking about, pages of strange analogies notwithstanding.

To me, this was a book about a troubled intellectual and his grappling with mental illness. About somebody that drives himself insane by obsessing over abstruse concepts arising from human experience. And it's a well-told story that made me think, but also made it very hard to relate to the protagonist simply because I do. not. understand. his intellectual struggle.

Do these accessibility requirements only concern public institutions? Stanford has been taking down course videos (notably, CS231n) for the same reason, which just does not make sense to me. I understand the argument that an institution is obligated to provide accessible materials if the consumer is /paying/ for them, either directly or as a taxpayer. But imposing these requirements on those providing content for free seems a little ridiculous.

All these years I assumed that the 'spiral rule' and 'right-left rule' (linked from the stephencanon comment above, and also described in my second link) are two ways to describe the same algorithm, but, reading closely, they aren't! I guess 'spiral rule' is a stickier name, which is why it's something that people remember even though it's janky.

The trick to reading crazy C declarations is learning the "spiral rule": http://c-faq.com/decl/spiral.anderson.html (here are more examples, with nicer formatting: http://www.unixwiz.net/techtips/reading-cdecl.html)

A well-architected monolith is better than a spaghetti of mis-designed microservices. Microservices don't reduce complexity, they /can/ help manage it better, but only past a certain scale, as the article points out.

They do help achieve better mean time to blame / mean time to innocence, which is important in some organizations.

The original question has perfectly satisfying explanations accessible to anyone who knows algebra and is willing to spend a few weeks studying special relativity. cynicalkane above provides a great intuitive summary.

Likewise, generally speaking, when pi comes up in physics equations it is a geometric factor, either having something to do with the bona fide geometry of the system (e.g. the capacitance of a sphere) or with normalizing some relevant probability distributions. Name one example where we struggle to understand where pi comes from in physics formula!

I've been using Xournal for notes, problem sets, etc. for the last 5 years. It doesn't do handwriting recognition, etc., but I find that this is a good thing -- that way I don't ever have to go back and fix recognition errors, and unless you are preparing something for publication, typesetting math is a waste of time.

OP makes me wonder what resolution _is_ enough for most people. Sure, I dig quality screens -- as an undergrad in 2003 I dropped almost all my savings on a Dell 19" 1280x1024 panel with zero regrets, and would always opt for the highest-res laptop LCD if I had a choice. But after 24" 1080p form factor I kind of stopped thirsting for improvement. Currently I have a 27" 1400p panel that's more than enough for my needs -- and I have lots of windows, terminals, editor buffers, etc. Is there an end in sight to the pixel arms race?

This is a great project. There's no reason that any textbook, academic paper, or even a video lecture today shouldn't have a Medium-like comment/question/discussion layer. Academic papers are a natural place to start for obvious reasons (they don't undergo multiple editions once published, for example). Unfortunately, for-profit academic publishers (Elsevier et al.) have little incentive to introduce these innovations, and PLOS seems to have done little beyond allowing people to add comments at the end of an article.

Starting with famous out-of-copyright academic papers is a promising idea -- at the very least, we will hopefully end up with community-annotated versions of classic papers, which would be a great development in its own right. How long does copyright last on academic papers anyway?

Collaborative annotation has to be the future of academic publishing; the more projects push us in that direction, the better.

We've spent many millions broadcasting radio and TV to Cuba (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_y_Televisi%C3%B3n_Mart%C...). I wonder what the obstacles are to providing internet access via something like Project Loon. Free, uncensored internet access would be a far greater catalyst for regime change in Cuba than those shortwave broadcasts ever were.

I hope Project Fi has a side effect of improving existing Google Voice / Hangouts integration. While it's been slowly getting better, some of my texts sent via GV in Hangouts never get delivered, some arrive out of order. In addition, I've been able to crash Hangouts reliably and reproducibly (in latest version, by picking a GV sms conversation, pulling up the other person's contact card (by tapping their avatar) and selecting "send hangouts message"). And we still have no group SMS integration in GV.

De Garis appears to have genuinely good intentions to educate the world and thereby free it from war and poverty. Unfortunately, he also comes across as self-important, cantankerous, elitist prick, which makes me think that he is unlikely to make much positive impact. At least the categorized archive of papers appears to be way more useful than his rambling youtube lectures (with a typical view count of 15 over 3 years).

Does Xmonad work OOTB on recent Ubuntu versions? I remember that after the switch to Gnome 3 it was a huge PITA to get Xmonad, Xmobar, and trayer (to get indicator applets) all working; some indicator applets never displayed anyway.

TBH, though, I didn't miss tiling WMs much after switching to OS X, mostly because I spend 95% of my time in Chrome with hella tabs, terminal with screen and Emacs.

Phasing out cursive in favor of typing reflects an unfortunate reality in which the ability to bang out TPS reports is more important than writing a nice card to Grandma. But while I spend most waking hours at the keyboard, any creative process that involves translating thoughts into symbols is unsatisfying to me if keyboard is my _only_ input device.

I am excited about the shift to mobile computing partly because it forces us to come up with input paradigms that are more appropriate to the digital medium. My pipe dream is for inking on phones and tables to become ubiquitous. Between Samsung and Microsoft hardware, we are slowly inching in that direction. Now if I could only get off my ass and port Xournal to Android (I find myself living in a bizarro world where I fire up Linux mostly to take handwritten notes.)

What finally made the curse of dimensionality "click" for me was recognizing that the volume of an n-sphere goes to zero as n grows large. In 2D, if I want to see which of my data points lie close to some reference point, I can draw a circle around my reference point and count the proportion of the data points inside. In 3D, I could do the same with a sphere. But in 20D, the volume of my hypersphere will be miniscule, and it will probably not even contain any points, so this procedure becomes useless for clustering. Note that I can't just pick the hypersphere of a larger radius: suppose all my points are contained inside a unit n-cube. The volume of the unit n-sphere, the largest one I could inscribe inside the n-cube will _still_ be approximately zero!

This result is pretty cool and somewhat surprising, and there's a neat and short derivation of it; in fact (shameless plug) I have a youtube video where I derive it in 3 minutes: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QkMn_5QpsX8 -- feel free to check it out!