eyko

John Stuart Mill's essay "On Liberty"[1] offered one of the most comprehensive defences of free speech (that is as relevant today as it was then).

You do raise a good point re: tradeoffs in a healthy society. Mill anticipated this objection and addressed it directly. He didn't advocate for free speech without consequences but developed a harm principle specifically to establish what limits are acceptable. Acceptable limits on thought and speech should be based on demonstrable harm, rather than alleged offence, discomfort, or the current popular opinion or cultural disapproval.

He recognises the need to set some limits, yet also the dangers of who gets to set them. Historically, those with power to restrict speech have restricted truth as falsehood. The bar for restrictions should be very high, not because free speech should be absolute, but because the dangers of overzealous restrictions far outweigh the cost of permitting speech we might personally find objectionable. Even completely false opinions might have their value as they force defenders of truth to better articulate their position or reasoning, and prevents beliefs from becoming prejudiced, or platitudes.

I thought I'd share since it's relevant and there may be some younger readers here that might not have come across his work. I really recommend reading it, even if it's an LLM summary as an introduction (as seems to be the trend nowadays)

Edited to fix a few typos (typing from mobile)

1. https://www.econlib.org/library/Mill/mlLbty.html#book-reader

Agreed, and the same goes for most strategic sectors: energy, agriculture, animal husbandry, semiconductors, communications, space, the infrastructure to support all these, education, etc.

It's also worth considering that certain industries (fisheries and agriculture for instance) are subsidised. It's in our national interest to maintain production capacity, so profits are the least of our concerns. Both the UK and the EU's agricultural sectors are heavily subsidised mainly for this reason. It's cheaper to import than to produce locally, especially with our environmental standards and targets, but we need to keep producing. More so in the current geopolitical climate.

And whilst nobody wants to risk being starved to submission, it's also equally important to promote more profitable sectors, and tax accordingly, so that we can support our more strategic sectors. I wouldn't say we're doing a good job at that for what its worth.

As a UK non-citizen resident, my observation is that our economy is pretty much involved with USA (and the global economy more generally).

I just looked up the latest trade and investments factsheet[1] and there are some interesting deets. If you're wondering about direct investment in the US as well as imports:

- Total UK imports from United States amounted to £111.5 billion in the four quarters to the end of Q3 2024 (a decrease of 5.1% or £5.9 billion in current prices, compared to the four quarters to the end of Q3 2023).

- In 2023, the outward stock of foreign direct investment (FDI) from the UK in United States was £494.1 billion accounting for 26.7% of the total UK outward FDI stock.

In addition to direct investment I would also count portfolio investment since we're sort of involved at an individual level through our workplace pensions (and/or personal), savings, stocks and shares ISAs, and so on. A preliminary report[2] foreign holdings of US securities as of June 2024 puts the UK as the top holder at over 3 trillion USD.

1. https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/67b6f8efbd116...

2. https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/sb0037

I do not speak latin, although I studied it for two years in high school and I'm a native speaker of a romance language, so my understanding of latin is pretty much basic to guesswork.

This is a really cool tool -- I often read latin texts with the original on one page and the translation on the other, just because I think it's interesting to see how they wrote/spoke at the time, but for the most part certain words or declinations throw me off guard. Inline literal translations really help there.

That being said, I noticed whilst reading some of the texts that the inline literal translations are still in latin, e.g. in "Part IV. I Some Barbarous Customs", most of the translated text is just latin. I guess OpenAI won't take all our jobs just yet!

I do have one suggestion for improvement though. Many of these texts have translations that are already in the public domain (older translations). It would be helpful to display the original Latin and a fluent English translation side by side, whilst still being able to toggle the literal translation on or off. This setup would make it easier to compare the original text with a fluent English translation, similar to the format used in some bilingual books.

Speaking of postgrest, it looks like the article links to `www.postgrest.org` which has been "hijacked"? The correct url should be https://postgrest.org

Fear of death is not the only kind of terror.

And don't get me started on North Americans and "yams" for sweet potates/kumaras.

If you're going to treat logs as a db entry and afford them a schema, then by all means knock yourself out.

The main point he's trying to make is not just about the logs you wrote but about logs coming from other systems or services, e.g. monitoring kernel logs in your OS. As he rightly points out, one of the reasons is that logs are not an API.

One reason this happens is that almost no one considers log messages to be an API, and so they feel free to change log messages at whim.

To be fair a slightly better comparison would be MMS, but even then it doesn't compare. It's simply because data is cheap, the app is free, and the rich media features that came before iMessage/RCS existed (voice, photos/video, attachments, group chats, voip/video calling, etc), and because it's multiplatform (ios to android usage is near 50/50 or 60/40 depending on the country)

And all it takes is a few typographic rules in a style tag.

Perhaps it's because English is not my first language, but I find it confusing to read "this is evidence that .... might ....". Isn't the purpose of evidence to prove a claim? If there is no conclusive evidence, I would expect it to be phrased along the lines of: "Preliminary evidence suggests that... might...".

Can't speak for the parent commenter but their situation felt familiar. I'm in a new role where I'm contributing to a very large Python codebase (first commit from over a decade ago) and whilst there's a lot of more recent code written with type hints, they're not enforced and they're not always reliable or consistent. On my second contribution, I introduced a bug that pyright immediately spotted after I upped the checks from basic to strict. Our Sentry reports a lot of non-critical bugs that are being triggered in production that in many cases are _already_ highlighted by the type checker. It's just a big enough codebase that it's not practical to attempt to fix them all.

If I were starting a project today in Python, I would definitely try setting up my tooling and processes to enforce type checking to at least some extent. Fortunately, we have a lot of guardrails that recover from the typical exceptions that occur in those cases, but as I experienced first hand, it's very easy to introduce new bugs when relying only on my intuition for those difficult-to-spot cases. Tooling definitely helps there.

My previous role had me writing TypeScript and Rust so there's always the temptation, or bias, to advocate for strict typing everywhere, but I'm conscious that it's neither practical nor feasible in large codebases with hundreds of contributors (most of whom may be more accustomed to dynamically typed languages).

To be fair, average salary varies per city* and if you earn the average salary in any city*, chances are you'll be able to rent but not buy. I've tried a few London post codes and their average salaries: deep red can't buy can't rent. I've also picked a few random places up north and around Manchester, and it came out orange. I wouldn't be surprised if the conclusion was the same for most of the country!

edit: fixed postcode->city typo.

From layman to former submariner, a very silly question I've always wondered about and that I now have the rare chance to ask someone with some expertise: Do submarines mostly roam about or do they tend to stay relatively quiet/idle? I always imagined submarines constantly moving about but at the same time it feels like a waste of fuel.

I'm not sure tbh (English being my second language), but I guess I would? I mean, we were all very young and very nerdy and thought it was pretty cool to be having dinner with RMS himself. Still, by our nerdy standards, he stood out as being a bit awkward – perhaps partly due to the language and cultural differences (even though he spoke pretty decent Spanish).

I've met and hung out quite a bit with Stallman (as part of a conference organizers group) in the early 2000s and he wasn't the most self aware person when it came to social situations. He is very socially awkward. Everything I've read so far has seemed plausible, although I would also agree that it seems to be blown out of proportion. He is one of the kindest persons I've met, very idealistic, and a captivating personality. It's just super socially awkward being around him. Sometimes straight up uncomfortable.

My favourite on Indian cuisine is the Dishoom cookbook: it comes with recipes for most of their most famous dishes from their restaurant. I've tried most and, whilst the recipes might need a little tweaking to match your kitchen equipment, they are generally spot on. In fact, as far as cookbooks go, it's one of my favourites because it actually gets you close enough that you can figure out what to tweak.

And on the topic of onions: it has a three page section on caramelising onions, which will take you anywhere from half an hour to over an hour, depending on the quantity. That book doesn't lie.

I also have cookbooks that have been gifted to me that belong in the trash. You can tell from just looking at the ratios, times, and method description that the dish isn't going to turn out as expected. Worst of all, my partner is the type that can only cook from a recipe book and this has brought on many arguments over a simple suggestion to deviate from the recipe.

It is!

The four freedoms[1] of free software specifically state that:

The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others (freedom 3). By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.

Emphasis in "give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes".

1. https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html#four-freedoms

I used to cycle daily and as far as maintenance went, it was mostly: bike tyres once a year, valves, chain lubricant, bike repair toolbox (purchase once), drum brake maintenance. All in all it would be about £100 per year on average and I'm being generous.

I've never owned a car, but the cost of replacing a lost bike (mine cost around £600) plus its maintenance (let's say £200 per year to be generous) sounds cheaper than what I'd pay for car insurance, petrol, and maintenance per year in UK/Europe. I also live in London where public transportation, even with its aging infrastructure, is wonderful.

I'd definitely get a car if I was living outside of a big relatively city, especially if it isn't planned for walking and cycling.

After trying out Hyper (electron), Warp (Rust) and iTerm (Objective-C, Swift), I'm not as much interested in the language itself, but at least the fact that it's not an Electron terminal. So I guess I do subconsciously project the "therefore better", not because it's Rust, but because I'm assuming it won't grab a couple GB of memory.

This has also been my experience but I can understand that not all lone developers follow similar conventions.

It can take a while to get used to someone else's conventions, but once you do, the one advantage of a lone developer is that the conventions can be generally consistent. I say "can be" because that has been my experience in many cases, but not all – especially for long lived projects where the conventions evolved as the developer either gained experience or was influenced by other conventions. But, even then, their evolution still has personality to it, that is easy to perceive.

pd: Thinking about it, larger teams with conventions (when they're followed) sometimes achieve a similar consistency to lone developers. So: thank you to all those lone developers that have left their code in a state that has helped me thrive, not fail, :-)

At least provide a user friendly way to manage it. For instance, offer the option to either delete, backup, or leave in place when uninstalling. For things left in place, have a GUI to view and manage them.

Funnily enough I still plan that extra hour around my work day as the "commute" time, so I could highlight all the things I can do whilst I'm just standing in public transit going from A to B. It's changed over the past two years but, currently, my 1 hour morning routine involves: a herbal tea brew, brief exercise, some food prep for later in the day, 15 minutes of study, then I take a shower and get ready. Of course, I've also gained some extra sleep time since I shower and get dressed during my commute. My evening "commute" hour generally is another 15 minutes of studying, writing (and reviewing) and depending on the day I spend the rest of the hour either on a short walk, or practicing the guitar.

Going back to the office 2 or 3 out of 5 days is still better than 5 out of 5, but the amount healthy personal things that I get to "miss" don't sell it for me. I probably prefer an entire week offsite with my team once a quarter where the commute is literally a 5 minute walk from my hotel room to whatever conference / workspace we've reserved. Bonus points if the offsite is in a place that has wellness facilities so I can still spend that extra "hour" on health.

It would be interesting to see what career trajectories people that work exclusively from home have, when compared to people that work in offices. What you say about professional connections rings very true. Most work related friendships I have are people I met in person, be it in an office or at meetups.

Half an hour commute? You're lucky! I would be giving up about 9 hours a week (55 min commute if I time things right) -- 9 uncomfortable rush hour hours.

I can imagine dragging smaller asteroids and letting them "drop" into earth (e.g. attach massive parachutes and then guide them to land on some mining site. Totally sci-fi but I still find it less so than the moon. The reason I don't imagine robots mining the moon is that minerals, as you say, are not readily on the surface, nor is the moon mainly made up of a specific mineral.

I just can't imagine mining the moon being in any way shape or form easier than mining the earth. The list of workplace hazards would be impressive. I imagine we're talking surface mines to keep the logistics manageable, but then:

1. How do you get astrominers there and back safely and on a regular basis whilst still keeping costs down?

2. What would it cost to keep your astrominers well fed and rested in a comfortable environment (warm, enough water, entertainment, etc)

3. How much more in bonuses (danger of hazard, long way from home, etc) do you even have to pay an astrominer vs a terraminer?

4. Most mines have some form of processing on site, e.g. break down rocks and sift through shit. How do you get those massive machines up there on the cheap and service them frequently on the cheap? Do we even have the machines that can work in those conditions?

5. Gravity is weak on the moon, I can imagine rocks of considerable mass flying or tumbling about being an issue. Sifting doesn't work as it does on earth without normal gravity and abundant water.

6. etc. etc. etc.?

I mean I think it'd be cool if we could pull it off as a civilisation but I just can't imagine how out there in scope and complexity moon mining would be.

I think it boils down to the (intellectual) effort needed to synthesise your thoughts, which is a skill that leads to deeper understanding.

I'd say ChatGPT is a bit better as a tool than copying from a colleague, just because you still have to double check for correctness. However, does it rob students of that opportunity to think deeply and therefore learn? I'm not sure to what extent, but I'd imagine that there's an impact to _some_ extent.

ChatGPT is also going to get better, and will eventually be pretty accurate (or, at least as accurate as a student of a subject may be). My stance is that in school, you should be learning to think instead of memorising. If the goal is to memorise, however, then use ChatGPT isn't that harmful (you'll still fail for memorising the wrong information).

Overall I'd treat ChatGPT as a tool, and give students the facts: first gain a deep understanding of a subject so you can learn to verify, then use the tool later in life.

I'm also mindful of the fact that if an AI is not guaranteed to be correct, which is the case right now, then students now have an incentive to _understand_ the subject so they can verify, which might actually be a net good?