funklute

Perhaps some meaning is getting lost in translation here...

If you mean curiosity as in academic achievement, then I think this is a deeply disrespectful way of thinking of other people.

If you mean curiosity as in having empathy for the people and world around you, and not being a narcissistic sociopath, then I probably agree with you.

But from what you wrote earlier, I get the impression you're talking about the former rather than the latter...

The best people are naturally attracted to knowledge and intellect

That is a pretty narrow-minded way of evaluating other people's worth...

That's not the whole story though. Often, what is more important is how stable the oil is below the smoke point. There's a pretty decent video on this by Adam Ragusea: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_aFHrzSBrM

Ah, fair enough!

On my team we use pre-commit[0] a lot. I guess I would define the history to be something like "has this commit ever been run through our pre-commit hooks?". If you rewrite history, you'll (usually) produce commits that have not been through pre-commit (and they've therefore dodged a lot of static checks that might catch code that wasn't working, at that point in time). That gives some manner of objectivity to the "history", although it does depend on each user having their pre-commit hooks activated in their local workspace.

[0] https://pre-commit.com/

then git gives you the tools to ensure the repos you control are not rewritten

I might betray my ignorance here, but what tools are those?

If I host a git repo, then I can obviously ensure that any branches on the origin are never rewritten. But how can I ensure that people who submit pull requests have not rewritten their history?

It's not actually clear whether you're using Wayland and complaining about X11, or the other way around... (or on a different OS altogether...)

That is a fair point!

Your first suggestion is basically momentum investing [1]. But as the wikipedia article alludes to, there are some issues with this, such as a potentially high risk, that one would need to carefully consider.

I think there is a big difference between merely applying critical thinking, versus investing the necessary time into essentially becoming a semi-professional day trader.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Momentum_investing

Most people don't think critically about their money

This is a bit of a naive viewpoint. Take your example of putting money in the stock market, regardless of its health and structure:

So I'll follow your advice and I'll think critically about it. I'm not an economist, but I'm technically and mathematically quite literate. And what I see is that historically, it's generally been a good idea to put money in the stock market. But of course that doesn't mean that will apply to the future.

Except, how can I tell whether the stock market is in good health? Even as an academic researcher, that is a really hard problem. The best I can do is look at the past, and then take a risk.

It's not my lack of critical thinking that is the problem. It's that it is a genuinely very hard problem.

And am I correct that these dunkelflautes are becoming an increasing concern because of the increased likelihood of extreme weather events? Otherwise I don't really see why this is suddenly a bigger concern now, than it was, say, 50 years ago...?

See https://twitter.com/DavidOsmond8 for a real time simulation of how Australia would cope with 5 hours of battery storage

Forgive me for being sceptical, but you did state that batteries have solved base load for most of the planet. Australia is probably the least convincing example anyone could pick, due to its extremely low population density, long coastline, and high amount of sun hours. I'd be much more interested in seeing this calculation for places like China, India, Nigeria, Brazil, Russia.

I had to look up what a dunkelflaute is... but the last bit you said:

i.e. dunkelflauts in winter which neither batteries or nuclear particularly help with.

doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Wikipedia defines a dunkelflaute as "a period of time in which little or no energy can be generated with wind and solar power". Isn't that precisely where you have to fall back to nuclear, battery, or fossil fuels?

Also:

Batteries have already solved baseload for most of the planet

this runs contrary to a lot of what I've read about the topic (which doesn't mean I lot, I know -- I'm not an expert). Do you have a source I could have a look at?

for political reasons

(ignoring the fact that t takes longer to build than the available time to transition)

My understanding is that nuclear is necessary, unless you believe in very optimistic development timelines for better batteries. Yes, batteries have come a long way, but they are still a long way off from being able to support base load -- is that not correct? It might be faster to build out nuclear, than to develop the necessary improvements in battery tech...

Or am I completely off here?

You don't want to end up like the french do you?

Exactly what do you mean is the problem with the French?

Assuming I've understood you correctly, I think it's worth pointing out that the French very consciously hold onto their linguistic identity. Many people would argue that is a good thing, rather than a bad thing. I don't necessarily agree with that, but I do think that your claim of "entirely a bad thing" is something that depends a lot on your perspective.

This kind of flexibility in the labour market is clearly an advantage because the US and CH have some of the highest salaries and lowest unemployment in the world.

It really is quite a big stretch to assume that this is a causal mechanism. You only need to look to Scandinavia to find a counter-example.

I think it is more reasonable to argue that high salaries in US are fuelled by borderline slave wages for menial labour. And Switzerland's wealth comes in a historical context that is completely different from the US - it's almost impossible to blanket compare them side-by-side. The difference in population size is another huge issue with such a comparison.

hehe yes I can relate to that!

I'm not sure if you had this in mind when you said "non-binary", but I also think along the same lines you just noted, that there is a difference between "not binary", and "non-binary". The latter could evoke connotations to the culture wars and gender identity -- though that of course has nothing to do with accessibility (of TUIs, bathrooms might be another matter).

Then again, I'm neither American nor a native English speaker, so I hardly have much authority on this point.

In this case, it seems a perfectly valid choice of words.

"irreconcilable" basically implies that there is a binary choice -- either use a TUI or aim for accessibility, but you can't have both. The responder was saying that actually it's not a binary choice -- there are degrees of accessibility, and some accessibility can be attained within a TUI.

Disagreeing with someone, using valid arguments, is not the same as squelching discourse.

Do you mean for simple command line output, or also for actual TUIs, like htop and vim? If the latter, how does that even work? Presumably you'd have to configure it on a per-TUI basis, which is exactly the point of the parent -- it's not accessible out of the box, no matter what you do...right? Or can it be more clever than that?

Do you think there is or isn't deleterious effects when children watch misogyny at a young age, what about watching programming that would show the beating of animals, even if animated and just for "fun", or programming that shows being "fat" is undesirable and indulging in bulimia is desirable (what could be wrong with over-eating and then just vomiting excess, right?)

I think he was asking (and rightly so) what the scientific evidence says, not what someone's opinion is.

I am perfectly aware what that word means, and it is exactly the word I wanted to use. Instead of being a condescending asshole, perhaps you can explain what you disagree with.

Arguably, the terminal is more general. Pretty much every developer will at some point have significant interactions with a terminal. The same cannot be said for emacs. On top of that, the terminal is a more general-purpose tool than emacs, and it is much less opinionated than emacs (each TUI tends instead to do their own thing, for good or bad).

I think the bottomline is that it's quite natural to delve into TUIs, when needed, whereas emacs requires a bit more of a dedicated interest (I say this as someone whose main driver was emacs for many years, though I've now gone back to (neo)vim).

Nothing is worse than trying to understand an issue with a program that heavily relies on environment variables for configuration

I totally agree with this.

A good old configuration file is the best.

But the issue with this is that you often don't know what your configuration is ahead of time. Sometimes it is only generated just before execution of your code.

not for reproducible/distributable configuration

At my work, we use environment variables all the time for configurations, e.g. for telling a kubernetes pod where to find the database. In your opinion, what is the better option(s)?

the Optical Winter of 2001-2006

I have never heard of this, and google doesn't return anything useful... what does this refer to?

Using the bindings is only possible if the library itself is already installed (since the bindings directly make use of the library, under the hood).

Also, Python is the worst imaginable engine for running Lisp

What exactly do you mean by this?

If you repeatedly re-measure for 95% confidence, you strongly select for random noise.

You can't use standard methods for early stopping - as you rightly point out, you get gibberish if you naively keep peeking at a growing data set. Instead, you have to use statistical methods that explicitly adjust for the repeated sampling in early stopping trials. This does make early stopping more complicated to analyse than a trial with a pre-determined duration.

Yes, exactly. Control groups are incredibly important for ensuring good quality of clinical studies. It's a technique that solves multiple "calibration" problems, including:

- being able to draw causal conclusions

- being able to adjust against placebo effects

A lot of clever people have tried to come up with ways of doing away with control groups. But ultimately, the best we can achieve is to stop early, as soon as the trial has a clear outcome. I do perhaps think this has become more common in recent times though, so perhaps the study you were involved in was at a time when early stopping wasn't really "the done thing".

But it still beats "studies" done 100 years ago, when you might give someone a cough mixture, see that they improved (if they died, let's just ignore that), and conclude that it was the cough mixture that did it!

Everyone knew

If that was truly the case, then - as the parent hinted - it was the trial design that was the problem, and not the practice of having control groups.

It is pretty common to stop trials early when it is obvious that the treatment works. Conversely, it is easy to think that "yea of course the new treatment works" despite the evidence not being there. The need for robust analysis must also be respected.

I mean, if that's your angle, then I can sort of see your point. But at the same time: if I decided one day to properly learn lisp (so far my interest in it has been as a curious outsider), I would do so not because it's an active language, but because I'm interested in what I can learn from it. Yet I would obviously go and seek out whatever tools are written in lisp, both so I can feel that I'm really using the tooling, and so that I can look into how various real-world projects have been designed using lisp. None of that would make me a troll or a bad-faith actor in these kinds of threads. It simply means I would be asking questions about a topic on which lisp arguably does not excel, but for genuine reasons. Certainly not to rub salt anywhere. And I like to assume the same about other people who ask such questions.

That they disagree with you, or have a different perspective than you, does not make anyone a troll.