leafmeal

Aka solar power

If you're open to physical media you can probably request it through your library, or similarly buy the dvd from ebay or something.

This totally makes me thing of Martin Kleppmann's recent blog post about how AI will make verified software much easier to use in practice! https://martin.kleppmann.com/2025/12/08/ai-formal-verificati...

I'm reading The Economy of Cities by Jane Jacobs right now. One of the main theses of the book is that small "inefficient" enterprises are actually the engines of economic grown. Large efficient organizations often lead to stagnation.

It's interesting how this intersects with Tao's point, about the social benefits.

I wonder how comparable this actually is to "American Nervousness" which I learned about on Derek Thompson's blog https://substack.com/@derekthompson/p-170457512

Points taken about benefits of run scripts for portability, reproducibility, CI, etc. I'm mostly just trying to find a way to debug arbitrary programs and run tests in the IDE.

It looks like this should be possible with tasks https://zed.dev/docs/tasks#variables but I haven't put enough time into figuring it out yet.

Maybe my use case is too specific, but I'll spell it out just in case: I try and open a Django project in Zed. I go to a test file. There's a > arrow next to the test to run or debug, but it will only run it with PyTest (I use unittest, but PyTest is backwards compatible, so w/e). When I try to run it, it fails because some environment variables I need are not set. I don't see how to configure them so I'm dead in the water.

I'd also love to run the Django server with a debugger attached. It's not clear to me how to do that. I haven't found the rights docs. Dead in the water again.

Maybe I need to spend more time exploring and reading the docs :)

The thing that's so sticky for me with JetBrains IDEs is their run configurations. Being able to configure all of the environment variables etc. for the actual code that I need to run, especially when connecting to a debugger or tests integrated with the IDE.

I haven't seen anyone else complain about this so I figure I must be missing something. Does Zed let you set up run configurations like this? If not, how do users actually run their code? Just in the terminal? It seems backwards to me to use a fancy IDE, but then run all your code in the terminal. I love IDE features like clicking on the test I'm editing to run it, and setting breakpoints in the IDE.

Does anyone else have this problem?

Do you believe making things easier and more accessible is bad for workers? I don't think it inherently is or isn't, it just depends on who benefits from the increased efficiency. I think that's more of a problem with your economic system, or wealth distribution.

Overall I think we would all be happier if efficient machines take away the drudgery of our daily work and allow us to focus on things that really matter to us. . . as long as our basic needs are met.

As someone who sometimes thinks of themselves as an "optimizer", I feel the opposite take away. I spend too much time "polishing" trying to make something perfect, at the cost of actually getting things done.

I think your statement is reasonably reflective of his web articles (especially his SubStack) but I've really enjoyed the books of his that I've read, which felt well researched and founded, especially The Righteous Mind.

If you factor in the cost of any government managed trash cleanup, it might. Basically require producers to cover all of the costs required to get the trash disposed of properly. Filtering micro-plastics out of the ocean? Add it to the plastic tax. Health costs from birth defects caused by certain plastic exposure? Add it to the tax for those plastics.

I think the market works amazingly as long as there's government to line the incentives up right.

This is a fun analysis, but that's not traditionally how a land value tax works. Land is taxed based on (surprise) its value. Land in cities is obviously more valuable than a big farm in Missouri.

The general idea is that two plots of land in the middle of a city, one with a sky scraper, and its neighbor, a bare parking lot, are taxed the same. You don't pay more for development.

This general scheme makes intuitive sense. It prevents speculation, and encourages development (if your parking lot costs the same in taxes as the sky scraper, you might as well get some more rent from it and make it more productive.

It's nice from a "libertarian" perspective as well because it doesn't force you to develop your land. It just puts incentives in the right places.

Finally, if land is taxed more uniformly, as you described, a landlord in the city, who owns their property outright, is collecting far more in revenue than one with a similar building somewhere more remote, simply because of it's location. Nothing the landlord did justifies the higher prices, it's the restaurants near by, the subways, the well employed people in need of homes that demands higher prices. Since all that value is produced by society, it makes sense to tax it and spend it on the public good. That value, is exactly the land tax.

There's a create blog from the creator of RhymeBrain that talks about Succinct Tries: https://stevehanov.ca/blog/index.php?id=120

I'm pretty sure these were used to store the built in dictionaries on early mobile phones, especially for the implementation of T9 word and similar programs.

I tried this just for fun and youtube said to update my browser :(

It's relevant to compare though because Google has done the same thing now.

This is fascinating! How can I learn more about this tech if I wanted to try an build something myself?

Probably I'm a bad person with poor taste, but I enjoyed this and hope it was written by generative AI.

I think PowerShell works this way essentially. As I understand, all data is structured which makes formatting and piping to other programs much simpler.

They used fire for much more than just promoting plant growth for baskets, I don't think OP did a very good job of explaining that.

Fire was used to promote plant growth to encourage game, keep meadows open and clear to aide hunting, select for fire tolerant plants which native preferred, and even harvesting of grasshoppers.

I'm sure the natives had some idea that frequent fires helped prevent more catastrophic burns, they would regularly schedule burns from every year to every few years depending on the landscape. But I doubt they could have predicted the kinds of catastrophic fires we've seen after decades and decades of severe fire suppression.

There's not much evidence that indigenous Californians were doing any kind of fire management in the California coniferous forests

My impression from the book was that there was. They specifically mention burning in around Yosemite and for the harvesting and health of pines whose nuts were used for food.

Also "Eh" seems somewhat dismissive of a really thorough and well researched book. I'm curious if you've read it.

I read Chasing the Molecule by John Buckingham recently and thoroughly enjoyed it! It give a good outline of the history of modern chemistry in a way that felt accessible but still thorough.

It also does a great job of explaining the different characters and their stories. Some little-known who moved chemistry forwards in profound ways, and others, very well-known, who through their loyalty to false theories ended up holding it back.

It's also a pretty short book when helps make it feel accessible.

I wonder if I can take credit for that :) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23838755

I can to this thread to talk up the book too!

In San Francisco, rent control doesn't apply to new construction as I understand.

If they're also downloading or seeding the torrent, the learn the IPs of their peers, so they know you were downloading that particular file.

immutable had a different meaning in common parlance than it does in datatypes. And even in datatypes usually you end up creating a new "copy" of the thing but with more info appended. The original remains as it was, unchanged (until garbage collection of course)

This is the main focus of Jon Haidt's research right now. Plenty of resources on his site dedicated to it here: https://www.afterbabel.com/

I think the general concept here is pretty good honestly, but would also emphasize that sometimes you don't even know if you're solving the right problem with your shitty prototype. You gotta get it out there and get feedback as soon as possible, before you waste all your time making the wrong thing perfect. That's the key to making something that's actually useful (for other people at least).

See my comment above, but the short of it is that it seems she didn't retract because she probably was not wrong. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39759898

I think it’s worth pointing out that your impression of Mead might be shaped by a strong critic who worked hard to invalidate her work and erase her legacy. This section of her Wikipedia article sums it up pretty well. Essentially, more recent reviews of the research bears out Mead’s conclusions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Mead#Criticism_by_Der...

Another interesting tangent about Mead was her almost foray into LSD research which I learned about from this submission https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39328747

a little late now, but I wonder if https://github.com/DataBiosphere/toil might meet your requirements