stefco_

I use digitalocean for personal stuff because of this

If you want to talk about premiums, the US housing market is out of control right now; just having a roof over your head in any metropolitan area means paying through the nose. It’s rough all over :(

It's funny you mention Boise; that city, and many parts of Idaho/the west, are undergoing their own insane housing price inflation at the moment that's surging through the pandemic; real estate prices are a serious problem in a lot of places that aren't SF/NYC.

Also not being limited by G-forces or endurance.

IQ also predicts or correlates with numerous other life outcomes.

If we hire people based on IQ scores/things that correlate with IQ scores, we should not be surprised if high IQ leads to better outcomes.

correlation != causation

Given how prevalent police unions are, and how incredibly quick they are to raise complaints, you'd hope for more self-awareness/solidarity and less hypocrisy.

Taking a single statistic on something as complex and multivariate as "intelligence" is already discarding a lot of information. When you throw in social factors (Who is writing the tests? What are the challenges faced by the various populations taking the test?), it becomes utterly absurd and unscientific to conclude that your statistic is free of some systemic source of error.

If IQ tests were presented in, say, a physics context as a serious experiment, the presenter would be laughed out of the room. Taking them seriously and uncritically indicates nothing less than a complete lack of understanding of how the scientific method is to be carried out and how its results are to be interpreted.

Predicting subsequent words is hard for humans, but correcting typos is easy. I've turned off autocorrect completely because my typos are always immediately decodable to their human audience, moreso than Apple's seemingly random modifications.

The Russian Revolution episodes are truly fascinating. The 1905 section feels particularly relevant to recent American history.

There's good reason to suspect strong regional variation, which means that finding a representative sample of 500 is hard. But that would still be technically possible (look at South Korea and China); we clearly lack to political will to do proper testing in USA.

It's not the smoothest, but at least it's fairly stable/consistent with good performance (vs. e.g. an electron GUI app). Once you get things dialed, you can keep your workflow going for years with minimal changes since nobody is trying to make money trying to sell you a new version of your workflow. I do a lot of work over SSH, too, so it's really nice to have my regular workflows largely port over to remote work.

Contrast with W. Edwards Deming's approach that stresses the systematics of the organization and considers rank-and-yank a symptom of bad management:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming#Seven_Deadly...

Yes, this is pretty much what I meant. The "horrid" part is that I would like to do a quick

    /"<CR>xnx

Of course, the fact that the text is modified in any way is user-hostile. I don't mind re-typing a code example (since I'm trying to learn it), but I like to copy-paste sometimes (e.g. data literals).

I paid for a DRM-free ebook that's meant to be copy-pasted. We have a universal paradigm for how plaintext copy works. Apple charges a premium for good design. Ebook readers are generally supposed to get out of your way and let you focus on content. There is no reason for Apple Books to have this behavior.

It's not just a browser thing. Apple Books does this with their e-books, which is infuriating if you're working with a coding book and just want to copy-paste stuff into your editor/terminal. You get something like:

    “ghci> putStrLn (pretty 10 value)”

    Excerpt From: Bryan O’Sullivan, John Goerzen, and Donald Bruce Stewart. “Real World Haskell.” Apple Books. 

    ghci> putStrLn (pretty 10 value)

From a liability perspective you’re probably right. I just mean it’s Apple that picks the courier, and that that solution to delivery can fail in basically the same way as store pickup (as happened to me).

Amusingly enough I've had that method fail while ordering an iMac a few years ago.

I requested delivery-with-signature on a $4k iMac and it got delivered to another house three blocks away. They didn't ask for the signature (though they were supposed to); they just left a $4k computer on the curb. It was marked as delivered. I'm lucky to have an honest neighbor who brought it to my doorstep (no thanks to Apple and their logistics partners).

Though git's interface is highly flawed, I do think a good VCS needs to expose more of its storage model to the user (or at least a model isomorphic to it) than most apps.

In vi and Word, you're not worried about state changes outside of saving the current state and, possibly, undoing some number of steps. In a VCS, you might need to check out, merge, or compare arbitrary states from the history, and doing this inherently requires a deeper understanding of how the history is stored. A good VCS should expose these internals in a clear way. In my experience, working with even 1 teammate immediately requires you to have some mental model of how your VCS deals with merging different histories.

That said, it's up to the VCS's interface to make these things clear. Git's mental model is simple enough, and the porcelain can do some of this stuff very well, but CLI is arcane; I end up storing extremely common functions as shortcuts because I'd never remember them or want to type them even though I use them dozens of times a day.

This is super cool! Could see myself using this when I'm feeling foggy-brained and want to bash keys until something useful comes up. But I also just love how it looks; nice interactive TUI apps are always a pleasure to use. Good luck getting it stable!

It would indeed be a bug, which is why any self-respecting operating system should include uninterruptible vi in the kernel /s

Progress in math often (or usually) isn’t driven by physical problems

This is true at the largest scale, but the math classes that most people take are directly applicable to (and often were developed partly to solve) physical problems. I, too, found the high school presentation of math dry and boring until I took a good physics class, and I was amazed by how much of the math I learned was directly useful for that subject.

Unfortunately, the dry treatment math gets in high schools also usually fails to highlight the beauty and subtlety of pure math. I didn't realize how much I loved pure math until I took my first proof-based analysis class after junior year of college.

I think we're seriously failing both the applied and pure camps of students with the way we currently present math. The fact that it took me till nearly the end of college to really like it, despite my proclivity towards the abstract and technical, really drove this point home for me.

If your application is allowing users to edit the text, or if you know which languages will be used, or if you don't care about capitalization, then you don't have to worry about any of those edge cases, and Unicode is useful.

Using a markov chain with your stochastic matrix set to I...

But our chief technical innovation was factoring problems into smaller ones. This is such a vital innovation that it's practically synonymous with engineering. So even superficially complex, organic-looking, highly optimized solutions will need to somehow factor nicely in order for us to be able to keep iterating on them. So in the end, it will have to just be a more clever or elegant factoring of the problem (unless we augment our intelligence in some way that lets us solve much more complex systems without factoring).

Yes, I agree that these are often abused tactics. Just saying they have their uses. The fundamental problem is graph literacy.

the broken programs would still be broken in either language.

You need to slap a decode anyway on reads from subprocesses in python3, and files open in Unicode mode by default. Wouldn't that fix the majority of silly UTF-8 compat bugs? Or am I missing a class of bugs that's not avoided automatically by python3 strings?

I agree that these techniques are often used in popular media in deceptive ways, but a couple of those plotting techniques have valid use cases.

Specifically, if you're really concerned about a delta, removing the origin is good for visualization; it lets you just see the difference between two trends (in particle physics, you can show an energy excess this way). Likewise, for exponential phenomena, log plots are the correct choice, since uncertainty will be magnified for larger values. In both cases, of course, you need to include error bars, but that is always true. But I don't think you can "instantly distrust" someone who is using these techniques when they are valid.

Thanks for the recommendation! I hadn't heard of it bookwithmatrix.com.

When the touchbar first came out, I thought we'd see haptics in the second iteration. It seems so obvious that pressure-sensitivity and haptics could mitigate a lot of the weaknesses of the touchbar.

What I really miss is upgradeable RAM and SSD. Still using a 2010 MBP because I was able to upgrade it; that's no longer possible.

707, 727, 737, and 757 all have the exact same cross section. One of the advantages of the 757 is that it sits higher off the ground and can accommodate the large engines necessary for a longer fuselage. More generally, 757 is designed to be longer, with larger engines and wings, and higher fuel capacity. 737 had to have these features bolted on as it was stretched, fitted with higher bypass (more fuel efficient) engines, and given larger wings and fuel capacity.

Google Flights uses ITA Matrix tech (bought by Google a few years ago) and it even gives you a link to buy tickets straight from the airline. Has pretty much the same usability features of ITA Matrix and none of the cruft of Orbitz et. al.; highly recommend it.