Agingcoder

No, French is highly irregular.

Reading it is easier than English but writing it is very difficult because it’s irregular. A typical 13-14 year old cannot write a full page of French without making lots of mistakes ( source : my kids’ teachers in France , and my fellow pupils at school in France when I was growing up).

Just to give you a very simple example, the following words vin ( wine ), vingt ( twenty ), vain ( vain ) are pronounced exactly the same. And there are other variants for the same sound ( some kind of nasal i) spelled ein, or un. You can figure out how to read it up to a point, but writing it is very difficult.

‘English speakers know that their language is odd. So do people saddled with learning it non-natively. The oddity that we all perceive most readily is its spelling, which is indeed a nightmare. In countries where English isn’t spoken, there is no such thing as a ‘spelling bee’ competition.´

The author has no clue - try French spelling ( there are no spelling bee competitions but grammar+ spelling ones). As a native speaker of multiple languages, I’m a bit surprised at the confidence with which the author writes things which are either wrong or obvious ( and don’t make English exceptional in any way ).

What is really odd is that the author is a professor of linguistics - maybe I’m missing something here?

First of all , I agree with all your points. I used to not use YouTube because it was unusable ( try to watch an educational video when you get interrupted every 5 minutes …). Most of my problems got fixed by paying for YouTube premium, and disabling search history, much to my surprise. It’s expensive though, and it won’t solve everything, but it makes YouTube significantly better.

This is what I’ve done - YouTube is a much better place now.

Yes you need it, and no it’s not trivial. Not all quants need it on a daily basis though.

This is not entirely true - they’ve invested quite a bit in maintaining backwards compatibility at least hardware side through various emulation or translation layers : first during the ppc/x86 migration then more recently with the x86 to arm shift.

Agreed. The difference is stunning.

Where did you find this ? This is just plain wrong.

Airparif is a collection of people involving regular people, the local cities, major polluters etc. https://www.airparif.fr/airparif/missions-dairparif ( unfortunately in French)

It’s funded 24% by the state, 24% by cities, 27% by large companies including the polluting ones,20% by selling what they produce/know how etc.

This is certainly not very common in Paris. Cyclists behave extremely badly, but don’t ride on the sidewalk. E-scooters were another story though, and were indeed banned for this reason.

Sure there are cars.

In my ( very personal, more than 20 years living here ) experience, it’s a completely different city, and there definitely are fewer cars than before.

Now if car exhausts are better and both effects compound I won’t complain !

Mismanagement is (very) well documented but corruption is a very serious accusation. Do you have examples ? ( that don’t go back to Jacques Chirac )

Indeed - I don’t work in the US so hadn’t considered that.

Try small businesses, large corps which don’t sell IT products, or even universities / government / etc. Avoid startups / competitive places.

You probably want to address your anxiety as well - where it comes from, how it affects you, can you do something about it, if you can’t how you can deal with it, etc

I’m supposed to be a high achiever professionally speaking ( by most metrics I’ve done well enough at least good enough for me), but still have to keep my natural anxiety in check. Surprisingly enough I’ve eventually figured out that when I’m stressed out there’s a reason, and that I can actually find it if I search for it. If I don’t look for it then I just end up completely paralyzed. The solution usually boils down to addressing the thing I’m afraid of.

Changing careers is another option, but there’s no reason why your anxiety won’t come back so I’d work on the anxiety first.

I wish you the best !

There’s also ‘don’t do it’ ( just turn the whole thing off because it’s actually not needed ) and ‘use a better middleman’ ( os, compiler etc while not going lower level). In my experience these are very cheap and usually not looked at and most devs jump at the other 5.

It depends on the Brie - pasteurized or not, from Meaux/Melun/etc. I find Unpasteurized Brie de Melun to be very strong.

The main idea here I think is that having someone who’s been embezzling money run for president would greatly undermine democratic institutions and the public’s faith in French institutions. However, the far right will claim it’s a political conspiracy and this will mostly have the same effect.

French politicians have a long history of accusing judges who sentence politicians of being enemies of democracy - the idea being that crooks or not, the people should decide.

It used to be the case in France too.

For a truly incredible version of it see the helicopter affair : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Toubon?wprov=sfti1#Con...

In many ways, sending high profile politicians to prison or semi-prison ( Sarkozy, now Le Pen ) is new.

Find people who understand it. I’ve seen epic failures when things grow , you lose a DC and hell rains on you. It’s not magic , you will need people who get it ( source : unstable cluster of a few petabytes where I work ).

I understand his shares are collateral for his various other ventures ( and most likely personal expenses ) - a Tesla stock crash might have other consequences

Does it work with Pernosco ?

Well, hostile state actors can ( and do!) already wiretap lots of things in the physical world, in theory wiretapping / surveillance is only possible for governments etc. And the NSA semi-successfully inserted a backdoor through carefully chosen elliptic curves a few years ago ( DUAL_EC_DRBG ) by convincing folks to use a weak PRNG.

I’d say that the problem isn’t so much related to encryption, but to the fact that anything digital can be industrialized very quickly, and that the ‘if it goes wrong’ scenario can go really wrong if ( and when) your backdoor falls into the wrong hands.

From a lawmaker’s perspective, it’s just a different kind of risk, which they may or may not be assessing properly. In some ways I see it as closer to people misunderstanding how easy and how bad it is to lose large amounts of data : it’s not related to the inner workings of computers , but rather to the leverage that computers provide. The same is true with weak crypto : everything is great until suddenly everything is in the clear all at the same time, and read by people you don’t want.

Why do they need to understand how encryption works ? They’re mostly interested in the goal ( a lock that can be broken by law enforcement, and allow wiretapping), and will tell you that these things are already possible in the physical world today.

In other words they’re fine with intruding upon citizens privacy - this doesn’t require any understanding of encryption I think ( and if encryption prevents that, their answer would be ‘ban encryption’)

Well it’s just that there was public shaming if found out, which is just as violent in a small group of people in which everything is based on reputation.

I find hospitals to be somewhat clueless when it comes to simple things like what you’re describing.

When a relative of mine got hospitalized for a laryngectomy, post op she obviously couldn’t talk since her voice box was gone.

She was either expected to learn to speak with her oesophagus ( doable but many people fail and it takes months ) or … remain mute.

That’s when I introduced her to the wonders of text to speech. Soon after she was the star of the department, which had never considered this !

The author seems to assume that conjuring up a conjecture is the hard part - yet it will be filled with the same standard mathematics ( granted, sometimes wrapped as new tools, and the proof ends up being as important as the result), often at great cost.

Having powerful assistants that allow people to try out crazy mathematical ideas without fear of risking their careers or just having fun with ideas is likely to have an outsized impact anyway I think.

No not at all, the differences are much broader than that. A Lebanese speaker can’t understand Moroccan at all typically.

At least the Arab world has a very wide range of dishes which require a large amount of preparation or require a fair amount of cooking time, so I would disagree with the ‘little preparation’ and ‘straight to the table’ descriptions you’re using. I’m most familiar with the Lebanese side of things , but I understand it translates to Morocco ( eg tagine, pastilla ) as well.

Now, this doesn’t invalidate your main point ( sophisticated tech is not a hard requirement for good food ) but afaik, some of the most famous dishes in the cuisines you listed do require specific equipment ( tagines, tandoors ) and don’t fall under the ‘ straight from the ground to the table ‘ umbrella.

I’d love to look at these pictures but have never succeeded. In particular, I find crossing my eyes to be a rather painful ( as in, it physically hurts ) experience so stop immediately if I try.

I know a bit about the taschen/luxury books business, having a very good friend who works in this space ( she’s built a publishing business, and makes a living out of it, typically her books print up to a few hundreds at most).

Basically, there are book collectors who are willing to pay for beautiful books ( my friend sells art pieces according to her , not mere books ), companies willing to buy them ( and sometimes codesign them if they’re say luxury brands ) and give them as gifts to their clients, and then people like you and me who will maybe buy one just because you really want it.

It’s not a highly profitable business by any means, it’s a small market, and it’s the opposite of the high volume mainstream publishing industry.

I agree with the point about noise. I’ve been looking for a powerful, compact and silent gaming pc for a while ( with silent then compact being more important than powerful ). I don’t need a laptop - a Mac mini-like or slightly bigger box is good enough .

When I look around, gaming pcs are mostly about big and visible, sometimes reasonably silent, almost never compact, inconspicuous and silent.

To me there is a market for this kind of product, and it hasn’t been addressed properly yet.

Since I have so far failed in my quest, I now use GeForce Now from my Mac mini which is a good approximation of what I want.