LeanderK

i think the pandemic is really over, it is endemic. I wonder when we will get back to baseline or whether we will have to live with deadlier virus than what's usual for some time. Just keep in mind that the flu isn't as harmless as it's usually portrait. Older or otherwise more vulnerable parts of the population died every year, with some really bad years. It's in some way part of life, a risk is always present.

But looking at the statistics in your link it is not that obvious, as it looks like the excess mortality slowly converges to zero.

yeah, but that's irrelevant. We're not fetishising poorness here but arguing wether you would always buy a house because it's objectively better. I wouldn't, I live in the city by choice and wouldn't move out for a house. Hell, I don't think I currently would like to live alone because I have to move into a new city and wonder about making friends there.

Re-reading it....maybe there's something lost in translation. Do you mean your own house, as in your own complete building, our something like your own home that could be an apartment?

I can imagine living in a single room with good, big shared amenities, but I can't imagine living in a pod. In fact, i would consider the opportunity for the single room, I find the idea appealing. But not a pod, just imagine starting a relationship while living in a pod. Sometimes you really need privacy.

I sounds a bit like you've never left where you grew up and can't imagine why someone else wouldn't like it.

If someone would give me a house I would sell it. I don't want to live in a house and I definitely don't want do go back to the suburbs. Imagine that, a lot can actually buy a house but choose to buy an apartment!

I don't get this comment? Separating what? Pedestrians and cars? Cars and bikes? Isn't this also mostly done? I mean that's the idea behind bike lanes for example. There are limits to the amount of separation possible though.

> I mean, not everyone has the possibility of walking a couple of streets to buy a cappuccino and then take an elevator to the office. Try having kids in a city today and then let's talk.

I don't get this comment. Is there no cafe near you? Also, you still shouldn't speed in residential or mixed neighbourhoods, regardless of where you live. Even if your office is further away. People live there. A highway and ring road usually takes you reasonable near you office, for most cities in europe and I bet every city in the US.

> Try having kids in a city today

What's the difference to having a kid in a city in the past? Cars certainly grew bigger and that's strictly worse for having a kid in the city.

I get not wanting your kids to grow up in the city, but that's also your own decision. And if you end up with a long commute others shouldn't bear unreasonable consequences. Others might raise their kids in the city and the kid might want to cross the road (assuming it is old enough) without a fear of death from thousands of cars speeding by.

It's also being rolled out in berlin and what I saw it's really, really great. But there are drawbacks. People living on the main streets get more traffic and pollution and some violently oppose it. Public transit and emergency vehicle access can be solved. It's really not that easy to implement because car drivers will try to drive through anyway, so you have to install modal filters everywhere (elements that bike traffic can flow through but not car traffic). But then you have to think hard about public transit and emergency vehicles. So it's not really that cheap.

I think you have to reduce car-dependency first, afterwards you can roll them out because the acceptance is higher and advocacy groups form.

> And the timber is much older than the earliest modern human - or Homo sapiens - fossils, which are about 315,000 years old.

this is what astonished me. I somehow depicted our ancestors or relatives to be purely hunter/gatherers without the means (and will) to build complex wooden structures.

encouraging public transport use is only one reason to lower the speed limit. Noise and safety are others and maybe even independent of the will to encourage public transit use

The thing about living close to friends is that it's not as much work to meet. Having to travel for half an hour is already a lot since it might not be worth it to meet spontaneously, it is easier to develop friendships to someone close by.

I see this happening again and again, sometimes repeatedly to the same persons. A friend of mine is currently going through this, but his solution to the problem is immediately trying to go into the next relationship, as fast as possible. I am very much looking forward to the next breakup. Another friend of mine just never got in touch with me after her new relationship, funnily we got to know each other from the last relationship to a friend of mine where I know she neglected her older friends to favour her new circle.

To be honest, I am not interested in being friends with a person when I get sidelined the moment someone goes into the next relationship. I have better things to do than to revolve around someone else life. I have my own friends. It's a very frustrating experience because you try to stay in touch and you don't know what's going on. It's not your fault.

I try to balance my relationship and my own, personal life. Breakups happened and rougher times in a relationship happen and it's essential to have your own friends. It is very important to me to not give up my identity and my social life. But it has to be said I also don't really accept too much inference into my own life and I don't think I could be in a relationship where each one doesn't have their own space. I know relationship that wouldn't really work for me because you have to negotiate stuff that is not negotiable for me.

Have fun pulling notes from websites without ML. NLP just plain didn't work before ML. The thing is that with ML you are able to work with unstructured data, e.g. routing email without having a complicated system the person mailing you has to understand or hundreds of brittle, hand written rules that in the end won't fire anyway because somebody spelled a word wrong.

I think ML/AI is just not ready for a lot of applications because it's not good enough, but our models are still improving every month. Impossible to know what it's like in 5 years.

I really don't think you can just import scientists and engineers and essentially develop TSMC. It's not the sixties anymore, Intel has a massive R&D budget but they are not currently able to compete with TSMC. Technology is also quite advanced, I doubt it's just a few years of R&D. In fact, it's so expensive, there are only a few factories on earth capable on producing those chips. China would have done it already if it's so simple.

numpy is a great library, but I find the pytorch take on it superior. It allows for much more method-chaining, which I find to be very readable in longer computations. I frequently want to reach out for it in numpy, only to see that it's a np.* function. In functional languages I would use an infix pipeline-combinator like (|>) but that's not possible in python.

> That's a logical fallacy.

No it's not? It gives him credibility. You can not lecture someone about the car culture in an area they've lived in. He has literally lived there and in his case, as I understood it, even grown up there. It seems like you are suggesting he only knows amsterdam and does not get that chicago is different.

> It should never be about either of these. Instead, provide public transportation people want to use. Carrot, never stick.

This really ignores the effects of car traffic on the communities. Reducing traffic is a valid goal and sometimes the really only goal. It might be because of and unacceptable level of noise, or pollution or something else like an increase in safety for people on foot. Then the current amount of traffic is just not acceptable, you might not care that much if they end up not taking the trip, switching to public transit or driving somewhere else because your only goal was the reduction of car traffic in a specific area. A good example is barcelonas superblock concept, where you minimise through-traffic through specific blocks to enable more walkable, bikeable and livable neighbourhoods for the inhabitants of these urban neighbourhoods. Within reasonable bounds, neighbourhoods should have the ability to limit excessive car traffic in the area they are living in.

it's not the wrong way because it's not always about the needs of the suburban/commuting community. Reducing car traffic can be a goal itself because it calms the neighbourhood for the community living in the urban areas or enables car-free, walkable zones reused for cafes etc. Those places can often fundamentally not coexist with cars. Parking can also be removed just because it's needed for other infrastructure, e.g. bike lanes. There are many reasons to remove parking spaces.

So I would say that usually it's about providing incentives to use public transit and reduce the incentives to drive, but sometimes it's purely about reducing traffic.

The poster also said that he's a former chicago resident (in his bio it says he's actually from chicago), so he exactly knows what he's talking about.

I would argue that in general that's probably true but not always. Reducing car trips can also relieve stress on the communities living in these urban communities or improve the quality in specific locations. Here outright banning or discouraging driving is done to improve walkability, reduce noise and quality of stay.

Communities living in cities also need traffic calmed, quieter places nearby. Banning cars here is often a good first step and reuse the street with cafes, restaurants and transportation by bike, public transport and cars only if parked somewhere else.

the intellectual attraction lies exactly in terraforming other planets besides earth. Dreaming big.

> I think it would be easier to just limit greenhouse gas emissions on earth.

Of course it would, but that's besides the point

I wonder how pragmatic those can become. Usually I don't really care about "exact" exactness, a common theme in haskell. A sort of "under common assumptions" (no underflow/overflow/OOM etc.) proof of laws and properties. This eliminates a whole class of bugs and strengthens your ability to reason, but doesn't make everything super, super complicated by thinking about all those edge cases.

One usually doesn't program airplane control software. Some bugs are okay and speed of development and correctness is a trade-off.

Regardless of wether it's the right idea right now, I am convinced that AI is at least not he complete vapourware that blockchain was. That really was some useless hype. There's something to show for and real applications, from self driving cars to other smart systems. Classifiers are everywhere.

I interact with chatgpt regularly. It's in my smartphone classifying my photos. I don't know when I have ever interacted with a blockchain.

> which pure "A-type" data scientists tend to prefer: R, SSPS, Matlab

I very much disagree and I would say it's the opposite. The only competitor for data-scientists is R, especially if you're doing stats-heavy analysis (opposed to an ML-heavy analysis). SSPS is in my experience used mainly by someone without a data-scientist background, e.g. psychology, similarly to matlab, where the only users I know are engineers.

I would bet that the overwhelming amount of data-scientists use python, even if it's just to set up the data-pipeline. It's just the better general programming language and data-scientist are not analysing all the time but have to get the data in shape and available first.

wait a minute...were you able to download chrome in the end? Or was edge straight up refusing to download it?

this is not true across the bank. Of course if you're really deep into depopulated rural areas then there is really a lack of basic social services. But it's not that there's only high-density cities and deserted landscapes, there are still rural areas with schools and doctors. Rural areas that are doing comparatively well, somewhat maintain their population. Also, many cities with a lot of population growth also struggle to provide those services as there are not enough doctors or teachers for all, so you might be able find comparatively better schooling in the right rural areas.

In some rural areas there's a really conservative, tight-knit mindset. A deep resentment for somebody different and a very specific world-view really dominating the area. This is not about hipster-cafes, but about some basic progress in society some parts just try to not be part of.

Rural is also more isolated and there's just strictly less to do. Fine if you want to spend most of your time inside your family circle or the same two people you grew up with. But some just can't cope with that.

I wouldn't return to more rural areas if 100% WFH is possible. Some left it for a reason and not to get better internet.

And, at least in germany, many rural areas are not so unattractive. I know plenty rural villages with great internet. Especially in BW public transport is solid, the next bigger population center is close by and there are many jobs. It's just conservative, culturally boring, inflexible and really set in their old ways.

A bit offtopic: In principle I like the design of the bloc, but I recently searched for a technical-looking font that is not monospaced. I like the design of the blog, but reading prose in monospaced font is just not very pleasant I think. All (freely available) coding I found fonts only have monospaced variants and all non-monospaced fonts didn't look like coding fonts. Any ideas?

I actually see autonomous cars complementing trains very well because they can be used for the last mile problem (getting people from the train station to the destination they actually want to arrive at). They are also available for areas poorly served by transit/inconvenient connections.

But I don't see them making more impact on somebody who's already driving. Traffic will still be traffic and walkable cities will have to limit that. It's the same car after all, just driven by a computer. All those current issues for heavy car-dependence won't be solved by autonomous driving.

> We already know that SUVs are more dangerous for pedestrians, but I think most of us agree that making SUVs illegal for this reason would not be a good idea, and is against the American ethos.

As a non-american that doesn't own a car it's not that unreasonable for me :) At least banning SUVs that are excessively unsafe for pedestrians in a collision. Or maybe just ban it in cities where some walkability is expected. I just don't want to die by getting hit by a car

I don't think the question was about the interpretation and specifics of the law but about the ethics. Wether an action is not unreasonable is also a question wether the action is should be a valid option.

We are playing a game about people after all.

compilers are really complicated pieces of software. There's a lot of complexity even in small routines. I would expect to encounter complicated types in there, they capture (while complex) intent and meaning.

It's not the frontend glue-code kind of code. The inherently hard problem makes is fun for people who like to solve small puzzles.

yeah, weird. I read a lot of code. I often read code to exactly understand what's going on, how specific functions are used or how the API was intended to fit together. That may mean that I read random code on github, code of my dependencies etc.

But it's not a continuous reading of code. I don't read the code of my dependency from start to finish.

ah okay, this makes sense!