Polygator

For an international perspective: buying and selling government bonds is far from an universal mechanism for interest rate control (AFAIK when discussing central banks the US is almost always a special case)

For instance the Canadian, UK and European central banks provide systems for interbank short-term loans. It is almost entirely through these systems that they set their target rate.

For Canada the BoC doesn't do any open market operations to reach target interest rate (so almost only repos and reverse repos). Their target rate is in fact called the "target overnight rate" and only concerns overnight lending between Canadian financial institutions.

Personally I think decimal time fails to recognize the cyclical nature of days. Decimal time is like switching from 360 degrees to gradians. A far superior better system would be to adopt radial time and have 2pi hours in a day. We could extend this to the whole year and have 2 pi months in a year, finally divorcing the counting of rotations from the counting of revolutions.

The fundamental reason why many functional languages won't allow you to do the first is that they use immutable data structures.

We could indeed introduce syntactic sugar (`y= (x[0]:=10)` maybe), but you'll still need to introduce a new variable to hold the modified list.

I don't Mercerism is about androids at all. If you read enough PKD short stories, Mercerism is just another of these cool ideas that appear all over the place.

Have you seen the Unreasonable Effectiveness of Multiple Dispatch talk on YouTube? It's pretty good if you have the time

If you read the thread, he appears to have asked for the last 30 to 60 days of code, printed. So not code they're proud of, literally everything. And why printed?

I guess he's referring to the fact that the glut of investment around 2017-2018 was followed by disappointment due to startups overpromising. I agree that from the technical side (I mostly follow NLP, might be different in other subfields) there's been no hint of a winter.

One of the issues I had with Go was that even though functions can return pseudo-tuples (multiple return values), there are no tuples anywhere else in the language. So you can't chain functions which return (T, err), easily create a slice of their return values, feed their output to a channel, etc. Just made handling operations on slices so tedious

This assumes that the lost human years are productive years, which I think is dubious at best given the demographics of Covid death.

We could count "years of productive work lost", but that feels like a very cynical way to look at it.

Yeah, but obviously the "stuff" has led to a Red Queen problem, with the outcome being incredible waste of electricity and computing resources (compared to PoS or having a less competitive eth mining industry)

The justification is that contrarily to PoW, where there are economies of scale on computing power, PoS power scales linearly with your stake.

Mining has been concentrated in the hands of a few gigantic mining pools for a while, and PoS will actually make Ethereum more democratic. Again, this is based on documentation, there might be unforeseen consequences

Not really. Using a statistical approach to text modelling, specifically using Markov Chains, was proposed by Shannon in 1948. But yeah, there's a point in the 2000s where generative grammar/ symbolic approaches were pretty much left behind by NN methods.

When we discuss Google's input in NLP, the most important contribution is certainly the "Attention is all you Need" paper, which paved the way for BERT and GTP (Alphafold also uses Attention networks, btw)