aninhumer

I think saying something it's simple because it's based on simple rules can be slightly misleading. This is why I like to distinguish the ideas of "complication" and "complexity".

To me "complicated" means that the rules of a system require a lot of information to describe, i.e. it has a lot of special cases and caveats to learn. Whereas "complex" is more about the variety of emergent patterns in a system which are necessary to understand it and interact with it effectively.

As an example, rules of Go are very simple, but we probably wouldn't call it a simple game. In contrast, the rules of Chess are rather more involved, with quite a few special cases. Both games can be called "complex", but I'd also say that Chess is more complicated.

So using these terms, it sounds like you're saying Scala is less complicated than Kotlin, whereas the parent is perhaps saying that Kotlin is less complex?

Yeah, that's a reasonable criticism. I read your first comment as suggesting he didn't recognise conflict theory as existing.

My instinct is also to characterise the theories in a similar way. I'd describe it as how things ought to be (mistake theory) vs how to achieve that (conflict theory), but I guess that's kind of the same thing you're saying.

However, I'm not sure you can entirely separate these theories though. A mistake can be creating a society which encourages power imbalances, and a consequence of power imbalances can be societies that are less able to notice certain mistakes.

I think the point of this entire post is him admitting the exact failing you're attributing to him in your comment?

Haha, thanks.

And nope, I have no professional experience with this, I just like trains a bit too much and want more of them. :D

I think self-driving cars can be combined with public transport to serve a lot of these more arbitrary patterns effectively.

In the future I imagine, every train or bus station would have a small fleet of self-driving cars that people travelling nearby could use on-demand. I think this arrangement has a lot of advantages over using cars point-to-point.

The cars themselves can have a lower maximum speed, and lower range because they don't need to go very far, and lightweight, because they're consequently unlikely to get into high speed crashes. This also means your access road network can take up less space, and be more pedestrianised.

Additionally, because people use these cars for last mile transport, the effective catchment area of a station is much higher allowing them to be more viable even at lower densities, and also allowing less frequent stops to cover an area effectively.

Also, once people are used to using transport-as-a-service interfaces, it's much easier to make them aware of new transport options, and convince them to switch. If someone is opening an app anyway to order a ride to the shops, you can offer them a slightly cheaper journey involving a bus interchange. This in turn allows the networks to be more flexible, as you don't need to worry as much about providing a consistent service pattern for people to learn. So if you notice a lot of people go to the shops on Saturday afternoon, you can add a few buses at that time and people will start using it immediately.

>there's never a shortage in basically any thriving region of people out and about doing things

The point the parent was making is that these bustling public areas you're seeing are primarily made up of affluent young people, and are not actually representative of how the majority of society lives.

You have offered no counterpoint to that at all, and yet still chose to start your comment with a rude dismissal.

Could you elaborate on why?

I've also used the system at Waitrose and it's completely painless, so I'd guess if there's a problem it's due to poor implementation.

One particular advantage for me was that I could take my backpack around the shop filling it up, so I'd never have to worry whether I was buying too much to fit.

And it also meant I could be sure multi-buy discounts have processed before I got to the checkout, instead of having to check my receipt and make a fuss about it if they didn't.

The only minor issue I noticed is that if you're buying alcohol you need a member of staff to confirm your age, and they often don't have dedicated staff on the QuickCheck machines when it's quiet, but even then it still doesn't take long to find someone.

I don't know how your brain works, but for most people just hearing/reading the words "pink elephant" will cause their System 1 to immediately bring that concept into their consciousness.

This isn't "simple minded" it's just how brains work, and the alternative of having to actively think about a word to remember what it means, would be much slower.

I don't think we need an "algorithm" just better RSS readers that let us filter things easily.

Or ideally more effort put into feeds by sources, so we get better curation of the feeds to start with.

>Pencils can be quickly swapped for different hardness. Swapping the lead grade in a holder is much more involved.

But surely you could just between multiple holders with different leads in them, which would be equivalent to swapping pencils?

> Even self-driving vehicles will not be able to compete with mass transit when they're both priced similarly.

I think there's likely to end up being a third option: Public transport with self-driving cars for last mile at each end. That way you have the convenience of door-to-door, combined with the efficiency of mass transit for the bulk of traffic.

There are also other advantages, like it expands the effective catchment area of stations, making them more viable even at lower densities. And the cars themselves can be much smaller and more efficient as well, since they don't need the range, and they don't need to be as comfortable if people are only sitting in them for ~5mins.

It's not that simple though. On the one hand, UBI will make people less willing to accept work, but on the other hand it will also make them able to have a higher quality of life with a lower wage.

If someone is currently on $25k and gets a $10k basic income, their employer can lower their salary to $20k and they'll still be getting $5k more than they were before. (This won't happen immediately because people will be reluctant to take pay cuts, but I think it will in the longer term.)

Exactly how much of this difference the employee and employer capture in the longer term is a concern, but I think giving people the option to quit without starving will go a long way towards empowering them to insist on fair pay. I also think a result would be an increase job quality, because I think a lot of people would take a pay cut to work somewhere less awful if they could afford it.

Of course that money comes from taxes, so there's still a cost somewhere, but I'm not as convinced progressive taxes on the wealthy will have quite as big an impact on the costs to produce basic goods.

Ads aren't just about click-throughs though. If someone is scrolling endlessly and seeing adverts every few minutes, that's still influencing them. Possibly more so because they're in a comfortable cycle of absorbing snippets of information, and don't appraise it critically.

>Almost every show - old and new - has them.

They tend to be a lot shorter in newer shows though. Older shows' credit sequence would typically last over a minute, whereas IME they tend to be 30 seconds or less on newer shows, some even less, and some only have a title card sting.

I think it helps to reframe the problem this way:

If people somehow magically stopped dying of old age tomorrow, would we choose to solve the resource problems that caused by re-implementing anything similar to death as it exists now? Say, for example, by executing everyone at the age of 75?

I think we'd be much more likely to prefer an alternative solution, such as restricting birth rates.

Yeah https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alea_iacta_est

The problem which the quote is pointing to here, is that then people use the old garbage to justify the new reprocessed garbage and vice versa, and it becomes harder for people to realise that it's garbage.

Read the article. It's debunking that exact argument.

Surely that's mostly a one-off cash injection though? Once all the regular commuters have their cards, you're not going to get much more. There will still be some extra from visitors, and new commuters over time but it doesn't seem like long term you'd see that much revenue increase.

Generally I'd agree that it's better to just let the government subsidise it (or just run it) and accept the cost in exchange for the economic benefits.

However, there is one way to make it work privately, and that's to capture some of those economic benefits by buying the land around stations. If someone buys some relatively cheap land near a city and then builds a train line from there to the centre, the value of that land increases and so they can charge higher rents on any housing, offices or shop units built there.

I'd imagine that the utility of spaced repetition for Haskell is more about remembering important function names rather than learning the concepts.

It's probably not amazingly useful in that context, but it may help to feel fluent faster, which could help with other things.

Not really. Inflation reduces the value of money, but not assets. A wealth tax would tax assets as well.

I suggest you talk to more actual trans people. I thought like you for a long time, but these concerns are based on assumptions about trans people, not the reality.

>They too are victims of stereotype.

Most trans people are well aware that the gender presentations they're conforming to are stereotypes, and indeed many would quite like to be butch transwomen or twink transmen, but find it very difficult to be accepted presenting that way. They are forced to conform to stereotypes by wider society, not by the ideas of trans people. That said, trans people often do choose and enjoy quite stereotypical presentations, and when they do, it's basically for the same reason that plenty of ardent cis feminists do: Just because you recognise the socialisation behind your preferences doesn't mean you can easily escape it.

> But the problem with being unable to discuss this

Trans spaces actively discuss a wide variety of gender identity experiences and possibilities, and encourage questioning people to explore their own experiences, and find the relationship with gender that feels right for them. The message is not "these are the things you're allowed to be" it's "do whatever makes you feel comfortable".

>may not see the other option: being yourself in your own body

Most trans people will have spent a long time uncertain and trying to "be themselves in their own body" before they decide to undertake any medical changes, and many trans people decide to change their bodies only partially or not at all. Very few people are comfortable undergoing extensive bodily changes on a whim. And when they do decide to make these changes, it is often driven by feelings of intense depression inducing discomfort with aspects of their bodies, not simply a desire to look how other people expect.

So you're carrying around tonnes of useless metal just so people don't have to walk a few feet and sit next to other people?

It's more than that though, you're paying for that artist to be able to create. In most cases, if people stopped paying, the artist would have to stop creating, or at least reduce the time they spend creating, so they could find alternative income sources.

Just because there's no defined benefit or exclusivity doesn't mean all you're paying for is "fuzzy feelings".

I'm not really sure how a small block size prevents centralisation?

As I understand it the transaction throughput is limited by the block size. The difficulty adjusts so the rate at which blocks can be mined remains roughly constant, but each block is size limited so it can only contain so many transactions.

Handling errors as values is great, but making that value a product type rather than a sum type is not good design. It means you have to return a result even when you have an error, and so nothing enforces that the user actually handles the error properly.

I think the confusion here is due to the semantic ambiguity of "competitiveness".

A tournament can be called competitive and a participant can be called competitive, but these don't mean quite the same thing.

Evolution is inherently competitive, but humans become competitive by evolution.

Not all refactoring fit neatly alongside existing work.

Sometimes you get a small change request that suggests a broader refactoring. You're pretty sure it will be valuable in future, but it would be a lot more work and isn't that useful in the short term. So if you try and do that refactoring upfront, you get pushback for wasting time on a small change. And then again on the next relevant change.

Developers often want to schedule these kinds of refactorings, because otherwise they get pushback on every chance they might otherwise have to fix these problems.