beefield

Vast majority of the gray goo in our heads is dumb as f*ck and can't hold a coherent thought more complicated than "I am hungry" together other than by accident. That's why writing is a superpower for thinking. It freezes concepts down and you are able to return and rethink them from more than one angle. Of course, mathematics is a thinking superpower on another level, and programming yet another level of superpowers of thinking. Which is why it would be important to teach basics of programming to everyone. Not so that all become software developers, but to tech them to think. Like writing and math is not teached because all should become authors or mathematicians.

> - Will switching to React make hiring and training future developers easier?

> - Will this technology choice make future projects faster to develop? (For example, do we get wins from a better toolchain, etc.)

> - Will this be an interesting project that helps me keep existing employees motivated?

> - Are the other claimed wins in the blog post actually going to work out that way?

But... These are (or can be framed as) concrete problems.

> - Do my existing programmers have the necessary skills to test this technology out?

If you can't produce a single concrete reason why to try a new framework, why should I discuss about testing it?

(this as someone who may be on the spectrum and for whom the original article hit a bit too close..)

My understanding why bowlines are disliked in climbing community is that it may fail if the pull does not come from the long tail, but from inside the loop. That is, cliiping two carabiners to bowline loop and pulling the carabiners apart is not a safe way to use bowline.

It's missing European Death Knot.

https://www.theclimbingguy.com/european-death-knot/

I'm not sure what your point was?

https://www.yorkshirepost.co.uk/news/people/cyclist-riding-e...

To me it is quite obvious that pedestrian crashing with a bicycle is much less dangerous than pedestrian hit by a car.

No, the context was that especially in startups there are lots of problems that nobody in the company knows how to solve beforehand. There is a certain personality that you can throw these problems at and they are happy to have them on their table.

The word I am looking for was a bit "catchier"

Well, I consider myself somewhat fluent with SQL, and for some reason left joins are the ones that occasionally get me really confused - so much so that I actively try to avoid them. Trouble is not in the vanilla cases, but when you start throwing multiple tables and multiple where clauses in the same query, then there is something about left joins and nulls that is really unintuitive to my brain. Maybe I should spend some time and study the left join more...

Well, if cost was not a factor, I'd prefer traveling long hauls with a space visiting rocket thingy, not a mundane private jet.

Shorter ones, again, if cost was not a factor, I'd prefer high-speed rail or supersonic Hyperloop stations next to my origin and destination.

You want to do that with the cooler water that is coming back to the power plant after the heat is delivered to the customer. Thus you use lower value heat to melt the streets. Assuming you do combined heat & power, as a bonus you get a small benefit on the power cycle as you get colder water into the pwrturbine cooling.

I would assume all the methanol produced this way is burned, taking the generated O2 from atmosphere to CO2.

Trouble is that management seems to be a P != NP type problem. Really easy to tell when done wrong but really difficult to get right - for variety of reasons.

> I never understood this

Me neither. I think there are two distinct possibilities you should consider when you think what to do today. First one is that you may die today. Second is that you may not die today.

> I haven't tried winter biking yet, and honestly, I'm a bit scared to.

Winter biking can mean a lot of differen things, and no, you do not need to start with trying to bike 20km on a -10c blizzard against the wind. A short trip on a calm, cool day is a surprisingly mundane thing after a try or two. A few notes, though:

- if there are icy patches, you might want to invest in studded tires. They are awesome.

- experiment with clothing on shorter trips. If you live there, you likely have anyway suitable clothes for a variety of different trips.

- somehow I feel that fatbikes have gotten a bit out of fashion, but they are really cool winter bikes and not nearly as bad in the summer as you might think (assuming a quality bike)

- overall, you need much less new things you might think to try. And after you try, you know much better what you actually want.

Not sure I follow. Ponzi can also exist without new participants buying into it - as long as the existing ones keep pumping money into it. And on the aggregate, bitcoin is negative sum game. Someone must pay for the mining costs and that money must come from outside bitcoin.

> There are endless curiosities in the universe.

I suspect that people who like to say that they would like to live "forever" or think that they would be interested "endlessly" in new things have not really thought through what infinity means. You might want to check Grahams number. And then spend a while thinking that even that number is not even a microscopic fraction of infinity.

And if you still think you want to live forever. How on earth are you going to use your puny 100 billion neurons to experience, store and decide the order of experiencing and studying the endless Graham numbers of curiosities without at some point getting into a loop after you have had your brain in every single possible state? And when your brain has been in every possible state for say a billion times, you think it is not going to get boring?

What's the opposite of "aged like milk"?

> Uh, yeah?

There was something about liberty and safety and deserving neither that some US president said long time ago that I think might very much apply here.

> At some point you have to consider whether this level of diplomatic incompetence is intentional.

Please, enlighten us, what should be done?

> With crypto, it is so hard to know what it’s actual value should be, since unlike a stock there are no earnings

Your second part there gives a very good hint to your problem in the first part. Of course, in some sense there is some value in facilitating child porn and other illegal activities and some value in burning fossil fuels for mining (the value may be positive or negative). I am still pretty confident that if you just round "actual value" to zero - and use the possible error to keep you away from shorting the market - that is in the long run the valuation that gives you the best quality of life.

To me emergent phenomena are things that simply can't be analyzed just looking at the building blocks the emergence comes from. Say, a photo of a cat is made of pixels, but there is no meaningful way to discuss "catness" of a single pixel. The RGB value of a single pixel simply has no information in that that distinguishes a non-cat pixel from cat-pixel. Only when you take a pile of pixels you may start to dicuss if that pile contains a cat or not. But you need to falsifiably define the catness of the image by something else than RGB values of individual pixels.

Not sure if this is applicable?

https://www.bos-ag.com/products/le300/

If the value of assets of a bank drops under certain limits [1], regulators can and will take action. To be clear, every single bank that is currently alive (and regulated by relevant western authorities) has assets way more than what the deposits are worth. They may not be liquid assets, but they are there.

[1] you may want to search for terms like "regulatory capital" or "capital adequacy"

You might want to check LiFePO4 battery chemistry. Heavier than Li-Ion, but longevity is better, as well as safety. I have been told that you can hammer a nail through a cell and nothing spectacular happens.

(One) trouble with lead acid is that deep discharges are really bad for the longevity of the battery. So you can use only a small fraction of the capacity if you want to run regular cycles form it.

> easy small transactions that don't go through a credit/bank card, would be nice.

Why? I'm hard pressed to see practical benefits over contactless card/phone/smartwatch payments for small sums. Yes, they work already internationally - at least with some definition of international.

There is a long history of non-fiat currencies before the current system. Would you mind quantifying some of the measures that you think make fiat a fiasco compared to e.g. gold standard?

Here is some background data:

https://www.moneyandbanking.com/commentary/2016/12/14/why-a-...

> I got the same kind of "hangover" I used to get after a night of binge drinking on basically nothing but really salt heavy foods.

Based on my personal experiences in some weird outdoor hobbies, I would say that surprisingly large part of what people call hangover is actually sleep deprivation and dehydration.

I think I am going to at least check the free tier anyways, but to manage my expectations, does anyone have experience from non-us-centric non englis h searches, are they also good?

Okay, I think I have some weird blind spot here. I have really hard time understanding the reasoning behind philanthropy being a societal good that should be subsidized by taxpayers.

Let's take econ 101 and revealed preferences. It is obvious that if you give 100 bucks to a charity you get utility worth more than that 100 bucks. Otherwise you would not do that. And there is zero difference on the mechanics there if you compare to buying a movie ticket. Watching the movie gives you more utility than what the ticket costs. So, from the point of view of the donor we can think charity nothing more, nothing less than entertainment, and the question is, why one type of entertainment is tax deductible while another is not?

If we compare these transactions not only from the donor's point of view, we notice a clear distinction in power balance between those. The movie ticket transaction is relatively power neutral. Both sides have roughly equal say in the contract, both are taking part of a balanced business transaction. Charity then, is far from being power neutral, the donor has all the power in their hands. Not exactly a reason for charity being the tax-subsidized transaction here.

But charity makes good things. Like... creating a job for a movie teather cashier is somehow not a good thing? Nope, not convincing either.

As said, I have a blind spot here. I find no serious reason why charity should be subsidized. Yes, it feels good and makes good, but so do normal business transactions. If you think that charity is somehow better way to organize social security for the poor than government-tax-mandated social security, think again. (hint: prisoners' dilemma) If you think that you would like to support poor voluntarily, but not by force, you do not understand (or want to understand) that that does not result to sufficient support for the poor.

> many economists think of money as something that is simultaneously: (1) A means of payment (2) a unit of account (3) a store of value.

Just some further notes on this. The word "is" is a bit ambiguous here. To clarify, those are "properties" of money instead of what money "is made of", like a knife is sharp, while what knife actually is made of is steel. In the same way, (modern) money is debt. To have money existing means that someone owes someone something.

Now, of course, bitcoin is not debt. Nobody owes you anything if you own bitcoin. You may just be lucky to find a greater fool to sell it. And yes, someone might think it makes a better money because of that. Unfortunately for bitcoin, just like what makes a good knife is that it is sharp, a good money that is a good means of payment, good unit of account and good store of value. And by any reasonable measure bitcoin is utter failure on all of those.[1] So I find it hard to believe bitcoin will ever be money in any reasonable sense. Being good at those would require the value of money to be relatively stable against other goods, and in the current world that is just not going to happen without some mechanism actively managing the value of the money. And bitcoin has no such mechanism available by definition.

[1] If you believe in the "store of value" story, please give me a reasonable quantitative measure for judging how good a store of value an asset is, and by using that measure, compare bitcoin to more traditional store of values and show that bitcoin is not an utter failure.