ccooffee

Thanks for sharing. Reading the (translated) piece seems more useful here than the Wikipedia summary which spends more time assuming the premise of the work and connecting it to other things.

I don't think it is a good series of essays. It's necessarily scattershot in its argumentation to address the pre-action, concurrent-action, and post-action angles. But almost none of the arguments come across as earnest. I feel like I'm reading a longform series of "gotcha" takedowns with the authorial intent simply to throw wrenches into any discussion without actually proposing anything or materially affecting how the discussion progresses.

'The Vietnam war wasn't a war because US Congress didn't declare war'. Oh man, I feel so dunked upon.

To emphasize my point that Baudrillard is doing nothing more than getting his name into op/ed columns, here's how he disdainfully reacts to a low-casualty high-consequence war.

> There is a profound scorn in the kind “clean" war which renders the other powerless without destroying its flesh, which makes it a point of honour to disarm and neutralize but not to kill. In a sense, it is worse than the other kind of war because it spares life. It is like humiliation: by taking less than life it is taking more than life.

Stop disrupting supply lines, destroying infrastructure, or planning feints. Real wars are all about body counts and nothing more. And don't dare you try military strategy, as that would _humiliate_ the enemy, which we all know is a fate worse than death.

If the "Cardboard Bed" was to be produced and used in the local area, I'd be a fan. Instead, these are created somewhere else and brought in. From the article:

> "The cost of 1,000 beds for a refugee camp ranges from €100,000 to €200,000 (US$110 to $220) and it takes up to two weeks to produce them, another two weeks to ship them (by land or sea) and more than 24 hours to install and set them up”, said Juan Sanz, Humanitaria’s CEO.

Humanitaria seems like they need to work on streamlining their manufacturing process if a thousand beds takes two weeks to produce. At 8 hours a day, 5 days a week this suggests 1000/80 = 12.5 beds per hour. This manufacturing appears to be simply cutting cardboard and packaging it. I'm really hoping this 12.5 beds per hour (one bed every 5 minutes) is inexperienced manual labor from one worker.

If Humanitaria _is_ actually automating this process in their centralized location, why is it so slow?

At the scales/speeds they are operating on, these beds cannot be produced rapidly in response to a crisis. Given the constant harping on low cost, I'm skeptical that these beds are actually even a good idea. I'm skeptical of the motivation to make a cut-every-corner "solution" for bedding needs. Are 1000 of these beds actually more useful than 100 more rugged beds? Outside of emergency situations which Humanitaria cannot produce sufficient quantities for, I'd prefer 100 real beds to 1000 cardboard beds.

According to "Codeine" from the Canadian government[0]:

> Certain lower-dose codeine products (8 mg or less per pill, 20 mg or less per 30 mL of liquid medication) can be purchased directly from a pharmacist without a prescription to temporarily treat mild or moderate pain, or as a cough suppressant.

[0] https://www.canada.ca/en/health-canada/services/substance-us...

> USA can make a superweapons, but can't seem plainly make enough ammo for them. So much bad it is, a single German company produces more shells than entire American industry.

Can you cite this statistic about ammo/shell production? I haven't been able to find any reliable numbers on annual production by country or company. The sources I have found all seem unreliable and instead list the authors favorite ammunition companies. Among about a dozen of these low-quality articles, I've not seen any references to your magical German company as the highest volume.

If your threat model includes someone breaking your encrypted communications X years from now, quantum resistance can be important. Signal markets itself as for reporters and whistleblowers who may have state-level adversaries.

An important part of journaling is the composition process. I have to explicitly structure a thought for it to make any sense in a written form. This is a slow, intentional process. I've had one-page journal entries take over an hour to compose and write, though I usually average 20 minutes per page.

In the limited number of attempts I've tried with audio journaling, it always comes across as stream-of-consciousness. I like to think out loud already, so I end up removing my anchor -- the written document -- and just chase one thought after another after another. I don't see how I'd be able to maintain the quality of my journal (or other written works) if I didn't have my easily re-referenced existing document.

Have you had success with audio/video journals? Any tips?

Someone logged a 500 hectare plot in Borneo. They split this into 125 sections and planted 0, 1, 4, or 16 "tree species that are frequently targeted for logging". After 20 years, satellite imagery shows that the more tree species you planted, the more recovered the land appears to be.

I'm left wondering:

1. Why did they plant only tree species that are frequently targeted for logging? This makes the whole experiment very suspect. The linked article talks a lot about restoring forests, but why restrict the tree species to those that are profitable to log?

2. Is the satellite imagery actually representative of on-the-ground truth? A lot of logging land in western America gets replanted with logging-friendly trees in very regular grid patterns. These areas may look like forests from satellites (or to uninformed ground-level visitors), but the regrown tree farms do not behave like forests. The dense growth crowds out the ground-level plants, which in turn makes the entire tree farm a poor habitat for local fauna. If your goal is to grow more trees for lumber, tree farms are great. But I'm not sure the claims about "forest restoration" are honest/true here.

"We've gotta destroy the economy to prevent the economy destroying itself!" isn't a rallying cry that is likely to garner much support.

Do you have any favored proposals for preventing "finance shenanigans"? Given the amount of money involved, I expect any government-driven reformation will be corrupted to serve private interests.

$1.50 or $2.50 for Uber-style door-to-door trips is absurdly uneconomical. I've always thought the premise of paid public transit was to offset the costs of the service, but at $2.50 per trip only the most minimal trips will break even.

And, unlike Uber/Lyft/etc, I don't think municipalities will be able to fleece the workers by paying only for the "gigs" accepted by drivers. If you're replacing bus routes, you're going to need a large pool of hourly wage drivers.

I'd much rather see this absurdly-scaling expense replaced by making existing bus routes free for all passengers.

Here's a 2019 article, "Study suggests how measles depletes body’s immune memory"[0] which (despite the title) seems to quantify the percentage of antibody arsenal that is lost after a measles infection. Sadly, I haven't had luck finding resources to answer "by what mechanism does measles cause antibody memory to be lost?", but I've got a good thing to ponder for the weekend. Thanks. :)

[0] https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2019/10/how-measles-w...

The submission URL currently points at

"Blood Transfusion and Brain Amyloidosis: Should We Be Worried?" https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/28094...

But, based on the submission title, I suspect this submission was intended to point at

"Intracerebral Hemorrhage Among Blood Donors and Their Transfusion Recipients" https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/28094...

I'm reminded of the quote from Keynes:

"Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent."

While I think the author does a good job pointing out how unsustainable this business model is, predicting the end of the subscription model seems a large leap. Given that the author doesn't frame the discussion with a solid prediction, this article comes across as a "it doesn't make sense to me" rant with a little bit of embellishment to predict a downfall at some unstated time in the future.

Nah, I don't use Chrome so I don't have it installed. I'm not a web developer, so testing across different platforms isn't useful to me. I've used StableDiffusion before, so hacking around to make this demo work in my browser isn't particularly interesting either.

> You need latest Chrome with "Experimental WebAssembly" and "Experimental WebAssembly JavaScript Promise Integration (JSPI)" flags enabled!

Darn, guess I'll have to wait for stuff to land in Firefox.

This is yet another way that running untrusted code inside the same JVM is a terrible mess. There's a lot of JVM state that gets "locked in" on first use (e.g. <clinit>) and a malicious bit of code could corrupt a LOT of shared data (like the post's mentioned string internment zone) even if you sanitize all of your inputs and outputs.

I wonder if you could do something nasty with this bug from inside an IntelliJ plugin...

Ooh, thanks for sharing this.

I've just gotten around to Kahneman's "Thinking Fast and Slow" (2011) and it seems a LOT of the discussion in the book relies on non-reproduced or even reversed results in your list. I hope the book changes significantly in the second half, as the first half is essentially barren after reading your FORRT link.

Hey, captchas also prevent disabled people from using the internet!

> Also: Reduce upholstered furniture, books and similar, take trash out more regularly, remove all cardboard from groceries as soon as you get them home.

What? I don't understand what any of these things accomplish, let alone a common element between them.

This does not appear to be a credible website, given the other articles on the frontpage.

I disagree in this case.

Duolingo formerly had conversational language lessons, which were 100% audio (not even able to see text on screen). These were phenomenal for actually learning to speak <language>, compared to the generated garbage in the lessons.

Duolingo formerly had lessons that explain new concepts, like a particular verb tense. It doesn't seem to have any of them once changing over the to completely linear lesson tree.

I believe that Duolingo has fallen into a logical trap. They can easily track app engagement. It is known that regular practice is the key to learning a language, but they incorrectly forget the quality of the interactions. I've got my Duolingo 800 day streak still kicking, but I've learned almost nothing with the changes over the last year or so. I'm not terribly sure why I even use the app anymore, as there are plenty of anki decks with the same quality content. (The only thing I'd lose is the speech recognition, but that's so laughably bad that it reinforces incorrect pronunciation.)

What separates the Christmas Flood of 1964[0] from these ARK storms? The wikipedia page discusses 1964 as an "atmospheric river".

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christmas_flood_of_1964

> [Brazil has] an insane education system, it's good but maybe too aggressive.

Richard Feynman had a not-so-positive view of the Brazillian education system, which he summarized with "no science is being taught in Brazil!"[0]. Granted, his view was based on personal experience around half a century ago, so everything may have changed since then (possibly even due to Feynman's influence).

> Lookup the law exam. It's rough.

I'm having a hard time finding comprehensive resources here. I've found bits and pieces that make it seem...not that scary. 80 multiple choice questions where 40 correct is a pass, and then a few essays. A 2022 article[1] states that some prestigious law programs have bar passing rates near 80% while the average pass rate is closer to 30%. American states have per-state bar exams, with average pass rates in 2023 ranging from 31% (Alabama) to Alaska (75%) [2]. Is the difficulty of the exam not easily represented in statistics?

[0] https://v.cx/2010/04/feynman-brazil-education

[1] https://portal.fgv.br/en/news/20-years-revolution-brazilian-...

[2] https://www.ncbex.org/statistics-research/bar-exam-results-j...

> I feel that much of the anger from our recent decision around the downstream sources comes from either those who do not want to pay for the time, effort and resources going into RHEL or those who want to repackage it for their own profit.

I'd go a step further and say a lot of the anger is general angst at the _everything_ of the world, but RHEL's changes provided a focusing point in the nerd world. Or at least that's how I've come to terms with my weird interest in this story (and Reddit nonsense and the submersible story).

When everything sucks, it seems very easy to misdirect that angst at whatever is pitchfork-trendy.

Sure, but to update their example using the new format, you'd say:

    ["1","2","3"].map(parseInt); // returns [1, NaN, NaN]

The gotcha trap is still there, and is just as likely to get through a code review.

The point isn't that only one person is the decider. When someone trusted has a very strong conviction about a hire, it may be worth rolling the dice.

From the Forbes billionaire list 2023[0]:

> Globally, we counted 2,640 ten-figure fortunes, down from 2,668 last year. Altogether, the planet’s billionaires are now worth $12.2 trillion, a drop of $500 billion from $12.7 trillion in March 2022.

For comparison (via various wikipedia pages reachable from[1]), the US federal government budget in 2022 was $6.3 trillion (against an income of $4.9 trillion).

If 100% of the $12.2 trillion owned by billionaires was seized and annually disbursed at 3% annually for social programs, this would provide $366 billion dollars annually. In 2022, the US spent $747 billion on Medicare alone.

Increasing the Medicare budget by %50 seems nice, but it also doesn't seem like it would be a transformational change to society. It may be a better idea to spend a large chunk of the $12.2 trillion immediately on high-upfront-cost things, but I don't have the imagination to come up with good ideas.

[0] https://www.forbes.com/billionaires/

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_budget

According to NASA's "Spot the Station" map[0], it looks like the ISS will be overhead Point Nemo sometime in the next 90 minutes. (Unfortunately, the location-specific discovery page[1] does not allow for arbitrary locations to be chosen.)

[0] https://spotthestation.nasa.gov/tracking_map.cfm

[1] https://spotthestation.nasa.gov/home.cfm

I've found https://chat.lmsys.org/ to be a useful multi-LLM chat app without scary ToS data-mining clauses.

Is endlessly seeking more truly _human_ nature? I'm reminded of the "Mexican fisherman" parable[0].

[0] https://bemorewithless.com/the-story-of-the-mexican-fisherma...

Correct.

You MUST EXPLICITLY invoke your fifth amendment right against self-incrimination.

(Okay, there may be some edge cases where invoking the fifth is implied, but SCOTUS has merely acknowledged that these edge cases could exist, but to my knowledge has never given rules for when it applies. Better safe than sorry.)

e: see Salinas v Texas[0] for example

[0] https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/12-246#writing...