edbaskerville

This argument seems right to me. Old ICE cars are basically the same as new ones. EVs are getting better quickly, so fast depreciation makes sense.

I avoided a used Leaf for exactly the reason you cited...2.5 years ago, and have been very happy with a last-of-its-generation 2023 Chevy Bolt (~ $22K new after tax credit).

But if you don't care about new features, e.g., really fast charging, a used Bolt (55kW max) is a great option!

Craig Newmark was...checking Wikipedia...42, 45 at incorporation of craigslist.

Oh hey Balateros!

Both are true.

The cello wasn't a popular solo instrument. Pablo Casals was a celebrity who made the instrument a much bigger deal. The cello suites rode on his celebrity.

I wish I could listen to classical music while using my brain. I can't. I end up listening to the music.

I've been listening to Scarlatti keyboard sonatas recently. They're great. He was born the same year as Bach.

The Bayesian results will depend on the prior. They use a uniform distribution over # tanks produced, in the limit of the distribution's maximum -> infinity. Is that reasonable? Something more constrained might be better, maybe a gamma-Poisson prior with gamma mean based on some plausible estimate of production rate.

(The frequentist/Bayesian estimates should converge as you collect more observations.)

jinx

My pleasure! I also get annoyed. :) But I appreciate how it helps keep me up to date on how the kids are progamming their computers. (Too complicatedly, I think.)

So I comment almost exclusively on music and 90s Mac nostalgia.

The linkage between hand position and visual location on the staff is so hard to relearn for someone that only plays one instrument that the music is written so that notes to be played on the B string (the C tuned down) and the F# string (the G tuned down) are written with incorrect pitches.

That is, an actual D# played on the actual B string is written as an E on the staff.

It's weird to learn the Kodaly this way, but the piece is hard enough that, at least in my case, I basically have to memorize it to have a fighting chance. I still haven't performed it for a real concert after 20 years of thinking about doing so.

This also creates some ambiguities, since you can play many notes on either the F# string or the D string. But context is enough to tell what Kodaly meant.

Relatedly, the fifth Bach suite is also written for an alternate tuning ("scordatura"), with the same "wrong note" approach to notation (at least in modern editions). The A string is tuned down to a G, giving you beautifully transformed resonances for the key of C minor.

Oh, it's...very new! Thanks for the recommendation.

Another recommendation: the recordings by the multigenre saxophonist Yasuaki Shimizu. It's insane. I won't give anything away, but in particular set aside some time to listen to the Menuets & Gigue from the first suite without any distractions.

https://yasuaki-shimizu.com/music/cello-suites-2/

I'm a cellist, played all the suites and always start with them when I return to the instrument after a hiatus. They've been analyzed to death, so my goal when playing is to avoid over-intellectualizing ("learn the changes, then forget them") and just try to take a different emotional journey each time (no way to say that without it sounding sappy), physically leading with my breath.

Me too!

Developed this habit as a kid on a Mac IIcx in 1992. Hard to break.

Yeah, advanced geothermal is very interesting. They're taking fracking techniques and using them to get to hot rocks, which opens up geothermal to a much, much wider set of locations. Interested parties say it could provide everything we need beyond wind/solar, and seems much simpler than building out nuclear plants.

Check out:

https://www.volts.wtf/p/catching-up-with-enhanced-geothermal

Human beings can, in fact, learn to echolocate, and they seem to experience it as vision, supported by their own descriptions and by fMRIs showing the visual cortex lighting up.

I'm not going to try to draw any inferences about consciousness from these facts. I'll leave that to others.

https://www.npr.org/programs/invisibilia/378577902/how-to-be...

It wasn't called National Socialism for nothing.

Haven't tried it yet. I hear it's having some impact!

I thought I was a pedantic non-idiomatic weirdo for doing this. But it really felt like the right way---and also that the language should make this pattern much easier.

I wish I could have met him before he died.

I'm yet another child of HyperCard. It opened my mind to what computers could be for, and even though the last two decades have been full primarily of disappointment, I still hold onto that other path as a possibility, or even as a slice of reality---a few weeds growing in the cracks of our dystopian concrete.

Regardless of the representation, some people are replacing news consumption generally with answers from ChatGPT.

I can't find a reference, but I have a vague memory that in original Mac OS X, 1-pixel-width lines drawn at integer locations would be blurred by antialiasing because they were "between" pixels, but lines drawn at e.g. x = 35.5 were sharp, single-pixel lines. Can anyone confirm/refute this?

Hey, thanks for writing the original Swarm! Also thought of that immediately when I saw the headline.

I enjoyed using it around 2002, got introduced via Rick Riolo at the the University of Michigan Center for the Study of Complex Systems. It was a bit of a gateway drug for me from software into modeling, particularly since I was already doing OS X/Cocoa stuff in Objective-C.

A lot of scientific modelers start with differential equations, but coming from object-oriented software ABMs made a lot more sense to me, and learning both approaches in parallel was really helpful in thinking about scale, dimensionality, representation, etc. in the modeling process, as ODEs and complex ABMs—often pathologically complex—represent end points of a continuum.

Tangentially, in one of Rick's classes we read about perceptrons, and at one point the conversation turned to, hey, would it be possible to just dump all the text of the Internet into a neural net? And here we are.

First note makes a better story. :) And not totally implausible--she could have inferred the tempo from the preparatory gesture leading into the first note.

Prompt experts, please figure out how to get GOODY-2 to answer a question!

The Chevy Volt was a great transitional vehicle, and I often wonder why they didn't build more cars like it. It had an all-electric drivetrain with a gas generator, which gave it slightly worse gas mileage than a true hybrid but had 50-mile all-electric range (300+ miles total), which was plenty for my daily needs. The only problem was an annoying bump with cupholders on top where the middle passenger would want their feet. If you want a city electric with the option to go on longer trips without worrying about charging, a used Volt is still an interesting option.

That said, I think all-EV is the right move even if it causes some short-term pain. Charging will get there before too long, and this lets GM focus their engineering effort. I imagine they've considered reviving some Volt-like cars to get them through the awkward transition phase.

I'm a late-stage early adopter and love my 2023 Bolt, which is quite popular and inexpensive—my sister got one, and then my parents got one too. They stupidly canceled the Bolt, but were wise enough to un-cancel it for 2025.

But they did make one really weird mistake: abandoning CarPlay. Why would they do that?

This interview with Fervo CEO Tim Latimer on the Volts podcast was really fascinating:

https://www.volts.wtf/p/enhanced-geothermal-power-is-finally

As a layperson I was certainly impressed by the notion that enhanced geothermal could get us the last x% of firm energy needed for a stable grid once solar+wind+batteries have gone as far as they can go.

Another interesting tidbit is that you can actually use their system to store excess energy from, e.g., wind and solar.

That doesn't preclude this cultivar being African in origin. Could have made it to Africa in the 1500s, undergone selective breeding there, and returned to North American via the slave trade later. (See also: North American potatoes coming from Europe, not directly from the Andes.)

I'm 41, haven't had a normal full-time job in my adult life (unless you count 5 years of grad school), and I will go seriously looking for work in a couple months!

I have no evidence for the following outlook, but I'm depending on it: if you're educated, if you're skilled, if you're a motivated learner, and if you have a good attitude, then you're not unhireable. Rather, you're in a rather enviable, privileged position relative to society at large.

Maybe you won't find your dream job immediately, but my guess is you'll be fine in the big picture.

ResEdit was the convenient app for that.

Apple type/creator was a superior metadata system for sure, but the UI was opaque for non-technical users. Paired with the modern "open with..." settings, it would still be better than how file extensions are used today.

Non-expert, but soap disables not just COVID-19 but also most other viruses and bacteria.

Also, water alone does a lot to wash them away. Found this study of no-washing vs. water-washing vs. soap+water-washing with a quick search:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3037063/

No washing: 44% of hands intentionally touching doorknobs and railings had bacteria

Water alone: 23%

Water + soap: 8%

(edit: line breaks)

Test of a large-scale weapon in a relatively uninhabited region.

(Of course this sort of thing could never happen in computer programming, where Logic and Rationality prevail completely.)