hetman

I feel like the windows are there to create context for the human brain, not because they resemble the shape of the screen. These context may look a little different to windows, but I don't think they will be radically different in principle and will still maintain a distinct resemblance to the physical world. That's what our brains are moulded to best interface with after all.

I understand that this is still a big problem in the air force when training fighter pilots with VR headsets. The fixed focal length means extended use still leaves pilots disoriented even after taking the headsets off. I would imagine this will hamper real world adoption and keep VR pretty niche for the time being. Using light-fields is the obvious solution but that's still a pretty nascent tech.

It's not entirely clear what problem VR is trying to solve in a lot of situations where's it's claimed to apply (like office use). There's obviously some places where it could be quite useful, but light-field fixed screens might offer a lot of similar benefits for a lot of these applications and at this point at least, that tech is a bit further along (and might be more comfortable for users).

I definitely agree in the short term, but having profitable assets might attract the wrong kind of people to the organisation so I don't know how I feel about it in the long term.

Rust has supported statically linking to MSVC and musl for a while now but also added static glibc support on Linux very recently:

https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/pull/77386

I still think Ruby is the more interesting and expressive language. However, for me there's a single pain point that means Python wins in any larger project. That is the behaviour of Python's "import" vs. Ruby's "require". So it's not surprising that this distinction between these languages pops up all over the place. Python tries to be as explicit as possible. While "from import *" is possible it is heavily frowned upon. The Ruby culture doesn't seem to have such qualms; things are often much more hidden and magical. It can make navigating larger projects... even your own... difficult and inefficient.

But how does prohibiting disclosure of money distribution facilitate this?

At those frequencies you're going to be losing a lot of power in the switching losses of the transistors. Power MOSFETS have very low leakage when fully on or off, the largest loss tends to be during the transition when voltage and current are non zero. Because the speed of that transition is limited, the higher the frequency the more percentage of total time is spent in those transition phases and the higher the losses.

We've been waiting for "knowledge bank" type of jobs to be replaced by AI any year now since the expert systems of the 1980's. But I feel like this kind of thinking reveals an ignorance of these professions. Optometrists do a lot more than just "measuring your prescription", they also deal with eye health and the peculiarities and variations that come with biological systems. But even when it comes to your prescription, what an optometrist does is deal with the subjective nature of your experience and that's something that's difficult for an AI to do today (or probably for a good while yet).

I think there's something very insightful in your post though, and that is the observation that programmers will just work one abstraction layer up. In general, it has been demonstrated that a combination of expert + AI is far more effective than either one on their own. I can see AI becoming an indispensable tool in the tool belt of an expert, and since we want the best possible outcomes, we're not going to throw the expert out of that equation any time soon. What we may see is the need for fewer experts to get the job done, as the automation capabilities of AI allow them to become more efficient. Just like the power loom, it certainly reduced the number of humans needed, but even today, you still need some people to service the machines and to program their patterns.

I think this can happen indirectly and unintentionally as people increasingly segregate into tribes.

Not sure what's up, but this website refuses to scroll on any Chrome based browser on my phone. Works fine in Firefox though.

Edit: Weird. Now it works. Though there still some initial "resistance" when I start scrolling...

I think you're right. By the time you know what everyone is buying/selling with any certainty, the boat has already sailed.

I don't think the issue here is about guessing. It's about how reluctant many doctors can be about exploring scientific paths which are newer and as yet less traveled.

To be sure, it would take a non-trivial time investment on their part. However, many doctors (though not all) seem entirely blind to anything they are not familiar with already, even if there would be reasonable scientific basis. There can be a level of pride there.

I'm rather surprised to see this statement: "...our planet has operated on a 24-hour clock for the entire span of evolutionary time".

My understanding is that during the Cambrian, the day was less than 23 hours long. At the emergence of the first eukaryotes it was 21 hours. Much shorter still when life first appeared.

That makes the uniformity of this protein across the major branches of life quite fascinating.

Modifying the environment sounds a lot like the the level 4 autonomy the exec said would be quite possible.

I think there's some confusion here. The effect is meant to describe the feelings being experienced and not the actual objective state of the individual.

I have come across many people who had never heard the term before but immediately identified with having experienced such a state when it was explained to them.

I also disagree that having names for things that is common to most peoples' experience is a bad idea. On the contrary, it helps people better understand their experience as a human. This isn't a competition to see who experiences it the most.

In the case of impostor syndrome I have also found this is true. In my experience, once people are exposed to the idea they find it a great relief to know it is merely a cognitive bias and it makes them more confident about their abilities in the future.

I'm the same but I'm finding there's simply not enough room to fold over like this on newer airliners.

Euro English is one example I can think of. The semantic shifts can make the language more ambiguous when used between different groups of speakers.

I don't understand why point 5 about efficiency trends is relevant. Power consumption trends show us power consumption is continuing to climb irrespective of efficiency. It's clear that civilisation's need for power continues to expand even if some of our devices get more efficient.

Physiologically it probably involves mirror neurones and what you describe shouldn't be all that surprising or require an internal philosophical discourse as parent might have suggested.

It's unfortunate some people think having their article read is a priority. Perhaps we need a browser plugin where people can rank the accuracy of titles from various outlets so the user can decide if an article is likely to waste their time.

How can the team be productive if its members are not personally productive? It seems to me about the only person that would be getting a productivity boon out of this is the team leader.

I'm someone who loves the new features even though I don't think they're "pythonic" in the classical meaning of this term. That makes me think that being pythonic at it's most base level is actually about making it easier to reason about your code... and on that count I have found most of the new features have really helped.

Similarly, a candle carries over 10 times the energy of the same sized stick of TNT but you'd have to work pretty hard to get that energy out quickly.

The article indicates the opposite:

"The fruit had a larger pit and less flesh than today’s avocados..."

While equalising opportunity is a noble endeavour, I fail to see how this particular initiative would achieve that. In short, it's too little too late. If someone struggled through high school because of environmental factors, they're not going to suddenly be on their A-game because they were admitted into university. At the end of the day, we should still expect the highest levels of excellence from our professionals.

If we want to have a real impact we need to be examining the factors contributing to the disadvantage leading up to this point and find a way to address those.

Roman metallurgy was really not at a point to make practical use of steam power on a scale that made it more effective than using slaves. Crucible steel, a bare minimum, wouldn't come to Europe for over a millennium. They simply did not have the materials engineering to build useful pressure vessels.

People get weirdly romantic about how easy these ideas would have been to implement; there's this weird conception that we should have been able to go from late antiquity Rome to early industrial revolution England in a matter of a couple centuries.

This ignores two things. First executing seemingly simple ideas can still require incredible expertise in a range of fields. Nuclear bombs are conceptually simple but building them still seems to require the economy of a nation state.

Second, Roman knowledge wasn't lost. It was all still there in the Byzantine Empire yet strangely they weren't sending rockets to the moon in the 1200's. The centres of knowledge simply migrated, and in every place knowledge grew and expanded. Whether work by Byzantine or Muslim scholars, science wasn't put on pause and without their contributions, we would not have advanced to where we are today.

While this approach did strike me as quite elegant in theory, what I found in practice was that a lot of those interfaces ended up just being boilerplate to give me access to the underlying elements of the data which I would have gotten for free in a more strongly typed language.

In other situations, this approach would work well as long as what I was working on was fresh in my mind. However, when I had to come back to some code and extend its behaviour it would be back to digging through it to either understand the structure of the data... or understand the structure of the fancy abstraction I had built up on top of the data. It just didn't seem to be very time efficient in practice for the things I was trying to build.

It's interesting that the very things that attracted the author to Clojure was what kept me from moving to it from Python.

I enjoyed the syntax. Loved the immutability. However, I wasn't able to understand the structure of program data at a glance even when reading my own code. The reliance on lists and maps everywhere meant that the structure of data was encoded in the code of the functions that created it and sometimes you had to go several functions deep just to understand the bit you wanted.

In Python if I'm returning a tuple that's more than 2 or 3 elements long, I know that it's time for, at the very least, a namedtuple because I've had to deal with code in the past that has mysterious 5-tuples etc that just becomes too tiring to deal with.

To be clear, big collections in Python aren't a problem as long as the type of the contained data remains uniform.

The authors indicate the blueprints were already present but the multicellular expression stopped being optional in their evolved population:

The ability of wild-type C. reinhardtii to form palmelloids suggests that the founding population in our experiment already possessed a toolkit for producing multicellular structures. However, while the palmelloid condition is expressed facultatively in wild-type C. reinhardtii, the strains that evolved in our experiment are obligately multicellular.

Maybe I'm not familiar with how this term is used in biology but given the above it seems the "de novo" claim in the paper title is a little sensationalist.

This reminds me of a tour I was once on, by one of the resident archaeologists in the open-air museum in Biskupin, Poland. It's the site of an iron age fortified settlement and there is both ongoing archaeological excavation and a reconstruction of sections of the settlement for visitors.

Anyway, the archaeologist showed me a shallow elongated oval wooden vessel with a slight depression in it, that had been on display. She explained that for a very long time it had been believed it was used for offerings as part of religious ceremonies. Only when she first began working there as a student this struck her as odd since she remembered her grandma had used an almost identical vessel for kneading dough for bread. Needless to say, its purpose has since been relabeled.

Her observation to me was that in archaeology, any time researchers are uncertain of the purpose of an object they tend to ascribe a religious meaning to it and so any time an object is described as having a religious significance one should always take that assessment with a grain of salt.