lambdadmitry

It's both. Look up council complaints and demands for the HS2, they're full of unreasonable NIMBY stuff like asking for the line to be put in a tunnel because it comes closer than 100m to an industrial estate. They didn't get it of course, but as a "compromise" they got high berms after a lengthy consultation/bargaining, both of which inflate the cost.

We do though! The first geological storage is going online next year in Finland https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_re...

There is nowhere to leak when we're talking multi-cm copper casks, metres of bentonite, and half a kilometre of bedrock.

The first geological repository goes online next year in Finland https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_re... . It's not in the sparsely populated north of the country either. There are no problems to speak of when you bury something under 500m of bedrock in thick copper and even thicker bentonite clay. There just aren't.

We do though. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_re... is going operational next year, and the amount of research that went into it guarantees that it's safe.

This podcast has lots of details if you're interested. https://omegataupodcast.net/368-nuclear-waste-disposal-and-s...

Something else that came to mind while I was reading the comments: you do want phonetics/pronunciation classes when you're C2+. Do learn IPA and learn the sounds, it's crucial not just for your accent but for understanding others. I found [1] very useful, but only combined with a great tutor.

Something I didn't appreciate enough is that we don't actually hear sounds when we hear people speaking. We hear phonemes, which are clusters of physical sounds that make semantic difference in the language. The clusters themselves aren't fixed either, they are very loose and mostly defined through what they are not — i.e., the difference that we perceive in "lip" and "leap" is not absolute, the actual sounds might easily overlap between speakers, but we adjust to the particular accent/speaker using the fact that they probably still have two separate phonemes there.

It works very well until one starts to learn a second language that might have not just different "clusters", but a different number of them. My first language is Russian, and in Russian there are just fewer semantically meaningful vowels; I honestly thought that the word "milk", молоко, has three roughly equivalent sounds, whereas in English that'd probably be heard as two or three distinct vowels ([məɫɐˈko]). Similarly, Russian "soft" sounds like м in мята are widely heard as having "j" in them, "m-ya-ta", while native speakers just don't hear that.

Phonetics training helps to start actually hearing all those sounds, to adjust our inbuilt clustering and start perceiving things that natives do. You suddenly start understanding native accents much better, and gain a new appreciation for the language and its beauty.

It's just as much about perception as it is about accent.

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

Two things I observed while slowly getting better at English.

First, the "sophistication" can backfire. There're a lot of comments about reading here, but there're very fine lines between

- "simple English", think a stereotypical ESL speaker

- "well educated" English, think a native posh college alumni

- "colloquially broken" English, the way native speakers speak to their friends

- "out-of-place highfalutin" English, a hallmark of someone who didn't have a chance to experience the variety of contexts growing up in an English speaking country.

It's quite hard to balance those, but I guess it just comes with time and practice while being mindful of it. For me personally it worked in waves, from unnaturally-broken to too-correct to feeling comfortable enough to break the grammar in natural ways to noticing more unnaturalness to… you got the idea.

Second, and I'm forever grateful to the person who first introduced me to this idea, is realising that high level language acquisition can only come with a new personality attached. It's very weird and disorienting if you're not aware of it happening, but it's a natural and necessary part of it. You need to grow a personality to feel in your second/third/etc language, to react to jokes on the spot, to make friends, to dream, to live in that language context. It often differs from one's identity/personality in the first language, and that's fine, it's just as valid. Embracing the process and the difference makes things easier.

I don't think it's possible to do that through learning though.

Why speculating then? There is plenty of hard data on skin testing of various sunscreens. There are physical sunscreens, too, which were around even longer. We have MUCH better understanding of biological processes as well than in asbestos times. What is this drive that makes supposedly technologically literate people flock to the GP question and come up with unfounded paranoid theories?

Indeed, it makes it worse.

That's not a rando, that's Vinay Gupta https://twitter.com/leashless/

Edit: staying more factual

I don't understand though how do you explain those transaction to your tax authorities and pay taxes. Surely it can only be so long that you can get massive (by local standards) and fairly constant salary month to month and not get them interested in the source of funds?

Between bots, wash trading, and algo traders it doesn't say much about real world adoption.

It would require quite a lot of it because you need to significantly change the orbit, especially if you want it to still be plenty fast on impact.

And it doesn't make much sense either. A billionaire can just pay a few millions to send a guy in a car bomb or a cessna full of explosives. It's way simpler and just as undetectable until the explosion happens.

What do you mean "it's not working"? We already have BCIs for paralysed people, they're quite bad: very invasive, very expensive, very poor user experience, e.g. [1]. What Neuralink is doing right already looks much better than those and they're only in the business for five years.

You need to separate the hype from the tech, especially so with Musk. The tech looks great.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9oka8hqsOzg

According to [1] and [2], most German plastic waste goes to Netherlands. Moreover, apparently a third of it gets incinerated or recycled domestically. So yes, officials turning a blind eye to developing countries pseudo-recycling plastic waste is a problem, but 1) it's not as clear cut as you present it 2) surely building a few incinerators is easier than reinventing all logistical chains to not use plastics?

[1]: https://www.destatis.de/EN/Press/2022/06/PE22_N035_51.html

[2]: https://waste-management-world.com/artikel/germany-s-problem...

If you live in a developed country, your contribution to the microplastic problem is minuscule regardless of the amount of plastic packaging you use. Landfilled, or better yet burned in industrial setting plastics don't get into the oceans, they are either fixed there for millennia, or don't exist anymore. Plastics are a non-issue for countries with functioning waste management, which is coincidentally the countries that can afford caring about it the most, so in a sense there is a self-contradiction in this debate.

International treaties forcing developing countries to get their waste management together combined with targeted investment there would help way more.

Until you encounter an instance that blocks any instance federating with what they consider undesirable. Then you have to choose.

There are at least three distinct use cases that Twitter somewhat covers:

a) participating in already existing, well-defined communities. Mastodon works for that, but so does Discord, Gemini, Gopher, tilda communities, IRC servers, and so on. Mastodon's peculiarities like tiny scale instances, inter-instance admin wars, non-existent search are perfectly fine for this use case. That's what it is made for, effectively.

b) connecting with friends and following their interests. This is just miserable with Mastodon: you might be on different instances that mute/ban each other, you might not find each other if you don't know their instances, if instances are interest-specific you have to follow on a number of instances, if their instance admin gets fed up with it and shuts it down you need to reconnect somehow, etc. Mastodon is not an identity-first design, it's community-first, and it's a problem for this use case.

c) following celebrities or creators famous in the world of atoms. Celebrities would want massive following, which requires massive scale, which is hard to achieve for something effectively run by volunteers. If it's smaller scale celebrities, they'd also want discoverability, which is hampered by the lack of search, federation bans, etc.

Mastodon is widely presented as a "twitter backup/alternative". It's just misleading unless the person moving to it only wants (a). There is nothing wrong with wanting (a)! However, it means that Mastodon has very little similarity to Twitter if people want (b) or (c).

You are right that simplified reimplementations make good property tests, but in this case I'd go the other way around: generate an AST, render it a in test case-dependent way (adding whitespace as you said, but also parens etc), inject known faults for a fraction of test cases, and check that the parsed AST is equivalent to the original one or errored out if a fault was injected. Rendering a given AST is usually simpler than parsing it.

Thing is, for something like an AST parser you want a property test, not a bunch of autogenerated boilerplate.

Generally, if something is boring and repetitive it's probably shouldn't be written, better code generation is rarely a good answer.

Trading is not exactly zero sum. Trading is price discovery + arbitrage, both of which are useful even if imperfect.

Yes, it seems the split was triggered by the war, but the censorship/promotion/collaboration with the government [0] were not worth breaking the ties.

A cynical view would be that it's only now that the association became bad for business.

[0]: By the way, Yandex was showing Crimea as unqualifiedly Russian territory since 2014, until the war, when they just removed borders between countries completely

Edit: qualified the remark

It's interesting how diligently they wiped our any and all mentions of Yandex from their website, to the extent that Google struggles to find meaningful mentions apart from a few exceptions like [1]. Quite peculiar considering that just two years ago, according to that presentation, they were still considering themselves a Yandex project, even the link in that tweet is https://clickhouse.yandex .

For those unaware, Yandex is a Russian internet megacorp, think Google but in cahoots with the authoritarian government: cherrypicked news coverage friendly to the government, effectively a monopoly across multiple verticals (eg they bought out Uber in Russia), etc. In 2020, the year that deck seems to be from, they were already censoring their news feed [2] and tweaking search ranking to promote pro-government results [3] for years.

[1]: https://presentations.clickhouse.com/meetup40/introduction/

[2]: https://meduza.io/feature/2022/05/05/my-zamuchilis-borotsya in Russian, but google translate does a reasonable job

[3]: https://www.svoboda.org/a/30580605.html same

It still doesn't, unless you mean as a cause for activists. Stocks are here to stay too, and SP500 returned about 12% since mid-20th century while being much lower risk and having no withdrawal restrictions. Why settling down for 4% when you can have multitudes of that with lower risk? There is no financial sense to do that, and "voting with your wallet" against your financial interests is by definition activism.

What you're saying is effectively "staking is a donation to Ethereum future", which I don't mind as long as it is explicit. In Ethereum's communications, it's anything but.

I'm saying that right now staking is an activity with a serious risk of losing all of the staked money, an undefined period of the money being inaccessible, and just 4% gross reward for that, which is so poor I can only imagine very specific people engaging in it. It doesn't make sense financially, so the people doing that are either foolish, enthusiasts, or looking for other ways to profit such as regulatory capture, which should not inspire confidence.

What's more, it's expected to change, changing the rules of a system relying on incentives to stay sound. In that sense it's not even releasing an alpha version, it's releasing a different product and promising to launch the announced one some time later.

What's more, it's still impossible to withdraw from staking. Which means there will be another massive change of incentives some time later.

What boggles my mind is that there is no withdrawal from staking and almost no one talks about it. That is, staking right now is a one way street with a promise to be able to withdraw some time in the future and returning only about 4% gross annually, which is laughably low for something that risky. It's well hidden in Ethereum press releases, the only mention I can quickly find is the FAQ entry titled 'Misconception: "The Merge enabled staking withdrawals."' here [1].

It's not just about transparency either. The whole system's security rests on game theory. Not being able to withdraw must affect incentives, which means the introduction of withdrawals will change the system in ways that were not tested yet.

[1]: https://ethereum.org/en/upgrades/merge/

No, the argument is that nationalisation/privatisation is irrelevant to the problem at hand. There is no causality, there are plenty of examples of well-regulated private companies and disastrous state-owned ones. There might be a correlation, but you didn't show any numbers to that effect.

Because I'm well aware of horrible evil governments doing exactly the same. Norilsk became what it is now under Soviets, which were not keen on private enterprises. Pollution is more or less orthogonal to the form of ownership.

No, the problem does not go away. You start optimising for short term political goals (see also: ongoing property debt crisis in China), and minimising short-term drama (see also: regulatory capture by unions). Sometimes you also start implementing insane projects just because your glorious leader decided to do them and cost/value is not an issue (see also: Chinese war on sparrows). Sometimes you just minimise the expense and make everyone disagreeing with you shut up, because they don't have a choice either way (see also: Chernobyl not having containment). You also get way less feedback, because you're spending someone else's money (i.e., taxpayers'). So no, "government consists of decent people and they won't optimise for the short term even though they are doing it now because there'll be no commercial company controlling it" is a very optimistic take at most and definitely not a realistic one.

I really don't like this kind of knee-jerk "privatisation bad, fatcat CEOs bad" reaction sadly prevalent in the UK. Let's talk about the underlying argument, shall we?

Firstly, you're talking about a failure of a regulator to regulate an industry and prosecute alleged perpetrators, and the implied solution is to… nationalise the industry, somehow assuming the nationalised entity will be managed better by the very same regulator? I don't think it's a good argument really

Secondly, if we go even deeper, what pressures would such an entity have to provide good service and not be wasteful with their resources? Right now there's at least market pressure, the companies trying to outcompete their peers, cut costs, and ensure future profitability by investment. What pressures do you think exist for a nationalised entity that don't exist for a regulator?

Thirdly, do you actually have any evidence to prove that those companies are uniquely profitable? Because unless they are, it's only fair that people investing their own money into infrastructure (remember, that was one of the goals of privatisation, tapping private budgets in addition to tax money) get some return on it, otherwise they'd just invest it elsewhere, e.g. into Apple stock, which would benefit British people much less.

Privatisation per se is not the problem, political failures are.

Even then, scaling is an almost self-solving issue, as it usually comes with money attached, which buys quite a lot of engineering hours spent on scaling things. Overscaling in advance on the other hand with all of its associated complexity and slowdown killed many, many companies.