mamon

The best Linux desktop environment is Windows 10 (with WSL2) That's why some journalists have already called 2020 "Year of Linux On Desktop".

Let's be honest, Linux has a good (but not great) kernel, good-to-great apps on server side, and the crappy UI side (Wayland, windows managers, desktop environments)

The best way to interact with Linux is throught API or commandline. Leave UI stuff for more competent folks (Microsoft or Apple)

That's the double-edged sword however. Many "random strangers" will be homeless people who notice that you are smoking and will ask you if you have a ciggarette to spare. My ex girlfriend used to carry an empty ciggarette box for that very reason: she will show it and tell "sorry, that was the last one I had" :)

I think that's one of the reasons that smoking ciggarettes is such a popular addiction around the world: it's basically a breathing exercise that helps you relax.

Since freight companies own the tracks the only way to do it would be if government bought them, which I assume would cost hundreds billions of dollars. Just passing a bill giving passenger trains priority would be unconstitutional because it would interfere with property rights of the owner.

Just last week there was a fire in my apartment complex: 47 cars burned in the underground garage, the building directly above has to be demolished because of the damage it took. 70 families lost their homes. Reason? Electric car exploded while charging. I think that after initial enthusiasm there will be a push back against electric cars due to safety concerns.

EDIT: Burning electric vehicles are much harder to put down than, say gas cars, because, for one they don't need external source of oxygen, and second, there's much more of fuel to burn: 1200 lbs of batteries in a Tesla vs 10 gallons (85 lbs) of gas in the tank of an average car. Electric cars will probably be banned from underground parkings, sooner or later.

And saying that gas cars are "destroying the planet" is just ridiculous - they are maybe 5% of total CO2 emissions. And electric cars are actually responsible for even more emissions - not from burning fuel, obviously, but just manufacturing it releases more carbon dioxide than an average gas-powered car will in its 25 years lifecycle.

If there is a pattern in data, such as it fitting on a curve, and you approximate that curve, then that should generalize to unseen data. What's surprising about that? A single polynominal regression wouldn't be able to do it, because some curves cannot be expressed as a polynominal, but superposition of multiple polynominals is apparently good enough.

Hubris. They thought Enigma is unbreakable.

>> Why do you need to own it?

Because our primitive brains instinctively want to own things. We can share with family, and with good friends, but not with strangers.

Another thing: car is used not only to drive, but also as a storage space for things that you want to have always with you: a bottle of water, duffel bag with gym clothes, umbrella, etc. With rented car pools you'd have to carry all that with you.

Also, society where no one owns a car or an apartment, where everything is rented, "pooled", would be a totalitarian dystopia - try to misbehave, post a negative comment about government on Facebook and you're banned from a car sharing service as a punishment. Seizing your property is of course also possible, but much harder.

yeah, if you put your phone in a pocket together with you key fob then that's not so different from using it to drive nails :) Fortunately, even skinny jeans usually have more than one pocket.

AI is not even required for "world in chains" scenario. All it takes is giving everyone a smartphone for tracking their location, social media account for tracking their thoughts, replacing cash with online banking ("because cash is only used by drug dealers") and banning strong encryption so that we have no privacy. As you may have noticed we're almost there.

What are you using it for, driving nails? I had many smartphones in over a decade and never a single scratch on a screen, without using any screen protector.

So, after initial fallout it is a long-term win for software industry, right? ;)

Or compare APIs to the car interface: steering wheel + pedals. If one car manufacturer was able to copyright them, then what are other manufacturers supposed to do? The second one can use joystick for steering, and maybe a lever for braking and acceleration. The third one has to invent something even weirder.

Everybody loses: manufacturers, because they can't easily create competing products, and users, because they have to re-learn driving every time they change car brand.

I spent a year in the US, despite my English being pretty bad, to a point where I struggle to pronounce some words correctly, or often ask the other person to repeat what they've just said.

Despite all that I feel no need to improve my English, since I survived that year somehow. If I was to invest my time in language learning, I would probably start a completely new language instead, due to better ROI.

Are you from Central Europe? That might be a factor if Russian was similar to your mother's tongue and French is not.

>> Their accreditation is not recognized

If so, then maybe they shouldn't have been issued "skilled worker" visa in the first place. Part of the visa process should be verification that a person really has the credentials to work in the profession they declare on their application.

Of course there also could be a process to get that accreditation without coming to the country. Something like bar exams for lawyers could be held in US embassies around the world, or online.

But still, you want that shortage to stay there for a while, because that provides the incentive to US universities to create more spots in CS programs for US teenagers. If you go straight to hiring foreigners you are leaving US kids behind.

It is true - as a part of H1B application you need to post a job advertisement in some US job board first, which becomes a part of the documentation you submit to USCIS. I went through that as a part of my own visa process.

EDIT: ok, maybe my immigration lawyer was a weirdo :)

I think this is by design. You don't want to issue visas to "people early in their career" - those jobs should go to Americans first. You only hire from abroad if there really is a shortage of specialists in some profession, and you want those professionals to prove their worth in their home country first, before allowing them to the US.

It's all relative. Shrek made $487M internationally, on the same $60M budget. And it also started a franchise that grossed over $2B

That compares to 4800U, not 4900U GP mentioned...

Do you mean this table which has a caption over it that reads "Training performance in images processed per second" ?? Looks pretty self-explanatory.

Which by the way might a perfect way of punishing dicks - nothing like pain and public humiliation to cure inflated egos.

Like stock options for employees?

Marriage is not about religion, or personal happiness. Marriage is all about "producing" new, physically and mentally healthy, well socially adjusted, future tax payers. Now, since marriage gives you privileges, such as tax breaks( which are supposed to help you raise the future members of the society) it is obvious that the state wants to have some control on who do they give those privileges to, through marriage validation.

I think it is meant for students for whom learning English is the main, or the only focus of their college program. Probably because that's the easiest thing to abuse for the extended stay in the US: if you're studying hard subjects, like, say, Mathematics, then you need to put in a lot of effort to pass your exams and stay enrolled. When you're studying English, after two years it becomes easy, so you can stay enrolled, but spend zero time attending classes, just show up for the exams every few months.

False, obviously. The resolutions were about promoting family values, things like making towns family friendly environment by building kindergartens, etc. There's not a single word on LGBT, homosexuality, etc in any of those resolutions.

You can read the whole thing here:

https://v.fastcdn.co/u/ff8eca37/50262470-0-SKPR-commune-ENG....

Do you have any good learning resources on encryption? any Github repositories worth mirroring, with the actual implementations? I am a programmer with zero experience in that area but want to some day be able to "roll out my own crypto" if necessary :)

EDIT: I'm not afraid of all the math I need to learn, just point me in the right direction.

Yes we still do have the capacity to go to the Moon. It's not like we've stopped developing space-related technology. There are dozens of rocket launches each year, we have people manning the ISS all the time.

The way I see it NASA is not really looking for a challenge here. Quite the opposite: they had budget cuts the last few years, so they are are looking for easy money, trying to cash out on the whole political correctness craze, #metoo, etc. Congressmen have to approve the funding for this mission, otherwise they can be publicly shamed for promoting patriarchy, white supremacy, etc.

This is so fucking stupid. We've already put humans on the Moon, 50 years ago. Does it really matter if it was a man or a woman? Why waste time going to the Moon again, instead of, say, working on getting to Mars?