mtts

Except that humans are not pea plants and having grandparents play an active role in child rearing significantly improves the survival odds for their grandchildren (who carry a quarter of their genes).

According to the article they’re not buying the indeed fantastic French “BD” comic books but manga.

Why would a newspaper send money to Blendle for a someone clicking a link directly to their own site?

A company called Blendle tried this in the Netherlands. It didn’t work. Turns out you do not want to have to think after every headline and teaser whether you want to pay to read the full article.

You can get masa harina at Albert Heijn (the bigger ones). But other than that: no.

Not usually in the habit of giving much thought to Tesla, but suggesting that a proven correct C compiler created by a company that builds transportation devices that contain lots of computers might be interesting for another company that builds transportation devices that use lots of computers seems to me to be perfectly sensible.

Especially since that other company has a bit of a reputation for writing shoddy software.

In fact, the more I think about the more relevant this comment becomes. Building computerized transportation devices is hard and apparently one of the things you need to do it well is a proven correct C compiler. A far cry from the type of software development most people do, which involves slapping together some stuff we found on the internet and writing some glue code around it.

> The Dutch 'r' phoneme sounds similar to the AE one.

Only in the West.

But there it is so strong that speakers of other languages affect an "American" r when they speak Dutch thinking it is the sound used in Dutch.

It isn't, though, and by using the "American" r they end up sounding like spoiled upper class teenagers.

Last mile delivery is hard to do efficiently. Sending someone into a huge warehouse to pick up and package, say , two cucumbers and a jar of olives, is ridiculous, so you need to collect items destined for last mile delivery in bulk. Then you divide them up further. To do this you need to create a separate section of your warehouse.

For groceries you have the additional challenge that different items need to be stored differently (cooled, frozen) during the time between getting retrieved from the big warehouse and being sent on their last mile.

You can build something for this, of course, but that’s expensive. In the case of Amazon, however, they already have facilities for storing smaller amounts of different groceries products that are relatively efficient for sending small amounts of products on their way for last mile delivery: they own supermarkets.

A decade ago I worked on some retail logistics and we ran up against exactly this problem. The solution we came up with was also exactly this: send workers into the nearest supermarket to collect the requested items from there. If you already own the supermarkets and have staff running around there, it’s a no-brainer. In fact, if you look closely you’ll see many retail companies, both large and small, do this.

According to the Chinese science fiction author Liu Cixin the Fermi paradox is solved by the certainty that if an alien civilization announces its presence to the rest of the universe, one of the gazillions of other advanced alien civilizations is sure to destroy it. So they keep quiet.

> They're [...] gentle [...]

No they're not. They're brutal, vicious killers (a trait they share with lots of others of members of the rodent family, such as rabbits).

Here's just one example:

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2018/03/red-squirrel...

Meanwhile in education Slack never was a a thing, everyone already had Office 365 and some adventurous users had already started to experiment with that chat client thing tacked on to Sharepoint.

Then, when COVID-19 hit, what we needed was not a chat client with history and file sharing but a video conferencing tool and it turned out Teams could do that, too. Sure, Zoom was better at first, but Teams came with that shared files thing, it already had some basic education friendly extra features and, very important, it quickly improved. By a lot.

The first day all education institutions in my country worked from home, Teams collapsed under the load. Microsoft quickly fixed this, however - and then started adding useful features.

I’ve never been a fan of Microsoft, but that was really ace work.

Meanwhile, Slack was ... a chat service with extras.

Which is why, the conspiracy theory goes, it’s only second tier athletic disciplines that have a doping problem. In sports where the real money is, such as football and tennis, it pays to sweep results under the rug. Cyclists and distance skiers, on the other hand, seem to go from one scandal to the next.

Unless an athlete shows up that does manage to bring in serious amounts of money. In that case the lid goes on for a few years.

It is a public secret that at the finish line of cycling races at the junior level, parents stand around swapping tips on which asthma inhaler to get.

While that generation lived long and fairly healthy lives (possibly because the weaker members of it were weeded out by the war) the current generation of seniors certainly looks and behaves much differently. My grandparents at 65 looked and behaved old. My parents at 65: much less.

(Yes, anecdata)

Guy I know owned (owns) a music store. In the late 90s, he thought he knew were things were going. He started saving up for his pension, thinking that by 2015 or so no one would be buying cds anymore.

Now, he says, his music store is doing better than ever. He was correct in that no one buys cds anymore, but vinyl is selling like crazy. The store, which has always been popular ever since the 1980s, is making crazy amounts of money and his pension is becoming very comfortable.

Only thing he can’t come to terms with, however, is that his younger patrons for some reason insist on buying Dire Straits records. He can’t for the life of him figure out how something that used to be a signifier of having absolutely no taste in music has become so popular with music connoisseurs.

Salaries work a little differently for pro athletes: they're not just earning money to live off now, but they also need to save up for when their career inevitably ends and they don't have any other skill to fall back on.

Seen in that light, $35,000 isn't much.

No need to share this link twice. Especially since the piece is itself more of an unfocused mess than the book it intends to critique.

Another example from South Africa is Afrikaans. It uses words that are clearly Dutch, but the underlying structure has more in common with the Bantu languages that surround it.

This example also shows, however, that the category of contact languages is rather fluid. Afrikaans is not an outrightly obvious example of one. While the grammar is fairly simple - and very little like that of Dutch - the vocabulary us almost exclusively Dutch.

So it could be a creole - albeit one with the vocabulary almost exclusively from one of the contributing languages, which is extremely rare. But it could also be an offshoot of Dutch that had its grammar simplified and adapted to surrounding languages without picking up more than a handful of words from those same languages - which is also unusual.

All this to say contact languages come in many forms - and, like the article says, should be studied because they teach us how language works.

I heard part of the problem is that solar collectors don’t work when they get dusty and that there’s a lot of dust in the desert.

(That’s alongside other obvious issues such as the political instability others have alluded to).

One other reason why vinyl sounds better is that how it’s mastered. For streaming, tracks are optimized for low quality headphones and phone speakers. Loudness is all that is required.

Mastering for vinyl, however, takes effort. Do it wrong and the record becomes unplayable. So when you have to put in the effort anyway, might as well make it sound good at the same time.

A/B some tracks some time. Chances are the vinyl version sounds more polished with a bit more dynamics instead of having everything slam into a limiter. This has nothing to do with sound coloring or “warmth”.

> Would having 6000 false positives be okay for being able to find the 1000 true positives?

I’d say no. That’s 5000 people who are told they might have cancer while in fact they don’t and who will then undergo further testing that is at best traumatic and at worst extremely invasive if not outright damaging.

Take intestinal cancer, for example. You can get screened for that and if you screen positive, they will take a biopsy - a fairly unpleasant and not entirely risk free procedure. Then it gets worse. If the biopsy shows some part of your intestines isn’t quite in order (a likely outcome, though not necessarily one that indicates cancer) they will take out that bit of intestine, just to be safe. This is a very invasive procedure and because it’s your intestines we’re talking about, you digestive system will be seriously out of whack for a while - if it ever heals completely - seriously and significantly degrading your quality of life. All this for a, let’s use your figures, 1 in 6 chance that you might have had cancer.

Not if you use zip loc bags

You can freeze coffee beans. Helps keeps them fresh a lot longer.

Part of it is because he’s painting now whereas before he was mostly drawing. You just can’t get as much detail that way.

But even so, yes, this looks amateurish. Which is probably due to he fact that he no longer paints / draws for a living and because he’s just starting out in this medium.

> Yet I find it lacking. I can never get IDE features like code navigation and completion to really work.

Same here. In the end I just gave up and installed Emacs with vim key bindings (evil mode). Took a while to set things up, though, albeit not so much the vim bits, which were fine, but the IDE features.

Vim is fine as a framework for text editing but as an application it's a bit lacking.

Thank you for this reply. I actually agree with you (except in not being Buddhist): we should differentiate between Buddhism the organized religion and Buddhism the spiritual practice.

Unfortunately, too many people are only familiar with the latter - and only with a variant of the latter that is much cleaned up and stripped of its folksy roots and made palatable for Western consumption - and then transfer the positive feelings they have about that to the former.

Interesting that you bring up that James Scott book because that paints exactly the unflattering picture of Buddhist states I’m talking about: rice growing states in the valleys waging war on their neighbors and capturing their populations wholesale to put them to work (a practice that is very much still current in Burma where the military occupies villages in the periphery and forces everyone to work, either in the fields or in factories that work for companies like Pepsi).

This kind of violence hasn’t been common in other parts of the world for centuries. It’s also a phenomenon that is distinct to states in South East Asia - and, in fact, to the Buddhist states in South East Asia ( it was not practiced in what is now Malaysia in Indonesia - which are now Muslim and before that practiced a religion that mostly resembles Hinduism).

I’m always baffled by Buddhism getting such a free pass from otherwise perfectly sensible westerners.

Many Buddhist societies are amongst the worst slave states know to history (the Tibet from this article, but also Burma and oh-so-beloved Thailand).

And this is not despite Buddhism but because of it. In all societies where it is dominant misfortunes such as being born poor (or worse) are seen as being justified somehow, leading to astonishingly callous mistreatment of the poor and unlucky - think the wholesale enslavement and transport of complete populations such as in Thailand not too long ago and in present day Burma.

Zen Buddhism, too, is a spectacularly nasty piece of work. It originally existed in two variants: one for the peasants, which taught them to accept their miserable lot, and one for the warrior class which taught it that life is fleeting and death inevitable (it is this variant of Buddhism that was used to indoctrinate Kamikaze pilots in WW2)

So why we in the west should think that this is an especially enlightened religion is beyond me. If you must do religion, why not Christianity or Islam? At least these two make a point of encouraging charity and kindness towards others.

> As a software developer I consider the most important part of my job to be evaluating new tools and techniques.

Really? I would argue it’s building software.

> This craft is in its infancy

We’ve been building software since ... dunno ... 1950s? 1960s?

> our profession borders on complete incompetence when it comes to predictably building usable tools at a reasonable budget

This is probably true, but I suspect chasing new tools isn’t the solution. I’ve seen a lot of very much with it development teams fail at building stuff because they couldn’t get their shiny new stuff to work predictably.

> If someone is "tired" of this process it might be time to consider another profession.

On the front end, yes, it’s probably par for the course. I suspect it’s because front end development is even more removed from rigorous engineering practice than back end development.

On the back end, however, lots of stuff is still built in Java and C(++) and it all works reasonably well.

It’s just not very exciting.

Hahaha ... I teach software development for a living and the first thing we have to students when they start presenting their work is always “please switch to light mode”.