mtts

Yes it does, because this is about profiling.

If all crime is committed by South Asian women, you're right that it would be madness not to use that information to target crime-fighting measures such as, for example, only looking for suspects that are female and have a South Asian suspects.

Profiling, however, where you preventively search if not outright harass people, is something entirely different: if one in ten South Asian women engage in crime, every time you preventively search and harass one of them, you have a ninety percent chance of searching and harassing someone who is innocent.

Someone once explained it to me like this:

Let's say 1% of the population commits crimes.

Let's also, for the sake of argument, say all crimes are committed by black people.

Of the general population, 10% is black.

If you profile all black people, you will indeed profile the 1% of the population that commits crimes, but you will also profile 9% of the population that does not commit crimes.

And before you say "not the entirety of the 10% black population is profiled": maybe ask some black people about this. It's not 100% of the black population that gets profiled but certainly a very significant percentage.

And even if it's just half or even a quarter of the black population that you're profiling, you're still profiling a lot of innocent people.

This is the reason why profiling is bad.

(and note that in reality the figures are even worse).

What’s the situation with Nordic police and minorities? Because in the not really Nordic but reasonably civilized Netherlands the supposedly well educated police force is also a known hotbed of racism. Members of the police force in The Hague refer to themselves as “exterminators of Moroccan vermin”. Ethnic profiling is rampant and on at least one occasion a man of color was held down by a group of cops until he died as well.

At least part of the problem is cops themselves.

In Emacs it’s easily readable ELisp. Much, much better than JSON.

Well, more versatile, anyway.

Only read Decline and Fall, but it was pretty funny. A good middle of he twentieth century British comedic novel.

Apparently Brideshead Revisited is among those lines as well.

Correct. If anyone's wondering why: Klein's blue has a somewhat powdery surface that disperses the color in all directions. As a result it's more intense than it would be if the surface were smooth.

I believe this is the same trick behind vantablack.

I just switched from TT-RSS to FreshRSS. FreshRSS comes out of the box with a Docker image which is really easy to set up. For TT-RSS you have to create your Docker image yourself as neither of the two images available on Github work without putting in a bit of effort.

TT-RSS requires an (old, probably no longer maintained) plugin for the Fever API. FreshRSS has it built in.

Interface wise it doesn't really matter that much.

Indeed. School teachers (not particularly well paid or managerial) are definitely part of the clerisy, supporting things like an [edit: added missing word "energy"] transition and, no surprises there, a greater role for education. Managers in companies that operate in the market: not so much.

The term “clerisy” to me rings clearer than “professional middle class” as he latter ignores [edit: removed autocorrect nonsense word] very real distinctions between corporate lawyers and directors of NGOs.

This is certainly true for the Netherlands (alluded to in the article): the yellow vests (and the supporters of right wing populists in general) are overwhelmingly poor, both in terms of education and in terms of wealth.

No, he’s right. It was very much in the interest of rulers to rule over as large a population as possible as that meant more tax income.

Think of all the slaves that were brought into the Roman Empire for an example. Or the laws binding serfs to the land in the Middle Ages. Or of the early modern kingdoms of South East Asia, which were essentially slave states, raiding their neighbors for their population so they could at them to their own.

That’s one aspect of it.

The other is that despite travel being difficult, historically people have done a lot of it. This has become clear in recent years as DNA analysis of ancient populations has become possible. The origins of most Western Europeans lie in the steppes of Ukraine (it might not be clear who built Stonehenge but it’s certain it wasn’t an ancestor of a modern Briton). There were Indian traders in Rome (probably to sell silk and spices) and Dutch settlers in South Africa were witness to Bantu immigrants sweeping in from he north.

People have always been mobile, it turns out.

I review a lot of code for work and I agree with you that you can usually tell the quality of the code simply by looking at its outward appearance. Rough edges and bizarre shapes almost always indicate poor, unstructured thinking in the code itself.

Not saying I go by shape alone, but if it looks messy, that's a warning flag.

We used to have that in the Netherlands. For banking, regular banks refused to service small businesses and lower income private people. The government set up two banks of their own, one for small businesses and one for ordinary people to do things like deposit their paychecks and have simple savings accounts. The latter especially was wildly successful and innovative, with a truly forward thinking IT department (they had online banking over dialup in 1987!)

Alas, the 90s hit and these banks, along with the energy companies, the cable companies and the postal company, were privatized. Innovation ground to a halt and service quality plummeted. In the end, they had to be bailed out during the 2008 financial crisis.

Ah, good call. Did not know that. Will look into it. Thanks!

One of the editors it lists is "vy" : a Vim-like in python: https://github.com/vyapp/vy

Does anyone have any experience with this? I'd love to have a vim that is more pleasant to program.

edit: added link

Let’s use the Gulag administration’s own numbers. One and a half million.

How’s the death rate in the US prison system, then?

Mortality rate.

Read up on the gulags sometime.

Have an upvote.

By coincidence I just read Scott’s book not too long ago and can attest that it contains not a single suggestion that imposing any sort of order on a system is ever a good idea. Quite the opposite, in fact.

There may be lessons for city planners and agriculturalists in the book, but I’m pretty sure there isn’t a single one for software developers.

He said it would have been stupid had someone designed it that way but given that it evolved it made perfect sense why it was the way it was.

Right. Should’ve said “unless they've significantly changed things for the worse”.

I doubt they have now:

* Surrounded the ML with other masterpieces

* Placed it in a room that’s only accessible by going through each other room in the Louvre and significantly disturbing the people that want to view the other masterpieces on display

Unless, of course, they made the Louvre smaller.

The premise of he article is just wrong. If you must view the Mona Lisa, a very pretty picture, btw, you can. Just come early. If you want to see something else in the Louvre - and there is plenty of choice - you can as well.

Unless they've changed things for the worse, this is nonsense. I visited the Louvre about five years ago and found:

* The ML (Mona Lisa) is put in its own room, surrounded by a bunch of not very remarkable paintings that would not lose out to being ignored by tourists focusing on the Mona Lisa.

* You can get to the ML fairly efficiently from the main entrance. If that is all you want to see, it's not a very big problem because:

* The Louvre is VAST. 99.99% of it is not the ML and probably around 90% of it does not suffer from being in the same very, very large building as the ML. You can have a very fulfilling visit to the Louvre and never get anywhere near the thing (or the queues leading up to it).

Also, the common trope that the ML is not actually an interesting painting is nonsense as well. It's a perfectly charming little painting and if you make sure you enter the museum early enough you can get close enough to enjoy it.

My 2 cents. That hinge on the Louvre not having significantly changed things for the worse recently.

The second category essentially concerns spelling variations. Years and years ago I built a tools for searching old documents and to deal with all the spelling variants these contain I implemented something called the Gloria Guts algorithm, which ranks words based on how much their spelling differs. As I recall it worked much better than sounded for our data set

“ The problem with tech today isn’t so much that software failed to eat the world, but that the most celebrated unicorns weren’t actually software companies. They have struggled to achieve liftoff because their feet are stuck in the mud of the physical world”

This sums it up nicely.

Investors got deluded enough to think that if they threw enough money at a non-software company it would magically start making software company levels of profits.

Hopefully the real economy won’t be affected too much when this bubble finally bursts.

Interesting approach. The difficulty, of course, lies in how to get students to actually read the lecture notes, aka do their homework, but the principle seems sound enough to me.

In one of the classes I’ve taught we had a similar approach where we had students do a homework assignment beforehand where they would encounter the very problem that he material in the lecture would address. It did seem to make the students who actually did their homework more attentive.

I teach a first year introduction to sql course and this is exactly how we tell our students to construct their queries.

Yes. Cancer treatment is very, very invasive.

Between - very roughly - 100 and 200 years ago books (some containing essays) were where the intellectual life of the west happened. Since we are not in any meaningful way different - or smarter - than people from the 19th and early 20th century a lot of what they concerned themselves with is still relevant for us, especially the stuff that managed to get itself canonized.

The novels that managed to become classics became so for a reason (and if you've ever read some second rate 19th century material you'll appreciate the the distinction).

The art form of the fiction as moral treatise probably hasn't been surpassed since then. So just pick up a few big 19th century novels and start reading :-)

A solid contender for the title "best book of the 19th century".

Together with Madame Bovary.

Which wins, IMHO. But still: great book.

I only buy vinyl because, funnily enough, it lasts. CDs scratch and become unlistenable. I’ve also had multiple name brand players crap out on me. Record players are much more reliable - and much easier to fix.

Also, in my favorite genre - electronic music - artists no longer put out CDs. So I pretty much don’t have a choice.

They could have built it much less dense than they did. It’s a very green city.

It’s also hard to imagine a place with better public transportation.