rosetremiere

I heard (iirc in the “In our time” podcast) that they associated rare/unusual cosmological events (say, a solar eclipse) with signs from the gods. Hence, to better read the signs, you want to know what's normal/predicted.

Don't quote me on this, though :)

Indeed, though I have no quote or link for this "claim".

A bit off-topic, but I'd like to see a language à la rust+gc, with pattern matching, traits, and the functional stuff rust got right, but without all the worries of lifetimes, and maybe some easier trait management (function signatures become very ugly imo).

I've heard the claim that lean is going in this direction.

Can you share the before/after, and your strategy?

Wikipedia seems to agree with you:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concrete#Industrial_era

Anyone knows the relation with the swissmetro project (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swissmetro though it very much reads like an ad) ?

I feel like lead distribution/packaging/format is suboptimal. You can only buy leads in very small quantity, compared to the size of their container, and their short length, as you say, means you have lots of losses. Maybe longer leads would mean more breakage, but I feel like there is room for improvements in terms of general waste.

The article says, if I'm not mistaken, that the heat source must be between 1900 and 2400 degrees (Celcius), and I would bet that Vantablack loses its blackness at such temperatures?

Good points, thanks!

In your opinion, what kind of life would be "austere enough" to claim (faithfully) that it does not benefit from other people's hardships? As in, what kind of life should you live to be able to say that you're not "rich and healthy because someone somewhere is poor and sick"? (I'm having trouble stating that question clearly, but hopefully the point gets across)

I's a bit of a hard question in my opinion, because so much of our economy is interlinked with the world and even with history… Probably, some richness of the west is a legacy of colonial times, during which a transfer of richness occurred, and the west would still be indebted in that sense?

> Reality is what is going on in Mariupol right now.

I seem to often hear such kinds of claims repeated: Only hardship and poverty is real, and the mundane life of people living "sheltered" lives in western countries is somehow just a bubble, artificial.

Why would that be the case?

Fair point. I don't know if there is a better link, but the conclusion of the book is sufficiently "startling" that I wanted to get some opinion/discussion on it. If you have a better link, I'd be happy to change the url.

I didn't know about "toolbox": it seems close to what I want. About 3D, does calling a program through `bwrap` disable opengl or something?

Right. I'm being a bit less ambitious here: I've recommended fedora to plenty of (non-tech) people around me, and fedora presumably already has all the necessary tools to add such a simple “workspace manager” without much disruption. It would provide an easy intuitive step-up in terms of security, starting from something people already know.

Here is something I'd like to have in fedora (or desktop linux in general): A sort of “workspace manager” using bubblewrap for isolating user-defined groups of applications and file hierarchy.

I imagine it as some kind of GUI with “boxes”, each defining a “workspace” with specified permissions (access to that and that folder, network, etc), such that the user could easily drag and drop apps into new workspaces.

This way, I could have a “banking” workspace just containing, say, firefox, and a “work” workspace with, say, firefox and thunderbird and whatever, etc. The “workspaces” would by default be as unprivileged as possible, with the possibility to give access to folders, or even maybe to use unionfs or similar to combine the views of different workspaces.

For ease of use, I could assign a color or icon to each workspace, and the manager would automatically generate desktop files so that I would easily be able to spot “banking firefox” from “work firefox”.

I feel like with bubblewrap, this is only a short python GUI away, and would be super helpful to strengthen security on linux, even more so for non-technically inclined, or lazy people.

[Edit:] If someone wants to discuss things further and even maybe try and write a “MVP”, I'd be happy to try.

Isn't "finding patterns where there are none" more akin to finding correlation in the first place, than to making the correlation->causation jump?

Re

> dramatically reduce world hunger is a direct consequence of humans' capacity to improve crop yields such as rice and corn through breeding and engineering.

and

> the technical plant wizardry that prevented the starvation of millions of people.

What exactly are you referring to? In my mind, crop domestication and selective breeding is what allowed population growth, not what prevented starvation. In other words, population grew thanks to the increase in production, rather than the increase coming to combat decline. Was that a wrong notion?

My turn to be sorry! I had to blow some steam off and hadn't thought about the fact that the person behind the page might read my comment. Cheers on your work :)

I must say, it's frustrating clicking this link and landing on a page narrowed to the USA, and, to top it off, in Fahrenheit… Maybe a title change would be welcome.

> I have zero trust in EU institutions,

Why is that?

Or scribus?

Not much more than an anecdote, but I found working with julia quite a lot of fun. It was not data science, but since julia is more or less aimed at data science, I'd predict that my positive experience means julia is a very good choice there too.

There is the "time to first plot" issue, and I found that the "efficient as C, easy as Python" motto really means "efficient as C XOR easy as Python", but all in all, it's very easy to write stuff very cleanly, and the path to effiency is quite natural if you know where to look, and the metaprogramming makes it that more powerful.

Ivan Illich has a similar idea about technology and people becoming slaves to technology instead of the other way around, starting at some "threshold".

Is japan the only country that has its own map as a unicode symbol? If so, is there a story behind it? I would bet on compatibility with some regional encoding that had it to begin with.

I'm distressed by the fact that the i is full instead of "double-stroked".

I'd like to implement it as an exercise. Any recommendation on a good resource for that purpose?

Good to know. I just wanted to express the (quite disappointing) fact that not all Ph.D.s match what's being proposed here.

In my experience (math, small european university), this is the romantic idea of a Ph.D. more than how it ends up being in practice. In my case (and quite a few others around me), a Ph.D. is some research of varying novelty and complexity, far from making you an expert in the subject(s) at hand, but hopefully enough for your committee to think you deserve the title. In the cases I'm talking about, you're far from becoming this idealized "expert in your specific subfield" with new insights and that further researchers will base their work on; it's mostly grabbing whatever small questions you can try to explore and if possible answering them. Still, I think the idealized version does hold for quite a few people, if not all of us.

Wow, I love those "concrete tiles". Any idea where this is?

Some people like butter but don't want/can't eat dairy. That's just one reason.

Fair enough, but my issue with your original comment is that it implied that _by design_, ISBN does not uniquely identify books, which is wrong, as far as I can tell. In any case, the issue of reuse of ISBN has practical consequences, so that the original intent might not be so important in the end.

Do you have any idea how many cases there are of reuse? Is it actually common?