setopt

Thanks! Then I’ll look more at Restic :)

Why?

I’m currently trying to decide between Borg and Restic myself. Borg has worked very well for me in the past, and I’m a bit excited by the new Vorta GUI frontend. But I already have a BackBlaze B2 setup for backing up my Mac, and Restic would let me continue to use that as a backup store. I’m interested in hearing about differentiating points between them.

If you have Bitlocker on on windows you might have to disable it for dual boot installation to work (you can re-enable it later).

> It’s not yet the year of Linux on desktop, I don’t think - but we get closer every year.

For me it is. I was already considering going back to Linux for a while, and MacOS Tahoe pushed me over the fence. Got a Thinkpad with Linux as a replacement for my MacBook some months ago and don’t regret it yet.

On Jan 11th I received "Easy self-care you can start today" advertising how ChatGPT can be used for meal planning or finding a local gym (ending with "Ask ChatGPT for more wellness tips"), and on Jan 19th I received "Use ChatGPT to make life easier" advertising how ChatGPT can for example improve my coffee brewing skills (ending with "Ask ChatGPT for more ways to get it all done"). I certainly consider these "spam", and until recently didn’t receive such emails from them.

Sadly, most other keybindings differ between org-mode, markdown-node, and auctex. I would have loved more consistency, and often end up typing the syntax instead of tripping up keybindings.

I guess the people you quote also missed that not all of us work in Silicon Valley and can afford those expensive coffees every day. I’d like an estimate of how many Nescafé powder coffee cups I’d have to skip per month to use their subscription.

Indeed. I received 28 unwanted emails of this kind in January so far (just counted), which is a bit more than once per day, despite quite avidly unsubscribing from this kind of emails. This month I had to unsubscribe from ChatGPT and GitHub emails of this kind too, although I don’t recall opting in to them in the first place and neither of them spammed me until recently.

> An alternative would be to simply use square brackets for both clauses of the link.

For comparison, Org-mode uses [[LINK][DESCRIPTION]] instead of [DESCRIPTION](LINK).

> including a visit at 5:30pm or 6:30pm to see the state of the office and attendance

As an academic, I used to work 11am-8pm many days when I was younger thanks to flexible working hours, and I wasn’t the only one working late but not early. I realize this is probably more rare in corporate settings, but keep in mind if the place has flexible hours you might see more people at 6pm despite people not doing 996.

Depends, it’s hard to make a blanket statement like that. Recycled steel and aluminum for example is absolutely not a scam. But for plastics, I agree that waste incineration is mostly a better solution than recycling (which produces low-quality plastics with some risk of unhealthy contaminants in the few cases that it’s not actually a scam).

Recently bought a Yoto Mini and quite happy with it. Remember to buy the blank cards.

Markdown was based on the "syntax" already being used informally in emails and on IRC. So the author did do some searching to define the syntax.

I don’t like many parts of markdown either (like the syntax for bold), but those were also IIRC already being parsed by some IRC clients before Markdown was specified.

I really miss explicit support for type classes in languages that I use regularly like Python.

I feel it depends whether you inspect and edit the code as part of the workflow, or just test what the AI produced and give feedback without participating in the coding yourself.

Shellfish is underrated. It has a very convenient tmux integration (auto-restore a specific tmux session per host to work around iOS suspending background apps), supports SSH tunneling via other configured hosts, and can be used as an SFTP file provider for other iOS apps. It’s also generally polished and supports the expected standard terminal features.

There’s a few settings I wished were possible, like using volume buttons as modifier keys in Emacs (I’ve heard about this in other apps), but mostly it works fine.

The risk is that publishers might then start opposing the publication of manuscripts that have been shared as preprints on arXiv, if they start perceiving it as a competitor and not a supplement to their "service". But I concur, arXiv with social media features would be nice.

Thanks. That’s horrible, I didn’t even think about the possibility before seeing your post.

I get regular "crashes" on the newest Fedora KDE on a new Thinkpad X1 (from this year). I say "crashes" because it’s not the window manager or Wayland session crashing but some non-essential component of the Plasma desktop (don’t remember which one right now), so it doesn’t affect my work at all. From my point of view it basically just causes a crash report popup every 1-2 hours and says whatever service crashed has been restarted.

Does Waterfox support Firefox Sync? Their web page is a bit sparse on details on how it differs from Firefox.

Source?

I suppose it gets a bit more complex again if you enable stuff like microtype, but even then you can probably measure how much inter-letter and inter-word spacing has been adjusted by just scanning other text in the same line.

I think the conclusion is honestly that PDF is an outdated format for keeping records that might have to be redacted in the future, like court documents. Something reflowable like epub could have the text replaced with constant-space black squares instead no hints leaked as someone mentioned in a parallel comment.

My guess would be a linkage with something else as you say. Look for example at the Russian domestication of silver foxes which was done very deliberately, and bred for less aggressiveness, yet it caused physical changes in appearance like dog-like ears and tails: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domesticated_silver_fox

I tend to agree. Science funding is unfortunately a limited resource, and I would like to see different approaches explored in more detail, which unfortunately would imply less (but not zero) funding to string theory. Not zero, because we also don’t want the competence built up in string theory groups to die out completely, in case that remains our best lead.

To borrow a compsci analogy, we tried the depth-first search going in the string theory direction, maybe it’s time to switch to breadth-first for a while, to see if there are any viable and useful theories with less distance from the ones we have today. Maybe it doesn’t have to be a "theory of everything" either, we can initially settle for a "theory of more".

Physicist here. Would you like to enrich our world view by linking to counter-examples?

My understanding was that string theory being more "hypothetical physics" than "theoretical physics" at this point is still a pretty legit criticism.

In a "righteous world", no one would starve, regardless of their work style and performance.

Doesn’t Windows show ads in the start menu these days?

If you really only care about syntax highlighting then nearly any code editor will do. Even nano supports it, it’s just disabled by default.

If you want something powerful yet easy to pick up, you might want to look at e.g. Zed (GUI IDE), Sublime Text (GUI editor), or Micro (TUI editor). If you don’t mind a learning curve, Vim/Neovim and Emacs are excellent choices. But there’s a lot of other options out there, like Gedit, Kate, BBEdit, Notepad++, etc. depending on your platform of choice.

As someone teaching in higher education, I’d say that you can certainly incentivize the students to learn "understanding", although I agree that a lot is up to the student.

Some basic examples:

- Don’t give test and exam questions that are too similar to examples and problems in the text book and homework. Then they’ll know that learning to generalize is a better pay-off than memorizing the textbook problems, and may choose to change their strategy when studying for exams.

- Reduce the amount of curriculum. By studying in depth instead of in breadth, you have time to focus on how things really work instead of just rushing through material on a surface level, and in my experience that improves understanding more. (But I know many disagree with me on this one.)

- Focus on problem solving as part of the lectures (student-active learning). I’m not an extremist, like some advocating that we shouldn’t lecture at all, but the pedagogical literature is pretty clear that small doses of lectures interspersed with problem solving enhances understanding.

- Try to teach intuition and conceptual models, not just facts. For example, as a student, I really struggled understanding eigenvalues and eigenvectors because our linear algebra textbook defined it by Αv = λv but made no attempt at explaining what it means intuitively and geometrically. Similarly, integration by parts has a simple and beautiful geometric interpretation that makes it obvious why this is correct, but we were only taught the opaque symbolic version in my calculus classes. When I teach myself, I try to lean on such visualizations and intuitive pictures as much as possible, as I think that really enhances «understanding»; not necessarily being able to cough up a solution to a problem you’ve seen before as fast as possible, but being able to generalize that knowledge to problems you haven’t seen before.

But who knows, maybe I’m just biased by how I myself perceive the world. I know there are some people who for example eschew geometric pictures entirely and still do very well. My experience is that most students seem to appreciate the things listed above though.

Yeah we do. For many reasons:

Privacy is privacy. I ideally don’t want any of my data sold to anyone, but health data is even more vulnerable.

In my country it was even a big deal when they allowed different doctors to access your health data via a common system, as there were e.g. concerns that the information recorded by one doctor might bias another doctor, so some felt that it should be your choice what data to share between different parts of the public health system (except for explicit referrals).

Moreover, most European countries do have private doctors, private hospitals, and private health insurance – it’s just way less used than the public system. Those would have the same concerns as in the US.