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stewbrew

1,407 karma · joined February 15, 2011

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stewbrew··on What the debate about Neanderthals reveals about us
I assume you are from the US with little knowledge of history. Neander (ever wondered where the Neanderthals got their name from) was German. Early anthropologists were German or French. So yes, early anthropologists were all (really) white Europeans.

BTW I'm actually surprised you wouldn't think of Jews as "white". But I'm not familiar with US American raceology. Are you from the white supremacy fraction?

But all of this misses the point of my statement.

stewbrew··on Tracking Austrian grocery prices by scraping store sites
Funny comment. You should tell this the Austrian chancellor.
stewbrew··on Tracking Austrian grocery prices by scraping store sites
You should add conglomerates. In Austria, the grocery market is effectively dominated by 3 companies. They rarely compete directly, i.e., by having stores next to each other.
stewbrew··on Chromebooks will get 10 years of automatic updates
But don't expect them to check whether the Chromebooks are still useful after an update. E.g., the original Lenovo duet turned into an oversized paperweight after one of their later updates.
stewbrew··on USENET rises again?
I assume they dropped it because they couldn't monetize it, i.e. spam you with personalized ads and the like. Probably the same reason why RSS News feeds were dropped.
stewbrew··on Seven Sins of Writing
I don't think you got the last sentence right.

I once noticed that people who are used to quickly read tons of texts often don't get the meaning of more winded sentences right. (I assume chatgpt would have the same issue.) But the fault was mine of course, since I did not distinguish between texts written to convey information and "literary" texts written for amusement.

In the age of LLMs it makes you wonder though, if all this writing advice isn't out of date. Concise texts are for AIs, wordy texts are for humans.

stewbrew··on No Markdown support in Google Drive after all these years
Get yourself an old-fashioned web-space, setup a nextcloud instance ... profit.
stewbrew··on Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid
Of course it could be a scientific to estimate the probability that ...
stewbrew··on Why do cats knead?
They knead before they sit down. If you lived in grass land with the gras being higher than you, you'd probably knew why.
stewbrew··on AI will save the world?
My comment doesn't have anything to do with AI per se but with the hybris and inhumanity of people in the AI bubble.
stewbrew··on AI will save the world?
Love, respect, and humility have a small chance to save the world. AI? I don't know. I have my doubts it will improve human interaction.
stewbrew··on 27 years later and the Psion 3a is still wonderful (2020)
There are several devices like that. But I guess most people use their phones + bt keyboard.
stewbrew··on The Diaries of Franz Kafka
While "In the Penal Colony" actually is really funny and readable, I don't think much humor could have been lost.
stewbrew··on Albert Camus
I don't think you use the word autistic in any meaningful way.
stewbrew··on Pixel Tablet
They still don't manage to sell their devices world-wide. Even in Europe. Clicking on the above link I see only their useless nest devices.
stewbrew··on How did the chess pieces get their names?
That would be a horse, which is seemingly used in some other countries.
stewbrew··on How did the chess pieces get their names?
But in many countries, it isn't a knight.
stewbrew··on Higher-order functions in Go
IIRC lisp was already called "functional" in the 1980s. It was in contrast to purely procedural languages. I cannot comment on the 1970s.
stewbrew··on Parquet: An efficient, binary file format for table data
Parquet is cool. What isn't so cool is that, e g., partitioning isn't supported on all platforms out of the box. Hence, reading a set of files created in one language may require extra work in another language. Partitioning should be supported in all languages.
stewbrew··on The Worlds of Italo Calvino
Calvino was a member of oulipo. Other than Vonnegut (whom I admire too), he had a concept of literature as art. You should take him serious.
stewbrew··on The inner life of the octopus (2022)
I don't think this is not how evolution works. Octopuses are most likely as dumb (or, by maritime standards, clever) as they were millions of years ago.
stewbrew··on The inner life of the octopus (2022)
Sure but why should they get (somewhat) smart then? Or are you proposing only the smartass octupuses survive?
stewbrew··on The inner life of the octopus (2022)
I doubt this is how nature works - with the exception of octopuses, it seems. In most environments, you probably get eaten or starve to death before you have time to figure it all out yourself.
stewbrew··on The inner life of the octopus (2022)
I don't follow. Why should they develop a high intelligence if the don't have a chance to learn from others? Usually, these others are your parents.
stewbrew··on Measuring Adiposity in Patients: The Utility of Body Mass Index (BMI) & Body Fat
Thank you all for your replies.
stewbrew··on Measuring Adiposity in Patients: The Utility of Body Mass Index (BMI) & Body Fat
I simply cannot imagine such a measure to be sensible for all types of body shapes.
stewbrew··on My bad habit of hoarding information
Just subscribe to a good weekly magazine like e.g. the economist and let other do the hard work.
stewbrew··on I'm done with Google
I think the problem here is that people don't realize or care what they sign up for when they "buy" something from a streaming service. IMHO the term "buy" is misleading here and it should be forbidden to call it this way - to acquire a semi-permanent licence for viewing content.
stewbrew··on What's Great about Julia?
Java (or kotlin or scala) using arrow, spark, H2O etc.?
stewbrew··on Psychological and psychiatric terms to avoid
There is a more or less fine line between unconscious and subconscious (its slightly hysterical cousin). The term might be somewhat outdated but it's still in use and also cognitive scientists make respective assertions - even though they might call it differently when talking about human consciousness.
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