benrbray

13 ms·

91.
by benrbray 5y ago
There is something in between NYC and an American-style suburb. I encourage you to take a look at Not Just Bikes [1,2]: [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWsGBRdK2N0 [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bn
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by benrbray 5y ago
This is just poor planning, no? I never said it's not possible to design cities badly . Look to Tokyo for an example of density and transit working really well.
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by benrbray 5y ago
Perhaps that's where my own theory of bullshit jobs diverges from Graeber's then. I'd say a job can be bullshit regardless of whether or not the person doing it agrees. As for janitors feeling like their jobs are meaningless
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by benrbray 5y ago
I moved to Tokyo after vowing never to live in car-dependent hell again. I can say with certainty that the grass is greener on this side, at least when it comes to transportation!
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by benrbray 5y ago
Personally I would prefer 2 hours on a train to 2 hours by car, since I can read or reply to emails without focusing on the road. But the idea of density is that everything is closer together, so transit time is less, and you have more mode
96.
by benrbray 5y ago
For one, everything would be closer together, which helps reduce transit time. Advocates of density and public transit also usually advocate for mixed-use zoning, which would make it much easier to live near within walking or biking distan
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by benrbray 5y ago
Not necessarily. Urban/suburban spaces today are dominated by parking lots and four-to-six-lane roads. Eliminating those would make cities more compact without sacrificing size. With everything closer together, you wouldn't nee
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by benrbray 5y ago
> Remote work has given me almost two more hours of life a day (that I'd otherwise spend commuting) I get this sentiment, but I want to stress to people who feel this way that long commutes are not a problem with our work culture ,
99.
by benrbray 5y ago
I agree it would be nice to have more concrete numbers, but this in itself is a pretty shallow criticism of the bullshit jobs idea. Part of Graeber's argument, too, is that many of us are employed doing useful jobs in service of others
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by benrbray 5y ago
Since you mentioned QR, I want to link [1] to one of my favorite articles, which explains how to use the QR decomposition to sample a random orthogonal matrix uniformly at random. The basic idea, of course, is that if A is a random matrix,
101.
by benrbray 5y ago
Definitely take a look at fp-ts [1]! It's mentioned at the end of the article, but I want to emphasize just how cool it is. [1] https://github.com/gcanti/fp-ts
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by benrbray 5y ago
Hey me too. I'm pretty sure when you shuffle, it's not actually random, but weighted by some combination of licensing fees / paid promotion.
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by benrbray 5y ago
That's two or three weeks of groceries if you're on a budget. It can make a huge difference for some people -- especially the type of people who don't feel like they have any options but sex work. It's hard to blame th
104.
by benrbray 5y ago
Ah, I guess unsurprisingly the twitter thread is light on details. I saw "perceptual hash" which I usually interpret to mean some kind of feature-based semantic hash that is not as sensitive to small edits. Even if it isn't
105.
by benrbray 5y ago
It's also just plain absurd. Hundreds of pictures of my own children at the beach in their bathing suits? No problem. Hundreds of photos of other peoples' children in bathing suits? Big problem. Of course, the algorithm is
106.
by benrbray 5y ago
I second the book by Pinter -- the bulk of the book is a series of well-curated exercises meant to guide you through discovering the basic principles of abstract algebra for yourself. Excellent for self-study in the absence of a good profe
107.
by benrbray 5y ago
afaik Rust traits were directly inspired by the typeclass system in Haskell, which came about as a type-safe way to do the kind of ad-hoc polymorphism that you can do with interfaces in object-oriented languages like Java. Here's [1]
108.
by benrbray 5y ago
You don't need to weight the groups, since everyone experiences all ages (not counting early death). My proposal is: Multiply the number of house reps and senators by ten (for instance). Each representative now represents a district
109.
by benrbray 5y ago
It doesn't need to go that far, necessarily. Sometimes I get really into reading about a certain topic for a month or two, joining hobby forums, etc. to the extent that I feel "connected" to it for a long time afterwards. S
110.
by benrbray 5y ago
> #8 Not enough whitespace If anything software has TOO MUCH whitespace these days. It seems like with every UI update, everything gets 10% more padding, and I have to scroll more and more to see something that used to fit on one page.
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by benrbray 5y ago
StackExchange is a breath of fresh air compared to the rest of the web. I saw a meta post the other day where they were soliciting feedback about how make their mobile site more information dense. Love it!
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by benrbray 5y ago
Needs $inline$ and $$block$$ math!
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by benrbray 5y ago
Indeed. I really want to like GIMP, but it doesn't hold a candle to my old copy of Photoshop CS4 from ten years ago. From what I can recall, the GIMP UI has hardly changed since then too. I suppose they're probably constrained b
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by benrbray 5y ago
You are correct about the problem, but your solution is backwards. The solution is not for us to retreat to the suburbs and WFH forever. The solution is to build dense, walkable cities with good public transit, allowing for sustainable in
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by benrbray 5y ago
I graduated into this mess and feel like I've been cut off at the knees.
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by benrbray 5y ago
That's basically what I meant by "ergonomics" -- do you think we're still quite far from researchers being able to develop their own "tactics" to automate the sort of reasoning that would normally be "left
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by benrbray 5y ago
This is quite interesting, especially since one of the major objections to computer-aided proofs has that they are more difficult for humans to understand. Common wisdom has been that proof techniques matter more than the results, but if hu
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by benrbray 5y ago
I do wonder where all the mathematicians / academics hang out online. Now that I'm out of (compsci) grad school, I find myself without like-minded peers to study math with. Currently working my way through Riehl's category
119.
by benrbray 5y ago
When in doubt, put some more dots in front of your import statements. Or remove them? Maybe I need an extra __init__.py somewhere? Oh I'm importing from a subfolder, what do I need to do to get that work again? I can't remembe
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by benrbray 5y ago
Whenever I come back to writing JavaScript after a long break, I always forget how to correctly return objects from lambda expressions, and end up with this: () => { foo: "bar"; baz: "qux"; }

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