bookofsand

19 ms·

61.
by bookofsand 5y ago
I don't have an incontrovertible proof and I secretly hope I'm wrong. A few observations: * We already observed a techno "Green Revolution" in our recent past. Norman Borlaug, starting in the '60s and '70s. Dir
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by bookofsand 5y ago
Change itself is speeding up. We are going to zoom through the hive era and jump straight into AI era, where 99%, if not more, of the heavy lifting will be done by the machines. The centaur era is rather close ahead. Beyond that, the hope i
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by bookofsand 5y ago
Yet another short-sighted techno-optimist that can't be bothered to look beyond his own lifespan. Biological systems grow exponentially until they reach the brink of starvation. More efficient farming methods mean more carrying capaci
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by bookofsand 5y ago
Once upon a time there was a small country tucked in the southeast corner of Europe, harboring a colorful mix of ethnicities, yearning for peace and prosperity. There were horrible demons in its closet, and they were unleashed upon its pres
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by bookofsand 5y ago
For context, the speech was delivered on July 5, 1852. 169 years ago. Assuming the average age of the mother at birth of 25, this was 6-7 generations and a civil war ago. I hope that we have enough maturity to not behave as if the respectiv
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by bookofsand 5y ago
A. Then don't submit the exploratory test in your next PR. B. Then memoize the expensive function to disk. Bonus: Can keep multiple versions on disk, thus can tweak the expensive function while having fast reloads with guaranteed corre
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by bookofsand 5y ago
Step1: Write a test. Step2, IDE: Right click + Run. Step2, CLI: $ run <test name> Bonus: The test is now part of your automated test suite, and will be ran many times to ensure things don't break.
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by bookofsand 5y ago
That Cuba is ruled by a communist party is, unfortunately, relevant to this conversation: there is a significant chance the claimed results are pure fabrication. First line of the article: "Cuba's health authorities said this week
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by bookofsand 5y ago
Relativism is in contradiction with the empirical facts. Modern industrial societies are 'better' than traditional ones in the sense that 99% of the people chose an industrial lifestyle over a preindustrial one, if given the choic
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by bookofsand 5y ago
Indeed, the process might have been quite traumatic for the natives. On the flip side, the aliens might have had the best of intentions, alas executed with significant flaws. It so happens that boarding schools are (were?) a major tradition
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by bookofsand 5y ago
Parents are and should be deciding the set of values and skills their children acquire. As the Amish demonstrate, there are ways to mix tradition and modernity in a functional package. However, it is highly likely that indigenous American p
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by bookofsand 5y ago
Something to keep in mind when talking about confounding variables is that all preindustrial cultures, including European cultures, had a GDP of less than $1000 per capita per year, measured in 1990 USD. The default state of humanity is dee
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by bookofsand 5y ago
Remote work has been around quite a while. Used to be called 'offshoring'. The main driver is raw economics: the price of tech labor is too high. 'Social distancing' is simply an excuse to push it into overdrive.
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by bookofsand 5y ago
Not sure if I got this correctly. The argument is that no rational conversation of public interest can be hosted by youtube , in order to protect the public from the sensationalistic garbage youtube cynically promotes? And the solution i
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by bookofsand 5y ago
There are at least two questions to ask: * If X died because of a "Take Ivermectin and you'll survive COVID" video on YouTube, who's to blame? Assumption: Ivermectin has a net negative effect. Assumption: X relied on Ive
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by bookofsand 5y ago
Interesting. Vaguely related, I wonder if cuelang has a mechanism to declare disjoint unions, aka. sum types.
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by bookofsand 5y ago
38-12. Edit: 41-9. Nice game.
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by bookofsand 5y ago
Thanks for the "why cue" posts. The two key points appear to be inheritance vs. unification and nothing vs. typed. Somehow I'm unable to grok why unification is better than inheritance. Going a bit deeper: * "Inheritance
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by bookofsand 5y ago
Not all vaccines are created equal. Grouping people in "pro/anti-vax" carries a risk of creating a huge backlash against vaccination in general, if the relatively new and unproven mRNA vaccines end up less than ideal. For exa
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by bookofsand 5y ago
> In marketing strategy, cannibalization refers to a reduction in sales volume, sales revenue, or market share of one product as a result of the introduction of a new product by the same producer. https://en.wikipedia.org&#x2F
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by bookofsand 5y ago
Something is wrong when we expect high quality libraries for free. The authors are highly skilled individuals with mortgages to pay and children to feed. Not sure what the answer is. If coupling Observable with d3 is such an answer, then mo
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by bookofsand 5y ago
Skimmed through their excellent design docs. The code is open source, but requires running a centralized control plane sever and may also require running a data plane relay server to cover some relatively common NAT configurations. https:&
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by bookofsand 5y ago
Indeed. For those that started scratching their heads 'this is impossible', this deep dive from the Tailscale blog will be informative. Perhaps even entertaining, the birthday paradox may have a hand in it. https://tail
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by bookofsand 5y ago
paid => ads => free. How is a 'free browser' supposed to pay its developers?
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by bookofsand 5y ago
For yet another definition, OO is about encapsulated polymorphic interfaces. Which raises a communication difficulty: encapsulated polymorphic interfaces are very useful in some of the cases (ADTs, modules), and a misfeature for the other c
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by bookofsand 5y ago
Syntactic forms ('frames', 'held arguments') are reasonably useful, but have two flaws: A. Understanding how to implement functions using syntactic forms is a steep learning curve. I remember running out of dplyr and h
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by bookofsand 5y ago
"Lab leak" and "zoonotic" are not mutually exclusive. The pandemic could have been triggered by simply collecting samples from a remote cave and culturing them in a lab in the middle of a 10M people metropolis. A routine