jbay808

63 ms·

661.
by jbay808 5y ago
I've been thinking about this topic more and more, and the more I study it, the more I realize how incredibly rich of a subject it is. For example, I used to assume that monetary inflation was instant and automatic. Double the money su
662.
by jbay808 5y ago
I find Japanese convenience store washrooms are about on par with the ones in fancy hotels in Canada!
663.
by jbay808 5y ago
I picked up some ice cream there once, probably the best ice cream I've ever eaten. It was completely unflavoured ice cream -- not vanilla -- and really amazing and subtle. Since then I've searched for other "just milk"
664.
by jbay808 5y ago
FWIW I've had multiple data loss issues with Safe Notes. Sometimes one notepad would spontaneously get overwritten by another. I've switched to Simple Notepad since then.
665.
by jbay808 5y ago
Me too, but I'm not savvy enough to track these changes over time. I wouldn't normally remember what the price per 100g was last month, even if it matched this month's sale price.
666.
by jbay808 5y ago
That's actually how traditional weights and measures used to work. Tithes and taxes owed to the lord were set out in age-old contracts that even the lord couldn't change, with things like "ten pounds of grain" written in
667.
by jbay808 5y ago
Well, they forgot to account for adiabatic heating of that cold air getting pulled out of the upper atmosphere, which would have made it quite hot when it hit the ground. If I recall, that cold air was the central threat in the movie.
668.
by jbay808 5y ago
Don't the Russians run nuclear-powered icebreakers?
669.
by jbay808 5y ago
Not a VGM track, but "Something Dark is Coming" from the Battlestar Galactica Soundtrack by Bear McCreary comes to mind. https://youtu.be/tlwZEutyrX8
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by jbay808 5y ago
Volume aside, a lot of the annoyance comes from the unnatural sound of four motors running at slightly different speeds, going in and out of tune with one another.
671.
by jbay808 5y ago
I know what you mean. They somehow irritate my skin in a way that doesn't make any sense for a smooth surface to do.
672.
by jbay808 5y ago
New ThinkPads still have these! They have trackpads too but you can disable them in the bios to avoid accidental clicks.
673.
by jbay808 5y ago
That's a good point, although in the context of exponential growth, it's a small difference that just buys a few more centuries. The heat spreader would either have to grow exponentially in area radiating into space, or grow expon
674.
by jbay808 5y ago
Yes, definitely. This isn't meant to argue that those limits are anywhere nearby. The significance of the argument is that once everyone accepts that a seemingly-unstoppable exponential growth trend can be halted by far-off limit A, yo
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by jbay808 5y ago
Yes, but only in proportion to the fourth power of the Earth's surface temperature, which we would want to limit. (The argument is predicated on not becoming multiplanetary).
676.
by jbay808 5y ago
For the analogy to work with energy and still be true to the physicist's argument, we would also have to imagine that all exchange of goods and services requires new platinum -- and that there's a hard physical limit on the platin
677.
by jbay808 5y ago
It might be because you're a physicist that you find the argument tiring! You already understand and accept the underlying assumptions. I think it's meant to be applied when someone really stands their philosophical ground on ex
678.
by jbay808 5y ago
> The issue is does increasing economic output, require increasing energy use? The answer is no. The article addresses that by arguing that it would imply energy became arbitrarily cheap, while being scarce and finite. That means someone
679.
by jbay808 5y ago
The rebuttal to this is presented in "Exponential Economist vs Finite Physicist": https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist... The argument boils down to that all economic activity,
680.
by jbay808 5y ago
Climate change is such a weird example, too. That's been a long term issue for years! Because we procrastinated and didn't prioritize long-term risks , it's now catching up to us and becoming a short-to-medium-term issue.
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by jbay808 5y ago
Do you ever encounter chargers that are AC-coupled (like, a transformer at the input), or do they generally all work fine from a DC supply?
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by jbay808 5y ago
It's not a static multiplier; I thought I was clear that it's very much a context-sensitive multiplier , which depends on risk tolerance (which you get, straightforwardly, from how far you integrate the tail of the distribution
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by jbay808 5y ago
Every time this is mentioned, it seems like there are vocal factions insisting that they treat the cables gently but they split and fray, and others insisting that they abuse them but they last forever. Anecdotally, I've actually seen
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by jbay808 5y ago
I don't know if it's unique to them, but Sony slow-charges up to 80-90% until about an hour before you set your alarm, then brings you up to 100% before you wake up. Seems to work well and the battery degradation I've seen, a
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by jbay808 5y ago
Unfortunately, that just masks the difficulty by using ambiguous terms that nobody knows if they agree on, and makes communication hard with 3rd party stakeholders who don't share your conventions. When marketing wants to know when som
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by jbay808 5y ago
> If your initial estimate really was a median then it would be an overestimate (i.e. the project ends up taking less time) in about 50% of cases It is, yes. And it frequently happens that you go to fix something, which seems really diff
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by jbay808 5y ago
Whatever number you come up with, treat it as the median of a long-tailed distribution (if it matters, the lognormal). To get the mean (expectation), multiply your estimate by about 1.6. To get the 95% confidence bound, multiply by 5. To
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by jbay808 5y ago
Unfortunately you can't; society has changed too, in many ways. Even some government services now require either an iOS or Android device to access (like vaccination records here in BC). A dumb phone does less for you now than it did i
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by jbay808 5y ago
Yes; it's caused several people to leave their empty houses in a permanent state of not-fit-for-inhabitance, which allows one to avoid paying the tax.
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by jbay808 5y ago
That's true, but area is not the only important metric. It only takes a thin sliver of highway cutting through a forest to segment an habitat, break migration paths, and strongly affect ecosystems. The article is mainly about green roo

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