jltsiren

9 ms·

181.
by jltsiren 6mo ago
Mathematics is notorious for exams like that. But if you look at the reasons why people fail to get a perfect grade at undergraduate level, it's almost always due to honest mistakes or because they didn't learn what they were supp
182.
by jltsiren 6mo ago
Hard problems introduce noise to the grades. A student who gets a hard problem right could be good or lucky. In order to grade the students properly, you need multiple problems of similar difficulty. If you have both ordinary and difficult
183.
by jltsiren 6mo ago
Greek identity is a 19th century creation. People of the East Roman Empire, as well as their descendants in the Ottoman Empire, considered themselves Romans. To them, Greeks (or Hellenes) were the pagans who lived in the region in the dista
184.
by jltsiren 6mo ago
Cyril and Methodius were Roman citizens, as was their father. Whatever ethnic roots they had was a secondary concern, much in the same way as it is in the US today.
185.
by jltsiren 6mo ago
That might work if airlines bought most of their fuel in the spot market. But major airlines tend to hedge their fuel prices, buying fuel that doesn't exist yet for a guaranteed price. If the shortage is severe enough, that fuel might
186.
by jltsiren 6mo ago
This branch of the discussion was about "European governments" not treating theft of dual use technology from ASML as a national security concern. Except when it also involved a breach of sanctions against Russia. Your perspective
187.
by jltsiren 6mo ago
I'm not sure how the "importance" of various countries is related to the discussion. Or what Russia or the US does. My point was that there are different perspectives on national security. If everything ASML (or another simil
188.
by jltsiren 6mo ago
You are generalizing too much. Europe is full of different electoral systems, and each system has its own dynamics that favor different kinds of people. Take Finland, for example, with open list proportional elections. The primary competito
189.
by jltsiren 6mo ago
It's an outcome of the expectation that people earn their living. People work less today than they used to, but a larger fraction of that work is paid. And it's a consequence of making divorce legal and socially acceptable. Tradit
190.
by jltsiren 6mo ago
That depends on climate. The longer and colder your winters are, the more you benefit from the reliable efficiency of a ground source. Ground source heat pumps have been the most common choice for heating new single-family homes in Finland
191.
by jltsiren 6mo ago
I work in bioinformatics. The numbers are typically large enough that you either have to think about numeric limits all the time if you use 32-bit integers (or bit-packed arrays), or you end up wasting (tens of) gigabytes with 64-bit intege
192.
by jltsiren 6mo ago
In some languages, the signed version is undefined behavior. You may get a negative value, INT_MAX / 2, or an error. Or the compiler may detect the undefined behavior, which according to the standard cannot happen, and mutilate your co
193.
by jltsiren 6mo ago
I find it the opposite. Unsigned integers are intuitive, while signed integers are unintuitive and cause a lot of tricky bugs. Especially in languages, where signed overflow is undefined behavior. It's pretty rare to have values that c
194.
by jltsiren 6mo ago
That's not an apples-to-apples comparison. Naval reactors look cheap, because the cost is for the reactor in the narrow sense. Other major costs, such as the containment building and countermeasures against natural disasters and terror
195.
by jltsiren 6mo ago
Craig Venter had his genome sequenced in 2007. It was the first individual human genome that was sequenced and released publicly. The human reference genome is ~70% from a man with African and European ancestry who lived somewhere around Bu
196.
by jltsiren 6mo ago
What we're seeing in Ukraine suggests that drones cannot win the war for you, but they are essential for not losing it. And what we saw in Iran was that US air superiority is no longer a given. While the US had conventional air superio
197.
by jltsiren 6mo ago
It's a more diverse industry with many companies and many types of jobs. If you don't like one job, you can quit and try another. Which people tend to do multiple times in their careers. Software industry has always been plagued b
198.
by jltsiren 6mo ago
Uncertain long-term career prospects that depend on a single employer. If you pay enough to make long-term prospects irrelevant, you may end up attracting the wrong kind of people. People who can't be trained do the job well enough, or
199.
by jltsiren 6mo ago
I think there is enough evidence that millennials had a slower start than their parents. They were worse off by many important metrics (home ownership in particular) in their 20s, but they've largely caught up by 40. Younger generation
200.
by jltsiren 6mo ago
If you want to buy a small house, you often can't. The rate of new construction has been low for a couple of decades, typically at or below 1% of the housing stock. Because people's preferences change over time, older homes are mo
201.
by jltsiren 6mo ago
Only in a market with perfect information. With imperfect information, the market rate is an estimate of the expected or typical rate for a similar good. Because everyone has access to a different subset of the information, everyone's
202.
by jltsiren 6mo ago
90% of revenue, not funding. Most of it is revenue from the businesses they run, and most of that goes to ordinary business expenses. In any case, it's just an arrangement that has worked for the IRGC so far. If it stops working, the r
203.
by jltsiren 6mo ago
Ideological commitment and personal beliefs are orthogonal, much in the same way as religion and personal faith are orthogonal. IRGC members are ideologically committed, because they have chosen to serve the regime. They are committed, beca
204.
by jltsiren 6mo ago
Destroying the regime is much easier than destroying the IRGC. The former requires killing enough key people and destroying enough key infrastructure to make the regime unable to govern and take initiative. The latter requires killing most
205.
by jltsiren 6mo ago
If the goal is to overthrow the regime by force, you need boots on the ground. The basic approach might be something like the Iraq war but bigger, and with an actual plan for the aftermath. And it might end up being the biggest (or at least
206.
by jltsiren 6mo ago
The "happiness" in the World Happiness Report is an imperfect translation for a Bhutanese concept. Most discussions about it go astray when people assume that the report is supposed to measure the translated concept. Roughly speak
207.
by jltsiren 6mo ago
The palantiri were created by Fëanor. The kinslayer whose pride, rage, and desire for vengeance drove most of his people to their doom. The potential to corrupt was always present in them. In the LotR, Aragorn bends a palantir to his will a
208.
by jltsiren 6mo ago
The banality of evil is a well-known idea. That evil is often done by people who are just doing their jobs and see themselves as decent people. Words are cheap, thoughts are cheap, and voting is cheap. A full-time job, on the other hand, is
209.
by jltsiren 6mo ago
You should not adjust for inflation or even for wages, but for cost of employment. The way health insurance works in the US makes public sector jobs with average wages and good benefits expensive to the employer.
210.
by jltsiren 6mo ago
It depends on the kind of work you do. I'm in the academia, and Claude's performance in my field could be described as a very fast junior grad student. When I use Claude Code, I typically spend a few hours figuring out what needs

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