mbivert

8 ms·

31.
by mbivert 2y ago
I think you're missing the point. Slavery is an old thing[0]. Even assuming the death rates are correct, one can't honestly conclude that what happened in the West in the past 500 years is similar to what happened, say, in Antiqui
32.
by mbivert 2y ago
I meant in general: I'd expect moderately happy slaves to perform better, and the cost of keeping them moderately happy lower than acquiring new slaves over and over; creating slaves has a cost. Accurately answering your question requi
33.
by mbivert 2y ago
At least when defining "slavery" as "restricting people to dispose freely of their time, space (or goods…)", and when considering the way most people on Earth are employed today, yes. Of course, if we define "slaver
34.
by mbivert 2y ago
Most contemporary people can't freely dispose of their time. Their ability to move in space is restricted likewise. Aren't they essentially [part-time] slaves? That is, by comparison with people who can dispose of themselves freel
35.
by mbivert 2y ago
There are so many ways to practically apply Plato. The simplicity of his elocution, his use of systematic pauses when communicating — that's a common advice given to contemporary speakers — the relevancy of the cycle of political syste
36.
by mbivert 2y ago
Maybe some aspects of the Plan9 UI? (rio/9term, plumber; acme as well). You should be able to get this to work on Unix with plan9port.
37.
by mbivert 2y ago
Has been roughly doing the job since the 70s (?): $ du -a | grep blbl
38.
by mbivert 2y ago
I didn't knew much about Scientism; the wikipedia page already contains quite a few heavy critics. Its very definition feels inconsistent: > Scientism is the belief that science and the scientific method are the best or only way to
39.
by mbivert 2y ago
This observable resistance to change seems to stem from firm irrational beliefs: it's amusing how structurally close to an (institutionalized) religion institutionalized science is. Like, how most people actually believe in science:
40.
by mbivert 2y ago
Nibs / dip-pens ;-) It's only half a joke: having to regularly dip the pen in ink, be mindful of how much ink you have, having to swiftly wipe it once in a while to avoid drying ink (& flow issues), forces to slow down & t
41.
by mbivert 2y ago
Yes, that's kinda my point: Aristotle's physics worked well until it failed. Newton's worked well until it failed. General relativity works well, but some people look for where it might fail, so as to help reconcile it with Q
42.
by mbivert 2y ago
> There is no reasonable disbelief in evolution. Again, as I've said, it's a reasonable theory . Using the word "theory" isn't about casting doubt, it's purely about intellectual honesty, at least as far as
43.
by mbivert 2y ago
It's difficult to say: I think shortly after this "incident", I started doing more maths/physics on my free time, which must have help this boost to persist. Thinking about it, this recalls me of a Leonardo quote (pertai
44.
by mbivert 2y ago
The problem is, conflating theories (beliefs really) with truth is one of the things reproached to past religious people. There's no shame in saying: "we don't know for sure, but this is reasonable so far". If we don&#x2
45.
by mbivert 2y ago
> Changing into new species is just a longer time frame of more an more adaptations Strictly speaking, this is a theory , however reasonable. We know from history that life can be surprising, hence, from a truth point of view, it's
46.
by mbivert 2y ago
It may be anecdotal, but I once involuntarily trained my memory by trying to recall what I've been doing each day. After a few weeks, my memory noticeably improved. That's to say, the task may feel insurmontable at first, but if y
47.
by mbivert 2y ago
I'm convinced slowing feeding students, and having them produce good low-level codebase(s) (e.g. OSs, compilers) is a great Way to "holistically" teach them CS, much better than what's happening usually. "C is a raz
48.
by mbivert 2y ago
> I would love to see a deep dive on what features / architectural paradigms the Golang runtime shares with Plan9. Has anything like that been written? If it has, then it's most likely available on https://cat-v.org&
49.
by mbivert 2y ago
> Environmentalists were successful in opposing nuclear construction because it was expensive and unprofitable As far as Europe is concerned, there seems to have been various political move and lobbying to affect energy independence (e.g
50.
by mbivert 2y ago
> In many spiritual circles, luck has nothing to do with it, but inevitability does. What do you mean exactly? Say, the notion of karma in Eastern religions is a way to explain at least some amount of what is commonly dubbed "luck&q
51.
by mbivert 2y ago
> So what's your proposed solution? To take the time to study the root causes of obesity more closely, and treat the genuine causes, instead of slapping medicine on top of it, for an undetermined period of time to millions of peo
52.
by mbivert 2y ago
I'm not sure the selling point is similarity with markdown, but rather, to improve, or modernize LaTeX/TeX-the-language/s: TeX is really archaic: if you're curious, there's a series of articles by overleaf[0] deta
53.
by mbivert 2y ago
> If you find yourself in a room that is on fire, The immediacy of the danger makes things incomparable. > "Too good to be true" is also just an aphorism, not a law of nature. It's not "too good to be true". I
54.
by mbivert 2y ago
Perhaps I must emphasize that my point is subtly different from the parent's: whether those people are genuine or not fundamentally is irrelevant: a miracle drug with essentially no drawbacks is a fairy tale. It's almost certainly
55.
by mbivert 2y ago
Sure, there may be honest and enthusiastic people. But their input would be essentially that of an ad: a product with 100% gain and 0% loss? That's never been observed, never; there's always a trade-off. A less emotionally groun
56.
by mbivert 2y ago
The little I know about contemporary mosaic[0] is about as busy. Perhaps even more, as we now have wider color palettes. Compared to contemporary architecture, yes, I'd agree though. But it's on par with contemporary fine-arts. [0
57.
by mbivert 2y ago
Hm, what the post's author says is reasonable on its own, but I'm confident Kernighan's intents were really about avoiding clever code when simple, dumb code does the job. Or, as Rob Pike[0] puts it: > Rule 3. Fancy algori
58.
by mbivert 2y ago
Well, λ-terms are defined by the rules of the λ-calculus[0], or variants of it, while mathematical functions have their own, distinct definition[1]. Essentially, the axioms used to define either are fundamentally different. Not all mathemat
59.
by mbivert 2y ago
You can think of a LFS as training before actually tackling an original distribution: distributions are complex, even following the steps of a LFS won't necessarily yield a working system (lots of room for mistakes). Or, as a base to b
60.
by mbivert 2y ago
One benefit could be to emphasize the distinction between regular mathematical functions (e.g. x ↦ x+1) and λ-terms (e.g. λx. x+1): strictly speaking, those are different kind of objects.

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