sn41

13 ms·

91.
by sn41 3y ago
Thank you for this information. I just find it amusing that instead of calling it "Big Brother telescreen" just calling it "Smart TV" made everyone comfortable with the technology : we are all smart, right? As they say:
92.
by sn41 3y ago
I am a fan of fountain pens, but do not have a lot of cash to splurge on experimentation. This detailed comment is a great resource.
93.
by sn41 3y ago
Thank you for a delightful term - churnalism : I had never heard that before!!
94.
by sn41 3y ago
Were you around when Internet 2.0 was supposed to bring democracy all over the world? It has brought a slew of right wing populists. We need to stop viewing technology as neutral, and "oh it will all turn out nice, like the railways di
95.
by sn41 3y ago
> research-only the elite Not really. This is true only for faculty in research institutes like IHES in France, or IAS in USA. In normal universities, both research-only faculty and teaching-only faculty are considered below the "te
96.
by sn41 3y ago
Methods from Numerical Linear Algebra are at the heart of a lot of dimensionality reduction techniques. Moreover, Nick Higham is one of the most prominent numerical analysts today. He spends a lot of time making clear expositions of arcane
97.
by sn41 3y ago
Yes, but aren't there more viable options? Like: a transition page that just waits for 5 seconds before loading. Then I don't have to, as an Asian, wonder how American school buses look like when I "click on all squares that
98.
by sn41 3y ago
If you like long movies, I highly recommend Sergei Bondarchuk's film of Tolstoy's "War and Peace" - IIRC, more than 7 hours long. I have never seen such dedication to the art of moviemaking. Sergei Bondarchuk also plays,
99.
by sn41 3y ago
Everything every Kenyan ever writes is boring? Don't equate being (comparatively) poor with being stupid.
100.
by sn41 3y ago
I think it is better to use candlesticks for this kind of data. This makes it easier to detect when humans start to have an upper hand, so that we can strike back decisively with our secret weapon - natural stupidity.
101.
by sn41 3y ago
Yes... like hygge is the secret to happiness. (Or was it haggis?) /s Also, there is ikigai. And sisu. I guess the real secret to happiness is socialized medicine, which kind of takes away some of the non-hyggeikigaisisu nature of exist
102.
by sn41 3y ago
Sounds like "The Garden" of Epicurus, a community of like-minded individuals who lived outside the city walls [1]: [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epicurus#Teaching_career
103.
by sn41 3y ago
A related question: can anyone provide a link to what the K-12 syllabus of the former Eastern bloc actually was? Certainly USSR and Hungary must have had impressive curricula. I had a Croatian friend who said that his basic skills in algori
104.
by sn41 3y ago
I guess smoke signals, semaphores, hand gestures, and communicating via silly walks is not covered by the SEC. Also, white handkerchief out at 9 am means meet me at the pub tonight? Only half-joking. I really wish I knew how this works.
105.
by sn41 4y ago
A little known fact of history: there was an Indian kingdom, Travancore, which defeated the Dutch in a naval battle in 1741 [1]. (This might be the only major naval victory of an Asian kingdom over European navies until the Russo-Japanese w
106.
by sn41 4y ago
Wow! Just yesterday I was reading about non-linear effects related to the Cardiac rhythm, where Purkinje fibers play a role: [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purkinje_fibers
107.
by sn41 4y ago
Some of the emphasis on intent, to give freedom to subordinates to contradict the commander on tactics so long as the larger goal is attained, comes from the legendary Prussian general von Moltke [1]. His famous saying is that "No plan
108.
by sn41 4y ago
In an interview, Jacob Ziv said that it was the uncomputability of Kolmogorov complexity that forced him to think about a different way to define the complexity of a single finite string : this is what led to Lempel-Ziv complexity in 1976,
109.
by sn41 4y ago
I parse it as: Yesterday, it was a few days ago. Today, it was many days ago :)
110.
by sn41 4y ago
Socrates did not originate the word, his usage is the most famous we have historically available. The Greeks believed in good spirits helping people ("Eudaemon") and evil spirits for darker purposes ("cacodaemon")[1]. It
111.
by sn41 4y ago
I once had to generate about 170K+ pdf files from latex. Took a while (~5 hours) on a desktop, so had to get a server to do it and ran pdflatex with gnu parallel. The layout was a pain, since some strings in the databases were quite long. T
112.
by sn41 4y ago
Maybe the good idea needs to stop being perpetrated.
113.
by sn41 4y ago
> I can imagine being stuck out in nowhere on a job site with some mission to do and being told, no, I have to stop working, and not being pleased about it. Some things make sense to just hurry up and get done with. This is exactly as in
114.
by sn41 4y ago
Somewhat related: I personally found Korzybski's "General Semantics" approach to be useful when preventing myself from making unsafe generalizations - for example, "This guy is always on a rant about something". Th
115.
by sn41 4y ago
Actually I am a bit on the fence with the SVB situation. I think they suffered from bad timing and an excessively cautious strategy. To be fair to them: one week back, given the asset allocation of SVB, how many of us could have predicted a
116.
by sn41 4y ago
OK. Here's a usecase where I found emacs to be wonderful. I had to email the grades, together with totals, and class averages to many students in a class. I tried fiddling with Excel and Google spreadsheets and scripted mail merges. Th
117.
by sn41 4y ago
It's a delight to see smaller humans feel so happy around the bed!
118.
by sn41 4y ago
I remember this article when it appeared. I did not like the tone of the whole experiment. The most offensive thing to me was the title in the Washington Post: It was titled, "Pearls before breakfast". Anyone familiar with Matthew
119.
by sn41 4y ago
One of the contributors to Emacspeak is also blind: T. V. Raman. He won an ACM distinguished doctoral dissertation award for his work: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T._V._Raman
120.
by sn41 4y ago
Thank you for these nice intuitions, especially the negative examples. I liked the second point.

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