valw

42 ms·

31.
by valw 6y ago
If you can't name one important outcome for your job, maybe it's time to change jobs. OTOH, if all you lack is directing your attention to these important outcomes, I'd recommend some rituals like meditation.
32.
by valw 6y ago
Hopefully, you're learning that new tool to achieve some worthwhile goal? For example, I recently had to learn a desktop programming toolkit in Python, which I found very tedious and uninteresting. But knowing that I was doing it to he
33.
by valw 6y ago
Might sound cheesy, but cultivating love and passion for what you do, especially targeting the tedious aspects of it. Most people tend to assume that they have a fixed amount of energy, motivation and ability for their work, and don't
34.
by valw 6y ago
WARNING: before anyone gets overenthusiastic, please observe that adopting this setup probably caused more harm to the environment than it prevented. Despite their romantic reputation, photovoltaics aren't green - they cost a lot of (u
35.
by valw 7y ago
> This one is interesting, again, will just get more expensive with time, but that one I never seen any project that allow to buy carbon credit for theses kinds of projects. And yet Gold Standard reports renewable energy projects are a h
36.
by valw 7y ago
I was just refuting the incorrect statement: "The only way to make tree-growing carbon negative* is to sequester the grown trees underground." It would indeed be foolish to believe we can halt climate change just by growing trees.
37.
by valw 7y ago
There's a common misconception that voluntary carbon market projects solely consist of planting trees - that's not the case. There are also forest protection projects, energy transition projects, and so on. ClimeWorks' projec
38.
by valw 7y ago
Examples: forest protection programs in low-wage countries, investing in renewable energy on high-carbon-intensity grids, distributing enhanced ovens to reduce wood consumption... Carbon offsetting is cheap currently, but won't alway
39.
by valw 7y ago
I don't think it's technically hard on their end - we totally have the science required to estimate how much their process captures.
40.
by valw 7y ago
What for? the harm done by excess CO2 is global, not local. CO2 is diffused across the whole world in a matter of months. Its climate-changing effect lasts much longer than that - decades to centuries.
41.
by valw 7y ago
Actually, you can buy carbon credits for less than that if you make bulk purchases. It's usually for preventing emissions from occurring rather than capturing carbon from the atmosphere. But we couldn't keep this price so low if w
42.
by valw 7y ago
That argument gets brought up again and again, and is just wrong. Can't people see the basic contradiction in that reasoning? Trees have always died! What matters with forest-based offsetting is the increase of forest biomass - the dea
43.
by valw 7y ago
Better: protect a forest. Most solutions to climate change are subtractive, not additive.
44.
by valw 7y ago
There's no 'first' - it's a battle we must fight on many fronts :) Destroying Bitcoin, and more generally digital sobriety, is only one of them!
45.
by valw 7y ago
If you want make your money work against climate change, I wouldn't recommend this service - it's simply not competitive compared to voluntary carbon markets, in which well-certified projects can offset a teqCO2 for less than 10 U
46.
by valw 7y ago
Frankly, this service is basically reinventing the wheel of volontary carbon markets, and doing so much, much less efficiently, and with fewer co-benefits. Well-certified projects can offset emissions at a price of about 10$/teqCO2. I
47.
by valw 7y ago
And assuming a person needs 0.5 gallons (2 liters) of drinkable water per day, we get that 1 square meter provides drinkable water for 15 to 30 people. Not bad! Of course, once we factor in cleaning uses of unsalted water, the picture is le
48.
by valw 7y ago
What I would call "quantitative environmental consciousness" - things like estimating energy consumption and carbon footprints. Topics like energy policy and CO2 emissions will become increasingly critical in our lives, and yet yo
49.
by valw 7y ago
I wrote a blog post making a similar point with Clojure as an example: https://vvvvalvalval.github.io/posts/2018-01-06-so-yeah-abou... The core ideas are timeless really, but the examples might be a bit more relatable
50.
by valw 7y ago
To the experienced data scientists / statisticians here: does this sort of regression analysis between the actual and predicted age seem legit to you? It seems very weird to me. From what I understand, the p-value tests the hypothesis
51.
by valw 7y ago
cough Datomic cough : https://www.infoq.com/presentations/Datomic-Database-Value/
52.
by valw 7y ago
Some programmers will ask you "why didn't you just" questions about something you've worked on for weeks, months or years, not because they think they're smarter than you, but because they never think about anything
53.
by valw 7y ago
Don't let the title fool you - 90% of the advice given in this book isn't specific to Clojure, and boy is it good advice. This book contains some of the deepest programming insights I've encountered, to be put on the same lev
54.
by valw 7y ago
Not going into this explanation (as I believe the qualities of languages can only be assessed through experience, not theoretical arguments), but I, and many others, have been through Scala with high hopes before finally settling for Clojur
55.
by valw 7y ago
Don't forget that the IPCC report concerns itself not only with preventing climate change, but also with adapting to it. What's more, changes in land management can be part of a solution for GHG sequestration, so it's not jus
56.
by valw 7y ago
A rational approach to climate change consists of accounting for GHG emissions where they are and cutting them where they are. Meat production and fossil energy are 2 large causes of GHG emissions, and so we must significantly reduce both.
57.
by valw 7y ago
That said, about 40% of arable land is currently being used to grow cattle fodder. So there's a big opportunity here: if we drastically reduce our meat consumption (especially beef and lamb), which is not a huge effort, we can signific
58.
by valw 7y ago
From experience: you don't have to dig into the Java world for using Clojure any more than you have to dig into the C world for using a Unix shell.
59.
by valw 7y ago
> I'm digging deep into analysis and combinatorics Thanks, could you provide some material recommendations? I'll share one: I've really, really enjoyed 'Graph Theory' by Bondy and Murty (2007 edition): https:&#x
60.
by valw 7y ago
I think our understanding of the good parts and bad parts of OOP has matured a lot. As a result, we tend to find the good parts of OOP in new languages (runtime polymorphism, 'metaprogramming' facilities, sometimes message passing

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