Silixon

You are the only person who will recognize and value your own overachievements. Prevailingly, others will view your efforts and either think nothing of them or wonder why anyone would go to such lengths.

If you're going to go above and beyond, you should seriously question why you are doing so. When in doubt, do it for yourself.

Plenty of smart people drop out of school. Even more smart people never get a chance to attend a school out of which to drop.

There's a code golf problem in there.

My money's on sed and /etc/network/interfaces.

Opportunity costs only exist wherein opportunities exist.

But the facts are less fun than my indignation!

They can always print fake labels, but they can't deliver fake products too many times. Customers will realize that fraud is happening. Again, there are also ways to make labels that cannot be faked, then attach those labels to tamper-proof packaging. It helps to realize that these labels and packaging exist so that the food items can be scanned and tracked as they enter and leave different facilities along the supply chain.

A blockchain is useful as a review database because you have guarantees that the reviews came from the claimed reviewer. This reduces fake claim fraud, which you might, for example, see in restaurant reviews. The reputation of the purchasing company is also at stake when they make claims that another company committed fraud. You want good guarantees that information came from the party it's ascribed to. It's reputation building in a scenario without mutual trust.

You don't take the data at face value. The goal of these systems is to reduce human intervention, not to remove the intervention. If a firm fakes data, you still have proof in the bad products and customer complaints. This lets you investigate and file complaints on the public blockchain. Think of it like a review of a company's supply chain reliability.

More advanced systems consider using third party, tamper proof scanning systems and packaging. Again, the costs of these systems are quite high, especially for food, but there are physical ways to reduce fraud if the data holds enough value.

As an example, food safety in the developing world. Food firms claim food is fresh and came from places where it did not come from. If you introduce an agricultural and food tagging system that logs food item IDs into a blockchain-based system, you can know when and where food was made and grown.

Note that this ignores the huge expense of measuring and storing all of this data, but I've seen some interest in these use cases in Asia, especially for staple crops like rice.

We're agreeing. My point is that we should care about a billion people in China and a billion people in the West and billions everywhere. You're right that free speech and dissent are how we make change. I'm questioning the Western perspective because it seems like free speech and dissent are reaching limits as well. Dissent as you like, it probably won't work, and you'll probably suffer consequences in the commercial sphere, albeit not formally in the political or national spheres. We should keep complaining until it gets better. I just wonder if the complaints ever get heard in good faith.

Replace "reeducation camps in Xinjiang" with "projects in Philadelphia" and "social credit system" with "private credit ratings" and you see that we're not as unlike as we thought. Yes, the scope and severity of the situation is more blatant in the Chinese example, but pointing fingers overlooks that we have similar problems brought about by similar causes in the West. Moreover, we already have these systems in place, and we treat them like oracles. How many poor in the West will never get a chance to be anything else because they get stuck in a system that only sees them as an unnecessary risk? I'm not claiming either system is good or bad. I'm saying both systems are similar and will have similar benefits and pitfalls.

I would ask Westerners to look long and hard at our financial credit systems and ask whether they allow dissent or whether we have simply accepted that dissent is a largely fruitless endeavor.

In the limit of infinite passing tests, do we recover the byte we sought? Or does it asymptote to some other quantity? I'm asking relative to a maximum entropy prior.

This is where we revive the debate about whether programming can be creative because it follows such rigid syntax rules. The unenlightened say it's not, and the obsessed say it is. How do we communicate across this gap?

Python? I find the documentation to be confusing and difficult to search. Many of the arguments to standard functions are not explicitly documented nor do they have obvious enough names for me to guess what they mean. As I was learning Python over the past few years, I inevitably turned to blog posts and Stack Overflow for clearer examples and more explicit descriptions of optional parameters.

I'd be curious to know what you like about the Python documentation because my experience has probably been different than yours.

There's a Pascal's wager in this situation. In the worst case, there's no cognitive effect from pollution, but you clean up the environment anyway. Even without the possibility of improving your ability to reason, there are many other obvious benefits to reducing pollution, quitting smoking, and many other major changes about which the effects have been debated and exaggerated over time.

Tuttle or Buttle, was it?

As a native English speaker whose first written language was Spanish and who has studied and spoken German, Italian, and Cantonese, it has always seemed to me that English is one of the easier common languages for conveying simple meaning in a small number of words. With a vocabulary of two or three hundred words you can reasonably speak Pidgin English to accomplish basic tasks like asking directions, ordering food, and buying daily items. With a romance language (let alone a character-based language), you realistically need about five to ten times more words to do the same thing. This is especially true for languages with formulaic conjugation and gendered nouns. My point is not that English is better or more flexible. My point is actually that English is often ambiguous and that new speakers can use that ambiguity to convey a lot of meaning compactly. However, that ambiguity also means that fluency is hard to come by because you need to understand context and custom well enough to choose the right meaning of words that could realistically have dozens of separate and contradictory meanings. Basically, the barrier to entry is low but the barrier to fluency is high and hard to overcome.

The theory of chemistry from the perspective of information theory. Since we can equate energy and information and since chemical reactions are largely governed by energy landscapes and (quantum) thermodynamics, we should be able to reformulate the energy theories into information theories. Sometimes a change of variables or parameters introduces a more convenient representation for discovering new phenomena.