andrepd

Eh I don't think so. Commutes are as clean and peaceful as they can be in the Netherlands or Switzerland and people are no less buried in their phones with noise-cancelling earbuds on.

That's a bold assertion.

Never mind that you know what's also not "sustainable", if the definition means "costs > revenues"? Automobile roads :)

On the other hand, no charges mean you can get rid of a lot of cruft: no tickets, no gates/turnstiles, no machines, no payments, no paperwork thereof, no ticket inspectors, etc etc. So in fact having 0 charge is unequivocally better than having a residual charge.

In other words: charge price = cost, or don't charge at all and get funded by public revenue.

Note that 128€ is the monthly price for 100% discount, but 6€ is the monthly price for 40% discount. It brings the prices of rail travel in the Netherlands from "fucking ludicrous" to just "reasonably expensive".

Absolutely incredible writing! Loved every word.

Regarding (1), that's on your keyboard, which you can choose. Maybe you can give Futo a try? https://keyboard.futo.org/

That's total bullshit. Middle class families in 1976 did NOT live in smaller houses than today, and certainly did NOT eat "poverty meals"... What on earth are you even talking about.

Especially silly that you mention housing because if there's one thing that is absolutely fucked for the middle class of the 2020s is housing.

Is there a summary of price increases?

I disagree. When you are absolutely sure that God itself is on your side, then there is no atrocity to big to commit. I feel that religious zeal has led to some of the worst catastrophes in human history. I would put para-religious zeal in that category too, like dogmatic forms of communism.

It was also behind unspeakable acts of massive cultural destruction, so there's that.

He should ask AI to tell him that #aaa text on #eee background is not acceptable.

> Yet somehow we decide that the benefits outweigh the risks.

More like malicious lobbying and incompetence made it impossible in many places to use any other form of transportation, despite there being safer, faster, cheaper, and healthier ways to move around. Which come to think if it makes this a rather nice analogy for the current situation... :)

LLMs routinely hallucinate sources. I guess that's why some people feel that way.

I had to re-read that twice, some how my eyes slipped over this part: I thought you were saying "in the early 2000s in California schools you'd get marked down". Which yeah of course, lazy kids would copy-paste Wikipedia (with the formatting sometimes, lol) but you have to teach them that Wikipedia is an encyclopedia and not a source, and yeah looking at the citations in brackets is what you should do.

But no you were talking about universities... The concept of citing Wikipedia in university is wild x)

I know that "French strikes" and "French setting fire to things" is a popular American trope, but things really don't work like that. If that were the case France would be a much better place than other European countries, and it really is not.

> But the sickening aspect of cable news is the way the presenters talk.

"Só para as pessoas perceberem lá em casa" is the standard phrase TV pundits use back in $home_country. Translates to something like "just so that you there sitting at home can understand". It's incredibly condescending, truly the gall of these mfs with zero credentials and maximal confidence, speaking assertively about every single topic always with the tone that implies everybody else is a moron.

I haven't watched actual TV for many years so this passes me by except on occasion, but when I see that there are people that watch hours of this garbage every day, part in the TV and part regurgitated on social media... By god it explains many things rotten with the world.

The + trick is useless to protect you, obviously. Instead, use a a service like simplelogin to create unique emails for every place you sign in.

It's annoying because I would definitely like for some internet-enabled functionality, such as youtube. I would also like to connect it to the LAN and not to the internet for other things, such as streaming from my NAS...

The only hit I get for "non-crime cybersecurity incident" is this very thread. Would you care to elaborate what you mean?

> Despite many flaws, the US has some damn good rights for its citizens

The absolute gall of saying this, on this point in in particular, with all that has happened over the past 1.5 years in the US... Gobsmacked

AI gives us some bad things but it's really outweighed by the good things. One one hand we have very rapid deterioration of our children's mental capacities yes, but on the other hand we have also made the internet into an unnavigable mound of slop produced by, and for consumption of, bots.

> the military hegemony and political influence over allies and adversaries that the F-35 program provides

Hilarious to say this, given the very public and very significant failures of US foreign policy these past couple decades, not least of all the current special military operation.

Thanks, but if wanted to ask chatgpt we would

They will drag the rest with it.

Cutting SNP500 from you etf portfolio seems the sensible choice now. On the other hand, things haven't been sensible for over a decade, and there's still no sign the insanity will stop. The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent...

There is a very prominent "show always / show on demand / disable completely" button, which you can choose and is respected indefinitely from that point on. That's orders of magnitude better than anything else, and really the best you can do short of refusing to use any AI at all.

Ahahaha, I'm sorry but that's just a ridiculous thing to say. "The IEEE floats do not have any serious design issue. They are much better than any other floating-point formats that have ever been used". Really?? x)))

It's obvious that IEEE floats have several issues: low precision, excessive dynamic range, underflow to 0 causing infinite loss of precision (ditto for overflow), denormals, non-portability, lack of a total order, redundancy of NaN bit patterns, poor scaling to low precision... I can go on! Whether you regard those as relevant or as unimportant, or perhaps as unavoidable, is your opinion. But they do exist!

To re-iterate: claiming that IEEE floats are superior to any existing or proposed alternative is a claim you can attempt to make, although I disagree with it. But claiming "IEEE floats do not have any problems whatsoever" is simply not a good-faith conversation...

> In scientific and technical computations, a constant relative error over the entire range of the numbers is optimal.

What do you possibly mean by "optimal"? For instance, inference on a neural network using a 16-bit (or even 8-bit!) posit type tailored to the distribution of the weights in that neural network can yield better results than with 32-bit floats! Obviously floats are not "optimal" in any possible conceivable situation (neither are posits "more optimal" than floats in any conceivable situation).

Even in "traditional" HPC applications, like weather modelling, experiments have shown 16-bit posits to be acceptable replacements for 32 or even 64-bit computations.

> Like I have said, for technical/scientific computing posits are much inferior to FP64

Repeating something does not make it true :) Like I have said, 32 and 16-bit posits can replace 64 and 32-bit floats in many important applications (obviously not all). HPC and ML workloads are largely memory-bound nowadays; halving the number of bits can yield a doubling of performance, roughly speaking.

> it is pretty certain that 64-bit or bigger posits will always be inferior to IEEE floating-point numbers.

> The problem is that while the IEEE floating-point numbers are either optimal or at least acceptable in almost all applications, the fact that posits might be better only in certain special applications

You assert this repeatedly as dogma, without proof x) I don't get it, do you have a dog in this race somehow? Bizarre.

In fact, the simplest way to see that this is wrong is to consider a "posit"-like format with no regime bits, but with otherwise the same structure: twos-complement representation, no underflow or overflow, deterministic rounding, a quire. This format is essentially an improved version of an IEEE float, without most of its warts, but still a constant relative error (actually constant, unlike IEEE with its subnormals!), similar hardware encode/decode implementations, etc.

Yes, politics was always about controlling power, be it military, economic, or other.

> They provided a better and more cash efficient solution for passengers. That is enough.

They burned half a billion dollars a month of VC money at their peak to undercut taxis across the world; in quainter times this used to be called "dumping", now it's just the standard way of doing business. All the while basically flaunting the law with their whole "we're just a platform connecting people who happen to drive a car with people who happen to want to go some place, it's totally not a taxi guys". No regulations, no expensive licenses or professional certifications, no need even for a minimum wage or basic social security or insurance or any kind of protection. Amazing!

Essentially the same in spirit as Airbnb, only this latter had far more destructive consequences than screwing over taxi drivers.

It's one of several issues with the design of IEEE floats, unfortunately. I wish we could start thinking more seriously about a new design, to complement if not replace IEEE in the long term. Posits are an example https://github.com/andrepd/posit-rust