cabalamat

> I liked buying the blu ray because my internet speed isn't great

This is mostly an issue when streaming, which I prefer not to do for that reason. When I've had slow connections, torrenting a movie has generally been fine as I just let it run overnight.

If everyone's basic needs are met, they won't be so discontented and thus easily be swayed by destabilising propaganda.

Will there be a TypeScript version?

> The issue is that it's too easy to forgo all of that and scroll through tiktok for 12+ hours a day

That's because social media is deliberately designed to be addictive. Zuckerberg et al know this, but don't care, because all they care about is their proftis.

> Medication CAN lead to a much better quality of life for many people.

Yes, it can. But if the underlying issue is that society and social structures are fucked up, and that's what's making people depressed, then a proper cure has to involve fixing society.

Heathcare theatre.

> If there was a good time to consider full lockdown, it was at the beginning of the pandemic when little information about it was known.

Agreed. A really aggressive lockdown right at the start would have made sense.

> Based on what?

There was a study in the UK from the summer of last year that said the majority of unvaxxed people had antibodies to it. (Sorry, don't have the URL)

Omicron is more transmissible, so if most had been infected then, an ever higher proportion will have been infected now.

> a temporary closure to “flatten the curve”. I had flashbacks to 2020.

Realistically, covid is here for the forseeable future.

It's a fast-mutating pathogen (which I understand is typical of respiratory infections) and since about half of humans worldwide are vaccinated and half aren't, in a perfect environment to evolve resistance to vaccines (and the immune systems defences generally).

If covid were a worse infection, this would be really serious. But it isn't. It rarely kills people without pre-existing conditions (the biggest of which is old age). It's also getting less virulent: e.g. in the UK omicron has led to a big increase in infections, but not in deaths[1].

Scott Alexander calculated that it takes 52 person-months of lockdown to save one person-month of life[2]. This suggests to me that if lockdowns reduce quality of life by at least 2%, they are QALY-negative.

My conclusion from all this is that I don't think lockdowns should be compulsory. If people think the threat to themselves or family members is severe, by all means they can lockdown; but expecting everyone else to is wrong as lockdowns reduce overall utility.

Regarding schools, in this as in a lot of things vouchers would be a good system, then people who don't like how their state schools are run can walk away and take their kid's education money with them.

1: see https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/uk/

2: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/lockdown-effectiveness...

Why does it need a URL? I should be able to search on e.g. "banana cake" and get banana cake recipes.

> Otherwise people won't know what you're talking about.

That's a good point!

> Unit tests should be small, specific enough tests that they should not ever require using the database.

What if the code you're testing is an ORM, or something else that intrinsically implies a database?

It seems to me that tests that're good enough that they'll catch a decent proportion of errors would involve a database here.

Of course, you might designate such tests "integration tests" rather than "unit tests", but I think the important thing about tests is not what you call them, it's whether they catch bugs.

> suddenly the correctness of the test becomes dependent on the order tests are run in preventing you from running subsets

I once write a test library where you could annotate tests with TestA requires TestB which in turn requires TestC, and it automatically runs all the requirements for each test.

This seemed to work quite nicely.

> tests need to be as maintainable as the code itself.

Yes, if not more so. Tests that are a hassle to use won't get used, and so are useless.

> Celestial is impractical for modern weapons.

My understanding is ICBMs use it. It could be used by UAVs to get within a few miles of the target, and then use visual / IR / radar to to get to a more precise location.

Would it be possible to have something like this that works by writing to a PROM? That would make it immutable at the hardware level.

Certainly GPS is, but I don't see how inertial or celestial are.

> Quantum accelerometers theoretically enable hyper-accurate guidance systems immune to external jamming

Can one jam normal accelerometers? I don't see how.

Will there be a Linux version?

For example, all 3 of the non-English parts of the UK have separatist movements that are big enough they have MPs elected.

In general, the more that someone is trying to push the point of view that something is true, the more likely it is to be false.

Chargebacks are a thing in the UK, and the only time I've ever gone to my credit card company with one they resolved the issue properly.

> dplyr

Ths s lbrry whs nm nds mr vwls. F m tlkng t smn, hw m sppsd t prnc t?

Have you actually tried this?

What does 'fby' mean?

VB was good at some things (e.g. UI design) and bad at others (e.g. doing complex computation).

Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people":

First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration.

Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc.

-- https://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html

> it's objective will shift to the survival of the organization itself when the original (legitimate) objective is made irrelevant by internal or external factors

Yes, and also the furtherance of the careers of the top people.

> I've made a few video game pages where auto-playing MP4s were essential at giving the right message

No. What you say is simply factually inaccurate. I've looked at the web page in your URL and it would be much better without distracting auto-playing video.

The video should play then the user wants it to play. Is that really so hard to understand?

But Dave can only use the capability if he has Bob's private key. That's why we need keys.

> once you send an attenuated capability to someone else, you've lost it

I'm not sure what you mean here.

For example, if Alice sends a token to Bob giving Bob a capability, Alice can sign it with her private key and Bob's public key, such that if Bob (or anyone else) wants to use that capability, they have to have Bob's private key to do so.