davidgay

Or, in another world, the official US CPI definition (https://www.bls.gov/cpi/) is 16.3% based on energy prices.

I strongly suspect this definition strongly correlates with what most people call inflation (my fuel bill went up! and strangely, not heading to work wasn't really an option).

I could've sworn that malpractice insurance cost is viewed as one of the driver's of high health care costs, and that it's expensive precisely because medical lawsuit payouts are large...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r... has the US at 7th highest out of 22 countries (for which this data is available) for the most accidents per km driven.

So it's clearly not that hard to be safer than the mean human driver in the USA. 3 of the 22 countries manage to have less than half the US rate.

I'll very happily (as a significant benefactor) take this century's medicine over the last. And the one or two centuries before that aren't even worth starting to think about. So something must be working wioth mainstream medicinal research.

Editing is fine as long as you keep the signed original for validation purposes.

> Children are part of hobbies.

That is a weird (modern?) delusion. Without children, our species disappears in <100 years. And the last of those years would be painful for those still alive.

Those who are having and raising children are the ones doing the most for the next generation.

Not killing someone when one can (in a not them or me situation) is not “good will”, it’s one of the most basic ethical principles. I’m surprised you need to ask this question.

I guess you view what would be the worst crime against humanity ever to be committed (and yes, I really do mean to include all the previous ones in that statement) to be an acceptable answer to “oh, we have no more smart bombs, let’s just kill everyone in this country”?

Not committing a crime against humanity is not “good will”.

> Like, of course you can prevent all memory safety errors by using a garbage collector. That has been known since the 90s.

No, it's been known since GC was invented.

> In fact, there was a good two decades after Java released where all the research on memory safety just stopped, because the standard answer became "use a GC".

Having done all of my research on memory safety after Java was released, I find this statement a little exaggerated... (e.g., https://barnowl.org/research/pubs/98-pldi-regions.pdf, https://barnowl.org/research/pubs/07-hotos-linux.pdf)

For homework: if you make homework results not count towards the final grade, then there's no reason to use an LLM - the point then just becomes to have practice problems and feedback on how well you are doing.

This is what my university (EPFL) was doing ~40 years ago. And yes, some students didn't bother with the homework, and mostly paid the price at the final exam...

The open source policy described above was in place 16 years ago (I went through it to continue working on some existing projects), and I doubt it was very new then.

You can proportionally reduce the time in the role;) Though the most senior people wouldn't be there long...

There's about 500k kids in California each year. The 100th smartest is undoubtedly smarter than you or me.

This is an extremely simplistic view. For instance, the US moves more of its freight (by percentage) than all western European countries except Switzerland: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_rail_usag...

Not to mention India without the spicy peppers...

I don't think the other governments that collapsed in 1989 in the face of public protest could be honestly described as "relatively liberal".

> Only as a last resort. If possible, governments, just like any other organizations, should have absolutely no say about anyone’s identity.

An unusual position, as historically governments have provided birth and death registries [0], passports, identity cards, etc, etc

[0]: or, earlier, in the West at least, the church

No, this is bunk. App Engine and GCE, the earliest components of GCP predate Kubernetes.

[I've been there for nearly all the relevant time]

Not intrinsically or commonly deadly. https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/conditions-and-diseas... says "1 in 10 people will develop a pituitary adenoma in their lifetime" - pituitary adenomas is the more general class of these benign tumors, as the pituitary gland produces multiple hormones.

I think https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Pasteur wins this one, though.

> Even unemployment, which is your top line, seems... fine?

The unemployment one is interesting because if you look at that graph, the universal pre-2022 pattern is basically a spike of unemployment during recessions followed by a gradual drop.

The recent pattern is a gradual increase.

I'm not a big fan of "numerical only / shape of graphs" analyses, but this does seem strange. Of course, the 2020 Covid spike is also unusual, so...

The bit about "Canon, Sony, and Nikon may have replaced Kodak for professionals" was entertainingly silly. AFAICT, Kodak cameras were never used by a significant fraction of professional photographers? (maybe pre-WW2?)

Film is a different matter of course.

Except it cannot decide all Horn clauses.

> In my experience, when one begins to program in Prolog, they pepper their code with cuts to try and stop unwanted bactracking, which can often be avoided by understanding why Prolog is backtracking in the first place.

This gets to the heart of my problem with Prolog: it's sold as if it's logic programming - just write your first-order predicate logic and we'll solve it. But then to actually use it you have to understand how it's executed - "understanding why Prolog is backtracking in the first place".

At that point, I would just prefer a regular imperative programming language, where understanding how it's executed is really straightforward, combined with some nice unification library and maybe a backtracking library that I can use explicitly when they are the appropriate tools.

> renewal mechanisms

Conveniently, for individual sports like tennis there's a guaranteed renewal mechanism - the near-term likelihood of 50 year old tennis champions is low, and that of 80 year old champions is not really worth discussing.

And then there's Bulgarian, with no cases and definite articles, to throw that scale off...

> Quite the opposite. The benefits of rent control grow the longer you are in the same apartment without moving as the difference between what the tenant pays and the

You're assuming a form of rent control where new tenants pay market rate. That's not the only form, e.g., Berkeley's rent control used to continue "forever", until California forbade that (Costa Hawkins act in 1995).

The GRE vocabulary is actually based on French, Latin and Greek, not English. Much less rare and unusual once you realise that.

> Rent control in particular is an economic basket case policy

Switzerland has had rent control for a long time, and seems to have (rather successfully) avoided this economic basket case fate.

> > History shows people are also very resilient at moving on from trauma

> i’m extremely skeptical that people move on

Historically, essentially everyone who lived long enough to have children had some of those children die [1]. So either:

- that wasn't traumatic

- they managed to deal with that trauma

- or they didn't move on, and everyone was somewhat traumatised

You can take your choice from the above, but on the whole this was the normal state of affairs for most of human history and prehistory.

[1]: from https://acoup.blog/2025/07/18/collections-life-work-death-an..., 50% of children died by age ~5