debok

You might find this shocking, but in many parts of the world "nice computers on fast internet" is kind of a high-end luxury right now.

I think both metrics have their value. g/kwh gives you nice overview at how clean the energy is, and there is value in optimising that figure.

The problem with measuring CO2 per person is that it is heavily influenced by the wealth level of the country's population. Poor counties have very low CO2 emissions, but people in wealthy countries wouldn't want to trade their living standards for those of a poor country. That would arguably be worse than climate change in the first place.

So optimising for CO2 g/kwh allows us to reduce our emissions without reducing our quality of living. Which is great.

That being said, I agree that running escalators at night is a terrible waste of energy.

I don't think there is anything wrong with spending money to make buildings look beautiful. Beauty is important, and we often overlook the impact that beauty has on our psyche.

I have the same experience with the test I give my back-end devs. ChatGPT can't even begin to decode an encoded string if you don't tell it which encoding was used.

ChatGPT is great at some well defined, already solved problems. But once you get to the messy real world, the wheels come off.

My wife likes the color blue. So the rocks on the engagement ring I got her has a mix of Topaz and Sapphire.

Also, it only cost about 25% of my salary at that time. Spending 200% monthly salary on a ring makes absolutely no sense.

I wonder if they are going to do one for 2023?

I disagree. It lends perspective if you know that other people made it through worse times. Especially if those other people are your family or, in this case, ancestors. It makes your own problems and challenges look smaller, which lends you courage (for lack of a better word) to tackle your own challenges.

* I can't find a better English word for the Afrikaans "moed" which refers to not only courage, but something a little bit bigger and more holistic than courage.

> So then instead of saying avoid “processed foods” (which means nothing and everything), name the ingredients and the processes that are bad.

Yeah sure, but that is quite a lot of effort. And you are going to end up avoiding most processed foods anyway. Especially if you are the sort who distrusts artificial sweeteners and preservatives. So then it is just easier to say "avoid processed foods" than to say "avoid foods that contain [...insert a long list of ingredients here]"

I don't really understand what "prayer book" means in this instance.

In my understanding a prayer book can refer to either (1) a notebook specifically used to list things to pray for, or (2) a book with liturgical(formal) prayers for use at certain times end events.

The text quoted in the article seems to detailed for (1) and too specific for (2). Maybe I'm looking at this from a too Christian perspective? Do prayer books have a different meaning in Judaism?

> it much different than them processing it in a factory or bakery for you.

The difference is that bakeries etc. tend to add a lot of sugars and preservatives.

> Per that definition, items like white vinegar and corn syrup are not processed foods?

Yeah, so not a perfect definition, but a good rule of thumb.

The general idea is that you don't want some big corporate to prepare the food for you, it is better to prepare it yourself. If you prepare the food yourself, you have more control over how healthy it is. This approach serves my friend quite well, he reports that he feels more energetic when he avoids "processed" foods as per his definition.

My friend who is really into these things describe "processed food" as anything that has the ingredients printed on the label when you buy it from a grocery store.

Veggies, fruits, meats, and "natural" starches (like potatoes and rice) don't have ingredient labels, so they count as "unprocessed" or "natural."

I didn't even do that. I just told people in my immediate vicinity that I am open to individual projects. One project came from my wife's ex-boss, one project came from a colleague who got a project via LinkedIn, but didn't want to take it himself.

You can just drop it in casual conversation. "What do you do for a living?" "Oh I'm a software developer at X-Corp, and I also do some work for individual clients" Something like that. People remember that stuff. If you like, you can even tell people you offer a finder's fee. Just don't be pushy. Be willing to build the business part-time until you have enough work to take it full-time.

You probably won't be getting big projects from the get go, but if you are humble, that won't be a problem. My first project was just optimizing and cleaning a slow and messy Python script. I charged $35 an hour an threw 10 hours into it.

From my experience it seems that there is more work in this space than there is people to do it. If you just tell people that you are open for individual contract type work, the business will roll in eventually.

Just give it some time and start by doing it on a part-time basis. It might take several months before you land your first project, but once you completed some work for some clients, more business will come if you are good.

You will know when you are ready to take your individual contracts full-time.

If a universal moral code exists, it wouldn't cease existing even if 100% of people dissents from it. The whole point of a universal moral code is that it exists outside of us.

> Those groups would also call us wrong.

Wouldn't they then also be appealing to a universal moral code in order to call us wrong? If there is no universal moral code, nobody gets to call anybody else wrong (in the moral sense) at all.

We are rightfully condemning chattel slavery. However we can't do that if we are not appealing to a universal moral standard. We have no right to claim that the Southern states were wrong, if slavery in the way existed back then wasn't universally wrong.

This also applies to all the other examples people are giving in reply to my comment. People doing things that we consider to be morally wrong does not imply that there is no code. It merely implies that one of us is wrong.

> If groups of humans tend to display very different and incompatible moral codes, that's a strong argument against a universal morality.

I don't think is is a strong argument at all. People are wrong about things all the time. If a whole civilization of people consider earth to be flat, and a whole other civilization considers it to be round, it doesn't follow that earth has no shape at all. It follows that one of them are wrong.

> Not at all. I used those examples because I know that most contemporary readers would agree.

Fair enough. I misunderstood you. I didn't mean to strawman your argument.

I'm not denying that civilizations use different moral codes. I am trying to say that we must have appeal to a universal moral code in order to judge whether a culture's moral code are in fact moral or not. This would apply to our own moral code as well as for those of other civilizations.

I am saying that if we are too say the Ancient Mesopotamians was wrong for sacrificing their children, we have to appeal to some kind of universal standard outside of them to do that. This logic also applies to the Aztec human sacrifice, and to the way the Nazi's treated the Jews. We need a universal standard to say they were wrong.

To make this more actual: You are advocating for a technocratic liberal moral code. Many people are advocating for a historic Christian moral code. How would you even start debating the Christians without appealing to a universal morality? You'll have to assert that your moral code is universal. If you don't, you have no basis to require other people to behave according to your morality.

RMS is notorious for his willingness to go through quite a lot of inconvenience to stick to his free software principles.

You can search his site for the word "ticket" to get an idea of how he feels about software systems in public transport.

What do you mean by "cannot be applied"?

Of course it can be applied. We know that those states and governments are wrong by the universal moral code condemning murder, slavery and genocide. We would have no grounds to condemn these things, if it wasn't for a universal moral code.

Thanks. From playing around with many of the suggestions in this thread, this seems like the best option. It is lightweight and easy to use. Exactly why I was using Insomnia in the first place.

How do human groups glorifying immorality imply that there is no universal moral code? If the universal moral code exists outside of those groups, then it can be applied to their actions, and we can call them wrong for the thing they glorify.

Your very sentence implies a universal moral code. You are calling murder, slavery, and genocide wrong. By which standard do you know them to be wrong? Such a standard must necessarily exist outside of the groups that glorifies the things you correctly call abominations.

Edit: typos

Moving away from the traditional family has detrimental effects for the children. See this Wikipedia page and it's citations for a start: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Father_absence

One of the new banks in my country (founded in 2018) decided to use a mainframe for all their core functionality. The actually have statement about it on their website:

"""

Many factors from cost to regulatory requirements to cryptography and other security requirements play a role in making a decision to run a core banking platform in the cloud. Whilst the cloud is good for managing certain services (which we indeed use), it becomes a challenge to manage a bank’s core banking platform.

Once infrastructure is in a cloud, it is outsourced to that cloud provider. That means that the business is bound by those agreements covering aspects such as scalability, usage, capacity-on-demand and disaster recovery. These costs could grow exponentially as volumes grow. By using our own infrastructure for our core banking platform, we have full control over these factors.

Our chosen mainframe solution provides the ability for us to grow exponentially, while controlling all factors (CPU, Memory, Disk, Network, DR, Remote capability, etc) allowing us to manage the environment efficiently and effectively.

"""

> when you place faith in something, you aren't certain that it even exists or that it'll do anything.

I have to politely disagree with this statement. To place faith in something means that you believe it to be true regardless of evidence. If you aren't certain, it is not faith but guesswork.

Yeah, you make a good point. It reminds me of that Arthur C. Clarke quote: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." I guess if you see AI as something magical, it could easily start occupying a religious or God-like space in your psyche.

I also only read the abstract.

The argument seems to be: Belief in God implies a belief in the fallibility of humans, which leads to a reduced reliance on humans and therefore increased willingness to accept AI recommendations.

Most of the logic in that argument checks out. I just don't understand the last step in the logic. How do decreased reliance on humans lead to increased willingness to accept AI?

I'm a religious person myself, and my argument would be to not trust AI all that much. It is a creation by fallible human beings trained on fallible human data.

Yeah, I have the same experience with retention. The extra time spent on the detours helps to contextualise the theory. To expand on your flowers analogy, looking at the flowers helps to remember the path better.

Or you have state-run education as another competitor. Or you can have the state sponsor promising but poor students. You can even incentivise private enterprises to give bursaries to promising but poor students.

Weak oversight with nationalisation is even more disastrous. With a profit motive, the utility is at least incentivised to deliver the service so that they can get paid. If you have government-owned utlity with weak oversight, there is no incentive to even deliver the service.

Look at what is happening with South Africa's power utility (and other State Owned Enterprises like their post office and national airline) as a great example of what happens to a public enterprise with no oversight.

I did this a few times on a specific route. It was a +-R1400km trip where about two thirds is desert, and the last third is grasslands. The last time I did this was in January 2022. I find it very relaxing to drive alone on a highway for 16 hours straight, especially if you are taking it easy.

Reactive frameworks are the best. It is so much easier than having to handle events. I also find it way easier to work with a component based framework for complex UIs.

I have 2 production Svelte projects completed, and it is a charm to work with.