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dkga

946 karma · joined October 13, 2021

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dkga··on Do birds have accents? the regional differences in birdsong
Beautiful. An interesting tidbit some here may like: for some birds, their songs carry over genetically. As a result, there are no dialects in the same sense as described in this page. The most famous example (at least in the Americas) is Pitangus sulphuratus (known in Brazil as "bem-te-vi"). This bird is present from Southern US until Southern Argentina, and has virtually the same song all over. In fact, I know I arrived in Brazil when I get out of the airport, anyone in the country, and catch a (sometimes clear, sometimes faint) "bem-te-vi, bem-te-vi" song.
dkga··on I think you should almost never use AI to write
Wow, love this! Could even match with a language I am actively learning so it helps that as well!
dkga··on EU Floats Canada Becoming the Bloc's First 'Associate Member'
I would even suspect Carney would want to eventually be the head of the EU (he also has European citizenship)
dkga··on Pre-Release of Polars 2.0
Still, it’s a very good approximation but still an approximation to the more ergonomic and expressive tidyverse syntax
dkga··on AWS Acquires DuckDB
I am a big fan of the Duck team since before their v1.0 and I am happy for them personally for the big payoff, both in monetary terms but also in terms of scale and longer-term viability of their baby. I am also happy to see the arrangement will keep the core OSS. Let's see what the future holds now!
dkga··on I accidentally logged hundreds of thousands of phone calls to military bases
Now a question daunted on me. Assuming away strategies like store-and-decrypt-later-in-a-quantum-future, could a MITM really eavesdrop, as in, aren’t such ARPA-routed phone calls encrypted?
dkga··on Felony charges for citizen deleting phone data at US Border
Interesting. So is this GrapheneOS indeed operationally good for keeping one‘s data private?
dkga··on I accidentally logged hundreds of thousands of phone calls to military bases
I enjoyed reading this much more than anything I read here recently. In particular I like how it absolutely shows that somethings just… fall through the cracks!
dkga··on Amazonian civilization had estimated 3M people in 3% of forest area
Not all - it is very likely this large Amazonian civilization perished before the Iberian colonists arrived in the region. For example, these geoglyphs mapped in the (super interesting!) paper are dated 2k years before the Europeans first arrived in Brazil.
dkga··on If You Build It, They Will Come
Those interested in this discussion might enjoy familiarising themselves with the concept of social capital, and in particular, with Robert Putnam’s work to understand and to promote it.
dkga··on The lost joy of music piracy
I miss that network discovery as well, as well as the quasi-random element to it. Nowadays I get my kicks by searching for, say, Albanian rock (I don‘t speak Albanian), whatever was trending in Indonesia (I am not from there), who is the national poet/singer of France (I am not French), what was playing on Peruvian radios in 1985 when I born, etc.

Edit: it‘s also a great way to meet other countries/cultures, not only other great music. For example, this is how I got acquainted with the beautiful Wolof language from Senegal and even with traditional regional music in Brazil (where I am actually from) I would have never been exposed to otherwise.

dkga··on Sleep regularity is a stronger predictor of mortality risk than sleep duration (2023)
Could be related to the light spectrum. Kindles aren't really "screen" like the others; they do have background light but you can turn it off and use it with its paper-like screen (which is what I do and really like it). But traditional screens have blue light as part of the normal light they emit, which is known to disrupt sleeping patterns. When I am using my cell phone or computer right before sleeping, I usually turn on colour filtering to make my whole cell phone be tinted red. This helps wonders. I found this page that explains how this can be done: [0].

[0]: https://ios.gadgethacks.com/how-to/keep-your-night-vision-sh...

dkga··on Mel Brooks is 100 today
That movie is so fun and intelligent and heartfelt, pure Mel Brooks genius
dkga··on Sixty percent of US consumers say 'AI' in brand messaging is a turnoff
I’m surprised it’s just sixty. I don’t think anyone, not the least consumers, wants AI used upstream of themselves.
dkga··on Nobody ever gets credit for fixing problems that never happened (2001) [pdf]
Beautiful text. By the way, I can't thank enough the maintainers at ctext.org. What a beautiful work they do.
dkga··on Stop the Apple Music app from launching
I signed up for Apple’s subscription which includes Apple Music. We are a Spotify family, but I then cancelled our premium subscription to avoid duplicate spending. I embraced Apple Music with an open heart in spite of the reservation from my family members. I liked that DJ feature that joined songs. But everything else felt subpar to Spotify. In particular, with AM I feel that they were always pushing US pop/rap music to me, even as I was listening everything from old Tunisian singers to Denmark’s Magtens Korridorer. But overall it just felt that Spotify folks really liked music as an Art form, whereas AM really wanted you to listen to whatever they were featuring/pedalling. Like that song lyrics translation feature introduced by Spotify - only if you enjoy songs in languages you might not yet understand you would think of such a nice feature!
dkga··on The Pirate Bay Remains Resilient, 20 Years After the Raid
What MJ episode?!
dkga··on WHO declares Ebola outbreak a global health emergency
I suspect this is to mitigate perverse incentives for countries to avoid reporting outbreaks and collaborating with the WHO for fear of tanking their economy
dkga··on DeepSeek 4 Flash local inference engine for Metal
That a serious number? By the way, how does a hardware normie like me even measure this?
dkga··on Does Employment Slow Cognitive Decline? Evidence from Labor Market Shocks
I think it is also more than that. In car-centric places like Brazil or the US, older people essentially need to drive or be driven around to have a social life. In pedestrian friendly cities like many in Europe, it is very common to see older people walking to meet their friends/relatives. I saw it all the time in Switzerland. Even those with severely limited mobility would prefer to actively walk or take the tram/bus somewhere (no matter how much time it took) than stay at home.
dkga··on UK Fuel Price Intelligence – Market analytics from reporting stations
Hi, economist focused on monetary policy/inflation here! That data would make for a cool empirical paper that could help central banks and other economists better understand price dynamics around a significant shock. Are you interested in discussing it?
dkga··on A treasure trove of fossils rewrites the story of early life
What a treasure indeed! I just didn‘t understand why this particular site had so well-preserved soft tissue fossils? I assume it is probably related to the geology of the site during formation of the fossils, and probably the researchers themselves are not quite sure. But I would love to know more, if anyone here understands about this sort of thing.
dkga··on Soft launch of open-source code platform for government
Curious about how exactly does Kyndryl (or Solvinity for that matter) plan to monitize citizen data.
dkga··on Soft launch of open-source code platform for government
Any recommendations / lessons learned when building this? I would love to give it a go for Brazil if one doesn't already exist around the time of my holidays in June/July.
dkga··on Third editor fired in Elsevier’s citation cartel crackdown
Unfortunately I had the same impression. Or the comment on Anna Du's looks. Otherwise great reporting that, even in an informal substack piece, lose the shine with these types of aggressive comments. The content speaks for itself and is already quite damning to the corrupt editors. No need for ad hominem attacks.
dkga··on Third editor fired in Elsevier’s citation cartel crackdown
Not "behavioural economics", but rather a very small number of rotten apples.
dkga··on DeepSeek v4
Not only that, but in tandem the collapse of social capital in the US has been the result of a very intentional process (on top of the multidecade undercurrent of declining social capital). This according to Robert Putnam himself (sorry, don’t have time to find the source now but will add it later).
dkga··on Tim Cook's Impeccable Timing
Yeah the car always seemed (to humble me) to be so… un-Apple. As in, the iphone was a success because of its aesthetics but also it solved a real problem, while creating a whole new market. But in the case of cars, cars are the problem.
dkga··on Tim Cook's Impeccable Timing
I have one such mac. Things I like: the keyboard feels smooth, the speakers are great and the touchbar (yes you read correctly). Things that make me partially agree with this post I am responding to: annoying overheating, including when I plug an external monitor (!); the camera was really subpar, it always seemed as if I was facetiming using a 2002 cybershot rather than a 2019 MacBook Pro; the screen has nice colours but very easily feels smudgy. Other than this, I love using that computer as a secondary device.
dkga··on Tim Cook's Impeccable Timing
Same. I still have my intel Mac as a secondary, backup device and I still love using it, in part because of the touchbar.
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