doubleunplussed

Works pretty well on Reddit.

It's not perfect, but reddit threads sorted by "best" are a sight better than threads sorted by "new".

Upvotes-only wouldn't get you the same effect, since "best" is about the ratio.

Honestly twitter should implement downvotes and just copy reddit's thread-sorting system verbatim.

Finally, I swear I saw downvotes on the Twitter app some time in the last few months. Unless it was an April fools joke, it was briefly a real feature! What happened?

Georgism rears its head once more

I'm in Australia too so I'm not just watching from afar and making stuff up. You might even recognise my username from the Australian COVID subreddit. I'm fully aware how harsh the lockdowns were - I'm in Melbourne, even.

But I'm not sure what you're talking about. Those lockdowns ended because of vaccination. Yes they were long, because for most of the pandemic we didn't have vaccines.

> This went on for literally hundreds of days in some parts of the country, even those places with high vaccination rates.

That's not the case. There have been a few short and localised lockdowns since vaccination levels were high, but still mostly in specific locations where vaccination levels were lower. Certainly not anything for hundreds of days. It hasn't even been 100 days since the country got to 90% of 12+ double-dosed - it's been 57 days. The lockdowns in VIC and NSW ended around 80% double-dose coverage.

Pre-omicron, it did. Australia and New Zealand were pretty much at the herd immunity threshold from vaccination, before even getting much third dose coverage or vaccinating children.

Omicron is sufficiently immune-escaping that it changed that, but I continue to be surprised how many people don't realise that the vaccines were actually very effective at preventing infection and transmission for pre-omicron variants.

Edit: I don't mean they prevented infection and transmission 100%, obviously. But for two doses the total reduction in transmission was like 80%, and higher still for three doses. This is more than most people (other than Australians and NZers who watched vaccination bend the curves in real time) realise, from the way people talk you'd think the vaccines barely reduced infection and transmission at all.

You think the supposed experts have additional evidence, so you're treating their claim to have evidence as evidence in itself. You're unaware that they have no more evidence than you already did.

IPv6 addresses can be ephemeral? What, DHCP is assigning a whole range to each client? Didn't know that.

Pretty weird. For internal stuff I would be using IP addresses to identify peers. Ephemeral IP addresses in logs aren't very useful.

As soon as one of the computers in the subnet initiates traffic outside the network, its IP address becomes public knowledge though, right? Doesn't matter how large the space is, that information leaks, whereas with NAT it doesn't.

Your sarcasm is misplaced. I would prefer a SyntaxError to either of the implicit behaviours.

Note that it is trivial to split the real and imaginary parts into two separate real-numbers and write quantum mechanics that way with only real numbers. Instead of i you get a 90 degree rotation matrix, instead of individual numbers you get a 2-element vector, etc.

Lacking "numbers" with the right arithmetic properties for other things in quantum mechanics, we indeed use matrices and vectors for other stuff all the time. Dirac figured he needed some 4×4 matrices in order to be able to take the square root of some operator at some point, which is how his equation predicted the existence of antimatter (because it implied the wavefunction had to be a vector with more components - some of the other components turned out to be antimatter).

But complex numbers happen to have the right properties that at least we can do without matrices and vectors for the lowest-level quantities in quantum mechanics: the state amplitudes or the values of wavefunctions of spinless, non-relativistic particles. This article is saying that you can't do away with these properties at the lowest level of quantum mechanics, whether or not you actually use complex numbers to represent them.

The rent isn't based on the sale price of the land, it's based on the value of the land. If land comes with a tax obligation, they're not the same thing anymore.

    sale_price_of_land = underlying_value_of_land - how_much_you_would_pay_as_a_one_off_to_avoid_paying_the_tax_forever

So no, you wouldn't update the tax rate to be a fixed percentage of the new sale price of the land after bringing the tax in. That's not the value of the land, it's just the sale price.

Instead, you would update the tax rate in order to ensure the sale price of unimproved land was zero. If the sale price is zero, that means the tax rate is correctly set so as to cancel out the land value as per the above equation.

It's weird having the value of the land plus tax obligation be exactly zero, which is one of the reasons many Georgists propose merely a 85% tax instead of a 100% one.

Can't help but notice that the "hut" is pretty much exactly 8x8 pixels in size, which is the size of a JPEG block. Makes me wonder if an unlucky bit flip in the image data could produce an image like that. Or just unlucky lossy compression.

I have no reason to believe the image original images is actually a JPEG, though the image in the article does look like a JPEG. Just an observation I couldn't help mentioning!

That'll prevent it leaking to most things, but not to subprocesses of your application.

For example your application might interact with command-line tools written in Python, and unless you delete PYTHONPATH from the environment variables prior to launching any subprocesses, they'll inherit it. This could lead to subtle and confusing breakage.

It's completely global, shared by all Python interpreters of all versions.

I set PYTHONPATH, but the code in that directory is solely small debugging utils of mine that I want available in every Python interpreter, and I make sure not to put anything more complex in there.

If you are in the know and are aware that dash to panel, dash to dock, and whichever system tray extension is the one maintained by the Ubuntu developers are the ones you want. Otherwise you get one of the million broken extensions.

And this is after figuring out how to install a browser extension (from the browser extension store) and the "connector" library from your package manager, to be able to install shell extensions from the browser. I wouldn't call it intuitive at all.

And the re-enabling of minimise buttons is in gnome-tweaks, which you have to install separately, and which I'm used to, but is a bit weird to put such crucial functionality in a separate settings app.

Good thing Ubuntu sets these things up by default for their users.

I still see GNOME as the most practical DE to run - but it's telling that absolutely nobody uses it as shipped: at minimum they install dash to dock or dash to panel, re-enable minimise buttons, and install a system tray extension.

The project seems to usually come around in the end, and it reminds me of some quote critical of the US's foreign policy I think, that "You can always count on the Americans to do the right thing - after they have tried everything else".

Perfectly practical solutions to problems are proposed on bug trackers, and dismissed with the demand of impossibly strict requirements of well-justified use cases, when the current behaviour was never subject to such a high bar. Then years later the obvious fix is quietly implemented after the sheen has worn off whatever sacred cow was considered "the right way to do it" that was blocking the obvious, impure, against-the-vision fix from being considered.

Of course nobody can rightfully expect work to be done on a FOSS project even if their suggestion is a brilliant one. So a response like "Patches welcome" or "Yes we'd like that too but this is on the backburner and not a priority" would be fine. Instead the response too often is along the lines of "that is not in our vision and there is no use case".

I've also infuriatingly gotten a "patches welcome" response before, and then simply faced the "that's not in our vision" response upon providing a patch. It's not that there was a problem with my patch (there may have been, but the conversation didn't get that far), and I got the feeling that "patches welcome" was just a way of kicking the can down the road to make me go away. Am now very hesitant to provide patches to GNOME projects unless I can see that the core developers are explicitly in favor of a change in advance.

Honestly, it's a few bad eggs in the project and not the majority - but it leaves an extremely sour taste in my mouth as someone who has been participating in FOSS for a long time.

And on the CoC discussion, I can't help but notice that the most abrasive participants seem to be the ones most likely to have rainbows and pronouns in their bio. Hypocrites.

It's not 1-1. Cython can compile regular Python, but you only really get significant speedups when you declare the types of things using cython-specific syntax.

Strange to use China's oversupply as a comparison when it too is the result of intentional government action.

Governments can cause oversupply, governments can cause undersupply. Bet you can think of plenty of examples without my help of government policy resulting in supply for some goods decreasing or increasing relative to demand.

Governments can do a lot. Like, they can pretty much dictate what you're allowed to make, how much they're gonna tax you on profits from making something, who you're allowed to sell it to - they can absolutely decide to cause an asset to appreciate.

Your bot could be anonymous, the only thing you'd be forced to reveal is that it was a bot.

just a [bot] marker of some kind next to the tweets that were posted by a bot. That's it. Still anonymous.

I could tell you this comment was posted by a bot, that would reveal nothing about me.

I don't know anyone who believes this. Words mean what they're intended to mean and interpreted to mean, and that's how it's used in practice. Claiming otherwise is just a bald-faced "nuh-uh" when people who use the term are confronted with the double standard.

If there wasn't at least a little bit of complicity in it being interpreted as a general diss on masculinity, the term would never have caught on, or a different term would have been chosen in the first place. In the face of repeated misunderstandings, people using the term would pick a new one. They haven't done that. Why? It seems to me that they are quite happy to be "misunderstood" 95% of the time.

The gender swapped equivalent seems to be "internalised misogyny". Do you think I could get away with calling it "toxic femininity" instead? Nobody would let that pass. Do you think I could get away with calling any obviously bad behaviour associated with femininity, "toxic femininity", at all? I don't think I could.

It's widely considered by men to be an insulting term, and if people who use it don't want to insult people, they should pick another one. They don't though, which is telling.

That's an orthogonal issue, we already use a pre-commit hook that prompts for the committers name instead of caching it. Who commits is one thing, who authenticates a push is another.

I guess we could have a shared github account and I could give it commit rights to the specific repositories. But that's still pretty silly that I should have to do that.

Viruses are subject to selection, mutation, and heredity. These are the three necessary ingredients for Darwinian evolution.

Whether they're defined as "life" or not isn't really relevant.

(Personally, I have a pet definition of "life" that just equates it to being subject to Darwinian evolution. Viruses not being defined as life never sat well with me)

Vaccines can't do their thing in a petri dish, they need an immune system to work via. That's just a petri dish not being an adequate simulation of the environment viruses are normally in, and doesn't imply anything about whether viruses are subject to Darwinian forces.

In this case the environment is shared and so there is a single user account - this is for example a computer in a laboratory, connected to instruments.

Multiple user accounts would defeat the purpose of it being a shared computer. It's a shared computer because everyone is using it for the same thing.

What's the recommended way to manage git clones on shared computers now?

In the past, multiple people would use these computers, and would push and pull using their own github credentials. I'm talking lab computers in a research context, where there is a shared login to the computer, but where we use our own github credentials to access a shared repo we all have commit rights to.

Now what are we supposed to do? I don't want to put my ssh key, or an access token or whatever, on a shared computer. My colleagues using that computer should not be able to access my other github repos. I should be entering a password, something I can keep in my head.

They're talking about propagating a density matrix instead of a state vector. If you're not familiar, a density matrix is an n x n matrix where n is the number of elements in the corresponding state vector, and contains information akin to a probability distribution over state vectors.

However, actual quantum computers propagate state vectors, not density matrices, as far as I know. You'd need to run it a large number of times, or have a large ensemble of identical sets of qbits being propagated with the same algorithm to need a density matrix to describe it, I would have thought. So saying you'd need to simulate a density matrix to simulate a quantum computer confuses me.

I know quantum physics but not quantum computing specifically, so I could be wrong - the grandparent comment sounds like they know what they're talking about otherwise.

The author said they excluded the "COVID-zero" strategy, because Czech leadership did not consider it an option. See their comment at the top of this thread.

Surprisingly readable

Signalling wokeness is wokeness. It's not like there's some authentic wokeness - calling it wokeness is accusing it of being inauthentic.

It's almost certainly a conscious choice to not use an AUR helper

If the number crunching is numpy-heavy, multiple threads absolutely can use real thread-based parallelism. C extensions like numpy release the GIL and so can run in parallel.

I was disappointed that it's actually 4.8.1 in the setup.py