jimworm

That's only true in a theoretical sense. In practice capital needs to invest in the right things for that to happen, otherwise the people are better off working for their own immediate needs as subsistence farmers or hunter-gatherers.

I wouldn't mind if ruby copied the rails docs style exactly (https://api.rubyonrails.org/), and I'm pretty sure rails wouldn't mind either.

Picking one point from there, possibly the one least connected to Signal:

> The focus on deepfakes in a vacuum is actually missing the forest for the trees, with the ‘forest’ being the fact that we now rely on five massive social media platforms as the arbiters.

I think the way legislators have come to understand media - at least by the way laws are being written - is that the collection, distribution, and filtering must happen on a single platform. So there's this attempt to force platforms to be the arbiters of truth.

But this is dangerous in several different ways:

1. It is impossible to be an arbiter of truth, it's a fundamental problem of epistemology that cannot be solved without perfect knowledge of the "real world", and so the platforms must necessarily be allowed to fail to some, or a large degree.

2. Having been given this impossible responsibility, the platforms are going to disallow/punish based on controversy, because their real problem isn't breaking the law, it's others bringing attention to where they're breaking the law.

3. In the meantime the platforms might offer some token resistance to these laws, but ultimately they will not say no to being handed the one tool that gives them enormous political and economic power, power which will protect them if the law comes after them.

These three points will keep reinforcing themselves to lock us into the information dystopia we're in today.

I don't think it's possible to preserve 1. freedom of speech, 2. protection from mis/disinformation unless the different layers could be forcibly separated. My current crackpot idea is that the distribution and filtering layers have to be broken up in a way that both forces information to flow freely, and allow consumers to protect themselves by consciously selecting and filtering their consumption in meaningful ways. Filtering providers cannot be given the power to control information supply for other filtering providers, which allows the market to abandon untrustworthy providers at will, and also gives the authorities the degree of power required to find bad actors and dispense meaningful punishments.

Being excessively reclusive needn't be a death sentence. Have you tried to transition to home-schooling[0], which might get the law off your back? If he is interested in gaming, perhaps he could try his hand at game development, or parts of it such as music or art. Spending a couple of hours each day working (with you perhaps) on some skills and then publishing something on itch.io - say a short PICO-8 game - might help open him up a little and give him some street cred with former friends and classmates.

[0] https://www.gov.uk/home-education

Those books had tremendous impact. BBC Basic was the first programming language I ever saw, in a children's book in a library, years before I ever got to touch a PC. It made computers seem so straightforward that it felt natural to reach for one as a tool or a toy. I've only ever seen a BBC Micro in a museum.

Failure of imagination indeed. There's much more to energy than the regular usage cycle of the average electrical supply grid.

What if creating easily-fusable isotopes is the most efficient way to store "renewable" energy? Fusion is the most concentrated release of power humans are able to muster. What's to say such concentrated power will never be required for any purpose?

> If you see a three-syllable Chinese name, you can be confident that the two-syllable name is the given name, and the one-syllable name is the family name.

Statistically speaking one could be fairly confident, but as a rule it is wrong due to the presence of compound surnames.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_compound_surname

The popup window login with the many different domains doesn't work with isolation on. Hope they don't take the random meeting name (the last anonymous option) away.

What are the insurance payouts like when plants like these are destroyed? Could those be manipulated to balance the risk motives for omitting or delaying mitigations when warnings signs appear? Or would that just encourage poor record keeping and falsifications?

The touchbar feels to me like a time bomb that explodes when Apple thinks it's time for you to give another stack of cash to them.

The accidents you described didn't come from nuclear power plants. The Western Australian incident was mining equipment. The Goiânia accident happened in Brazil and was medical equipment. The Kramatorsk radiological accident was also mining equipment.

At some point the blackout will be the thing saving them from losing data because shreddit can't delete posts from private subs.

How about being on hold, listening to repetitive music interspersed with a recorded "you are x in the queue, we'll be with you shortly" in a precisely-calculated interval to get your hopes up then immediately crush them, efficiently fanning the flames of rage as the minutes and hours pass.

I understood the GP as focussing more on the missed opportunity. Those cheap renewables didn't exist 40 years in the past. There could've been lots of nuclear energy built since then, a lot of emissions not generated, and those hypothetical decades-old plants would now be considered for decommissioning over the coming decades, just in time to be replaced by the renewables that do exist.

One potential life-changing application I haven't yet found for eye tracking is to train monocular people to align their blind eye properly. I don't know if it's possible, but if it is at least partially successful for a monocular person's simulated depth perception, it could improve their eye contact with others and benefit their social lives immensely.

It's also a nifty way to loosen meat from the shells of lobsters, crabs, etc.

Why would they dirty bomb their own land? If anything it's a reason to have already taken some materials offsite to dirty bomb Moscow later. Or for the invaders to threaten dirty bombing if they're about to be driven away (like they're already doing with their nuclear arsenal).

The perl-family heredoc syntax could be quite flexible with options. I'm used to ruby which does have an option for indent-stripping.

Heredoc by another name...?

For those wondering, the Q for this particular result was 0.33. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H99hvPlC4is&t=48m

This is the big one imo. Youtube's monopoly status is making creators sign unfair contracts, after which stealing from them becomes legal.

Once had a bug that set then re-set a cookie. Worked just fine in a browser. A customer wrote some automation that depended on the bug and ignored the first set-cookie. The bugfix caused some problems.

If they had put in these proposed charges from the start, it would protect the NZ government from the criticism they're facing.

Ending MIQ is inevitable but it's a one-way decision. Once the virus takes hold there's no going back, even if you take quarantine and isolation to China levels. Nobody likes a lockdown. My opinion is that the right time is when the globally dominant variant is a fast-spreading one with a proven hospitalisation rate post-wave that is lower than what NZ could cope with, given the vaccination rate. Omicron could be a candidate but its wave is still spreading, so it's too early to tell.

As for MIQ dues, the government and therefore the people bear its cost. NZ$13 million isn't a trivial sum, but it isn't huge either, so while any scheme to reduce the burden would be welcome, a plan with a huge potential cost such as ending MIQ is a bit too much risk, especially with Omicron data coming soon on the horizon.

Even the most expensive MIQ places are incredibly cheap to the average millionaire, NZ$5520 for 14 days for a single adult, which gets cheaper per person when sharing [1]. There are also huge outstanding bills (over NZ$13M) from people that have been through MIQ and haven't paid [2]. Some of the hotels in the MIQ list could be a lot better than others [3]. The solution is to make these investor visa categories pay a lot more - something like 10x - to fund the others who can't pay, but give them priority to the best rooms.

[1] https://www.miq.govt.nz/being-in-managed-isolation/charges-f...

[2] https://www.miq.govt.nz/about/media-centre/common-topics-for...

[3] https://www.miq.govt.nz/being-in-managed-isolation/isolation...

That's merely refuting the least relevant part.

The ideographs were important in that they could tie together vastly different spoken languages in the same family. Because the writing was unified, all the spoken variants had their own influence on it by way of traders and administrators, and successful changes by proxy affected the speech of other regions. This meant that all the different places effectively evolved their languages around a virtual core based on the communications of the literate class - even the phonetic-based parts; and they could do it peacefully and continuously, constantly realigning their definitions without legal or violent coercion, uninterrupted by the constant evolution of the whole group of spoken languages.

For example, French has had a great influence on English, and they both use the Latin alphabet. Would such influence have been possible in the same time without violent conquest, given the alphabetic system of writing?

> Rather, written Cantonese (or Shanghainese etc.) often use characters for phonetic purposes rather than true etymological meaning

This is where the mistake is. Written Chinese does have all those characters - it is the adoption of a "standard Chinese" that caused those characters not to be taught when mass education was introduced. The people were left to transliterate or create new characters for their spoken native tongue, and the correct characters are now known only to researchers.

One very annoying part of Mandarin's effect on modern Chinese is that many words are being replaced by transliterations of/in Mandarin, even when the Chinese word itself exists. Often this is because the source of the word was foreign. To a non-Mandarin speaker, written Chinese is very slowly turning into complete nonsense, and written Chinese is losing its edge in longevity by no longer being a ideograph-based language.

There's no requirement for the pressure vessel to be the freezer itself. I'm imagining stainless-steel cylinders of wagyu steak or other similarly high-valued items lined up in a freezer, each with its own internal thermometer, to be taken home by consumers and returned to the retailer for reuse.

Its very close cousin tetanus toxin has the opposite effect, but would also cause zombies to be immobile all the same.

It was not my intention - lab-grown meat is already on the market, a lot further along than those ornithopters were!

What I meant to express is that for all we know, the lab-grown meat solutions being tried today could be approaching the problem in a much too difficult manner, like the early ornithopters did in the flying-machine problem. The whole field is still in its infancy and it's very possible that many of the issues could be sidestepped with new discoveries.

"Lab-grown" is such a vague term. There's no indication that today's tech is the best that could exist.

The purpose of lab-grown meat is to remove unnecessary parts of the animal from meat production. While many animal parts could be substituted, right now lab-grown meats have the opposite problem, that too many not-animal parts have been introduced.

What if "good" parts of the animal come back? Could disembodied guts and livers turn non-sterile grass into sterile, nutritious plasma? Could muscles grow in slabs and have slices removed regularly, protected by a working immune system?

Lab-grown meat is at the same stage as the early ornithopters.