jyounker

My first night in Switzerland there has a 5+ earthquake.

The problem is the houses.

In lots of pictures from LA, there are green trees right beside burned out houses. The video in this NYT article is a great example: https://www.nytimes.com/live/2025/01/15/us/los-angeles-wildf...

One of the biggest problems are vents in the eves. Typically these vents have a single screen with a coarse mesh. Embers from fires easily pass through these vents, land on a surface, and start a fire.

Replacing the one coarse mesh with two or more layers of fine mesh significantly reduces the odds of an ember getting into the house.

This is a trivial improvement that dramatically increases survivability.

That happened six years ago: https://www.businessinsider.com/severe-rainfall-hits-new-yor...

The Netherlands has been planning for the impacts of sea-level rise for decades now. At least twenty years ago the government broached the idea (with TV commercials) that they were going to have to abandon some are areas to the sea.

Yes, exactly. Because people in power decide to keep wealth for themselves and people who look like themselves, and because when minorities start to gain power, then the majority crushes them.

My ex-partner was a consultant at a FANG. It was her first engagement at a customer site after six months of very successful work internally.

She was placed in a group overseen by another consultant. He was from the same firm. In fact he was a principle in the firm.

He immediately started undermining her. He gave her advice that she followed, and then he criticized her for following his advice. He was extremely helpful to women employees from the client, but a complete dick to her. There were many other things he did. She documented what was happening, and complained to the skip-level but he denied it, and they didn't believe her. It looked like she was going to be out.

Then there was a reorganization and several other women from the same consulting company were moved onto her team. They had much more history with the company. They were all high performers. He started doing the same shit to them. When they started reporting the same treatments and complaints management finally listened, and recalled him to the central office.

The story has a great ending though. Once back in the main office, said horrible man then made a wonderful mistake. He started sexually harassing the new corporate council. That ended very badly for him.

So, yeah, sexual harassment happens.

One thing to pay attention to is how you influence those around you. I'm guessing, doesn't put up with that kind of shit. People who act like that probably don't act like that when you're around. Because of that, you get a sanitized view of the world.

That sort of chud behavior is very much tolerated in many places: https://www.romerolaw.com/blog/2021/11/complaint-alleges-ram...

I'm assuming you are not familiar with this study: https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/lkatz/files/chk_aer_mto_04...

It shows that if a poor family moves from a poorer school district to a richer school district, and they have children under 13, then those children are significantly more successful than children whose families remain in the poorer school district. However, after 13 there seems to be a slight negative effect.

There are other studies showing similar effedcts.

Summary: It's not genetics.

Suggested solutions: Suitably positioned and serviced trash cans and public toilets.

The most effective policy for fixing homeless is, surprise, giving people places to live.

It's hard for people to address any other problems in their life unless they have a roof over their head, if for no other reason that the homeless are chronically severely under-slept.

> Christianity is uniquely welcoming in a way that neither Islam nor Judaism are.

That's not been my experience at all.

It is a German conference. It was started by Germans. It is organized first and foremost by Germans. It happens in Germany.

I find it arrogant to think that presenters should speak a language other than German.

I think it works exactly that way. It's doubt that protects you. If you think you're too smart to fall for it, then you've now got a blind spot that can be exploited.

Assurance makes you a sucker.

I know of people who go to church for social reasons, but are complete non-believers.

> Why does it always have to be an accident?

Because that's a surprisingly common way for things to be discovered.

Saccharine? Somebody working in a lab didn't clean their hands well, licked their fingers, and discovered it was sweet.

Aspartame? Somebody working in a lab didn't clean their hands well, licked their fingers, and discovered it was sweet.

I think this is true of basically every major artificial sweetener except invert sugar.

If you have unknowns, then your planning process starts with, "let's figure out how to use this new technology." And that process can involve a bunch of prototyping.

Having to make a choice between "make a design document" or "do prototyping" is a false dichotomy. They're complimentary approaches.

Every time you interview a user or set up a survey to determine customer preferences, you're using techniques developed from social sciences.

It's easy to say they're probably no threat. The number of ways for something to be a threat is much smaller than the number of ways of something being a not a threat, therefore the probability of them being a threat is very low.

It's always possible to make a just-so story about them being a threat, and those are the kind of stories that catch people's attention. The odds are they belong to a mapping company, or a drone construction company, or a university or something else completely innocuous.

Why don't we know? Well because it's a big world, and people dealing with actual problems have more important shit to deal with.

Strong/weak typing is very specific thing. It refers to the ability to create invalid types within a language. In strongly typed languages it is hard to defeat the type system. In weakly typed languages it is easy to defeat the type system.

Python is strongly typed (hard to escape the bounds of the type system) but (traditionally) dynamically typed (types are checked at runtime).

C is weakly typed (easy to escape the type system), but statically typed (types are checked at compile time).

A simple solution might be to put the charger on a timer.

Which is also a fantasy, since if you did achieve it, you'd just have tests that verified that all your bugs were in place.

Setting up an exhibition can take many days, and the hours can be extreme. There is limited time between when the previous show goes down, and when the next show goes up.

It's crunch time for the artist, and what exactly is involved will depend upon the show. This is the time when the artist's concept for the show meets physical reality, and since things involve the physical world, there are all sorts of things that can go wrong.

At this point the artist is essentially a project manager. They are coordinating with other people to fulfill their own vision. If those other people need a question answered before they can proceed, then those people are going to be blocked until the responds.

It's simply not polite to let people sit on their asses for a half day waiting for a response.

It's about relationships. Abstraction is the tool for understanding those relationships.

Mathematical definitions are precise. If you miss one part of a definition, then you cannot actually understand what the definition actually means.

You have to internalize the meaning also, but you must know the definition precisely.

And the problem with that is? Honestly, the more experienced a developer is, the more their code naturally seems to look like what Go shepherds you towards.

It's not a perfect language, but it's a pretty good language for building shit and shipping stuff.

I think your recollection of Python is a bit off. Python wasn't really obscure or developed in silence. If you needed a glue language for a unix system, then there were really only three choices: Perl 5, TCL/tk, and Python.

If you worked in a career where you needed a glue language, then you were at the very least aware that Python existed.

I'd expect flats on cars to be correlated. People tend to buy tires in sets, so age related factors affect them all. Similarly they tend to get driven on the same roads, so are subjected to similar environmental damage.

Also, people are good at noticing patterns that don't exist, so that's a possibility too.

I live in Berlin. Judging Berlin by the traffic on the streets is silly.

Berlin has the lowest car ownership of any Germany city. Part of that is the excellent public transit. Another part is the extensive network of bike paths (combined with flat topography).

Trains run from 04:30-00:30 on weekdays. On weekends they run 24 hours a day. During rush hour the trains come every five minutes, and the cars are standing room only. (I checked a couple of hours ago.)

As for weekends, why would you drive a car to a beer garden when you can take BVG and talk with your friends on the way?

[Also, Berlin in October is normally f*ing cold. This year was a freakish exception.]

If Ukraine falls, the war is coming whether we like it or not.

Nine years ago I was in Riga talking with a Latvian friend, and even then she was telling me how Russia was broadcasting separatist propaganda into Latvia

While the EU may not be at war with Russia, Russia is already at war with the EU.