kawhah

The whole project is futile and serves only to placate anti-immigrant feeling.

Tags do not prevent someone from absconding - they could simply remove the tag and disappear, into those parts of society where people are able to live without paperwork.

The only reason tags work is because most petty or white-collar criminals have no interest in disappearing, and can be easily found if they do. They only serve to enforce bail conditions such as not going out in the evening.

The museum lent the artist money as well as paying him to produce the works. Accepting the art submitted does not invalidate the artist's requirement to repay the loan.

I have never encountered such a system. Integers used for fixed-point representation do not suffer from "bit-level issues".

no, integers are generally used. BCD is fixed-point in any case so it's just an inefficient integer representation.

do you see all the tweets or just the top one?

The experience of Tesla clearly shows that this is a completely inaccurate picture of what motivates R&D. For decades big automakers took steady profits but declined to spend much on R&D, preferring to make incremental refinements to a conventional product. When they were challenged by an efficient upstart with an innovative product, the threat to their steady profits suddenly made them decide that they were prepared to spend on R&D.

Well what's the profit of the other two? Does it add up to $21 billion?

But Github has the closest thing to a solution - a public repository of all the previous questions which people can search to discover if someone has already had the same issue.

The link between the Poisson process and the distribution of bus arrival times, is firstly that it's a good idealized example for understanding and reasoning about Poisson and exponential distribution, and secondly that the Poisson process somehow seems to be an accurate representation of our mental model of how waiting for a bus works.

If buses are scheduled to come quite frequently (and don't disappear, so they do arrive with that frequency on average), but the variance in their arrival times is a lot bigger than the average gap between them, then the distribution is actually quite close to Poisson.

Unless you are specifically interested in the history of the response to the Satanic Verses and what it means about world society, I would recommend 'Midnight's Children' as a better book, and a better example of what is interesting about Salman Rushdie's work.

The opposite of Chesterton's fence is "Chesterton's facehugger". Sometimes, when you discover something bad, the best strategy is to immediately try to remove it as quickly as possible, before spending any energy trying to find out why it appeared.

Umm, no. There is a huge selection bias at work here. Most people, when they read the bible, read Genesis and Exodus, the Gospels, Psalms, Ecclesiastes and a couple of other books. It is true that lots of phrases, images, stories, quotations and so on from those heavy-hitting parts of the Bible have made their way into the general culture.

The vast majority of the Bible is not at all influential on either our religious understanding or on general culture. Partly because most of it just isn't that commonly read. The popular parts are read thousands of times more commonly than the least popular parts, and many of the readers of the least popular parts (in our era) are people who have a deep religious commitment to reading the Bible, but who aren't necessarily prolific writers or influential thinkers.

The other fact at play here is that most of the unread parts are unread for a reason. There is a lot of material which is, of course, of historical or theological interest to experts, and which had undeniable spiritual significance to many people who lived long ago, but which is very hard for most modern readers to extract any real meaning or value from.

Some examples - each of these is taken not from the really obscure books, but from 'second-tier books', in order to demonstrate how quickly the long tail of Bible literature descends to filler.

The book of Numbers (part of the Pentateuch/Torah) mainly consists of pages and pages listing how many animals of different types should be sacrificed in various ways for different festivals. This is extremely repetitive stuff, pretty much beyond satire. There is no justification given for any of this doctrine, and once you have extracted a minimal amount of historical content ("it seems like cattle were more valuable than sheep!") it's on a par with reading the telephone book.

The book of Proverbs sounds fun, but do you know any of the proverbs it contains? Probably not many, because they consist of dozens of very small variations on the same message to embrace wisdom, as though there were some doubt about the advantages of wisdom. Sample: "Blessings are on the head of the righteous, but the mouth of the wicked conceals violence." The catchy phrasing and apt metaphors which you would hope for simply aren't here (barring a very small number, which stand out as being slightly less banal: "iron sharpens iron").

A couple of the Epistles of St Paul are deeply uplifting and moving pronouncements of the essence of belief in Christ. The rest (circa 20 books) are probably fascinating political history, if you have the background knowledge about the different early Christian thinkers and communities and the evolution of their doctrine. If you don't, they are hard to make much sense of - for example, thirty pages of careful analytic debate about circumcision, responding to someone else's letter which itself breaks down a third person's arguments, neither of which we have available to us.

The awkward truth about the notion of the 'Bible as literature' or the supposed cultural importance of the Bible, is that in modern secular times, it is a myth passed on from otherwise educated people who have read less than 5% of the Bible, to other educated people who are going to read even less of it.

The tweet says "arxiv is a cancer". It's obviously reasonable evidence that some people don't like arxiv. You are splitting hairs.

This sort of makes sense, almost everyone else in the world learnt of coffee directly or indirectly via Arab-speaking people and so use their name for it, but Ethopians had it first and so have their own word for it.

So AI can't do my work for me, but it can automate the activity which I do for enjoyment in my coffee break?