mtts

Sounds like you’re not in NL. I am, and for the past ten years or so new varieties of locally grown tomatoes have appeared that are markedly better. Not as good as fresh Puglian tomatoes during harvest season, but much, much better than the infamous water bombs the Netherlands is known for internationally.

Problem is, they’re somewhat expensive (or rather, not insanely cheap), and, likely for that reason, only available over locally. For some reason the rest of Europe insists on buying only the cheap flavorless water bombs.

You get what you pay for, I guess (said Puglian tomatoes, in season, aren’t cheap either).

p is the chance that you would have gotten this result if the null hypothesis were true.

This.

R2 is not the correct measure to use.

This article is a perfect example of the principle that simply doing math and getting results is not necessarily meaningful.

True, but while they're not building more housing at least in this case they're making it so the people who do have a house to live in don't have to contend with it being surrounded by hotels.

While Tangible Waves' BRAEDBOARD is cheaper, the advantage of this thing is that it's compatible with Eurorack, which someone who is interested in learning how to prototype modules is likely to already have a lot of.

But yeah, it's expensive.

Correct, but “not tracking personal data” is in fact not a rule in the GDPR. “Only store personal data you really need” is, qualified with “and don’t share it with others”.

Cookie walls exist because companies insist on handing over their visitor data to external ad networks.

Not only is the GDPR not difficult to comply with (just use only the personal data you need to provide your service - and don’t share it with others), it’s also nothing new: it’s just a bunch of previously existing privacy laws bundled together.

Not all those laws applied to all EU countries before, but, basically, if you were doing business across the entire EU all the laws that you had to conform to together looked a lot like the GDPR.

Do you only update your grocery lists at home or in places with good WiFi? Because I can reliably cause iCloud to choke if network coverage is less than excellent (a plausible use case for grocery lists, I’d imagine). Dropbox, on the other hand, doesn’t bat an eye.

Once a year I do some tests to see if the wife and I, with only our grocery list shared between us, can switch. And once a year I find out the answer is “no - and it isn’t any better than last year”.

iCloud is extremely slow. Updates in files can take 10 minutes or more to propagate, especially if two or more people have been editing them. If you’re the only one editing a file, on multiple devices, it’s still slow but much less so.

It also tries to be clever about what it syncs and when, with no options (that I’m aware of) to force it to simply fetch local copies of everything. This makes it unusable for files that you want to access in a terminal as the terminal is, for some reason, not part of the clever sync on demand system.

However, if you want to get fancy with sharing stuff with applications on iOS, such as, for example, an Obsidian file directory or some other set of markdown files to view and edit on the go, you’re pretty much forced to do it in iCloud as the Dropbox file provider on iOS is extremely unreliable and prone to locking up, even if you’re the only one editing the files. For this use case you’re pretty much condemned to iCloud.

It used to be this way. Cycling was doped, everyone knew that and everyone was open about it. There’s an amusing story from those days where two top contenders in a multi stage race agree to skip the drugs for one day. They arrive at the finish line much later and much more exhausted than usual and publicly announce they will never do something like that ever again.

The ban on doping dates from 1967, I believe, when British cyclist Tommy Simpson dropped dead from his bike during the Tour de France from having taken too many drugs (in combination with alcohol, too - truly these were different times).

People think that, but it’s not true. The majority is migrant workers, and a substantial portion of them do white collar jobs.

And pilsener beer.

For some things the artisan skill is in approaching machine level efficiency.

(of course in many cases, such as with baklava, hummus and pilsener beer the temptation then arises to cheap out on the ingredients, causing the factory to lose out to the granny, but the principle essentially holds)

I’m sure one could learn to appreciate all the different aromas, yes, and hat doing so would be an amusing and interesting pursuit. However, I have enough hobbies and interests already and don’t need another one. I just want coffee that sort of resembles what you can get at every street corner in Italy.

Agreed on Starbucks being roasted too hard, though. I suspect that’s because most of their coffee will be diluted by large amounts of milk and sugary stuff and this way some of the bitter flavor people associate with coffee.

Right, but "uniform espresso" is exactly what I mean when I say Italy has "decent espresso at every corner". In the Netherlands, where I live, it's "every place has a different variation of awful slop", except for a handful of good coffee places (that then may suffer from hipster problem of serving sour^H^H^H^H fruity coffee".

So yes, when people praise Italian coffee it's because you're pretty much guaranteed it will be ok.

Nigeria is all the way on the other side of the African content while the Arabian peninsula is right across the very narrow Red Sea. So it would make less sense for Ethiopians to speak a language that’s related to languages spoken thousands of kms away in West Africa than for them to speak a language that’s related to the languages spoken on the other side of the Red Sea - which is exactly what they do.

Edit: also, if you look at pictures of Ethiopians and Eritreans and of Yemenites you’ll see they’re way more similar in appearance than Ethiopians and, say, Nigerians.

Education in the Netherlands uses Microsoft quite heavily as well and so when the pandemic started it was also either Teams or nothing at all.

However, the reason for this wasn’t so much MS being evil as Google and others basically ignoring sensitivities about where user data is hosted. MS guarantees (well, sort of) user data is stored in the EU when customers set it up properly.

No one else does (or did, maybe things have changed by then).

So the monopoly MS has here is basically because they do what their customers want them to do.

There’s also the mod for the HD-439 where you cut away some tape that covers up some holes and you get markedly more bass.

The upgrade kit contains a battery pack so it's user replaceable.

The price is quite reasonable. You shouldn't compare it to a MacBook Air but to other stand alone boxes with built in controllers like the Akai MPC X which is €2400, the Akai Force, which is quite Ableton-like and which costs €1200.

It also comes with an MPE controller and those are not cheap.

The common solution in this case is simply to also GROUP BY owner.name.

That said, if owner.name has different values and you didn’t actually care which one you’d get ANY_VALUE could maybe be useful.

Though in that case you could also just use MIN or MAX, which already exist.

If a business can only exist if energy prices are unrealistically low, then, yes, it is inefficient.

Hahaha - never thought of it that way. Given how dirt free a lot of modern greenhouse agriculture is, it could conceivably be done.

This was the promise originally but it turned out to be impossible. As it turns out, data center waste water is nowhere near warm enough to use for heating.

The agricultural lobby puts this out a lot, but it’s not true. The pig farmers and the dairy farmers that are causing the most problems require vast imports of fodder grown elsewhere. The efficiency of a lot of greenhouse agriculture is questionable as well (which was made obvious when a not insignificant chunk of its production was wound down when supplies of cheap Russian gas dried up.

Maybe that’s just setting a low bar.

Dutch agriculture is anything but a bucolic idyl, instead consisting of very large industrial operations owned by an ever decreasing number of companies that produce vast amounts of food for export using imported feed and plowing the manure that remains, truly stupendous amounts, into the soil thereby rendering it effectively dead.

Large tracts of the province of Drente, formerly poor and backward and hence, in a way, pretty, have been taken over by lily plantations (yes, the flower) that are absolutely drenched in pesticides.

Most food crops are grown in enormous greenhouses that take monstrous amounts of energy to heat and that are lit up 24 hours a day to increase yields, making it difficult for people in surrounding villages to sleep. They are automated as much as possible and the work that can not be automated is done by underpaid immigrant workers living in horrible conditions.

So, yes, Dutch agriculture has “as good or better yields”, but it’s still ecologically disastrous.

Don’t know about Sweden but the Netherlands does not have a “big violent gang problem”.

It has a problem with a few small and very violent gangs that occasionally gun down people in broad daylight, in the middle of the street, completely disregarding the safety of the people around them, which is bad but nothing like the gang problems in the US or Latin America.

That’s a rose tinted view. For some fields (not unsurprisingly nerdy ones) the quality of the amateur content was good enough. For other fields it was abysmal. I remember trying to look up scholarly material on English literature in 1998 or so and not being able to find anything that was even remotely decent, for example. And it could have been worse: among the amateurs that put history related material online, crackpots and conspiracy theorists were (and, in fact, are) vastly over represented.

You're getting downvoted and maybe that is somewhat justified on account of the snark, but that is unfortunate IMHO because your first criticism is very valid: there are no good Org tools for phones.

I've tried all of them, paid for some of them and while the best, Beorg, is an excellent TODO-app, nothing available beats the ease of use of a good Markdown editor. If all you want to do is add some notes somewhere or look something up, which I'd argue is the main use case for Org-like files on a mobile device, you'll have to make do with the simplest of text editing tools.

This is unfortunate, because, even though org is plain text it is very messy plain text and without a good tool it is unpleasant to use.

Contrast this to Markdown, which has dozens of tools available, with all the syncing options you can think of and it becomes obvious that Org, despite having fantastic features, and arguably being a better format than Markdown, is only useful inside Emacs.

This is fine if you live in Emacs and only in Emacs, but if you don't and you'd like to read and modify your files on the go, simply going with the format that for better or worse the rest of the internet has standardized upon, is the much better option.

> Even if you strip out the supernatural parts, a religion provides all sorts of notions about fairness, justice, forgiveness, family life, the rules and order, etc.

Most people would call that a culture.

One were most people do not go to church on Sunday and politicians, even if they’re from a religious background, like Angela Merkel, don’t ever talk about God.

And one that is very different from the one across the Atlantic where “in God we trust” is the national motto and politicians make sure to fluff up their religious credentials.

> Hasn’t the growth of Islam in Europe been a large and growing political issue for the past decade?

Probably more like two decades by now :-) The political parties in Europe that pride themselves on anti-Islamism are themselves not religious all. And no one (of any significance) in Western Europe is arguing for a return to Christianity. Some parties advocate “Judeo-Christian values” but the various incarnations of this concept are nebulous at best and mostly completely unrecognizable to Jews and Christians.

At the same time, many Western European countries are now majority atheist or at least majority unaffiliated with organized religion, so, no, religion is not at all a bigger deal in European politics at all.