primitivesuave

Calling archaeology and history "deeply entwined" with white supremacy is extremely inaccurate. You can certainly find examples of biased historical perspectives going all the way back to Herodotus (known both as the "father of history" and the "father of lies" by his contemporaries). But to apply that categorization to every European explorer is modern propaganda that the "woke" crowd tends to eat up.

I was born in India, and the best resources I have to learn about the history of my ancestors were written by German anthropologists in the 1920s and 1930s. Just because they came from an increasingly xenophobic society, does not mean that categorization should automatically apply to them and their work. The most biased historical perspectives, interestingly enough, seem to come from Indian scholarship - usually by claiming the authors of the Vedas knew everything there is to know about science and the natural world.

The reason I take the time to even write a response here is because propagating a biased view of history can harm people. A vast majority of Indians believe that Ayurvedic remedies are more effective than modern medicine, and many pay for engaging in this widespread anti-colonial perspective with their lives.

I brought up Pigafetta's account to point out that even five centuries ago, people were capable of making fascinating discoveries and simply stating the objective truth about what they found. Nowadays, the announcement of a discovery is usually paired with hyperbolic statements (e.g. "this changes everything we know about X") and veiled social commentary (e.g. "there is a widely-held Eurocentric view of civilization").

Had the sentence read more like "some academics have a Eurocentric view of civilization", I would probably take that argument at its face. But nowadays, with improvements in education and the vast quantity of good information available to anyone on the Internet, telling your readers that "we are Eurocentric in our view of culture and civilization" is tantamount to calling them ignorant.

I was about to start writing exactly this, but didn't want to get into an argument with another Internet stranger about what the unspecified "we" (i.e. the general population) believes nowadays. Even the original explorers of that region, back when it was known as Verzin, were quite objective in their reports.

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_First_Voyage_Round_the_Wo...

The journalistic style at the BBC is to push an outdated colonization narrative onto everything, and I am also quite tired by it.

I'm a software developer and use it for one-off tasks like image processing (create an SVG from a folder of images), quick visualization of data (read a giant JSON file and create bar charts from certain keys), file preparation, and much more. It's taken me several years to really feel like a power user, where I intuitively know which functions to use and how to compose/customize them. When I worked at Wolfram Research (over a decade ago), I even made a proof-of-concept for programming Arduino microcontrollers and controlling them directly from the notebook interface.

It's a powerful tool with a steep learning curve - hopefully the LLM assistant will help with this.

I had a go at this concept as well, over a decade ago [1]. I used rubber bands to collect energy from the mechanical movement so the gate could be reset, but this would ostensibly require larger and larger forces to operate more complex gate architectures.

1. https://keshav.is/building/lego-logic-gates/

I was severely burned out two years ago after I left the last startup I cofounded. I had a good bit of cash saved up, so I traveled around the world to get better at rock climbing. I could barely write more than a few lines of code before closing my laptop. I would rather sit on the beach and stare at the waves than do anything productive back then.

When I got home from my trip around the world, I struggled to build anything meaningful - I'd get intensely bored after starting a new project, and move on to something else. The first project that I took to completion was reprogramming my Lifx smart bulbs. There was a noticeable delay between turning a light on/off in the iOS app, and the light actually changing its state. Sometimes the app and lightbulb would get their states out of sync, and I didn't like the idea of some light bulb company knowing my schedule. Even for first-world problems though, it was hardly worth solving.

I discovered there is a binary protocol to control the lights directly over the local network, so I developed an extensive TypeScript library to control the lights and build custom web interfaces to serve as light switches. I found a guy on the Lifx forums who built his own crude solution with Python scripts, and he became my first consulting client. That client's referral led me to a variety of interesting work opportunities over the past year. Noticing similarities across a variety of these projects led me to start a new company a few months ago to build a product to address them.

My point being, sometimes you just have to sit down and play.

If you live in California, you can potentially build one of these as an ADU (Accessory Dwelling Unit). Local agencies are required to approve an ADU within 60 days, and recent state bills (AB 976, 434, 1033, and 2221) make it easier to build/sell/rent ADUs on your property. You'll have to wait until 2025 before every locality is forced to have a process for pre-approved ADU plans (at which time you could potentially have an "open-source permit" to construct one of these very quickly).

Beautiful interface! This would be an excellent replacement for the traditional "times table" approach to teaching basic arithmetic. My only suggestion would be to limit multiplication/division by 1, as this makes some puzzles trivially easy to solve by process of elimination.

This is one of the most well-written and well-researched historical narratives I have ever read. As one of the Wordpress comments suggested, I would be an instant subscriber to a Patreon to incentivize future writing projects (in case the original author ever reads this).

I'm also quite inspired to visit the Ivory Coast for myself and see the giant basilica in Yamoussoukro. Perhaps in the modern age, "corruption tourism" will help bolster these types of places.

This so accurately describes my own experience a couple years ago, down to the specific anecdotes, that I had to double check the username to make sure it wasn’t something I drunkenly wrote last night.

This really resonated with me. I taught computer science to middle/high school aged kids for several years, and had similar dilemmas on how to keep everyone engaged. There would always be a wide range of student aptitude, and it was always a bit discouraging to see how many students aren't ready to learn. But it's pretty awesome nowadays to get messages out of the blue from my former students entering the workforce and thanking me for the course.

I am sure one of your students will build something amazing with Rust some day, because they worked on a practical application and had the resources to "level up" on this very useful skill. Hopefully they send you a message about it :)

Terrible UI. I found two example functions (call them `f` and `g`), found the dropdown to change the input type of `f` from "string" to "function call", and even manage to get `g` suggested when I enter it's unique identifier - but cannot set up any configuration to compute `f(g(x))` (even after exhaustively trying all options).

It seems like it should be a core functionality of such a project to easily set up complex computations as function compositions.

A government computing project acquiring 10k GPUs is pretty impressive, but can hardly be deemed a "competitive advantage" - Google and AWS are already offering double the computing power in a single data center [1]. OpenAI is likely already using a cluster of at least this size to train ChatGPT.

1. https://www.hpcwire.com/2023/07/27/aws-cramming-up-to-20000-...

In Japan, tattoos are commonly perceived as being associated with organized crime.

Definitely a PR stunt - it wouldn't even be possible to service an existing Roadster, as the "special tools" are not open-source as well.

https://service.tesla.com/docs/Public/Roadster/Original/1.2....

This seems like a native advertising piece. The article's own screenshots of popular Threads posts on the OpenAI story have less than 1% of the engagement of similar posts on Twitter/X, so it's a bit meaningless to point to these as evidence that Threads is "up for the task" of handling a major news event.

TODCO stopped construction on thousands of housing units for over 2 years by simply having a BoS member (Dean Preston) convince the board to perform a "race and equity study" that never happened [1]. They also refused to fire one of their directors who had sexually assaulted multiple people and left evidence of his crimes.

1. https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/bayarea/heatherknight/article...

There were over a thousand Roman hoards discovered in Great Britain alone [1]. Given the scale of Roman mining operations, there are certainly many more out there.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Roman_hoards_in_Great_...

When Oppenheimer witnessed the first explosion of a nuclear weapon, he quelled his ethical reservations over the destructive power of his creation with a verse from the Bhagavad Gita [1] often mistranslated as the deity stating "I am death, destroyer of worlds", but more accurately - "I am time, and I will destroy these people with or without your involvement".

Had the scientists of the Manhattan project (Oppenheimer, Fermi, Szilard, etc) subscribed to the EA philosophy, they would have been unlikely to work on nuclear weapons development, and millions more would have likely perished in a land invasion of Japan. However, millions of Southeast Asians and South Americans did perish in the subsequent "proxy wars" of the Cold War era, so you can make a convincing historical "what if" either way.

Effective altruism is not a very useful philosophy if you don't actually know what is best for humanity. Oppenheimer's philosophy (the Gita philosophy) was to simply do his job without being attached to the outcome.

1. https://www.holy-bhagavad-gita.org/chapter/11/verse/32

From my consulting experience, I can say that there is certainly a custom type of relationship you can build with certain companies where the CEO/management are willing to think outside the box on hiring. I'd say those opportunities are relatively rare compared to the majority that are trying to hire within the typical 9-5 framework.

I'm not trying to support or dismiss any quality claims, merely trying to point out that a news article premised on "this happened to this one person" is lazy journalism, and has virtually zero impact on changing anyone's mind (pro-Tesla or anti-Tesla).

If there is a quality control issue with some product (cars or otherwise), a worthwhile journalist would examine the larger trend and try to tell both sides of the story. To some extent, it's a reflection of the shorter attention spans and reactionary nature of today's readers.

I think the press actually devalues their ability to criticize Tesla/Elon when they push stories like this, where something out of the ordinary happens to one person. What used to be a common journalistic intent of "let's find out who else this might have happened to" is completely gone, replaced by sensational clickbait titles.

This is a Scottish person driving in conditions that would never be encountered by over 99% of the Teslas out there. People who love Tesla don't care about this. People who hate Tesla/Elon will add this to their data points of why they will never buy one. The person with the $21k bill will pay it and move on with the rest of us.

If someone walks into a bank and carries out an unlawful scheme (i.e. fake notarized paperwork) that nets millions of dollars, 5 years would be a lenient sentence.

Also, it is 3 years in jail followed by 2 years of supervised release.

“Indian exceptionalism” is a prevalent notion among the middle/upper class of India - i.e. the quality of life in India is comparable to other countries. You’ll hear it most from the people who have servants taking care of their household chores (but never the servants themselves). There are also common excuses thrown around like “it has only been 75 years since colonialism” and “the British stole everything”.

I was born in India, grew up in the US, and remember many visits back to the motherland where a relative would extol the virtues of “coming back”. I also remember getting sick all the time, abhorrent public restrooms, sitting in traffic for hours, etc.

Anyone from an actual modern country would agree with you on this, but many Indians living in India would not.

The “most accurate translation” of the first line of the Tao Te Ching (The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao) would be “Tao that is Tao is not Tao”. The original Chinese leaves a lot of room for interpretation, and the best translation (in my opinion) is by Gia-Fu Feng & Jane English.

Honestly I feel like the people who made digital electronics accessible to 2nd graders deserve compensation. I used to organize and teach Arduino robotics classes, and had thousands of students over the years. A handful of those kids even went on to make science fair projects and portfolio projects with Arduino, which set them on a path to a career in engineering.

Even if they completely reverse their open-source approach, I’d still be grateful for the tremendous contribution Arduino has made to education.

By the way, the best way to support Arduino as an individual is to only buy official boards directly from their site.

The mayor who sold Chicago’s parking meters had a father by the same name (Richard Daley) who was also a corrupt mayor of Chicago, and who infamously reneged on a desegregation deal with Martin Luther King Jr.

https://www.nbcchicago.com/news/local/how-mayor-daley-outfox...

This has been my experience as well- 99% of Indians outside India don’t know and don’t care. If anyone has any doubts the system is still very much alive in India, just visit the ghats of Varanasi where even in death (i.e. cremation) the castes are kept separate.

I was born in India and moved to the United States when I was very young. One of the other Indian-American kids asked me what my caste is after hearing my unfamiliar last name. At the time, I hadn't even heard of caste, and didn't realized what kind of parenting environment creates a 7 year old (who doesn't even live in India or speak the language) to question the caste of another Indian in the first place.

After school, when I asked my mother about my caste, she refused to tell me anything about it. "We left that silly system behind in India, and we're not bringing it here."

This is especially impressive because of how good the search is. I searched "mongo" and got all DBs that support Mongo (i.e. including AWS DocumentDB). Overall it seems like search, filters, and suggestions have a better implementation here than most ecommerce applications have for product search.