roel_v

Yeah there's an SK village inside the DMZ, I had lunch there last year on a tour. It's both wild and utterly unremarkable at the same time. There's a high fence around it, and you're warned not to go over that fence as there are land mines around it (as if someone would climb a, what, 2.5m fence while on a tourist tour?). The thing I found most remarkable is that house prices there are not much less than in Seoul proper (that's what I was told at least), which just seemed utterly absurd - what market forces could drive prices of a farmer village (because that's what it is, really - although the houses looked nice) surrounded by landmines and that is a pain in the ass to get in and out of to that of a first world metropolis? And although one after the other bus with tourists drove into the small parking lot, there was only a canteen for lunch (with canteen quality food) and a souvenir shop that is described at best as 'functional'.

I think, judging from your responses in this thread, that you're focusing too much on the 'generating stories' part. IMO that's the least attractive/useful part of your offering. The 'read something in two languages' is what use useful to your users. I made something not quite like your app but related: a tool to translate (epub) ebooks into two-column ebooks with a translated version on one side, so you're not constantly googling/chatgpting things. What you have has the potential for more interactivity though (like, my dual language ebooks can't highlight words to match from left to right or vice versa). I would love your tool if it wasn't for the 'the content is AI generated' part. I'm not looking to add more AI slop into my life, but that doesn't mean I'm against it for actually useful purposes, like translations/language learning.

In the Netherlands, it's not included in the 'standard' curriculum but it's optional if you take 'Wiskunde D', i.e. basically what elsewhere is called 'advanced placement math' or some such. ('Wiskunde D' / 'math D' is basically a 'capita selecta' of various math topics for those who want to prepare for math-heavy/STEM university studies, whereas math A, B and C have fixed curricula and each lay a different foundation for various follow on studies. Math A has the stuff useful for (amongst others) medical studies, such as statistics but less calculus, math B is the most 'rigorous' and math C is for those who can't tell a fraction from an asymptote but since math is a required subject still need a way to pass their high school final exams).

When I was in highschool in Belgium 30 years ago, linear algebra (well, 'matrix calculations' is was called then) was part of math (depending on your electives) but I can understand why it's not taught today any more by default; there's just too much to teach, so you have to make choices. And I imagine that today they say 'we better do fewer things well than a lot with insufficient depth', which is what my experience is from how I took it 30 years ago. What's the point in doing linear algebra when it's only the purely numerical operations without teaching why or when you'd want to take a cross or dot product? And it's only a one semester course when you go to university anyway, so it's not like it's necessary to include early on or that any other high school subjects need it.

Combined defense budgets of all individual member states was 214 billion in 2023. That's 'spending budget', not revenue like the 300 something billion of Apple's revenue cited above.

"13 billions absolutely nothing for Apple"

LOL no there is not a single company or person in the world for whom 13 BILLION dollars is 'absolutely nothing'.

" and Apple should've known better."

Of course Apple should've known better. Their lawyers warned them about the risks of these deals (I do not have internal knowledge, I just know they did, they do to everyone who enters into deals like this). For years (rather, decades) everybody bet on this being too widespread to be corrected like it is now. You can't really blame them for trying, but in the end, this is the corporate/tax version of 'fuck around, find out'.

Not to highjack this topic, but she was recommended (like to many others of you no doubt) quite a bit in my Youtube feeds over the last few months; and the first few videos I watched seemed to be solid enough. Yet as I watched a few more, I couldn't shake the feeling that she's so out of left field that she's not just a 'quirky renegade' anymore, but rather a quack who dresses up her quackery with just enough 'real' physics to make it all sound very convincing. (By that I don't mean that she says factually wrong things, but that her conclusions or extrapolations from established facts seem to me, well, outrageous). However, I don't know enough physics to be able to tell if this is a correct feeling, and the Youtube comments are, as usual, one big fanboy fest, which is true for any large enough channel - even those of flat earthers and similarly delusional content).

So my question is - just how serious should she (and others like her, who denounce 'mainstream' academia as much as those other fringe groups who go on and on about the corruption of 'mainstream' media) be taken? Anyone have an opinion on this?

No, it has regional meanings, and you cannot assume that 'cider' always means what you say it does. I mean I too would have liked to have kept the original meaning of 'hacker' but alas, such is the nature of language.

I have not made enough cider and mead to be called a 'cider maker' in any sense but the most literal, and neither am I a chemist, so what I know about this is mostly from reading books and following others' advice. The way I understand it, all fermented drinks have methanol, including all your store-bought wines. They just have very little and it's distributed uniformly so the point at which it becomes it a health risk is way beyond the point where other things would be problems before the methanol (that's a roundabout way of saying - if you drink something like 20 liters of wine, the methanol in those 20 liters will probably not be your most pressing concern). Methanol only becomes a problem when it's concentrated, i.e. in distilled drinks. When you distill, you separate the methanol by throwing away the first part of your distilled result (probably has a proper name, I've never distilled anything myself), because the methanol evaporates before the other alcohols, the ones you actually want to capture.

I have a working mental model for how electricity works that is useful enough to let me do (some) electrical work, figure out simple electronics circuits, have some sort of understanding of how electrical devices like light switches, light dimmers (of the mechanical and the electronic kinds), motors, batteries etc work, ... All of these are useful skills.

Yet I know for sure I do not understand electricity, as I do not even understand most of the answers given to me when I ask about whether electricity has mass. And, apparently, many people who claim to know about physics don't either, because I get all sorts of answers that contradict each other.

Should I not know what I do know about electricity because my mental model is a simplification? I think your position is needlessly absolutist. I don't think my teachers ever taught me 'junk', just a (useful) simplification/model of reality.

Reminds me of a rumor in the first dotcom boom, where it was said that Larry Ellison would do 'laptop clay pidgeon shooting' from his yacht(s). He allegedly would have entire pallets of laptops carted onto the ships, take it out to open water, have some sort of contraption launch the laptops over sea and guests would shoot at them like you would at clay pidgeons. Seemed to be too outrageous to be true, but at the time (if I recall correctly) there were pictures of the setup on the boat. But this would have been 25 years ago, maybe I'm misremembering. I did a quick google but nothing obvious shows up. Anyway recall this?

But don't worry, 2024 is going to be the Year Of Math On The Web.

(I've been trying to do 'math on the web' (ish)) since 2002, and it's always sucked in some way; and all that time, images/pdf have Just Worked(TM). The emphasis in the OP on how much you'll have to report/chip in/fix is telling...)

I don't think there are ways specifically for 8 year olds, what one needs is an 8 year old who is motivated enough to take the route that adults take. There's no material on topics like this to 'gamify' learning Blender that will trick kids who aren't sufficiently motivated in the first place into learning it. But if your point was 'he was asking about methods for 8 year olds so your answer is irrelevant to the question', then yeah, fair enough.

The movement did stand out to me, but I found it added to the atmosphere. It's a robot, its movements are supposed to be unlike that of humans. The non-physics based aspects just add to the mystique of the story for me, as this is clearly set in some (dystopian or not, for the viewer to decide) future. 3-CPO also walks 'weird' or at the very least unexplained from a physics/mechanical pov, but its movement is iconic nonetheless.

I've done a lot / most of the popular Youtube tutorials (donut, Grant Abbit's series'), but I found it very useful to combine them with some Udemy courses that usually take a slower, more curriculum focused approach. The ones that are relevant today are probably different from the ones I used during early Covid lockdown, so I can't really recommend any specific ones; I usually picked the long ones, with say 10 hours of video content that then took me 20 to 30 hours to complete (when following along, you have to pause and rewind often). You do have to be wired to enjoy such slow-paced, fundamentals-focused learning, it's certainly not a quick dopamine hit approach.

Then again I'm still no good at making 3D art due to an innate deficit in aesthetically pleasing creative thinking, so I can't even testify for myself that this approach will make you good at making 'art'. It did teach me the mechanics in a way that I enjoyed.

Just out of curiosity, did you investigate how much more expensive it would be to have molds made somewhere in the West? Is that even available at all for relatively small and inexpensive molds/projects/orders like yours?

" it is just a collection of anecdotes of the clueless"

But those are the entertaining ones innit. What fun is it to read a blog (like OP) that says 'yeah we hired a bunch of experienced professionals and we didn't have any problems'. No, we want to read stories of 'so I forgot about one detail and the manufacturer completely misunderstood us so I had to fly to China and spend 100k to get it fixed and it still was 3 months late'.

He was robbed of the label/title/achievement 'kernel contributor'. In the same way that the loser of a sports match due to a bad ref call is 'robbed' of something. Which I think is a fair description, given the facts as presented here.

Do any of these methods actually work though? Last time I looked (admittedly, 6 months or so ago), there were 0 seeders on the torrents.

This is the point where I would tell the story of how I once got lost in Porto, while in a group of 25 geographers

It fits quite will within French legal tradition. Remember that it was Montesquieu himself who said 'le juge n'est que la bouche de la loi'. When I was working on my law degree, I (being a programmer) was quite interested in this field, and (although my French wasn't/isn't great, so I didn't get to go as deep as I would have liked) I found a large community of such legalistic work in French speaking parts of the world. The professor at my university who was into this sort of stuff also seemed to lean towards that sphere of influence.

Isn't that the geopolitical equivalent of 'You wouldn't know her. She goes to another school. In Canada."?

I have literally not once in my entire life heard a woman in real life say 'oh he's so tall, that's so attractive'. That's only an internet thing. Or an outside-Western Europe thing, maybe.

The HiP '97 mentioned in that link is actually where I first learned it and stole it from lol.

My last LAN party was back when everybody was still lugging around CRT's, but despite that being a long time ago, I remember the smell when you'd been inside for several days, pop outside to wake yourself up in the cold outside or to get some drinks when they'd ran out near the end of the event, and then walking back in.

I mostly organized events, so a lot of my time was spend on configuring networks and just general overhead of running events. Always fun: people who configured the wrong IP address so there'd be conflicts and you had to get up on stage, get everybody's attention, and get everyone to check they IP addresses at the same time. DHCP? Lol. After a few events we switched to peg DHCP, that worked remarkably well, as long as you had a few tech support guys who could help people out setting things up.

And also, people bringing extension cords on a roller, not completely unrolling it, plugging in several computers and the wires inside the coil melting as soon as the load was high enough. Smoke coming out, breakers going off, actual flames once.

And then there were the incredulous looks from parents or the occasional girlfriend who stopped by to see what was going on. I found some pictures from an event in a shoe box when I was clearing out my parents' attic a few months ago. I don't understand how any of us ever convinced a woman to have kids with us.

I have the top left button without modifiers remapped to esc, it's no problem at all. All your muscle memory works just fine, no retraining needed (UHK since 2018/2019, on of the first batches, and Vim user since late 1990's).

I've watched (non technical) people use ChatGPT a few times now, and most of them have rather underwhelming results. The reason is that they think it's just some other search engine, and they phrase their prompts as 'search queries'. Or they go completely the other direction and think they can just throw in a few random words that somewhat describe what they're roughly thinking of, and then expect the computer to fill in the gaps.

It's 2023 and there are lots of people who don't know how to efficiently and effectively use Google. To be able to do that, you need some sort of mental model of crawlers and websites and what gets indexed and what not and at what frequency, and the results of SEO and how a somewhat savvy marketeer at some company might influence things etc. The same with LLM models - if you don't know what a 'token' is, your only chance of getting good results is to use these models a lot and then hope that you start building useful intuitions. It really doesn't come natural to most people like it does to most of us here.

Why would they? The resale value has plummeted because they're both prone to breakage and basically unserviceable.

I've never taught mathematics but I think it's much harder to teach the intuition, and I also think that more people are capable of learning the mechanics than the intuition. So from the point of view of someone designing a methodology and curriculum - you have to design for scale.

I have the same thing with learning languages: I despise focusing on the rules of conjugation and word order and rote memorizing rules, exceptions to them and exceptions to exceptions. I much prefer to bootstrap with some vocab and then acquire by immersion, even if that means I get the conjugations wrong in the beginning. But I also find myself in the minority by far, to the extent that pretty much all language teachers I ever had (except my high school French teacher - she was awesome letting me translate MC Solaar lyrics for grades) didn't even really seem to believe that there are other ways of learning other than studying rules.

"The question is never asked about any other school subject"

Huh? People around me asked that all the time in high school & beyond.