tduberne

This is a classical circular problem of transportation planning: when deciding whether to get a car, and if yes which car, people often use their vacation as a use case. And then, when they got that VW bus to go to the seeside once a year, using it in the city is the logical choice, because it is just lying around. Basically, getting a car is expensive, but once you have it, using it is cheaper (and often faster and more comfortable) than the other options.

So a lot of the discution about getting people "out of cars" is not about getting people to never drive, but to get them to not own a car, such that they have to make the concious decision of renting a car for the holidays, if this is the best choice, for instance. What you describe sound like this.

Obviously, this opens the question of how to improve the car rental market to make those options real options. This is where car-sharing systems and the like come in.

Very interesting. I first wondered how nature can randomly generate such a pattern, and then realized we are just falling for our "built in" pattern recognition: it would feel much more "natural" for the stop sequence to be the encoding of some specific protein without any clearly recognizable pattern... But it would actually be more unlikely to appear/survive mutation than "any long-enough sequence of A".

I also like how it is established that this has an effect on replication, but that as far as I understand we do not understand the underlying process. Humbling.

This was my question as well. I was myself directly involved for about 10 years in the development and maintenance of a medium-sized open source project, and am still part of the community, and there was never really any form of "external contribution", appart from the occasional user who found a problem in the docs or a small bug and was knowledgeable and kind enough to fix it and submit a PR (less than a handful in 10 years). And we typically would already know the guys from conferences or similar.

I feel that the user is coming from a place of wanting to gather experience and show it, and read somewhere that open source is great for this. But lots of projects are open source not to favor external contributions, but for other reasons. And external contributors will typically be long term users of the software, who already have deep knowledge about it and a personal interest in moving it forward.

If the aim is to get experience, I am actually convinced that it is easier to get an entry-level job than to invest the time and effort to be able to make significant contributions to big open source projects. Of course if you manage to get a job where you can contribute to open source, even better.

Good luck!

For anyone interested in those topics, I can really recommend the report of the Galileo commission: https://galileocommission.org/report/

It is a report from a number of established scientists and philosophers, which questions the assumption that science is necessarily materialistic. It is a very thorough summary of centuries of scientific evolution, and of the place of background assumptions, whatever they are.

To be honest, there are 1000 ways to see this work, and he probably had a very different view of what he was doing than "chipping a the same rock for 5 years". Here is a proposal that might be closer to what he was feeling: carefully revealing a creature no eyes saw since millions of year as carefully as if you were unclothing your first love. With each movements, getting more intimate with it, more familiar with every detail of its skin, until you know its features better than your own. For millions of year, it was encased in cold stone, as a fairy tale princess enclosed in a cold room, that you would be preparing for its first night in the world.

I do not mean to diminish the level of discipline and patience required, just to point that the fantasy you have about your work is much more important than the work itself, and that there is a lot of beauty into that task, certainly much more than in creating data pipelines to decide how to better trick unsuspecting web users to click on ads (and there, again, people who do that kind of thing probably have a very different fantasy than mine).

I wanted to say the same thing. Here i Germany the choice of vegan sausage and cold cuts is huge, even in small grocery shops. I know lot of people who eat meat regularly _and_ buy the vegan alternatives on a regular basis.

I would argue the opposite. Give anyone who can write reasonnably the abstract of a few dozen papers in a given field, and I am confident they would be able to produce a convincing bullshit abstract. Most abstracts in a given field sound extremely similar, and are mostly keyword dropping with an ounce of self-promotion. I actually think that the only reason ChatGPT did not produce a higher rate of convincing abstracts is that the reaserchers assessing them knew they had a high probability to look at an AI result and were thus extra careful. Most of the abstracts correctly labelled as AI would probably be considered legit (which does not mean good) if sent to a conference without warning.

I do not live in Switzerland anymore, so I cannot do a survey, but I can tell you helicopters are used an absurd amount in Switzerland, and everyone seems fine with it. For instance I personally saw, with my own eyes, helicopters used to:

- install an AC unit on the roof of a university building

- move building material from one side of campus to the other side

- extract dead trees from a small forest with an extensive network of roads and paths

- plant trees in the middle of campus. Which lead to this fantastic exchange with my then 2 yo: "look papa, a flying tree!" "What do you mean?" "There!" "Oh, you are right. A flying tree. Do you want a banana?"

My pet theory is that given the high wages in Switzerland, it quickly becomes cheaper to rent a chopper for two hours then to get a crane built, operated and unbuilt.

Re looking silly, I am not so sure. Only 10 years ago no one would have expected adults to proudly navigate the city on flashy colored elwctric kick scooters, and yet look at any big (european?) city nowadays. Even investment bankers in tailor-made suits move on those abominations as if it was the next lamborghini.

I actually find them quite attractive as a means to access my local train station: easier to take with me than a bike or kick scooter, apparently much safer than rollerblades or skateboard. Just not for that price, but let's give it a few years to see if it takes on.

Trying to interpret dreams logically is unlikely to generate explanations that are helpful: there are so many possibilities, and even when one finds an explanation that makes sense, one is left wonderingwhat to do with it. A much more potent approach seems to be to re-explore the dream as image, being mindful of the resonances you can feel in the body, and letting it develop the way it wants, without focusing too much on "understanding" or any specific goal. This might sound a bit abstract, but here is a two part blog post which I think explains this pretty well (I am not the author):

https://inthewilderless.substack.com/p/against-dream-interpr...

https://inthewilderless.substack.com/p/towards-dream-intuiti...

(Note: I was quite familiar with "imaginal meditation" when I first found this post, so to me this made a lot of sense and was immediately applicable. But I hope and think that it is even if one is not familiar with those practices)

I read it as well, and also listened to his podcast (which is where I learned about "TEAM-CBT", his supposedly highly effective new approach). The concepts and arguments in the book (and podcast) make total sense to me, but the _way_ it is presented is sounds more like snake-oil marketing than science, which is why I am interested in learning about its effectiveness on severe forms of depression from independent sources.

(Before anything: sorry if that nessage comes accross as insensitive, this is not the purpose. More on this at the end)

Your situation sounds like the textbook description of depression as caused by "mental distortions" from proponents of CBT. Did your wife consult a CBT practitioner, and did this help?

I am in no way trying to say I know the solution to your (past) problems, but CBT is sometimes described in a bit too enthusiastic terms by its proponents, and your story sounds like an opportunity to get anecdotal evidence on how much it might actually work in practice. In particular TEAM-CBT proponents claim to be able to cure depression in a session (and then continue to accompany the person through the innevitable relapses). I love their very data-oriented approach, but find it too good to be 100% true.

I did not read the book, but my understanding of "bullshit job" is a job that is useless to the entity paying for it: you could remove that person completely, and everything would continue to work. This seems very different from what is at play here: the game studio very carefully designed the game to attract those grinders, and this is how the studio makes money. The article clearly sees this as well, by labeling the game as a ponzi scheme.

> Another French slang expression (also testicle-related) for not giving a fuck is “I’m painting my balls with the brush of indifference”

If anyone has an idea of the original in french, I would be interested. I am French and I have no clue what he refers to.

In French cuisine fish sausages ("quenelles") exist since a long time, though I expect they might taste quite different from the ones described here.

The article makes the exact opposite claim: the cultural imprint does ot need to evoke a feeling in you, you just need to believe that others are associating the product with a certain image (to which the company hopes lots of customers will want to identify).

As the article argues, this also makes it more difficult to escape: you have no control over what others are seeing.

I am not sure that this really changes the situation. The fact that peopke do use guns in defensive situations do not meant that this is the best option. I would expect most of those situations to be armed robberies, and there an obvious alternative is just to give the attacker what they want. It is painful and traumatic, but likely less so than killing them, and likely more cost efficient.

There are places where attackers "shoot first and ask second" (I heard that Sao Paolo is like that), but even there carrying a gun is likely to put you in more danger than it helps.

I think the main problem with gun ownership is that there is a feedback loop: the more people own guns, the more likely it is to be held at gunpoint at some point, increasing the appeal of carrying a gun. It is hard to break, no question. But it is possible. Australia was similar to the US not so long ago, and they managed to change it.

I once read something that went like:

- do not carry a gun if you are not ready to draw it

- do not draw a gun if you are not ready to shoot

- do not shoot if you are not ready to kill

Because when faced with an opponent with a gun, one moment of hesitation could mean your death.

I also read (from a gun instructor) that if you intend to use a gun for self defense, you should know that using it will bankrupt you. Because even if you use it in a lawful way, the legal process that will determine that it was lawful costs more than the typical gun owner can carry financially.

So I think you are right. I can understand how fear might push to buy a gun, but I definitely see it as a bad idea, even if the danger the person fears is real (which I think is often not the case). Using a gun is the end of your life.

As a non American, it is often puzzling to read that there is even a debate about it.

One requirement seems to be that the driver can access the mailbox without leaving the vehicle. So the equivalent in Europe would be the bikes (or, nowadays, electric scooters) that are used to deliver mail. They are typically specifically designed for the postal service.

So it might be less different than it seems at first.

This might be related to people not having English as their native language and just absorbing whatever formulations they read most. I thought about it, and in English I would say "I am really exited to share some great news", whereas the sentence I would use in French would be better translated as "please allow me to share a good news with you". So american exageration is more an addition than a replacement for my "native personality".

That's funny, I had exactly the opposite reaction. Almost 20 light hours sounds far for something we basically strapped on the top of a big firecracker, which probably provided propulsion for at most a few dozen minutes... The fact that it was even possible to make that thing fly over several planets before exiting the orbital plane on a predictable course, and that one can still communicate with it as it exits the heliosphere is truly awe inspiring to me.

Am I the only one wondering why they used 40 computers, if the computation only lasted for 30 minutes? Does anyone who read the full paper jnow the reason? The article does not explain anything in that direction, but I would expect that if they could just do it on one computer and wait for two days, they would have done it...

Really interesting paper. Layman summary for those not used to network science: infection rate are lower than expected from standard models, because they consider each infected person meets new completely random strangers, while in reality, they are more likely to meet those who infected them, or those who infected those who infected them.

In particular, the paper shows that a "phase transition" happens when the degree (average number of person met per person) exceeds a threshold, which the paper estimates to be around 7. Above that threshold, growth becomes exponential rather than linear.

This might sound silly, but the following, cited in Getting Things Done, helped me a lot:

"The middle of every successful project looks like a disaster"

Whenever I have setbacks, delays, whatever, this sentence can help me put things into perspective and keep at work rather than panicking. (Although of course, sometimes, things look like a disaster because that's what they are...)

You got me thinking... Would a webmention-based aggregator make sense? In the sense that you link to it from your post and send a mention to it, and your post appears on it?

I see a potential for spam, but on the other side I always found that given the low number of webmention-using blogs, they do not seem to bring a lot. Most posts where Ibsaw them used were posts about webmentions themselves, where people basically were playing around.

Such an aggregator would at least create some kind of hub where such posts appear.

There is worse: websites that redirect you to the homepage in your detected language, rather than the same page in "your" language if it exists, or the original if not.

I often have this problem with web shops with my wife, who has a different mother tongue: she sends me a link to eg. a piece of furniture she likes, and all I can see is the homepage of the bloody shop, with no clear way to just say "show me the damn page I asked for".

Another fun experience was a short text on an airline website (cannot remember which one) which ended being in 3 different languages, sometimes switching in the middle of a paragraph, depending on whether it was using the language of my location, my browser or my OS. At least that was fun.

A lot of the advice given is good, but I would like to add something I did not see: you can only be really fluent at a language you practice daily. I speak three foreign languages fluently, and speak two of them daily (English and German). I barely speak my mother tongue (French) with anyone else than my 3 and 1 yo. I am not really fluent at my mother tongue anymore, and my family often makes fun of how I speak, which is often a straight translation from English or German (and I apparently also have a German accent), with lots of pauses to search my words. Of course, one week in a French speaking environment and fluency is back.

What I want to say with it is: do not worry too much. Read, listen and speak English with natives, and you will keep a decent enough level to gain real fluency any time you get immersed in an English speaking environment.

It is very present in the current discussion around open access publications in academia. Lots of universities and funding agencies encourage or even enforce that scientific papers and/or teaching material they finance be published under a CC license.

"The mind illuminated" is a very good introduction to meditation. It is unique in the formal system he used to make sense of the various levels of practice. Very practical and low-BS.

Very nice. One question though: as far as I understand, it relies heavily on the fixed-size vocabulary to reduce keyboard size. Is it still able to handle names (of persons, countries...) which are not part of the vocabulary?