tensorproduct

That 7.5T in payouts doesn't just disappear from the economy. Most people will put almost all of that payment right back into the economic equation through consumerism. In most models the basic income would be pretty close to the cost of living, and (this is strongly speculative) savings would drop to near-zero if people are less concerned about where their next paycheck is coming from.

A huge proportion of the welfare will is spent right away on consumption of necessities (food, rent) which goes right back into the economy. Specifically, it becomes revenue for business owners.

//"Math checks out" is a questionable approach to understanding science.

Very much agree. By this standard, one could put "1+1=2" as an appendix to every article you ever write and then defend them as having valid math, regardless of the content of the rest of the paper.

I find this most surprising coming from Taleb, because I thought that one of his principal arguments in the world of finance was that rigourous mathematical models are of limited use in understanding complicated real world systems. Maybe I've misunderstood him, but he seems to have changed his tune.

Actually, I thought of an analogy that helps me reason about this.

If we think of the VCS like a text editor, then a branch is like a file that you can write changes to. However, if you're working on an unnamed file, then the editor (or its designers) has to make a choice about what to do with that unnamed document when you're done.

Git treats an unnamed branch like the scratch buffer in Emacs. You can make all the changes you want, but once you close it, it's gone (in this case, eligible for GC). This seems reasonable, because if you cared about it, you would have given it a name.

Mercurial's designers work off a different assumption: all the work that you do is important (and it provides other mechanisms to allow rough work). So if you start working in an unnamed branch, that's no problem. You can have as many unnamed branches as you like, but it's up to you to remember your way around. Going back to the filesystem analogy, it becomes like navigating between your unnamed text files by their address on the disk, rather than a nice human readable name.

Does this analogy make sense to anybody else?

> > So, is that before or after having been gc'd?

> GCing only removes garbage. Since you're creating branches to keep track of your topics, this shouldn't ever be a problem. If you had no references to a commit, it must not have been important!

Coming from Mercurial to Git, this has been the single hardest thing to wrap my head around (so far). Why should I have to tell my version control system twice not to throw away my work? Committing a change should be sufficient to let the VCS know that I want to save it. That's what that word means.

Somebody already mentioned Welcome to Night Vale, which is a serial fiction podcast in the form of public radio news announcements from a town where all the weirdness of the world is true.

Also, there is The Thrilling Adventure Hour. This is a comedic take on old-school radio serials. There are multiple ongoing series within the show. This is a really funny show, with great production values, and some high profile guest stars.

I agree. I thought that this was the whole point of having a CI system.

I don't have a huge amount of experience in open source projects, so maybe they do it differently. Anywhere I've ever worked, not breaking the build and not causing regressions were a prerequisite to getting any pull request serviced. That's how you keep the master from breaking.

On the other hand, building a testing in a clean environment costs money. A company will pay for server time if they believe it's cheaper than developer time (it is). Maybe OS projects just don't have those resources.

Maybe they just prefer nano?

More likely, if this is meant to be a gentle introduction to the command line, vim is a pretty scary place. Nano works much more like a "normal" text editor.

The first thing I do on any bash terminal is `set -o vi`. This changes the default keybindings from emacs-like to vi-like. I find it to be a huge booster to my speed in navigating the command line.

edit: Actually, something cool I learned recently is that if you put the line "set editing-mode vi" in your ~/.inputrc then vi-like editing keys are available in any program that uses readline. This includes bash and the python repl. Presumably, a bunch of other repls and interactive command lines too.

I'm late-twenties/early-thirties. I'm probably just on the old side to still be perfectly happy to rent a room in a shared apartment. If I find myself in a long-term relationship then I imagine my priorities will change, but part of the reason I moved to London was because I thought it would be easier to meet romantic prospects.

I completely agree that property prices in London are insane, and that the political system is doing nothing to reign it in (quite the opposite, from my point of view).

But, from what I've experienced, if you don't want to buy your own property, then it's perfectly possible to live in London without earning crazy hedge fund money.

I have sort of a different experience. I just moved to London, from Dublin, a few months ago. I make a good, but not outrageous, salary: pretty close to a reported average for software developers in London.

I live in a somewhat rundown area, just outside zone 1. The rent is expensive, but not unmanageable. I have flatmates; the area feels safe; its close enough to bus and tube lines that getting around is simple. I live fairly frugally otherwise. I don't at all feel like I can't afford to live in the city, and I can't imagine having the access to the range and depth of culture and social events anywhere else.

Maybe it's that I don't have any interest in buying a home, but I feel like so much of this doesn't apply to me. Maybe it's also that I moved here from Dublin, another very expensive city, that I don't feel like it's so bad.

You Could Have Invented Monads is what really made monads "click" for me. There are better tutorials for how to use monads in the real world, but I've never read a better description of why you would want to, if you don't know what they are.

I played this game some years ago before I learned anything about programming. Coming back to it with some understanding of recursion makes it a lot easier (though still tough in places).