There’s always some place that’s worse. What you’re arguing for here is a race to the bottom, where everyone tries to be worse than their neighbours in order to get the undesirables to go there instead.

In essentially “the tragedy of the commons” but in an opposite sense. If everyone gets worse in an attempt to get rid of “undesirables”, you just end up with everywhere being worse, and the “undesirables” still being around. What we need is for everyone to build safety nets together. That might actually improve the situation.

Honestly, I kind of wish crypto hadn’t gone to shit with the whole speculation thing… It was just this fun thing where obscure websites would let you buy random shit for laughs sometimes. Then suddenly investors had to try making money off something with no inherent value and ruined it :/

On a hard drive? I remember a bunch of people messing around with bitcoin when it was new, relatively unknown and considered a niche nerd thing. There were online competitions with money prizes where the “last winner” (eg. third place) would win like one bitcoin.

Fast forward 15 years and the stuff you mined for fun in high school and forgot about on some dusty old computer is worth thousands of dollars.

It’s completely common in most countries that some high-ranking government officials live on state-owned property. Among the reasons for this are security, and the fact that official visits, press events and other official events are held at that property.

We have divided a bunch of sports into “open class” and “women only” (some sports use “men only” and “women only”) because the difference between men and women is large enough that

1. Women would be unable to compete at a professional level otherwise

2. A lot of sports would be directly dangerous for women (see: contact sports without weight classes)

Nobody argues that it’s pointless to have weight classes. How is that different from having classes based on (a proxy for) levels of testosterone?

One of the best male 1500m runners today, Jacob Ingebritsen, beat the current women’s WR by almost 4 seconds when he was 15 years old. Women can be amazing athletes, and watching women compete at the top level is amazing. That’s why we need a class where they can compete, just like we need weight classes in many sports.

You may be joking, in which case: Fair game.

If not… come on. In what world do you write “(…) I’ll find you. Mark my words.” In that kind of context without being (at least humorously) threatening?

The way I understand this, the issue is that without reading it they cannot verify that it doesn’t contain sensitive information, so they can’t give it out. That sounds like a reasonable explanation to me.

The issue with online voting, no matter what you do, is that someone can force you under threat of violence to vote for a specific candidate, and watch to make sure you do it. Complete privacy in the voting booth is paramount to ensuring that everyone can vote freely.

Very dense, yes, but stuff can be very dense and have low viscosity at the same time. Lava has a viscosity similar to peanut butter is what I’ve heard. You can push stuff down into it, it just requires some force to prevent the stuff from floating back to the top.

You could in principle walk on lava, either by moving quickly enough that you stay on top, or by protecting your legs enough that you could sink in maybe around knee deep where you would float.

-Wfatal-errors is my friend

I see a lot of strange takes around here, and honestly cannot understand where you are coming from. Like really: I’ve written several 100+ page documents with everything from basic tables, figures and equations, to various custom-formatted environments and programmatically generated sections, and I’ve never encountered even a third of these formatting issues people are talking about.

You literally just \documentclass[whatever]{my doc type}, \usepackage{stuff} and fire away. To be honest, I’ve seen some absolutely horrifying preambles and unnecessary style sheets, and feel the need to ask: How are you people making latex so hard?

You are almost on point here, but seem to be missing the primary point of my work. I work as a researcher at a university, doing more-or-less fundamental research on topics that are relevant to industry.

As I wrote: We develop our libraries for in-house use, and release the to the public because we know that they are valuable to the industry. If what I do is to be considered “industry subsidies”, then all of higher education is industry subsidies. (You could make the argument that spending taxpayer money to educate skilled workers is effectively subsidising industry).

We respond to issues that are related either to bugs that we need to fix for our own use, or features that we ourselves want. We don’t spend time implementing features others want unless they give us funding for some project that we need to implement it for.

In short: I don’t work for industry, I work in research and education, and the libraries my group develops happen to be of interest to the industry. Most of my co-workers do not publish their code anywhere, because they aren’t interested in spending the time required to turn hacky academic code into a usable library. I do, because I’ve noticed how much time it saves me and my team in the long run to have production-quality libraries that we can build on.

You’re not seeing the whole picture: I’m paid by the government to do research, and in doing that research my group develops several libraries that can benefit not only other research groups, but also industry. We license these libraries under MIT, because otherwise industry would be far more hesitant to integrate our libraries with their proprietary production code.

I’m also an idealist of sorts. The way I see it, I’m developing publicly funded code that can be used by anyone, no strings attached, to boost productivity and make the world a better place. The fact that this gives us publicity and incentivises the industry to collaborate with us is just a plus. Calling it a self-imposed unpaid internship, when I’m literally hired full time to develop this and just happen to have the freedom to be able to give it out for free, is missing the mark.

Also, we develop these libraries primarily for our own in-house use, and see the adoption of the libraries by others as a great way to uncover flaws and improve robustness. Others creating closed-source derivatives does not harm us or anyone else in any way as far as I can see.

I do exactly this: Write code/frameworks that are used in academic research, which is useful to industry. Once we publish an article, we publish our models open-source under the MIT license. That is because companies that want to use it can then embed our models into their proprietary software, with essentially no strings attached. This gives them an incentive to support our research in terms of collaborative projects, because they see that our research results in stuff they can use.

If we had used the GPL, our main collaborators would probably not have been interested.

Oh, I definitely get that the major appeal of excel is a close to non-existent barrier to entry. I mean, an elementary school kid can learn the basics(1) of using excel within a day. And yes, there are definitely programs out there that have excel as their only interface :/ I was really referring to the case where you have the option to do something “from scratch”, i.e. not relying on previously developed programs in the excel sheet.

(1) I’m aware that you can do complex stuff in excel, the point is that the barrier to entry is ridiculously low, which is a compliment.

I just cannot imagine any task you can do in excel that isn’t easier to do with Python/Pandas. The simplest manipulations of an excel sheet pretty much require you to chain an ungodly list of arcane commands that are completely unreadable, and god forbid you need to work with data from several workbooks at the same time…

You are neglecting the cost-benefit of temporarily jumping to the wrong conclusion while waiting for more conclusive evidence though. Not doing anything because evidence that this is bad is too thin, and being wrong, can have severe long-term consequences. Restricting tiktok and later finding out that it has no detrimental effects has essentially zero negative consequences. We have a word for this principle in my native language - that if you are in doubt about whether something can have severe negative consequences, you are cautious about it until you can conclude with relative certainty that it is safe, rather than the other way around, which would be what you are suggesting: Treating something as safe until you have conclusive evidence that it is not, at which point a lot of damage may already be done.

So what you’re saying is: We have a small sample of unreliable evidence that this thing may be absolutely detrimental to the developing brain. Thus, we should assume it’s fine until we have more reliable evidence. Did I get that right?

This is starting to be some years back, but I was exclusively using apt when I was using Ubuntu, have they gone away from that?

I’ve only ever tried one distro. Please enlighten me on what’s wrong with Ubuntu.