Viewing profile — e-dt

> People only really learn when they’re surprised. If they’re not surprised, then what you told them just fits in with what they already know. No minds were changed. No new perspec…

Well, yes, but Maine and Vermont are also in the bottom ten states in terms of population. Surely there is not such a big difference in economic activity when you look at it per ca…

I signed up for Kagi during the closed beta, and used it for a bit. But I kept going back to Google for some searches, the proportion of which was steadily increasing over time, un…

The same model is used for broadcast television in Britain - the standard British 'series' is 6-12 episodes. (Apart from soap opera, which cranks out massive amounts each year.)

Ah. I don't really see how making fun of people who performatively support popular causes is relevant here, but I suppose memes move in mysterious ways. Perhaps it's assumed that b…

What do you mean by $currentThing? Certainly this is, indeed, a current thing. But so are most things in the news - it's named for it! (O, the ceaseless march of time.) I don't und…

Almost all of the companies with power on the web are invested in continuing with it as it is. Given that, the only way to change it so substantially would be to create some kind o…

Yes, but when that sort of thing happens in commodities it's an illegal cartel, whereas when it happens with jobs it's responsible self-regulation by a professional association.

I'm of two minds about the gymnasium system. On the one hand, as you say, it seems to provide a better, more well-rounded education than the public school system of at least my nat…

Why do we neglect poetry, anyway? After Mother Goose there's a great lacuna in poetic education up until, I suppose, a possible Literature degree. In school we study and restudy no…

This is fun. If you turn restitution all the way up and friction all the way down, you can get a passable simulation of a liquid, and then (when temperature is increased) a gas.

Yes, but not in general shortages of doctors. It's a totally different problem, so this isn't really a helpful way to look at it. After all, if there's a shortage of cabbages, it d…

Replacing trust in humanity with trust in an algorithm created by humanity doesn't really get you anywhere. Like it or not, you are human, I am human, and we live a society of huma…

They were only accepting PoW cryptocurrencies anyway. In future, if PoS crypto gains wide currency (ha), I assume the matter can be reopened.

Modern computing seems to be a story of "worse is better", and not just the classical "worse is better" of Gabriel's paper but something that amounts to "worse is better squared". …

One benefit of slides that largely duplicate the same content that was in the talk is that if they are made publicly available, then you can go back over them if you forget/weren't…

'masculus' does not seem to come from the Sanskrit 'marya' (both may have come from the same root), and 'marya' does not seem to mean mortal but rather young man. 'martya' (from a …

I went to the best high school in Australia, James Ruse. At that level gifted education is not really a question of 'gift' anymore but a question of outside tutoring. I was pretty …

I think that this can be expanded beyond just "only use plain text for important documents". I think the heart of it is really, "use only proven, open (preferably standardised) for…

To those clicking on link [1] and finding it broken: you need to add a full stop at the end, as Hacker News's software has seen fit to exclude it from the link.

It's an encoding that encodes all of Unicode. The "UTF" in UTF-8, etc. stands for Unicode Transformation Format.

There's a difference between what you are allowed to do with the code, which is what the MIT license covers, and what you are allowed to do with a specific hosted platform on which…

2022 - 2011 = 11, not 21.

But Peppermint Patty famously didn't go by "sir".