Viewing profile — stdbrouw

Same thing with beer and wine awards, some are good but most are just a paid promotion lottery.

One aspect is perhaps that simple things aren't necessarily cheap. One Laptop per Child struggled to get costs down, whereas a mass market solar panel is not self-serviceable but a…

Yes, ggplot2 is lovely to work with for complex graphs. Whereas a classic plotting library will have one function to create a bar graph, another to create a line graph, etc., in gg…

OTOH, motion sickness is often called "car sickness" for a reason, people who suffer from it only sometimes suffer on a bus, and rarely if ever on a train or a plane, so I'm not su…

... yet you still conclude "AI translation has gotten so good", so which is it?

Phenomenal author indeed. "Capital", a novel about the financial crisis and bankers on the hedonic treadmill, is wonderful too. Too bad either Lanchester or his publisher has beef …

Side note: what a stunning art deco (?) building! (There's a photo on the front page of the site.)

"The boy who cried wolf" is a story about false positives, so if that's what you want to avoid then you want to get close to 100% specificity, and accept that there are many things…

Before Netflix was a thing, I sometimes tried to have conversations with people about "gee, it's a bit annoying that my only options to watch a movie is to buy an expensive dvd tha…

You just have to go along with the idea that skin provides no indication of meatiness and that the two aliens are Ford Prefect types, then the short film lands just fine.

The AITA comparison seems apt insofar as chatbots function as a second opinion. You're consciously or subconsciously looking for an outside perspective that might differ from that …

My subjective impression is that 5 years ago AITA was actually quite wholesome and the top comments tended to be insightful. The shift towards "set boundaries, always choose yourse…

I read the Norwegian article that was linked, and it isn't actually similar: you would only have to pay taxes on food you've grown on your balcony (and mean to consume yourself) if…

I get the impression that most desktop users enable zram or zswap to get a little bit more out of their RAM but there is never any real worry about OOM, not regularly anyway, so th…

It doesn't really need any config on most distros, no. That said, if you want it to behave at its best when OOM, it does help to tweak vm.swappiness, vm.watermark_scale_factor, vm.…

You don’t get more income, but you do get more disposable income.

You don't have to pay VAT on things you fix for yourself, because you don't pay yourself at all. This is in fact a kind of (legal) tax avoidance, but not (illegal) tax evasion. Giv…

Well, it implies that the "grassroots" element of it is fake, the message itself being false is optional.

Doesn't this argument hinge on equivocating between two different definitions of aversion, though? I'm averse to bananas, but that doesn't mean I think it's immoral to eat them. Th…

So if I send an email that lacks a feature that MUST be there, will the email police come get me? At a certain point, looking for an analogy stops making sense I think.

One of the things I like most about CachyOS is that the configuration is all just in text files, one of the things I like least is that I am never quite sure whether to modify the …

Hah! Thanks for the correction.

Cute and thus worthy of an upvote, but whenever I see scientists or economists refer to first or second order effects it pertains to things that are subsequent to each other in tim…

The thing about second order effects is that they are almost never larger than the first order effect. Furthermore, GLP-1 users report having fewer cravings or just reduced appetit…

(Generalized) linear models have a straightforward probabilistic interpretation -- E(Y|X) -- which I don't think is true of total least squares. So it's more of an engineering solu…