My personal tale on this is that given that the brain contains chaotic circuits (i.e. circuits in which tiny perturbations lead to cascading effects), and these circuits are complex and sensitive enough, the brain may be inherently unpredictable due to quantum fluctuations causing non-negligible macroscopic effects.
I don’t know if the above is the case, but if there’s anything like free will out there, I’m inclined to believe that its origins lie in something like that.
I love pedantry <3 I got the “three medals per event” from some Wikipedia page, and I know they love pedantry over there as well, so maybe you should make a contribution?
In 2020 there were 448 events at the Olympics, let’s round up to 450. Each event gives 3 medals, for a total of 1350 medals. The Olympics are held every four years, so that 337.5 medals are awarded in an average year.
There are about 8.1 billion people in the world. On average, 0.000004 % of the worlds population receives an Olympic medal each year.
If this were a completely random yearly lottery, and you lived for 100 years, you would have about a 0.0004 % chance of winning an Olympic medal in your lifetime.
I would count myself lucky if I won that by the time I was 50.
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?
I can’t post my memes on the much room bulletin board for everyone to see unless I print them :/
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?
Honest question: Are there no limits in the US to what you can legally name your child? Where I’m from a name can be rejected if it can “cause significant harm or inconvenience to the child”. This prevents idiots from naming their child “Traitor” or “Terrorist”.
Software is a tool. I develop stuff that i know is of interest to companies working with everything from nuclear energy to hydrogen electrolysis and CO2 storage. I honestly believe I can make a positive contribution to the world by releasing that software under a permissive licence such that companies can freely integrate it into their proprietary production code.
I’m also very aware that the exact same software is of interest to the petroleum industry and weapons manufacturers, and that I enable them by releasing it under a permissive licence.
The way I see it, withholding a tool that can help do a lot of good because it can also be used for bad things just doesn’t make much sense. If everybody thinks that way, how can we have positive progress? I don’t think I can think of any more or less fundamental technology that can’t be used for both. The same chemical process that has saved millions from starvation by introducing synthetic fertiliser has taken millions of lives by creating more and better explosives. If you ask those that were bombed, they would probably say they wish it was never invented, while if you ask those that were saved from the brink of starvation they likely praise the heavens for the technology. Today, that same chemical process is a promising candidate for developing zero-emission shipping.
I guess my point is this: For any sufficiently fundamental technology, it is impossible to foresee the uses it may have in the future. Withholding it because it may cause bad stuff is just holding technological development back, lively preventing just as much good as bad. I choose to focus on the positive impact my work can have.
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.
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.
Please tell me how, getting up at 5 (and going to bed at 21) is going to give me more time than getting up at 7-8 and going to bed at 23-00.
Also, I would like to know why “society” thinks you are “better” if you exercise at 6-7 before work, rather than 20-21 after work.
Did you read the text on that graphic?
… land conversion for grazing and feed …
I’m not talking about meat production in general (which I think should be minimised), I’m specifically talking about meat production from land that is not viable for other uses.
This was exactly my point: I’m legitimately interested in how that graphic looks if you consider meat produced on land that cannot be used for other types of agriculture, and which is local so that transportation is a negligible cost, and feed production is close to non-existent, because the livestock primarily lives off the land.
It seems like you’ve misunderstood what I’m trying to say. I’m saying that
A) There are legitimate reasons for a country to want to have some degree of self-sufficiency.
B) The environmental impact of producing meat is hugely different depending on how the livestock gets its food, and the environmental impact of transporting goods cannot be neglected.
C) There are countries with terrain suitable for livestock that cannot be used for farming.
Of course: Almost no countries are, or need to be, 100% self-sufficient, because we have trade, but there is a huge difference between 10% and 50% self-sufficiency. If we are to cut out meat entirely, many places would be incapable of maintaining any notable degree of self-sufficiency.
With you third paragraph, it seems like you actually agree with me. I don’t know how you got from me saying “there are legitimate reasons to produce meat”, to me saying this is a black and white issue. I’m explicitly trying to say that it’s not black and white, both because of self-sufficiency arguments, and because of the environmental cost of transportation. Thus, we need a nuanced approach. This means that we should minimise (or eliminate) the use of farmland for livestock production, without condemning livestock production as a whole, because there are legitimate reasons to have livestock, as argued above.
The basis of this thread was that livestock can be raised on land that is not viable for farming. Re-do the calculation when taking into account that the livestock wander freely ten months a year, and that feed is grown on land too harsh for all or most crops, and let me know how it turns out.
GET THE ROUNDIE!