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9nGQluzmnq3M's comments

9nGQluzmnq3M | 5 years ago | on: Pure Skill Minesweeper

One thing I rarely see mentioned is that it's pretty common to have situations in Minesweeper where you need to guess, but the probability of each square being a mine is not the same. While each individual square has the same probability of being a mine in isolation, the numbers leak information: eg. if you have a set of numbers that could be fulfilled by one or two mines, it's statistically more likely that the one-mine solution is correct.

One example: https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/2511421/correct-pro...

9nGQluzmnq3M | 5 years ago | on: Dear Google Cloud: Your Deprecation Policy Is Killing You

Give me a break. Lots of teams in Google have restrictive travel policies and never see the pointy end of a plane. Massages cost money. Holiday gifts ceased to exist years ago.

I'm also quite surprised by your wage comment: a common aphorism is that Amazon cheaps out on everything except real estate and compensation.

9nGQluzmnq3M | 5 years ago | on: How to tokenize Japanese in Python

But rendaku rules are extremely complicated and often unpredictable , eg 中島 can be Nakashima or Nakajima depending in how the person chooses to pronounce it.

9nGQluzmnq3M | 5 years ago | on: I Tried to Live Without the Tech Giants. It Was Impossible

Imma need a citation for that. Yes, Amazon could do that, but the cloud providers are usually very clear about drawing a clear dividing line between their hosting businesses and consumer businesses, because enterprise customers are extremely sensitive to the slightest suggestion of their data being mined.

9nGQluzmnq3M | 5 years ago | on: I Tried to Live Without the Tech Giants. It Was Impossible

It's not, but perhaps it makes an even deeper point: that it is genuinely impossible to use the Internet without Amazon, Google and Microsoft, because so much of the web relies on the three giants, and every click you make adds a fraction of a cent to their hosting revenues.

That said, I do agree that madness lies going too down the supply chain. Is using any device with a lithium-ion battery inherently immoral because they contain some cobalt that may have been mined in exploitative conditions in the Congo? Where do you draw the line?

9nGQluzmnq3M | 5 years ago | on: No net insect abundance and diversity declines across US

This is anecdotal, but during Singapore's lockdown, one of the many services cut for about two months was curb maintenance. Being deep in the tropics, all green spaces immediately turned into jungles of flowers and weeds, and the butterfly population consequently exploded:

https://mothership.sg/2020/06/grass-cutting-butterflies/

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-52960623

On the other hand, mosquito populations also increased and there were lots of people stuck at home as bait for them, contributing to Singapore's worst dengue outbreak in years:

https://www.tnp.sg/news/singapore/three-more-dengue-deaths-s...

So at least one lesson here is that, if given an opportunity to bounce back, many insect populations can and will.

9nGQluzmnq3M | 5 years ago | on: Hyperloop: Pipes of Fancy

If built, it would compete directly with Etihad Rail, which is building a regular rail network throughout the entire UAE and already has its first phase operational:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etihad_Rail

This focuses primarily on cargo, but is built with passenger trains at up to 200 km/h in mind. And most Hyperloop business plans also seem to rely heavily on freight.

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