anthony_romeo's comments

Got it, thanks!

I think their license works for the current version at time of purchase and next version, so you’re good to go till version 5

Minor and pedantic: should this instead be “Ternary Decision Tree”?

Fun!

But I wasn’t able to finish: I got a captcha with digits 5, 3, 7, and 8. When the chessboard appeared, the best move was Qe6. These conflicted with the rule to have all digits sum to 25 (5+3+7+8+6=29).

As also a non-expert, I can add that the superposition and entanglement of qubits are performed using gates as in classical computing. There’s the Hadamard gate which takes two particles outputs a quantum superposition of the particles. Passing the result of this into a controlled-not gate, or CNOT, entangles the particles and induces them into a Bell state. From there, calculations are performed until some sort of measurement, wherein the entangled particles collapse into one possible definitive state.

For another logic text, I really enjoyed Walton’s Informal Logic: A Pragmatic Approach.

It describes arguments as existing within different types of dialectic contexts (e.g. debate, deliberation, negotiation). Arguments that are fallacious in one context (e.g. threatening your opponent in a debate) are not in other contexts (e.g. threatening your opponent in a negotiation). From this, informal fallacies are defined not as inherently bad arguments that must always be avoided, but rather they emerge when one inappropriately shifts the dialectic from one type of argument to another.

I’ve been dabbling in this, and created my own keyboard layout to include all kinds of math characters using the right Alt key for level 3 and level 4 shift. Also replaced caps lock with the compose key. Didn’t take too long to get accustomed to it since it’s a corruption of the Greek keyboard layout (which is laid out similar to QWERTY).

I haven’t had the audacity to use it in production code, but it’s interesting to play around with and great for quick note taking or hacker news comments. (Sadly I’m on my phone right now to not make use of it for this comment)

> Why were lockdowns so unquestionably pushed?

If memory serves me right, early on in the pandemic, the health care systems of a number of countries and cities (e.g. Italy, NYC) were completely overwhelmed by infected individuals with severe respiratory illnesses, many of whom needed several days of ventilator treatment to survive. Many aspects of society in these areas ceased to function because of the effects of the virus itself (and the effective collapse of the health care system). Support for government mandates grew out of a desire to mitigate the effects of the virus.

In the US, after a pretty devastating March 2020, government mandates were largely left to the states, meaning that states/cities more strongly affected by COVID were able to choose stronger mitigation strategies and vice-versa.

After we learned more about the virus, after a vaccine was developed & released, and after the virus mercifully mutated into a less lethal version of itself, the likelihood repeating the same sort of shock on the healthcare system dropped. Many states had already lifted their restrictions in 2020, and states that were hit harder early (e.g. NY, CA) gradually lifted their restrictions throughout 2021.

I interpret Dr. Birx's quote to suggest that she believed that "fifteen days" time was not enough time to slow the spread, and that this was the largest span of time for which she was able to obtain authorization. The later expansion to "thirty days to slow the spread" suggests that Dr. Birx was correct.

I'll also note that, the following month, the President of the United States suggested that citizens should "LIBERATE MICHIGAN!" of their mask mandates and business restrictions. From this, your claim that mask mandates were "unquestionably pushed" seems inaccurate to me. On the contrary -- the first year of the pandemic was a perpetual deliberation on the effectiveness of mitigation strategies. Lockdown strategies continue to be debated despite lockdowns being basically nonexistent in most of the US now.

Who are "the news media companies" here, exactly? Who is "they" and what do you mean when you say they "forgot race relations to push other issues"?

I ask this because I'm pretty sure race relations are still being discussed among "the news media" and I'm wondering how you came to this conclusion.

10 feet away from what, exactly? A ‘law enforcement activity’? Is that area defined in a meaningful way?

What if a bystander records 10 feet away, but a second person stands in between and records 5 feet away? Has the area of law enforcement activity expanded to include the first bystander because of the second bystander is breaking a law?

I guess bystanders who didn’t bring their tape measure can just run the risk of recording and let the courts shake it out, right?

So hypothetically, if one is being illegally beaten by a person who happens to be an on-duty police officer, all the victim has to do to achieve justice is turn on their camera to record the incident to gather evidence. Bystanders can feel good that they’re ignoring the incident and carrying on with their days, as they know that it’s the victim’s responsibility to record their own beating.

Thanks for your response in the other thread (FTR your reply was already flagged dead by the time I noticed it). I’m responding to that.

I understand your position. On your point about why people think marriage is a right… I suspect this is because, at present, many rights are coupled with marriage - visitation rights at a hospital being the classic example.

What do you actually believe then?

You're not suggesting this, but your line of reasoning can be applied to prevent people who are sterile from getting married.

Couples without children can adopt children, regardless of the gender of the parents.

Don't hold me to this, but if I recall, the recommendation is to consume 8 cups (1 cup = 8 oz ≈ 0.23L) of water a day, and the water contained in our food counts. This is to say, people conflated 8 cups of water to mean 8 glasses of water.

In the past, a recession was defined as two consecutive quarters of decline in GDP [I think the definition has loosened somewhat recently, but I’ll ignore that].

Real GDP (which accounts for inflation) was up in 4Q 2021, but down 1Q 2022. Based on a somewhat arbitrarily-selected article I briefly skimmed the beginning of, Real GDP is expected to be up in 2Q.

https://www.philadelphiafed.org/surveys-and-data/real-time-d...

Of course, it always comes down to the details, which I haven’t really looked into.

I was responding to your suggestion that avoiding calling monkeypox a ‘gay disease’ was “just political correctness” by suggesting that some meaningful percentage may instead be “actual correctness.”

Neither syphilis nor unsafe sex nor HIV are unique to gay men, nor is monkeypox. I think that is enough to genuinely disqualify it as a ‘gay disease’.

One fun paranoid thought I ponder over when getting a domain: What if someone with a lot of money and a distaste for what I write decides to buy the .com version of my site and post ugly photos of me to it? For me, I’d rather obviate that and just find an adequate .com.

> If I'm not mistaken there's a chapter in Effective Python about this, where they recommend never using lists or dicts as Class attributes or default values for parameters and instead use factories or use None and then initialize them with default values when a new instance is created.

Ya, this is because the initialized object is stored as the default parameter, and is not initialized every time the function runs.

    def functy(dicty={}):
        print('dicty=', dicty)
        return dicty
   
    output = functy()
    # dicty = {}

    output.update({'key': 'value'})

    functy()
    # dicty = {'key': 'value'}