fineline's comments

I just switched my banking from the largest national institution in Australia to a local credit union and another bank that has always had an online/phone only model and is good at it. I get the best combination of human customer service and good value accounts and leave behind the abysmal contempt for customer service demonstrated by the major, with all its infuriating new AI mediocrity. I can't be the only one?

Plus the Swedish Gripen jet fighters are designed to operate off roads rather than requiring long, smooth runways, as well as be main†ained in the field.

I learned a few years ago to see (and hear) the word "just" as a red flag, whether used by others or myself. I do catch myself "just"ing sometimes, but always seek to restate the sentence without the word "just". It is reliably a clearer, more honest and expressive formulation, and provokes deeper consideration in both the listener and, importantly, the speaker.

(Just is an overloaded word with several definitions, some of which are fine - "a just decision", "it just happened" - I'm referring to its use in a dismissive, diminutive or disparaging sense.)

My other red flag words are "assume" and "trivial". As in "I just assumed it was trivial".

Some might say that's a part of the problem. After the cold war, many Eastern European states received financial and other support and thrived as western-style democracies while Russia was more marginalised and went through period of economic decline, leading to rise of Putin as president after the "Chechen terrorist" apartment bombings and the demise in all but name of the fledgling democratic system. Parallels with history of Germany after WW1 / Weimar / Reichstag.

Ideal outcome may be that Russia ends up with different leadership after this disaster, and a strong, healthy democracy, with more of a stake in the global order - similar to Germany post WW2. Wishful thinking at this stage perhaps...

Thanks, I'll look into hidden variables.

I read this article more because I'm interested in Zen than QM. But it prompted a question for me. What (if any) is the relationship between QM (which I understand to manifest mainly at the level of particles and very small scales) and the science of complex non-linear dynamic systems (colloquially "chaos theory"). Both centre around the philosophical concept of unknowability, unpredictability, uncertainty. Both prompt questions around why the world is the way it is, rather than any of the other states it could have ended up in, which leads to wondering about whether alternate states could, or should, also exist. I personally find complexity more approachable, as it concerns phenomena that are at a more relatable scale - the weather, the economy, species evolution etc. Is there any intersection between QM and complex systems science in the conventional/institutional sense, e.g. in study or research? Or are they separate rabbit holes?

Prudent caution about snakes is good. I just today moved two small (<1m) but quite venomous snakes from my pool shed out into the bush, very carefully. But a reaction as extreme as yours may not serve you well in an encounter, it's best and safest to stay calm. Personally I was quite arachnophobic growing up, but have found that 20+ years living in Australia and the normalisation of removing the odd big huntsman from the house has made it so they don't bother me now. I believe this also helps me be more confident in other areas too. Like they say, beyond fear is freedom. Maybe have a look around for groups, hypno etc? All the best.

Either Gsuite or Office 365 with the Web/mobile apps costs around $5/month/user, and includes Email. Just sayin.

I expect smart glasses to be the next UI paradigm. Very conveniently portable. AR style visual interfaces. Built in speakers for personal audio (bose already do this in sunglasses). The AR interface could be directly manipulated by hand gestures using cameras and other sensors. I know there have been a couple of false starts (Google Glass) and current products with bigger form factors (Hololens), but I expect spectacles size devices with good UI in the not too distant future, and I look forward to the development opportunities.

I've never read Black Swan. I found Antifragile hugely thought-provoking. Knowing both, would you imagine I had anything to gain from also reading Black Swan, or do you really think they basically cover the same ground?

I agree that attributing this to genetics is somewhat abstract - it would normally be attributed as a phenomenon of psychology. And "more attracted to the negative than the positive" is an ambiguous way of putting what I guess the OP meant - that fear is a more compelling emotional driver than "positive" things such as the desires to consume or procreate. But in the very long run, since this is all the result of evolution (leaving aside for now the possibility that it is all God moving in His mysterious ways, which, whilst I certainly can't disprove, isn't the thrust of the criticism) and considering that these same behavioral preferences are readily observable in all animals and indeed many plants and bacteria, then the suggestion that they are indeed ultimately transmitted and shaped by genetics seems reasonable?

What kind of instance is that on?

Thanks for the article, very informative.

There is a third alternative with a clear advantage over these two. PNPM is an NPM client that installs versioned packages into a central location and uses file system links within the 'node_modules' folder of individual projects. For a typical developer with many local projects this is a huge disk space saver. It also uses the original and much clearer nested structure of node_modules. I don't know why NPM didn't adopt the shared package approach, or why yarn didn't either, but PNPM gets it right.

I used to think the same about where I live - Australia - a lot bigger and more sparsely populated than Denmark. But here is an article about the first woman (and second person) to drive around the country in an EV:

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/sep/12/how-much...

and two maps of the network in 2016 and 2018, showing the effort (by Tesla owners club!) in building out the network:

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/sep/12/how-much...

Yep they're not all superchargers, many are just EV friendly 240v hookups. But as the lady in the first article said "the reality is that if you can see the lights on, or that the kettle works, then you can charge".

Got me thinking about my next car. Or campervan. We often camp in caravan parks - with a 15 amp hookup plugged into the vehicle...

I did removals for a couple of years as a young man too. I disagree with your conclusion. There are so many different physical characteristics between each day's jobs - parking setups, strange paths through gardens, different types of building layouts and contents, different types of unusual belongings, the behavior of customers in one of the most stressful activities in most people's lives (possibly combined with other stressful circumstances such as divorce, bereavement or repossession), the need to pack and handle both very fragile items and very heavy and bulky items...

People who reckon you're going to build a robot that can handle this huge diversity of demands at a cost that can beat low paid manual workers are being very techno-utopian. Same with cleaning hotel rooms, doing roadworks, building up and knocking down special events etc. Not to mention the immense amount of work in reconfiguring physical infrastructure if we ever get remotely serious about climate change. If anyone was making a betting market on achieving automation of those kinds of jobs within a specific timeframe I'd be an eager counter party.

Now if you're a radiographer, legal assistant, project manager, sports reporter, then yeah the times are a changin'...

Apparently it used to be considered something you would try and hide, back in the days of the cultural cringe[0], whereas now it can be seen as a bit of a badge of honour. My wife's family descends from a convict bloke whose free wife came out too and got her husband assigned to her. Convicts were assigned as essentially unpaid labour (other than food and a rough bed) to land owners at the time. Given that many were very petty criminals back in Britain (e.g. stealing a loaf of bread) some interpret the arrangement as not much better than slavery, as a means to provide free labour to grow the fledgling colony. Some of the tales of the worst penal institutions (think Tasmania) are truly horrifying. But many convict labourers were granted their freedom over time too. It also had an interesting effect on the labour market, with free settlers finding it hard to get decent pay as farm labour etc. One of the great statesmen, Henry Parkes, was in exactly that position when he first arrived in Aus as a poor settler, and got involved in the protest which eventually turned back the last convict ship ever to anchor in Sydney Harbour. He went on to be elected multiple times as premier of NSW, achieving lots of progress in the state (trained nursing, universal education etc.) before getting the heads of all the colonial states around the table to drive the process of joining to become the nation of Australia. If only we had statesmen / women of that calibre today ... but sadly not.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_cringe

Right, I'll explain that to my kids school then:

"Hi, our family's switched from observing the clock, like everyone else in school, to operating on a schedule that is in rhythm with the ebb and flow of sunrise through the year. From now on, we'd like our kids' school attendance and lesson times to start and finish on a solar timescale. Perhaps a separate buzzer tone could be set up to convenience any kids who will be running their day according to the sun. We do understand the challenge to teachers in accomodating this natural schedule alongside other students who stick with the more familiar clock-based one, but hey - the sunlight is the convention we follow."

I mean I live in quite a hippy place but that just ain't gonna fly.

Thanks for pointing this out to me. I hadn't heard of lit-html before. Another case of learning about something very useful via HN :) Yes it is lit-html that I was impressed by more so than the micro framework that uses it. When I say automatic differentiation I mean treating different binding types (text value vs event handler) differently.

I like the use of template strings for, well, templating, with automatic differentiation between data values and event handlers, nice touch. The state mechanism seems similar to Elm and its derivatives (e.g. Redux), which I guess is a plus considering how much of a convention that's becoming.

"someone needs to find a way to make money from keeping climate change in check"

What about a price on carbon? We should put the most powerful tool created by our civilisation - our free market industrial economy - to work on our biggest challenge / opportunity. Governments need to represent their citizens to the market on this, not the other way around.