I kinda feel this way about variable names in physics. You could call the (x,y,z) components of the magnetic field (L,M,N), see [0]. There are so many people who call that utterly wrong, but really it's totally fine and merely a source of confusion.
How would this work for a personal blog? Would I need to be careful not to endorse or even talk about companies and products? And if I didn't have to, wouldn't that open the door for advertising masquerading as news or opinion? Genuinely interested in this.
I've had the bad luck that my first prescription was quite wrong: incorrect axis for astigmatism, and incorrect spherical (I basically have only astigmatism, no spherical). So for years I was suffering through the days. Optometrists flat out refuse to correct such mistakes (I've been to many!), preferring only minor changes. I finally started ordering a bunch of glasses cheaply online, and eventually found a prescription that works for me. Cannot trust optometrists anymore.
> With books, movies, series and music I like to own physically only my personal favorites that I know will use many times.
I don't own many DVDs, but when I see them in my bookshelf they remind of the story the tell, the context when I watched them, and my theories about society, sci-fi, and utopias that those movies inspired.
With books it's even more extreme. I get the physical copy sometimes more to have a physical representation of an idea than to read the book.
> There are countries running on 95%+ renewable electricity right now[1].
That list ignores that countries trade electricity. If, say, Germany produces a lot of electricity by renewables it can sell the excess to France (which has lots of nuclear). If Germany is low on electricity, it can buy from is neighbors. The system as a whole is nowhere near 90%.
The one exception are probably countries that have all hydro and biomass.
1. Procrastination seems to be a type of early stopping. I knew I had a good strategy in school!
2. Something that seems to be sorely missing in machine learning (I'm not a ML expert) are error bars. If you take the example of the figure at the end, as you increase the number of parameters in the model, your error bars become larger (at least in the overfitting regime), and they are infinite when you have more parameters than data points. Indeed, chi^2 tests are usually used in physics/astro to test for this. Of course, you need error bars on the data points to do this. So perhaps the difficulty is really in assigning meaningful uncertainties to your pictures/test scores/politicians.
Other purpose than being a psychological trick, what purpose could pointing out the lack of evidence at the time have? Instead they could have written something like "We found the problem in 2021 and promptly fixed it. We first learned that it has been exploited in 2022."
If passenger rail increases, then goods rail must decrease and go onto trucks. Or, one could let goods rail go at night, but Germany is noise -sensitive, so that's unlikely to happen. In the long run building more tracks are probably the only real solution.
Same for me, except my prescription is stable. The first doctor I went to got it wrong, and every doctor since was too hesitant to change it. One even got it right, but said nothing had changed... They missed that the axis was significantly different, and that had been the problem all along.
It's pretty obvious if you ignore the great leap backwards... I mean forward, coming down from ~40 births/1000 in the 1950s and 1960s to ~20 in the late 70s and after.
> There have been 3 times in the past month where I got an order of magnitude speed up because SciPy implements a very complex but highly efficient algorithm which I would never have had time to deploy.
Yes. I feel like the author conflates the language with the package ecosystem. Pure Python is pretty horrible for scientific computing (3*[3]=[3,3,3] is about as counterproductive to scientific computations as it gets), but Numpy changes the semantics of those operations.
In other words, Python has an absolutely stellar package ecosystem. There have been attempts to bring a package ecosystem to C, but it never took off. However, I do wonder how C would fare if it had.
If you know German, there is an entire book written in this style, introducing a simplifying spelling and grammar each chapter [1]. It is called "fom winde ferfeelt", a pun on "Gone with the wind" turned into "Missed by the wind". Highly recommend.
This line of reasoning works really well for those who understand (and want to understand) how git works. I know plenty of people who don't care about their development tools (e.g. scientists), and for them the index is a chore in the way of more important problems.
> is there really any practical value in this sort of research
In many ways it is too early to do this research, so it is a kind of art (as is a lot of research, imho). As long as only a few people do it, it's cool and useful so we can be aware of our potential future.
On the other hand, since we have no credible evidence of extraterrestrials, it would be surprising to find a civilisation so advanced to build a Dyson sphere. If they can build Dyson spheres, wouldn't they already be all over the place?
Ok, I suppose I should actually go read the paper now...