I used to be upset at such absurdities. Now I try to appreciate what a relatively universal interface images are instead! :D It doesn’t matter how text gets drawn if we OCR it. (Though I feel better when we do so on device.)
An abbreviation for “signal-to-noise ratio” that imo should have been StNR or simply S/N. (Thus I sympathize with not parsing it immediately — it is widely used, though, so it is good to know.)
Looks like coal usage for electricity production indeed only went up for ~3 years around 2011, probably we can consider that a mere blip within the downward trend.
Wind and solar indeed seem to pick up what nuclear used to bring to the energy mix. Gas usage is only slightly up over 30 years, which doesn’t look like it’s directly substituting nuclear — but surely it could have gone down had nuclear be kept around?
(Personally, I wish politics would have pushed harder against coal and simply ignored nuclear for a couple more decades. But political feasibility is important ofc, and I don’t know how hard of a sell that would have been in 2010.)
I don't know what would've surely happened. It's easy to think well if they did this not that all the positives would remain they'd just be better. I think life is more complicated than that.
In general what I think is people make a pariah out of Germany and its energy choices, but this is mostly based on false data, which tells me enough. The debate is riddled with false data which lead to even worse conclusions. In the end the numbers are positive and that's all what's important for me. There are better candidates for criticism when looked at individually or even globally, what the individual strategies accomplish on a global scale. So when looked at globally, the German energy transition has accomplished a ton. E.g. the 600TW of solar this year never would've happened without it, which more than offsets the 10-15GW of nuclear they switched off, most of which was past its retirement age.
I filled out a profile to 80%, hit back accidentally (Safari keyboard shortcuts for back/forwards are apparently the same as default macOS beginning/end of line text editing shortcuts? And a textfield I thought had focus didnt'? Not 100% sure.), and found the entire form empty again. If there ever is a place where state saving using sth like sessionStorage is vital, it's such long-form forms.
I imagine your friend is genuine. During undergrad/before 2014 I attended a summer school (https://www.jass.school) in St. Peterburg. I found the city to be welcoming, almost European in ambiance, with friendly university students. It never felt too foreign or unsafe. In my experience, St. Peterburg is as distinct from how I imagine Moscow as San Francisco is from Dallas, Texas.
(edit: I have no idea how it’d feel nowadays, and won’t visit Russia atm either.)
I'd skip Russia and Ukraine right now for obvious reasons. But I have a friend who managed to visit St. Peterburg before the current war and was quite impressed.
You’ve completed a cursory google search and don’t understand why our leading explanations for the observations cosmologists have made say what they say — OK. Sometimes when our opinions counter the narratives of whole scientific fields, it can be helpful to first convince yourself you actually understand what they claim: what is the evidence, and what are the required inferences to arrive at the modern cosmologist view of what the universe is made of.
A large part of the “value” a DJ brings is track selection; for sure. Playlists can do part of that, say to create a certain mood. But DJs get to adjust these on the fly as they observe the crowd reaction. Additionally, DJs rarely play full songs. Transitions can be drawn out over 16,32,64 bars, taking 1-2minutes. During that time DJs use tools like EQs or stem splitters to ensure the two tracks playing don’t clash.
There’s lots more detail; just take my strongest recommendation to try DJing on hardware with a friend at some point; it’s a richer and more rewarding experience than the “Skrillex pressing play on his MacBook” meme suggests.
Edit: there’s lots more to say about DJing of course, maybe someone else will chime in. One aspect to keep in mind is that DJing is important primarily in dance music. If you don’t go dancing at clubs you may not be aware how different dance music is to traditional music meant for listening. A lot of the focus of dance music is generating tension (“build”) and releasing it in a pleasant manner (“drop”). Doing that at a pace that works for the energy level of the crowd at that moment, without unexpected shifts in energy levels, is not trivial. It requires taste and experience, and aims to create a more cohesive and unified experience for the dancers than a playlist could.
Although I've never really been the "clubbing" type, I do other types of dancing (swing, salsa, Scottish, country, etc.). They usually go off playlists, but I can see how having a live DJ who interactively adjusts the music to the crowd's energy level would be fun. I'd love to experience something like that!
In terms of streaming, it would also be really cool to get a live DJ for D&D and other board game nights, who can dynamically respond to what's happening in the game world and blend the tracks (and sound effects?) appropriately. Does anyone do stuff like that? I'd pay for that service!
Yeah, in ballroom one takes a break between songs iirc. (It’s been a decade or two.) The harder styles of dance and deeper kinds of house music seem designed to put you into a mild trance, thus the need to keep the rhythm consistent.
For D&D, have you seen https://tabletopy.com/ ? I think I saw it here on HN a while ago.
> For D&D, have you seen https://tabletopy.com/ ? I think I saw it here on HN a while ago.
Lol, that's pretty cool. Like a soundboard for D&D.
Having grown up with the
D&D video games like Baldur's Gates 1 & 2 and NWN, the ambient music and sounds is something I miss about the tabletop experience. The cities and the crowd noises, the dungeons with subtle chains and screams and caves with dripping water reverberating, the background music that stays out of the way and then amps up in the prelude to combat and gets all romantic for dialog, etc. Adds a level of immersion that's hard to get in tabletop unless the DM is heavy on production value. Still fun, just different!
While op was a little exaggerating with service revenues, his points still stand. The thing is Apple is not selling you a computer but an ecosystem. Their products are all meant to work together and this is only possible with their software.
Running macOS as your daily driver makes buying an iPhone a very easy choice. It’s hundreds of little things like using your iPhone camera as a scanner from Finder on your Mac to scan a paper to the current folder, unified clipboard, using your Apple Watch to lock your screen when you leave your computer, having your AirPods automagically switch from iPhone to Mac when you start a video and instantly switch back to your phone and pause your video when you answer a call … and that’s only the tip of the iceberg.
Apple software is made to make you buy other Apple hardware so running Linux is pretty much not interesting for them. I’m positively surprised it’s even possible.
Services are only the cherry on the cake, you subscribe to them when you are already tied to the ecosystem because they became pretty obvious. And Apple is smart enough to not force them down your throat like Microsoft.
So yeah, it’s really important for Apple to keep you on their software if they want to sell you more hardware.
Bike looks very nice and it’s built on open file formats. I will try it out. Look at my edit above: it might be an old version of ginkgo. But I’m on my phone right now and can’t figure it out…
Nic was tutoring me in proof-based foundational maths when I worked as a research engineer and I have nothing but praise for him and his tutoring service. He created a hyper personalized syllabus and was able to focus in on the areas in which my understanding was shaky incredibly quickly. I only studied very foundational concepts with him, but you can glean from the articles on his website how far and wide his knowledge extends.
It feels very rare that someone with his level of intellectual depth is this interested in teaching others.
Nic was a colleague of mine when we were both at Google Brain and he has a rare combination of both desire and ability to really understand the fundamentals of a field. (That is especially rare in ML, haha.) He also has a knack for explaining these things clearly --- cutting away the cruft and getting to the heart of the matter. I can't recommend working with / learning from him enough!
