I go to this spot some evenings to get away and help my mind decompress and untangle.
It's at the top of a local hill.
A few other people go there too, I suspect for the same reason as they are always peaceful and calm, watching the sea and sun, some chomping on a sandwich or sipping from a thermos.
When I was a child the idea of memorisation and conformance was equal to academic success, and indeed success in life.
Independent thinking, challenge, tinkering, play.. were definitely not.
And yet invention needs the second.
Did this culture come from British colonialism and "Victorian" education designed to create unchallenging servants? Or did it exist previously? I guess it doesn't explain China's previous education values...
I sometimes listen to NN Taleb who is fervently against large institutions because they squish good culture. He suggests people who make progress do so despite their employer (academia, govt, corporate).
He gives many examples of historical inventors and discoverers who were lucky enough to have the time and resources to play and tinker.
For me this ties into the idea of UBI to free people up to follow their own instincts and not spend 100% of their time surviving.
🆕 blog! “It isn't who you know - it's who knows you”
I'm terrible at networking. I forget people's names minutes after meeting them, I never have business cards and lose the ones I'm given, and I can't go five minutes without burbling some nonsense. But I recognise that networking is a skill and, like any skill, it takes practice to succeed. I've always been told that […]
I’m so glad public libraries already exist. Could you I magine trying to sell the idea of libraries to politicians in 2024?
“You want to build a large public complex on prime real estate that gives away free books & education & community events—paid for by our tax dollars? Are you crazy??”
In the UK we're lucky to have already had the same for healthcare.
Publicly funded healthcare, free at the point of need and use.
If it didn't already exist, there's no way even the "centre left" party today would suggest it, I fear.
It goes to show how much of a victory establishing it was in the previous context of only private health, against eg the opposition of doctors associations.
I'm doing some thinking about whether to learn common #lisp or #scheme and create tutorials for others at the beginning like myself.
The focus would not be on syntax or an encyclopedia of available commands or external libraries. It would be about "thinking" and decomposing problems into algorithms.
So far I like that scheme is tiny, has pretty much one syntax, leaving us undistracted from the problem to solve.
New development policy: code generated by a large language model or similar technology (e.g. ChatGPT, GitHub Copilot) is presumed to be tainted (i.e. of unclear copyright, not fitting NetBSD's licensing goals) and cannot be committed to NetBSD.
(compared to python when it is forced to apply arbitrary functions with loops inside, element-wise to an array - that is, can't benefit from vectorised numpy functions)
this #maths experiment took about an hour in python and about 1 second in julia lang
sure my python isn't professional, but today was my first time with julia lang so that will be far from optimal either
“At Microsoft, the share of senior employees as a portion of the company’s overall workforce declined more than 5 percentage points after the return-to-office mandate took effect, the researchers found. At Apple, the decline was 4 percentage points, while at SpaceX — the only company of the three to require workers to be fully in-person — the share of senior employees dropped 15 percentage points.”
In fact this is my day job. I "work in technology" but spend 99% of my time grappling the interesting challenge people, groups of people, and organisations.
"They Used to Say Arabs Can’t Have Democracy Because It’d Be Bad for Israel. Now the U.S. Can’t Have It Either"
"Arab publics favor the Palestinians, the thinking goes, & will vote in governments that act accordingly — & that is a no-go zone."
Now, "the U.S., it seems, can’t have democracy either, lest an American democracy end its support for everything & anything Israel wants to do to the Palestinians."
I'm nowhere near pycon and I'm no expert in coding but I am spending a lot of time thinking about what a modern python plotting library should look like - if it were designed around users first, prioritising consistency, minimalism, intuition, low cognitive load, conceptual coherence ..
.. matplotlib/pyplot is powerful but very few would say they love the experience of trying to use it.
~100 educators in Berlin have stated their support of protesting students: "We stand with our students & defend their right to peaceful protest.”
Germany’s Education Minister called the statement "staggering. Instead of taking a clear stand against hatred of Israel & Jews, university occupiers are being turned into the victims."
Police said 79 protestors were arrested & 80 criminal investigations initiated.
My annual plea for a thing: I want a type 1 hypervisor that just has a small isolated VM and then passes through the rest of the hardware to the main VM which runs Linux. The small VM is intended to be used to run small pieces of code that the main OS should not be able to interfere with. Does such a thing exist? (Think Xen, but with a Dom0 that can't see into DomUs)
if you have the patience to argue with me I would value your reply..
for me, a security barrier is cryptographic
software and software-controlled-hardware barriers are just inconveniences
so the hypervisor you mention happens not to make it easy to see into a vm, but with the right combination of software failures or subversion it is possible
the openssl and CPU vulnerabilities (heartbleed, spectre) are illustrative examples
am i being too pendantic about a security boundary?