Fair enough - although I interpreted it as a flag like at the end of a sed match-and-replace command. Or I guess a closing HTML tag would make sense.

Our decisions are heavily influenced by emotion. We have the sense of empathy, which is an adaptation that makes communal living work. Empathy motivates us to do things for other people sometimes. You can say, “you do helpful things to satisfy your own emotional needs.” But that’s pretty much saying, “you do helpful things because you want to.” I think self-interest is a big factor in how we act, but I don’t think it’s the only factor.

Australians are getting a minimum wage increase? Can they share?

The images probably don’t have to look meaningful as long as it is difficult to distinguish them from real images using a fast, statistical test. Nepenthes uses Markov chains to generate nonsense text that statistically resembles real content, which is a lot cheaper than LLM generation. Maybe Markov chains would also work to generate images? A chain could generate each pixel by based on the previous pixel, or based on neighbors, or some such thing.

I raised my kids using metric temperature for weather. Now that they’re older they hold me to it!

1 cm is about the width of the tip of your pinky finger.

1 m is about the distance from your nose to your fingertips if you hold your arm out, and extend your fingers.

100 m is the length of the straight section of an athletic track, which is about the same length as a football field.

1 mL is about the volume of the tip of your pinky finger.

1 L is about 1 quart, which is half a carton of milk (unless you get milk in the smaller 1 quart size).

The m-to-km conversion is pretty close to 1½.

The kg-to-lb conversion is two-and-a-bit.

A difference of 1°C is close to a difference of 2°F.

Edit: My milk comparison was wrong - I’ve corrected it.

This advice is also golden!

Open the sidebar by clicking the three-lines icon at the top right. The translate option is at the bottom of the sidebar.

I’m not sure if I’ve used more in the last 25 years. And when I did I think it was in MS-DOS.

For the sake of benefit of the doubt, it’s possible to simultaneously understand the thesis of the article, and to hold the opinion that AI doesn’t lead to higher-quality products. That would likely involve agreeing with the premise that laying off workers is a bad idea, but disagreeing (at least partially) with the reasoning why it’s a bad idea.

Yeah, the article seems to assume AI is the cause without attempting to rule out other factors. Plus the graph shows a steady decline starting years before ChatGPT appeared.

I was also thinking Nestlé before I clicked through. They want to corner the market on water. WTF!

Whether or not an unsecured human poses a direct danger to another human in a crash, there are negative externalities to self-harm. One is that family members may be deprived of an important source of income and emotional support if you are killed in a crash. But the most directly-measurable cost is hospital expenses. At first glance medical expenses are another factor that affect only yourself. But in reality in the US emergency room care is guaranteed regardless of ability to pay, so plenty of ER costs are paid by hospitals or by governments. Emergency and non-emergency healthcare costs may be covered by Medicaid or Medicare - in other words, paid for by taxpayers. Maybe you can afford whatever treatment you might need, but policy must take into account people who cannot. That means that a personal choice not to wear a seatbelt, in aggregate, puts measurable costs on people who are not you.

Societal medical costs are discussed most prominently in relation to smoking. A study from last year estimates that healthcare made necessary by smoking costs an average of $2700 per person per year. That’s a major part of the justification to tax cigarette sales. Healthcare costs caused by not wearing a seatbelt aren’t as high, but are still substantial. Here’s a study that found that hospital costs are 84% higher for people injured while not wearing a seatbelt vs wearing a lap & shoulder seatbelt.

Cost savings from seatbelt requirements might be smaller than savings from reduced smoking. But on the other hand the measurable burden of wearing a seatbelt is tiny. Policy should be based on the measurable costs & benefits of its requirements, and seatbelt requirements are a very clear-cut example of a net-benefit analysis.

You made an argument about the violation of personal liberty. When thinking about cost vs benefit there are two ways to look at this:

1. Intrinsic value of liberty: I don’t know of a measurement of harm from restricting personal liberty in the specific case of seatbelt use. We have to draw a line somewhere on where personal liberty must be restricted to prevent obvious, unacceptable harm like murders. Considering the data, and the low burden of compliance seatbelt requirements seem to me to be an obvious case where restricting liberty as a worthwhile cost of harm reduction. Until there is some metric that shows that restriction of liberty may be more harmful than cost savings in this case I have to say, that’s like, your opinion man.
2. Individuals are the best judges of their specific situation: Policy needs to consider the inevitable outcome of people exercising their right to implement bad judgement. If this were a case where a reasonable analysis could conclude that not wearing a seatbelt in some situations is a good decision then it would be a different story. But it’s not. Data overwhelmingly shows that seatbelt use is the right decision in every case while driving. And data also shows that a high proportion of people make the wrong choice, likely due to a highly-inflated sense of their own invulnerability. Here’s an analysis of how seatbelt requirements influence good judgement in several states.

I don’t want to dismiss personal liberty. I think it is important to be able to make our own decisions. But it’s also important to prevent extraordinarily-problematic decisions in certain cases. With seatbelts (I’m assuming we’re not debating the cost of building seatbelts into cars at the moment) the measurable cost as far as I’m aware is the time taken to put the seatbelt on, which is negligible. Maybe there is a real cost to one’s self of individualism to be required to put that seatbelt on. If the cost is real, there must be some way to measure it. Maybe that could be evaluating happiness, or creativity, or lifetime earnings, or some such thing. If we want to take this factor into account in cost-benefit analyses we have to have a measurement. We can’t apply some arbitrary value because some people are going to say “infinite”, and others are going to say “zero”, and every value in between. Not only are those subjective opinions - those are self-evaluation estimates which humans tend to be bad at. I’m going to speculate that self-evaluations of the importance of liberty in the abstract is one of those areas people tend to get wrong. We need some kind of objective metric.

Edited for clarity

Write a NixOS module, publish it in a flake in the nixosModules output, import that flake in your flake-based NixOS configs.

I use obsidian.nvim. It’s a Neovim interface to my Obsidian vaults, so I can work on my knowledge base in whichever app works best in the moment.

Oh, this is a good tip!

It comes down to, what can be done or pre-generated at build or publish time versus what must be done at runtime (such as when a viewer accesses a post)? Stuff that must be done at runtime is stuff you don’t have the necessary information to do at publish time. For example you can’t pre-generate a comments section because you don’t know what the comments will be before a post is published.

For stuff like email digests and social media posts I might set up a CI/CD system (likely using Github Actions) that publishes static content, and does those other tasks at the same time. Or if I want email digests delivered on a set schedule instead of at publish time I might set a scheduled workflow in the same CI/CD system. Either way you can have automation that is associated with your website that isn’t directly integrated with your web server.

As you suggest some stuff that must be done at runtime can be done with frontend Javascript. That’s how I implement comments on my static site. I have Javascript that fetches a Mastodon thread that I set up for the purpose, and displays replies under the post.

I don’t exactly follow your first and fourth requirements so it’s hard for me to comment more specifically. Transforming information from CSVs to HTML sounds like something that could naturally be done at build time if you have the CSVs at build time. But I’m not clear if that’s the case in your situation.

Existential Comics continues to be amazing! I enjoy it to such a degree that I’m going to drop the Patreon link in here: https://www.patreon.com/bePatron?u=249109&redirect_uri=https%3A%2F%2Fexistentialcomics.com%2Fcomic%2F597

My wife has worked with lots of people who are not native English speakers who are sometimes taken aback by the idioms. One colleague flat out refused to accept that “FOMO” is a word.

I suggested that she is in a position to make some up, like “Let’s not put fish in the milk bucket.” But she didn’t go for it. I guess she’s not an agent of chaos after all :/

Do you have anything to check whether the current directory is under /media/ or /mnt/ so that you can change the drive letter according to a deterministic assignment?

/s