Brown CS (back in 2004) gave you a choice: you could either take a 2-class intro sequence that started with Scheme and eventually OCaml before moving into OOP with Java, or you could start with Java from the get-go and make cool/flashy projects like Tetris by the end. Both course sequences were supposed to bring you to roughly the same place by the end.
I took the Scheme path and feel great about having a deep theoretical foundation in CS, but I know plenty of folks who started with the fun/shiny stuff and became amazing software engineers. So all in all I'm really glad they gave us a choice.
I will admit that there were people in my classes who didn't really understand what they were getting themselves into and possibly would have benefited from starting with Python or Java and getting more inspired about building cool projects. It really was a YMMV ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
If you believe it, offer up all your money to cover the cost of all 911 services and life saving tools. Then, the companies can provide them free of charge since you ate the cost.
Most will probably hold back some or all of that money. They'll make it someone else's problem. If not, they'll limit how much they eat the cost of saving others' lives. Their justification will be to put the money into their own needs or pursuing more of something. Which is what the companies do when they don't eat the cost.
If it's right for most people to charge to cover their costs (or ignore other people's problems entirely), then it shouod be right for the companies, too. If they must be selfless at a huge loss, then so must any who demand they do thay.
To individuals, a life seems priceless. But to anyone facing resource constraints, tradeoffs are inevitable. Welcome to the quagmire where moral philosophy meets bean counting.
This should be such an infrequent occurrence that the cost should be negligible. Surely their $10/month plan has enough margin that this can be covered?
There is likely a cost to the infrastructure necessary to enable calling 911 that scales with the number of users not the number of 911 calls. Where I'm at, there is a 75 cent per month fee added to phone plans to cover the costs of access to 911. If most people are on the free plan, the margin from the few paying customers won't cover it.
Every cellphone without a valid service plan is still required to be able to call 911 in most places of the world, including the US, and carriers eat the costs. It should be obvious why.
Frankly it's weird they're making a clone of a classic touch tone corded phone and somehow get around this. Especially for a kids product when we teach kids to call 911 in an emergency.
Donate the cash? To a business? … So, you mean, paying someone else's profit margin, while they hold lives hostage? Immanuel Kant says you don't negotiate with terrorists.
Looks like it's a silly and self-aware play on the word "builder" (New England regional dialect):
> Since I’m relatively new to the world of containers and images, I was excited to learn about the Buildah tool. Especially since I’m a native New Englander and it’s a clever play on how we say Builder in these parts. [0]
The article gets into this where real Americans do job interviews and if they get a job they can keep 30% of the salary and have to pass off the remaining 70%:
> In the IT worker scheme, once someone involved gets an interview, North Koreans use remote-desktop tools to help coach people through the Q&A with a recruiter.
> Aidan Raney, founder of Farnsworth Intelligence, posed as an American willing to help North Koreans to investigate the issue for a client who almost hired a fake engineer. During the course of two video calls with three or four people who all said their names were “Ben,” Raney learned the details. “The Bens” would handle all the upfront work for him—creating a fake LinkedIn profile to verify his new identity for U.S. recruiters, formulating a bio, and sending it out to dozens of job postings with a new Gmail address they set up.
> The Bens even modified Raney’s headshot to a black-and-white photo so it wouldn’t resemble his usual picture, Raney told Fortune. If Raney got a job, he would show up for meetings, like a morning stand-up or scrum, and go about his day while a North Korean engineer handled the workload. Raney would be allowed to keep 30% of the salary but had to transfer 70% to the Bens using crypto, Paypal, or Payoneer.
> “What they were trying to do was use my identity to bypass background checks, and so they wanted this fake persona they created to be extremely close to the real-life version,” said Raney.
> The Bens got Raney an interview, and while it was ongoing, they used a remote-desktop application to set up a notepad on Raney’s screen so they could write out responses to the questions from the interviewer, Raney explained. And it worked: Raney got a verbal offer for a job with a private government contractor that paid $80,000 a year.
> He then had to immediately turn around and tell the company he couldn’t accept the offer and apologize for claiming their time.
I don't believe it's an actual counterpoint to legalization, since it seems solvable with better regulation. I suppose it could be solved with private labs and a more demanding public, however outright lying by private labs muddies the water -- who do you believe?
Cannabis is also in a unique situation given that is in legal gray area due to federal prohibition in the US (and many other countries).
I'm curious if pesticide contamination is as prevalent in markets where cannabis is decriminalized or legalized at the country level.
Sure. Just look at Colorado, where they have to destroy stuff over and over again, after mandatory testing before it's allowed to be marketed. Sometimes even after that.
*cides aren't the only thing to worry about. There are things to make it heavier, like lead dust, to make it feel more tacky(best case just sugar), to make it smell better, and whatnot else. None of which are good to inhale.
Vapes aren't that much better, containing different groups of chemicals you wouldn't want to inhale directly, or not in the concentrations used in vaping.
I don't know exactly, because I don't smoke/vape that much, and my experiences with what is offered in shops is mostly limited to some small resort town in Colorado, sometimes San Jose, CA, Austin, TX(no 'shopping' there), Hamburg, Germany,(no shopping there either, just strange vapes with 10-OH-HHC(P)), Rotterdam, NL, and finally Georgia, the country at the Black Sea, no shopping there, either, and couldn't read it anyways because of their most weird alphabet, but it has been good, no regrets so far.
So my 'knowledge' about that stuff is a patchwork of what I've read in the media, concerning the region/changing legislature/over time, and personal experience, be it by consuming it itself, or just smelling it from afar and thinking for myself 'I'd never touch that crap with a ten foot pole!'
I can say that I feel safest with Colorados model, which basically amounts to that all the stuff has to be tested before it is allowed to be sold legally, be it in shops, or online. Not halfassed shit like in the Netherlands, where it is only decriminalized, and the 'Coffeeshops' pay taxes for 'not drunken coffee', while the supply chain is still VERBOTEN and shrugged off, or the recent German model, which is shitty in similar ways, and doesn't even allow 'Coffee-shops'. Georgia, the country? They also messed the supply-chain and shop-thing up, or decided not to bother at all. Just consuming and maybe up to hand full of plants for personal use is legal, and that's it.
Which means anywhere not following Colorados mandatory testing model has a black market, and thus the potential 'quality problems' which they bring with them.
This is really cool! Well done. Like others, I'd love to specify generic things like distance to a "grocery store" or "gym" as part of my initial criteria. I see that I can add a long list of possible places that meet a search, so maybe I just want the UI to hide the details from me and add all those possible places for me.
I personally found the additional criteria being added to the top to be counter intuitive and I inadvertently deleted locations thinking it was the newest criterion, but it was actually my earlier ones. I think I've been trained to look/scroll to the bottom for the added element (e.g. like when adding additional Google Maps locations)
I would also love an option to mix transportation modes. For example, public transportation and biking.
_Examination…put his likely age to be around 45. This was a good age considering the short life expectancy 5300 years ago.
I think this is an urban myth.
Edit: Seems like I was thinking wrong, see below.
The average life expectancy 200 years ago (ie the time we did comprehensive and complete records of births and deaths of a population) was indeed much lower than today. But a huge part of that was a high child mortality rate of around 50% until adolescence was reached. Once a person grew beyond that age, it‘s life expectancy was just a few years below of where we are today. There is no reason to believe that this was different a few millenias ago. The reason that child mortality dropped substantially around the end of the 19th century was 1. the discovery of the importance of hygiene and 2. antibiotics.
" Once a person grew beyond that age, it‘s life expectancy was just a few years below of where we are today."
I strongly disagree. Every single archeological study that I read and that examined ages of skeletons excavated from normal European cemeteries (= not kingly burials etc.) indicated that people over 60 used to be fairly rare (less than one in 10), even in the Early Modern Era, much less so in the Middle Ages. In the Early Middle Ages, with their hunger and frequent raids, even 50 was untypical.
Even the most important people of the past, for whom we actually know their ages at death, died way earlier than we do today.
Try enumerating the English or the French kings who lived to be 70. Not many, a few individuals over a span of a millennium. It only started getting better post 1750, and really better since 1900.
Interesting! I admit that I never saw a study like that. I tried googling it unsucessfully so I asked chatgpt:
Caclculate the average life span of french kings who died on natural causes in the last 1000 years. Please return a single number.
* The average lifespan of French kings who died of natural causes over the last 1000 years is approximately 58 years.
This number reflects those kings who did not die in battle, through assassination, or from other violent causes, focusing instead on those who died due to illness, old age, or other non-violent factors. *
Assuming that chatgpt can read wikipedia pages correctly, it seems that you are right, thanks!
If you happen to have links for those archeological studies, I‘d gladly read them.
You could check actual actuarial tables and population wide statistics from the 1700s and 1800s directly. You'll see that young people were many times more likely to die in their 20s and 30s than they are now. e.g. as late as mid 1800s almost ~30% of those who reached 20 died before they were 50. The proportion is about 10x lower these days.
> Assuming that chatgpt can read wikipedia pages correctly
I gave it a pdf of the Wikipedia page, it wrote a Python script and calculated that it was:
However I don't think this data is necessarily at all that meaningful because it only includes who lived long enough to become king.
e.g. Louis XIV died at 76, his first son died at 49, next son who reached adulthood died at 16. His first grandson died when he was 29. Finally he was succeeded by the third son of his grandson (first to reach adulthood). So naturally the "sample" overrepresents those who had an average than longer lifespan.
Ask it to show you the list of kings and their ages and calculate the average yourself. I'll bet the answer is not 58 years. Regardless of the accuracy of the source data, ChatGPT is terrible at arithmetic. I asked the same question, and it told me the answer was 55 years.
I once asked ChatGPT how high a stack of floppy disks that holds 1TB would be. It returned 1.5 meters, which is clearly implausible to anyone who remembers how high a stack of floppy disks to install Windows 95 was. Obvs the model has improved over time as it now returns a more plausible 2.65 kM.
a. Until the 12th century or so, dates of birth even for kings are somewhat fuzzy, sometimes not even the year is certain. Deaths are usually better recorded, but anyway, there will be some systemic uncertainty there.
b. When evaluating whether a particular king's death was natural or not (the GP wanted to exclude non-natural deaths), we must take into account that a successful poisoning might look like sudden-onset gastritis or so, and that kings were absolutely a plausible target for such attacks. It works both ways; Ladislaus the Posthumous (died 1457) was widely suspected to have been poisoned, only a detailed scientific examination of his skeleton in the 1980s proved that cause of his death was a non-Hodgkin lymphoma.
So, one example. If you translate the following book into English using some online service, ages of the skeletons excavated near the Prague Castle are being discussed on pages 41 and 42
Of 95 adult people buried there, three men were in the category senilis (over 60). Women could obviously live longer, as 16 of them were in the category senilis (quite a lot! 29 per cent of all adult women in fact), but there was also a visible cluster of female dead aged 20-30, which probably indicates the danger of dying at childbirth or soon after.
The people buried at Lumbe's Gardens were probably members of the "better off" part of the society. It is located right next to the seat of the Bohemian King (then, Prince), after all. So this is how age profiles looked like in the "upper middle strata" of the medieval Czech society around year 1000 or so. Still pretty bad, by current standards. Quite a lot of deaths in the < 35 age bracket.
Karel Hynek Mácha, the national Romantic poet, died in 1836 at 26 years of age, either pneumonia or cholera
František Ladislav Čelakovský, translator, died in 1852 at 53 years of age.
Václav Matěj Kramerius, publisher, died in 1808 at 55 years of age.
Jindřich Fügner, sportsman, died in 1865 at 43 years of age, blood poisoning.
Miroslav Tyrš, his friend, died in 1884 at 52 years of age, drowning, possibly suicide.
Josef Mánes, painter, died in 1871 at 51 years of age, syphilis.
Bedřich Smetana, composer, died in 1884 at 60 years of age, syphilis.
Božena Němcová, writer, died in 1862 at 41 years of age, tuberculosis.
Karel Havlíček Borovský, journalist, died in 1856 at 34 years of age, tuberculosis.
Josef Kajetán Tyl, director and theatrist, died in 1856 at 48 years of age, probably tuberculosis.
These are about the most famous Czech cultural icons of the 19th century and most of them didn't even see their 60th birthday. Smetana did (barely), but he was broken by so many diseases that he might not have been aware of it anymore.
> life expectancy was just a few years below of where we are today. There
I don't think that's really true. e.g. IIRC back in ~1900 mortality rates even for people in their 20s and 30s were more than twice as high as now.
Life expectancy at 20 currently in the US is ~60 years, back in 1850s it was about ~40 and mid 30s in the 1700s. But we must consider that that US/Thirteen Colonies were an exceptionally nice place to live compared to pretty much anywhere else back in those days.
Look at Figures 4 and 5. A relatively huge proportion of the population died in the 30s - 50s. Very few people die that young these days. Back in the 1850 70% of reached age 20 and 50% reached 50. NOw it's >99% and 96% respective..
Young people died all the time from various rampant communicable diseases many which are treatable these days. Just consider the cultural significance Tuberculosis had back in the 1800s..
Regardless, he's certainly been in the right places to understand AI trends and Gates' write-up makes it sound like an intriguing distillation. Thanks for posting!
The Alignment Problem: Machine Learning and Human Values[1] by Brian Christian is a nice overview of some of this history and exploration of some of the pitfalls in different ML approaches. It's really interesting reading it now given what's been happening with OpenAI and ChatGPT, etc.
I took the Scheme path and feel great about having a deep theoretical foundation in CS, but I know plenty of folks who started with the fun/shiny stuff and became amazing software engineers. So all in all I'm really glad they gave us a choice.
I will admit that there were people in my classes who didn't really understand what they were getting themselves into and possibly would have benefited from starting with Python or Java and getting more inspired about building cool projects. It really was a YMMV ¯\_(ツ)_/¯