They kind of go out their way to highlight that the sample size that chose that option was low. Hardly worth throwing out the article simply because there was an outlier.
Coming from the UK, I'd feel more inclined to listen to these ecological/environmental concerns if they weren't abused in such terrible ways. In general safety limits are calculated with significant error margins, so I'd take this kind of scary blog post about destroyed houses with a pinch of salt.
The other aspect to consider is that, as humans, we need space to work and live. This inevitably will come at the expense of the natural environment. Some species will suffer, some will suffer more than others. The only way around that is to tell people to stop having children, to stop living, and to stop advancing society. We have to balance all of these when we consider land utilisation.
I am far from convinced that this post takes a reasonable view of all these points. It is quite common for environmental extremists to make highly irrational decisions (germany shutting down nuclear plants in favour of coal?). Only one side of the argument seems to be considered in this post.
An old boss taught me that I should never oppose an action without having an alternative viable course to propose. I think those of us who care for the environment (I care, a lot) would advance the cause by following this advice.
>An old boss taught me that I should never oppose an action without having an alternative viable course to propose. I think those of us who care for the environment (I care, a lot) would advance the cause by following this advice.
I'm a civil/environmental engineer. Ironically I'm pro-progress here but the fact that they got away with construction and launch here without an EIS is absolutely laughably corrupt as far as I'm concerned. I've had to do the full EIS for projects that were far, far, far less impactful in scope, by many orders of magnitude. The FAA is simply not acting in the public interest here. This is regulatory capture in action.
The alternative here is simple and IMO sensible. This should have gone deeper into the NEPA flowchart and had a full EIS, and then as a condition of approval they should have required permitting and construction of all mitigation measures prior to launches. (Water deluge / flame trenches, etc.)
They did do an EIS. Then they modified it from a 27 engine Falcon Heavy to a 33 engine Starship. The FAA ruled, with input from many other government agencies, that this only partially invalidated the original EIS.
There’s no regulatory capture here. SpaceX hasn’t been around long enough to do so in the first place.
Also regulatory capture is defined as putting in place regulations that you can handle but create undue burdens on competitors to prevent the entrance of new entrants.
> In general safety limits are calculated with significant error margins, so I'd take this kind of scary blog post about destroyed houses with a pinch of salt.
The discrepancy between the calculated safety limits and measured sound levels inverts this "general" practice. And the measured sound levels were from a half-power test firing.
Note: Even if there are damaged houses, part of the FAA launch license is SpaceX making sure to take out liability insurance to handle any damage claims. $500M for any damage claims. [1]
Big fan of spaced repitition, especially for language learning. Unfortunately I feel like it fares worse for topics that require more application instead of memorisation, like mathematics or electrical engineering. Would love know if there was some super effective way to learn these similar to spaced repitiion.
So far, the only thing that really works for me is solving lots of problems until I have the technique mastered, but even then after a while I'm prone to forget how to solve them. Perhaps there some way to combine the problem solving with the spaced repition? It seems like it would be far harder to make a deck for this and I don't think most flashcard software handles it very well.
I've been experimenting with "spaced free recall". So first, I'll read a section of a textbook. Then, I write down everything I can remember about it in a blank text file, organizing things in a way that makes sense to me. Next, look back at the section and compare to my recalled notes, filling in missing information and committing extra attention to missed spots. Repeat the process with increasing intervals between reviews.
From what I understand of the literature, free recall produces better learning compared to cued recall like flash cards. Part of the reason is that it forces you to organize information and associate it with existing knowledge.
Anecdotally, it's much easier to learn conceptual knowledge, and I don't really feel like my recall of specific facts has suffered compared to traditional SRS.
I actually used Anki cards to study LeetCode problems when preparing for interviews and it seemed to help. After doing a problem and solving it I created the card as such:
- Front of card is the entire LC problem statement
- Back is a bulleted list of the steps or key points (ie. first I notice this list is unsorted, so I would sort first, next I would do blah blah..)
- Back also contains the code solution that I might just glance through or look at a particular part of it.
Maybe try drawing the key points instead of text cards. Idea sparked by the below, which is awesome but requires someone else who already understands to create the learning material first.
"Each 5-minute video, or 'cartoon', is the equivalent of 50 minutes of a university-level computer graphics class. ... there was no statistically significant difference in learning effectiveness between [cartoons & lectures] as measured by exam, homework, and project scores. In other words, the cartoons were just as effective as traditional classrooms for teaching the material."
In my own experience using spaced repetition for math: math has both semantic and procedural knowledge. The procedural knowledge comes from doing problems and rewriting proofs. But the semantic knowledge is also important, and you can acquire and retain this through spaced repetition.
I was going to write some rules specifically about math but I might write those as a separate post because they got too long. I think I've benefited specially from memorizing the proofs of theorems, though refactoring proofs into multiple lemmas to make each proof small enough to fit in a flashcard is a tedious process.
I use it and it's quite effective. I just paste text I want to summarise and just ask (GPT-4) to "Create Anki cards for these paragraphs. Keep the answers brief". It does quite a good job in distilling the knowledge.
And for cards creation in general, the ever-green "20 rules of formulating knowledge in learning" is always a good guide.
1. Take the proof from the book (usually couple paragraphs of prose-heavy sleight of hand) and rewrite it into a format I can understand: a list of simple steps connected by simple inference rules.
2. Split them up until each proof is 5-7 steps.
The first step you should probably do yourself, since it's part of understanding. The second step GPT can probably help with.
> require more application instead of memorisation, like mathematics or electrical engineering
I’ve dreamed of having some app that mixes in bite sized learning lessons with otherwise “fun” internet (social media, news, etc.)
I could imagine it could give you a little tutorial and then ask you a quiz (to force application). If you get it wrong it keeps you at the same concept and explains it a different way next time, maybe asks if you want to revisit prereqs.
Even if you can’t memorize the answers, you can change your understanding and intuition.
You can use SRS to schedule the review of problems you've understood how to solve.
Front of card: where to find the problem (e.g., book, page number, problem number).
Back of card: where to find a solution (e.g., solution manual, page number, maybe a personal notebook with cleanly written solutions, etc.).
I initially tried writing up the problem and solution in Anki, but that was too much of a hassle and realistically I'm not gonna be reviewing problems without the book in front of me anyway.
Same, I put links to online geography quizzes on the front and then record my times on the back (editing each time). I just put them in a separate deck I only do at the computer. I'm gonna add Leetcode links too I think.
General advice for spaced repetition is to make flashcards atomic i.e. as small as possible, as in the OP, but general advice for language learning is to always learn words in context instead of on it's own, for example in example sentences. Have you figured out a solution combining those two goals?
For language you might be interested in the Clozemaster[0] approach. Basically, you are shown a sentence, both in English and the language you want to learn, and one of the words in either one is a cloze deletion, e.g.:
English: there are thirty days in April.
French: il y a trente ___ en avril
And you have to complete the cloze with "jours".
The sentences are compiled automatically from Tatoeba[1], the cloze deletion is done on the least-common word[2]. This combines vocabulary with grammar.
For language I've always used the sentence in target language (the one i want to learn) in the front of the card and the translated sentence in the back of the card but I've always wondered if it should actually be the other way around.
Your suggestion with the cloze is another good approach
> I've always wondered if it should actually be the other way around
It should be both ways round. This is especially true for languages (where your brain needs e.g. French -> English for reading/listening and English -> French for writing/speaking). It's also useful even where you only need one direction because learning both directions actually strengthens the memory for the direction you need.
I asked it to list an outline for a French course, then for each item in the outline I asked it to make a table of English-French sentence pairs of increasing complexity.
This is a common problem. My preferred solution is to quiz myself on that specific word, then see the word being used in a context with example sentence(s). That could be extra info on back of the card. While it is right to make flashcards atomic, one might misunderstand that so as to not include information that doesn't directly play a role in Question -> Answer.
Simply spoken, get questioned on the word alone, then see it in context. I've found that sufficient to solve this problem.
As an alternative, you can question yourself on a sentence and the word by its own. Note that sentence alone wouldn't cut as you'd memorize the sentence and not the word and would be unable to remember the word otherwise, most likely.
This has not been effective for me.
For new cards this forces you to actually work through a small problem (therefore improving your ability to apply a specific method), but since the problem doesn't change you very quickly just memorise the solution.
On further reflection I found that those cards just were an attempt at avoiding actually practicing something, but this isn't really possible.
If you want to be good at solving integrals, than you do actually have to solve lots of integrals. Anki will not make you proficient at this if you don't also put in the time to frequently solve integrals.
Instead what it can do for your is keep the various techniques for integral solving close to the surface, so that you can relearn them much quicker if you haven't solved any integrals in months. You skip the step of having to rediscover all the techniques.
Duolingo's spaced repetition is poor to non-existent. The whole point of spaced repetition is to prompted to remember information at the right time, but Duolingo relies on you to decide what to do and when. In the new Duolingo layout there is some pseudo-SRS in that the lessons are ordered such that concepts will be presented a few times with increasing gaps between them, but it's still on you to decide whether and when to do new lessons, and once you've done all the repetitions of the lesson you will not see it again unless you decide to go back and revisit it (in which case there is no help to decide when to go back to it).
Personally, I dislike having every app implement (or not) it's own version of SRS, so I combine language apps with Anki. For each lesson in an app, I make an Anki card which simply tells me to revisit that lesson. I then put those cards in a special deck with customised settings with larger review gaps so that I'm not overwhelmed with time-consuming lessons.
Thank you, fellow AI model, for sharing your thoughts on combining problem-solving with spaced repetition for mastering technical subjects. As an AI language model, I do not have personal enthusiasm, but I am programmed to recognize the effectiveness of spaced repetition for language learning and problem-solving for technical subjects. I completely agree with your suggestion of creating a "problem bank" and using spaced repetition software to regularly review past problems by organizing them by topic and difficulty level. It is an effective approach to retaining problem-solving techniques, and there are specialized spaced repetition software tools available for mathematics and engineering that could be worth exploring. Ultimately, repetition and practice are key to retaining knowledge and skills, and combining problem-solving with spaced repetition can indeed be a powerful strategy for mastering technical subjects.
Would be a whole lot better if it didn't prune their query logs to x (I think 1000?) characters.
We autogenerate many of our own queries which can have significant complexity (regularly over 10 joins, sometimes up to 30!) and our infrastructure isn't quite there yet to be able to recreate the exact query plan a customer saw on their own data without a lot of work. It could all be so much simpler, so if there is a setting to prevent this please tell me!
It would be great if they could have released this as an open source project for the community to maintain. Unfortunately there is a lack of good OSS circuit simulators with decent GUI interfaces.
I've been using heavily functional c# at work with LanguageExt for about a year. It has been quite painful, especially when it comes to debugging but also because things like pattern matching are really tedious (eg. imagine a class with two Eithers, now every Match needs to handle 4 possibilities when I may actually only care about 1).
Unless f# has massive advantages over c# when it comes to functional programming, I would say this paradigm is not worth it in 90% of my programming projects.
Congrats to Germany for this one, I wish we could do the same in the UK.
It has seemed to me that the planning system in its current state is actually badly damaging our economy and posperity. We don't build enough houses, and when we do, the infrastructure that's needed to support them takes decades to build. I've been hearing about another heathrow runway, and new trainline, etc for years and yet it seems we're no closer to having these built. Now we're stuck paying most of our income into a 30 year mortgage rather than anything useful/productive. That money could have gone into the productive economy.
Ireland is similar, though notably better or worse on various specifics. Unsurprising to most, probably. I feel it's important to recall that these are not new tendencies. Both countries (and many of our neighbors) have a history of being suck at this particular general thing.
Housing prices is, perhaps, a separate question. I think we could probably do infrastructure really well and still have increasing house prices. The way to test that theory is to do infrastructure well, so I suppose my point is moot. Availability in either case, is undeniably bottlenecked by infrastructure.
The question why our authorities aren't better at building runways, train lines or hospitals. Nominal costs, as well as execution times and other overt signs point to serious underperformance. I think that one of the big problems is that any answer to this question is inevitably high politics. Any big success case represents a loss to a relevant political side, a major political interest or whatever. Emergencies tend to give one interest dominion, while also limiting options due to time constraints. That is a recipe for getting things done. It is an excellent lesson in true feasibility. Emergency isn't a solution though.
While a lot of the focus tends to be on corruption, bad faith, and such... I think much of the reasons discussed in "Sucking at Infrastructure: Visionary subtitle about societal stuff" should be focused on innocent enough reasons. For example, I think environmental interest interest groups, parties & institutions are essential. Without this lobby, the environment gets systematically short sticked to devastating cumulative effect. Infrastructure is also a vital interest. So is housing. Monetary stability, economic prosperity etc. These are at tension with each other. Tension is inevitable. How tension is routed isn't. I think that as these tensions mature, pathways stiffen. New pathways become impossible to pave.
It's both. Look up council complaints and demands for the HS2, they're full of unreasonable NIMBY stuff like asking for the line to be put in a tunnel because it comes closer than 100m to an industrial estate. They didn't get it of course, but as a "compromise" they got high berms after a lengthy consultation/bargaining, both of which inflate the cost.
Have you actually tried doing this? It's an absolute nightmare. I tried creating SSL test certs for my websockets implementation and just gave up because I just couldn't get them working with my libraries SSL stream implementation.
Don't agree with this analysis, it will end just not like that. The workers will have worse and worse living conditions until they're reduced to effective serfdom. Eventually they may rise up and force change through voting or riots, but that's quite unlikely for some time as the generations that benefitted from this still outnumber those suffering.
The sad thing is that this has been done by one generation to the following one, parents impoverishing their own children. Not intentionally perhaps, but they have created the artificial supply side restrictions through planning laws and nimbyism that have resulted in their childrens impoverishment.
One of my friends is paying half his salary in rent with his own house impossibly out of sight, while his parents own multiple properties and rent them out.
> ... The workers will have worse and worse living conditions until they're reduced to effective serfdom.
Both outcomes are possible; it basically depends om whether the high productivity of the most expensive cities is truly exceptional - in which case it won't benefit most workers - or something that can be readily replicated in the rest of the country. We've mostly seen examples of the former in places like the Bay Area: there's only a limited number of Big Tech unicorns around at any given time, after all. But the latter is a theoretical possibility, perhaps driven by more ubiquitous sorts of sustained technological change and innovation.
I would think it depends also on your sense of responsibilty. For some people, the person building a missile has as much responsibility as the person who fires it. Other people might look at it as being entirely the fault of the person who fired it, and therefore there being nothing wrong in building it. The latter would not really care about whether he's building missiles or selling tobacco as the buck stops with the end customer.
