Just a note on your gun death comment. The chance of dying by a gun in the US is very small. Of those killed by guns in the US, less than 3% are killed by anything resembling an "assault rifle". Over half of all gun deaths are suicides, so even those numbers are inflated if what you want to know is "how worried do I need to be about dying because the 2nd amendment allows assault rifle ownership?"
> You were in a country that really was sealed off from the rest of the world. No internet or social media. All press and TV (one channel) dedicated not for news but solely for the glorification of the Leader. That is the Kim dynasty and the regime.
Obviously the average citizen don't have Internet, but an embassy without Internet (most probably through satellite) is unthinkable, they need to be able to talk to their home government.
But if we go back 20 years (others have said this is written in the early 2000's), satellite communication was probably worse than 28.8k modems and really expensive, so yeah, it could've been there but only for official and not personal use.
I am sorry but this is not true, the Danger Hiptop also known as T-Mobile Sidekick series was incredibly popular in the US starting with the color version in 2003. By any definition it was a smartphone. (Also, Android is direct successor to it as Andy Rubin left Danger to start Android.)
They have Iphone 11s in NK and plenty of smartphones. They have some internet, and they'd have more if they West allowed some investment and wasn't punishing a civilian population because of who their leaders are.
Later on they talk about installing a satellite dish for diplomatic communication, so the embassy might have had some sort of internet connection over that.
> Everybody benefits from infrastructure even if they don't use it directly.
...therefore, by definition, any infrastructure project is to be considered "worth it" and should be welcomed by everyone in the community. To be against government rollout of infrastructure is to be against everybody's best interest, right?
I'm not against government-provided services across-the-board. But apologists for infrastructure spending often seem to make this argument as if it's the last point to be made. The great thing about a private company "overcharging" or "underserving" a community is that citizens aren't forced to be in a relationship with that company for their services. That's not the case for infrastructure spending by the local government. It's much harder to vote with your feet than to vote with your wallet.
The fine line to walk with government spending is to find a way to incentivize competition in the local marketplace, without destroying it in the process. It's not an easy problem to solve.
> The great thing about a private company "overcharging" or "underserving" a community is that citizens aren't forced to be in a relationship with that company for their services.
But that is rarely true for any privatized infrastructure alternative. There is often direct financial relations through taxation anyways, either tax breaks for the company or outright having the municipality foot the bill(see most stadiums)
Then there is the potential resource usage itself - e.g how much of the land in that city is now dedicate to toll roads that could be free, or in the internet infra case it's often exclusive rights to the poles all of the lines are ran on.
> But that is rarely true for any privatized infrastructure alternative. There is often direct financial relations through taxation anyways, either tax breaks for the company or outright having the municipality foot the bill(see most stadiums)
How would you consider those to be "privatized infrastructure alternatives" then? To me this sounds like further evidence of citizens having fewer alternatives available because their money is being spent on things they may not (or may!) care about.
> Then there is the potential resource usage itself - e.g how much of the land in that city is now dedicate to toll roads that could be free, or in the internet infra case it's often exclusive rights to the poles all of the lines are ran on.
IDK, public rights-of-way don't seem to be the place where big disagreements are found? Passing a local law to allow common access to utility infrastructure seems qualitatively different than establishing a municipal competitor.
> The great thing about a private company "overcharging" or "underserving" a community is that citizens aren't forced to be in a relationship with that company for their services.
This is a hilarious thing to say about broadband, where the incumbents go to great lengths not to compete by carving out markets onto monopolized checkerboxes where customers are forced to use one ISP if they want anything meeting the FCCs definition of broadband, and their neighbor across the street (or next apartment building) has to choose another monopolist ISP on their block.
You can be broadly for cities rolling out their own broadbands while still pointing out that on the long term your local government growing its spending can be an issue.
10Gbps is absolutely great, but then the city might create an entire bureaucratic structure around it and in 30 years when it's not great anymore the apparatus won't die or be displaced like a company eventually would.
Which is not to say that in this scenario this is not a bit of a farfetched scenario considering that's precisely what the incumbents are doing as you pointed out.
> 10Gbps is absolutely great, but then the city might create an entire bureaucratic structure around it and in 30 years when it's not great anymore the apparatus won't die or be displaced like a company eventually would
I would fully agree with you if there was actual competition. As it is, I have no faith that terrible internet companies - especially monopolies - are guaranteed to be replaced by better ones (see Ma Bells offsprings/reconstitution).
My ideal scenario is that cities lay down the last-mile fiber and handle physical layer connectivity issues between homes/offices and an exchange (for a fee). ISPs would provide Internet connectivity, that way, you get actual competition, and the cities stick to their core competency: infrastructure.
This is all great to discuss in theory but let's be real here. A municipal ISP is a net win for the people that pay for it.
This shouldn't be controversial, and it isn't controversial for people in places where discourse hasn't been poisoned with these go no where derailing talking points.
I couldn't be talking from a more realistic standpoint. I've lived in places where incumbent ISPs don't invest in infrastructure, places where a private organization built out a cable network without any subsidies, places where a municipal provider was subsidized by federal grant money, and places where there was no public or private build outs and so I built my own ISP servicing my rural neighbors.
I'm not saying that municipal broadband is a net loss, but there are no silver bullets. Subsidies are one way that a municipality can "pick a winner", and in so doing, it can assure all of the competition loses. Sometimes that's a net win, sometimes it isn't, your claims to the contrary notwithstanding.
With regards to broadband, this is already a solved problem: build open access networks.
It is a very straightforward way for municipalities to incentivize and create competition.
As to other infrastructure projects, there are ways of calculating the public benefit to determine whether the project has positive ROI, even if no direct payments are made by the public.
I've not personally read "Misquoting Jesus", but I've listened to Ehrman on YT a bit. Based on that, and having spoken with a few biblical scholars who have read Ehrman, the general impression I get is that he has a "select is broken"[0] attitude toward the reliability of the Bible.
Much like GCC, and the Linux kernel, and the PostgreSQL query planner, the Bible is a battle-tested historical artifact. There may be a slew of yet-to-be-discovered "edge cases" in its interpretation (and perhaps Ehrman is the man to discover them). But in the main, it's an incredibly reliable witness to history.
So, while I wouldn't want to discourage people from starting their study of Biblical textual criticism with Bart Ehrman, I would definitely discourage them from concluding it with him.
The one who states his case first seems right,
until the other comes and examines him.
Prov. 18:17
I think you are making the opposite error that you're accusing Ehrman of making, specifically that you seem to be taking (what survived of) the Bible at it's word, putting the benefit of the doubt on everyone/everything else to disprove it, rather than giving it the burden of proof on its claims. You seem to be giving it more credibilty because it is old, but there are plenty of similar aged or older books that are clearly not accurate/true just because they are old and can't be disproven. If that's your standard, then you must also accept the existence of a lot of Pagan gods as well. Even if we just limit it to "the Bible" then you have to accept that Asherah and other early Hebrew gods really existed, and had priests and prophets capable of doing miracles and curses/blessings, etc.
Of course there is historically accurate stuff in the Bible, but there's also a ton of supernatural claims that can't be proven or disproven (aka they are non-falsifiable). For that matter The Odyssey has survived a long time and has some accurate historical things in it, but we don't take the Odyssey's stories about supernatural things at face value.
It's also not hard to show that The Bible is not historically reliable just by comparing different sections of it that contradict each other.
For example, what were Jesus' last words on the cross? Mark, Luke, and John all disagree on this and have different words. They can't all be his last words.
What day did he actually die? Was it the day after passover as in Mark, or the day before as in John?[1]
We absolutely agree though on reading lots of perspectives on it. There is no shortage of PhDs who debate these things, so at the end of the day you'll have to either choose the stay agnostic on it, or go with what seems "most likely" to you.
I don't tend to reread many books in general. C.S. Lewis and Tolkien's fictional series are probably the only exceptions. However, I do frequently reread books from the Bible, typically the English Standard Version. And yes, I would make the claim that all of these are non-fictional books/letters.
- Jonah: for its description of God's desire to have compassion on a group of people who don't know him, by leaving Jonah with no other option than telling those people about Him.
- Ecclesiastes: For "The Teacher's" many vignettes about how life is a quickly-dissipating vapor, and his pointing to ways to find satisfaction in it.
- Mark: Mark tells the story of Jesus' life and ministry in a no-nonsense, get-to-the-point kind of way.
- Romans: Paul gives a treatise on: the main problem of mankind, the inability of men to live up to any standard of behavior, the source of any confidence that anyone can have that God might be pleased with them, the way the Christian church relates to the people of Israel, and how to live in unity with people with whom you have disagreements.
- 1 John: John never got over the fact that he was loved by Jesus, and this letter is his recapitulation of that same love toward others.
GBM median survival for humans (according to the article) is 15 months.
If the effect is linear, the boost to survival time in humans would be an additional 19 months. With the death sentence of GBM hanging over your future, an additional year-and-a-half is huge.
It is and it isn't. A year and a half would go by so quickly. But if it were a high-quality year and a half and not spent in a hospital ward, I guess it's better than the alternative.
For a mother with a young child, getting another 1.5 years can be the difference between the child not knowing their mother and having some memory of her.
For someone with no or adult children, it can be a lot less significant. My dad passed away from cancer when I was 30 and while I certainly would have taken an extra year with him, it wouldn't have changed much.
Nothing like a deadline to make the most of 18 months. I have a 4 and 6 year old and if I were in this situation I'd cherish the hell out of that time. And hope for further improvements in treatment (and a stroke of luck) in the meantime.
It is and it is. My dad died of a GBM in 2022, 17 months after his diagnosis. If he had had another 19 months, I'd have made him breakfast this morning.
I find it much easier to sympathize with people's desire for additional time with terminally-ill loved ones now.
I see this claimed all the time, but I don't understand why this is assumed to be the case.
GDP rises and falls with economic progress and innovation. If new LLM startups make a bunch of money, GDP goes up accordingly.
But government spending is primarily geared towards defense, infrastructure, and benefits/entitlements. What makes those costs go up proportionally to GDP? A fighter jet doesn't directly cost more because Amazon rolls out a new Alexa device, does it? America doesn't suddenly grow thousands of miles of new coastline because Google opens a data center in Iowa, right? If Rivian builds 10,000 new EV trucks, how much more interstate highway must be built?
I would expect government spending to ebb and flow as market prices fluctuate, and I get that they might be loosely correlated, but why is spending assumed to be so closely linked that we should expect it to be a function of GDP?
* Managing a large economy is more expensive than a small one: for example creating legislation and managing a justice system for 100 companies is cheaper than doing the same for 10000 companies.
* Tax revenue is typically more or less fixed percentage of GDP.
The first point is something you can't really avoid without impairing the government. The second one you probably could with political decisions.
I've got my AI Assistant writing my code, checking in at the gym, running my poker night, and filing my taxes.
(Robot, experience this tragic irony for me!)
</sarcasm>
On a serious note, I agree with you. LLMs, in practice, seem to be both raising the ceiling of what's possible on the high end as well as lowering the floor making it easier for new entrants on the low end. See, for example, Justine Tunney's recent work on making llama run better on CPUs.
if you are satisfied with CVS/SVN version - any commit is final and there is no way to undo or modify them - then you don't need reflog. If you mess up, you just say: "oh well this sucks" and leave commit in place. This is what I was doing back when I used SVN and CVS.
hg has similar thing but it's different for each command. For example to undo "hg strip" you manually dig into .hg/strip-backups directory.. I never understand why people call it more intuitive.
That analogy is verging on dishonest. A word processor’s undo button is typically used in service of the operator’s thought process, as it pertains to their actual output, not how they’re using the word processor. The analogue to this is git itself.
I said typically though. We all know the “you move an image in Word and your layout completely changes” meme. Sometimes someone wants to undo something because the tool didn’t do what they intended. Even though I have no empirical basis beyond my no experience, I am incredibly confident that the typical use of Undo in a word processor is because the operator has changed their mind about what they want their output to be, rather than because they had already concluded what they want the end result to be and they just can’t get the software to do it. I have to imagine that you agree with this.
So yes, be thankful that git has reflog. All other things equal, git with reflog is better than git without. I don’t see how your analogy invalidates or refutes the the critique that typical use of git’s reflog is as a result of the operator not knowing how to use git. And to simply say “you’re holding it wrong”, when ‘holding’ git routinely involves standing due East at the next full moon, is absurd.
A person who isn’t “good at” word processors will use it both when they change their mind and when the program doesn’t do what they want (e.g. I didn’t realize that I had a text selection before I started typing and now my selected text is deleted). It’s the same with git, and now we are just arguing about what’s “typical”. An example of when I change my mind about what I told the program to do, maybe when rebasing I decide my merge resolution wasn’t actually what I wanted. That is certainly in the “user changed their mind” class of error.
I’m not saying git has a great user interface that users intuitively grok and rarely make mistakes in. But I am saying that having an undo button is not an admission of that, either.
Because we insist on telling people to Rebase as part of the standard workflow, which is just a huge footgun for people who dont understand what they are doing.
The quick answer is "very little".