GeorgeDewar

I totally agree with you, I think retries are overused, with the exception of operations that are known to be unreliable and can't be improved.

In my experience, errors which go away within a few seconds are quite rare, and are mainly due to flaws which are usually caught in testing.

I think a very careful cost/risk/benefit analysis should be done when adding automatic retries to things. As well as potentially causing cascading failures, it is a degraded user experience when it doesn't succeed.

As a user I would rather see an error straight away than see many seconds of spinning while something silently retries, and THEN an error.

Was it on 120V in the US or a 240V country? In my 240V country that would normally make a terrific spark and a bang.

Do you remember if it blew a fuse or tripped a breaker?

That writing isn't the only "thinking" though. Some thinking can happen in the course of generating a single token, as shown by the ability to answer a question without any intermediate reasoning tokens. But as we've all learnt this is a less powerful and more error-prone mode of thinking.

So that is to say I think a small amount of secret reasoning would be possible, e.g. if the location is known or guessed from the beginning by another means and the reasoning steps are made up to justify the conclusion.

The more clearly sound the reasoning steps are, the less plausible that scenario is.

Why is this? In my country they start at 1.

This has really made insurance click for me because while I understand it intuitively, I wanted a more scientific foundation to understand its value.

I think a great illustration is an extreme case. If I have a house and just enough income to cover all my needs and wants (including retirement savings), then depending on my attitude an extra $1000 per year might have no effect at all - I have nothing I want to spend it on and nothing to save for.

But losing my home would still be devastating. So the utility value of the $1000 per year for the rest of my life is low or none, but the utility value of the previously earned money I would lose from losing my house is high.

The lane keep assist in my 2017 Leaf is awful. If I used it, anyone would take me for a drunk driver as it drifts to the edge of the lane and then corrects endlessly.

Thankfully it can be turned off, and it stays off.

At the time of writing, this search will provide a top result saying "Help is available" and giving information about your country's crisis hotline.

"1236 800", "1236 + 800", etc. also do it, but 1236800 does not. The two numbers have to be separated and in that order.

It'd be interesting to know why.

One could get into a long debate about whether "most" is literally true or not, but I think most of us should be able to agree that at least a significant proportion of people - enough to matter - either won't or can't think of this without some prompting.

I've watched many of the videos on their YouTube channel and have been blown away by all the cool stuff in that museum, and the talented people that keep it going!

It's high on my list of things to see in the US when I next get a chance to spend some time there (which could be several years away so I hope it keeps going strong).

I think for many, perhaps even most people, you're right and friendship happens organically without deliberate intent.

Some people just do not work this way - maybe it's being somewhere on the autism spectrum, but whatever the cause, some people need to take a more methodical approach to do this.

I think what this blog post shows is that such an approach really can result in true friendships.

It's a bit like online dating I suppose. That idea is abhorrent to some (or used to be - the stigma has reduced considerably over time), but when it works, there's nothing preventing the resulting relationship from being as genuine as one that started any other way.

Very true. I usually ask "is or was it ever alive", and if yes I'll then ask if it's alive today.

Edit: don't know how the similar sibling comment didn't appear to me when I was writing this, since it's from 4 hours ago and I loaded the page less than one hour ago...

I did not know about tables in Excel. Now I do and it may change my life...