amirkdv

> forces the other players to reduce their prices or shed customers.

Excpet they revert back to old prices once the competition is dead. This is textbook predatory pricing.

> It's not like Bell, in this case, were offering 1Gbps for something absurdly below cost, like $1/mo or something just to drive the new comer out of business.

What's the significance of "absurdly below cost" here? They are doing exactly what you describe except the exact number here is not 1 but 50.

(1) Real Mathematical Analysis, by Charles Pugh is a wonderful introduction to pure mathematics for a mathematically inclined engineer. The back cover starts like this

> Was plane geometry your favourite math course in high school? Did you like proving theorems? Are you sick of memorising integrals?

(2) The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, by Oliver Sacks. I think it's impossible to read this (or a number of other works of Sacks') and not be mesmerized by the workings of the human brain. Disclaimer: I wouldn't call neuroscience my "field of study" even though I did study it.

Yup. Great article overall until the bit you quoted.

Sure, it has the _potential_ to transform personal genomics, but the (insanely cool) T2T project is indeed almost exclusively an academic one.

Maybe I'm too cynical, but I think academics are wired to automatically produce such declarations of Greater Societal Impact simply because of how we, as a society, have decided to allocate resources for scientific research.

I've heard this a lot. I think there are two problems with this. First, you need massive adoption for the "social" part to be at all useful, hence only the few big social platforms can even try it. Second, even at maximum possible adoption, you'll probably run into the problem that actual human social networks have nowhere near enough branching breadth to help rank the behemoth that the web is today, i.e. for most queries and most possible hits, there's not enough signal coming from the social network.

It's not ridiculous at all.

> They stop using it if the results are poor.

These are not laws of nature. There are so many reasons why most people would still use $X even if the performance of $X was underwhelming.

The document you shared is a great example of the education system acting as a vessel for inculcating children with sterile, polite thoughts. I can imagine the room full of well-meaning adults who think they must protect children from dangerous ideas like racial superiority and end up building an edifice of useless ideas.

Maybe we shouldn't even try to explain such an overwhelmingly complex topic like "development of civilization" in grade 4? A charged topic where reasonable sounding yet deeply flawed ideas are known to dupe entire generations of adults.

Alas, our education culture still prefers a feeding tube of narratives over an actual education that equips children with a robust understanding of basics (history, economics, ...) and the ability to question content in front of them. The same sadly applies to science education I think, but with less dramatic effect.

A lot of morality is of course fashion (and "relative", if you want).

But failure to articulate universal moral rules concisely, doesn't mean there's no concensus.

Circumstances and relevant context can be very complicated and laborious to describe, but there are still many cases where overwhelming majority of people would agree on what's right and what's wrong.

> Such obviously false statements might be treated as jokes, or at worst as evidence of insanity, but they are not likely to make anyone mad. The statements that make people mad are the ones they worry might be believed.

There's some truth to this that's worth pausing on.

But it's a fallacy (probably with a fancy name) to say "it made you mad therefore you worry it's true".

A statement could be false yet incite anger because it's demonstrably harmful.

> Asking "Any Java experts around?" takes little effort

which is precisely why this is annoying: it's asking for a social commitment without putting any effort in. It also reaches for the top shelf for no reason. Does the person's question really need a Java "expert"? Probably not.

> A "no" response for the first question could save you from wasting your time with the second.

Arguably if they were to find help _anywhere_ they would benefit from articulating their question in a clear and concise way. Let alone the high probability that through writing the question they might answer their own question, because we're all humans.

I've been a happy FastMail customer for 8 years now. Migration from Gmail was a breeze too!

The only feature I've missed in all this time is schedule-send which they seem to have indefinitely put on their backlog.

OP listen to this.

And go read So Good They Can't Ignore You by Cal Newport. You'll see stories of people in situations very similar to you.

Source: I rebeled in my early 20s for a more meaningful life before I had enough career capital to spend and learned a lot of lessons the hard way. My saving grace was that I already had a degree and was demonstrably good (i.e. employable) at a couple of things.

CLRS is the text, but for a more gentle introduction see Grokking Algorithms.

> Natural selection is what stops DNA from becoming non-functional [...] Over the extremely long run regions of the genome that have no biological function should disappear, no?

If you have a sequence that's neutrally mutating with no corrective pressure it won't eventually disappear. At most it'll mutate into something unrecognizable [^1]

For example, your genome is littered with pseudogenes. These are mutated, ineffective shadows of what used to be a functioning gene. Nonetheless they're still close enough to what they used to be that you could reason about them in an evolutionary sense, eg: this one is also a pseudogene in other primates (i.e. it stopped mattering a long time ago), or this other one has a functioning homolog in non-primate vertebrates (i.e. it kept functioning in that lineage).

[^1] as a first order approximation. There are of course other structural events that can create much more change per event than your run of the mill single-point mutations that occur during every DNA replication.

> as we have more and more interdisciplinary scientists jumping in at the interdisciplinary level, we're already in an era where diletanttery (especially in trendy science mashups like biophysics) is high

Once heard a bioinformatics (CS) PhD candidate say "natural selection would remove a region of the genome if it didn't have biological function". They graduated with a thesis having to do with genome evolution.