beevai142

> A large part of what makes the first world so productive is its culture

In view of history including colonialism this statement sounds very naive indeed.

That is a consequence of failed premises in the city planning in the US.

Joyce scholarship in some sense seems like mathematics --- the construct is an invention, axioms can be whatever they are decided to be, and the only question is in how productive and beautiful the construction is.

That being said, from this point of view the whole enterprise seems empty and vain. Even if you finally find what the book "means", the whole project seems like a dead end and does not lead to anything else --- you have gained nothing that generalizes beyond a narrow scope, and Joyce is long dead. This means that the work is not beautiful.

> known-to-be-flawed academic peer review system

That something is flawed does not mean it is useless.

You can find the fully unmoderated preprint forum at vixra.org and the results speak for themselves.

> From the simplest cases like being ignored on PRs

You're not entitled to having your PRs merged, or even having anyone look at them. PRs not of particular interest to those maintaining the project simply get low priority. Especially with volunteer work, time is limited and while your PR might appear large and of importance to you, it may not look like that from other perspectives.

But the stackoverflow answer is right, and accounts for the fact that in the majority of cases the person who is asking a confused question is indeed confused.

If what you are trying to do is to get best performance, make use of work that other people already did, rather than wasting your time on a solved problem.

If you want to learn about how efficient matrix multiplication can be implemented, that is a different problem.

> Don't forget that companies are made of people

This is totally irrelevant, because the governance model of a a company is a limited dictatorship, and not all those people are equal. A company is only the people at its top, the rest are chattel.

A company is also not made of people in the legal sense, it is a separate entity.

I have used an ad blocker for the last 10+ years. I don't know how Adsense has improved my internet experience, and I suspect it has had no effect.

Evolution only optimizes for having offspring in the future. Trying to find a rational reason for some evolved behavior is not necessarily a fruitful way to think about it.

Not a surprise and not a disappointment either, when it was clear from the start that all results are within measurement error bars, so that there was neither experimental nor theoretical reason to expect to see something.

It was not "NASA" who indicated something, but a couple of guys working for NASA. Also, the "pilot wave theory" stuff is just idle speculation on topics of which the authors did not appear to understand much.

> There is no substitute for you, the person reading these words, to stop accepting plastic bags and as much similar things -- coffee cups, utensils, etc.

There is: regulation by the government, restricting use of items harmful to the environment.

It appears naive to suggest that the tragedy of the commons can be avoided by individual action, when the financial interests are not aligned.

> Mercurial?

It's not.

The basic feature set is pretty much the same, and requires similar effort to grok. Some things are much harder to do in Mercurial, and some things are just confusing (multiple heads, pushing branches, multiple branching models, the "tip", etc.). Online platforms are worse (Bitbucket vs Github) in practice.

The problem with stackoverflow is that answering questions sucks in the long term, for most people. It's basically an user support job, and if you are not suited for that sort of job eventually you start to lose patience with fools, of which there is no shortage on the internet.