danohu

How do you understand the lease-vehicles line in the balance sheet? From $4.1bn down to $2.3bn. I understand there's some accounting change, but I don't see where the other side of that missing $1.8bn shows up.

Well, the first Pope was literally called The Rock (Peter). Jesus appointed him by saying "you are The Rock, and I'll build my church on this rock".

Exactly what he meant has led to centuries of debate between protestants and catholics.

"But new research shows that it may not be the sound itself that distracts us…it may be who is making it."

For me, the absolute perfect background noise is people talking in a language I don't understand. If you're in a big city, there are almost certainly cafes with customers mainly from some linguistic minority -- I've found them to be great places to work.

[on roughly the same principle, I sometimes listen to foreign-language pop music while working, so the vocal aspect becomes just another instrument rather than a source of distraction]

I seem to increasingly get unsubscribed from mailing lists because of not opening them, which is very frustrating.

Sometimes it's because I'm reading but not triggering their tracking mechanisms. Other times it's because I'm subscribed to lists that I only occasionally read, but want to have available for reference.

Either way: if I've actively subscribed to a list, I have some reason for doing so. I don't want to be unsubscribed!

I'd be happy to add my email address to some whitelist of 'assume I'm reading anything I'm subscribed to', if only it were possible.

Otherwise, maybe I need to forward mails to some service that will open them all in a browser, and trigger all the tracking pixels.

Not quite the Crimea, but you might like the novelist Amin Maalouf. He primarily writes historical novels set in the medieval Islamic world -- with protagonists who travel a lot, so you see some of the (more-or-less accurate) interactions of different places and people.

'Samarkand' is my favourite of his novels, or 'Leo the African' is probably his most well-known.

Something I would love to see is an open-source attitude entering into the furniture manufacture ecosystem.

What Ikea sells you is, essentially:

a) a set of instructions for making furniture out of basic components b) those components, produced and distributed through a highly-efficient supply chain

So break those two apart! Let hobbyists and carpenters share or sell their furniture designs. Just specify the components in a standard way, so suppliers can compete to supply the components for each design.

So you turn a monolithic business into one where smaller groups can compete on each part of the system. One company can cheaply supply cut wood in Seattle, another just sells its funky shelving designs without worrying about the infrastructure.

Most bits of this ecosystem already exist -- the furniture-making hobbyists, the DIY stores, the suppliers of nails and screws. They just need a bit of systemisation (and marketing) to pull them together into a system that can compete with a monolithic supply chain.

Earlier iterations are buggier and have poorer dev tools. So the God intelligence has more need to smite and command the AIs within the game.

After a while the bugs are ironed out, so God can settle back and gently tweak parameters at a distance.

Berlin is pretty dense, even without skyscrapers. Tightly-packed six-storey buildings can get you very high density (look at Paris for a more extreme demonstration). The area of Kreuzberg I'm in now has the same population density as Manhattan (28,000 people per square kilometre), despite not having anything more than 7 storeys high.

Housing everywhere in Berlin -- especially new-build -- is very dense. Importantly that's true throughout the city, not just in the centre.

Keeping Berlin so dense is an impressive achievement, given that it's surrounded by flat, empty countryside. Partly it's because of the cold war division of the city. But mainly it's cultural -- most Berliners are happy with apartments rather than individual houses.

Politicians religiously promise to maintain the 'berliner mix', where zoning encourages housing and commercial use in the same area, and keeping a social mix by having affordable housing everywhere. A new higher-density mixed-use zone category ('urban area') has just been introduced nationally, largely at Berlin's request.

I've occasionally suggested* a dirty bomb as the only way to make London livable again. Just enough radiation to scare away the rich, not enough to actually harm anyone ;)

And in Berlin, I've sometimes seen graffiti along the lines of "cleaner walls == higher rents". So making the city less appealing is already part of the anti-gentrification arsenal.

* for the record, I'm not actually planning to nuke London.

open/free data sources are likely to become very important. AI hasn't yet been super-important in the open data world, but I'd expect it to gain a lot of prominence as time goes by.

A decent amount eventually ends up at archive.org

[not all, because archive.ort needs to be a bit more careful, but they have a decent symbiotic relationship]

No, it's "learn by building things" with a very tight feedback loop.

When copying, you can immediately see where your expert has done something differently from you. And you can either learn to do it their way, or understand how different methods lead to different outcomes, and so consciously build your own style.