jerome-jh

There was a report a few months ago predicting 4°C by 2080. It came to this figure by selecting the most likely emission scenario and warming scenario from the GIEC report.

In particular, it is hard to be optimistic on the emission scenario nowadays. So the report opted for emissions starting to drop around 2040, if I remember correctly.

That's my new baseline. Sorry I cannot find the report anymore. I am pretty sure it was posted on hacker news though.

Protecting kids and other vulnerable people matters to everyone, so why not the government? What would think of a country where, let say your mother cannot go out without fearing getting robbed or raped? Same for kids. Maybe you do not have kids and you do not care. Anyway being a parent does not mean being behind your kids at every single moment. I hope you have not spent your childhood under constant supervision of your parents. So at some point everyone is concerned about protecting kid, and not only there own ones

If the kid knows how to buy a certificate from a shady website, then probably he his old enough to watch porn and other disturbing content. That does not mesn the system should be thrown away as a whole.

I upvote for the wonderful formatting ;)

We could prove P=>~P if we had earlier in our context another hypothesis Q, which is false.

So proving P=>~P does not imply P is false. It means our context is inconsistent. It could be inconsistent because of P or because of Q?

There is something which always made me uncomfortable with informal proof by contradiction (by informal I mean "with pen and paper"). So OK we reach a contradiction, and then immediately "oh yeah, that is _this hypothesis_ which is wrong". Erh, well why exactly this one? All we know is we started from an inconsistent state.

The article enters this territory at the last paragraph and simply concludes "This can be difficult questions to resolve to student's satisfaction", without even trying to answer it.

I sometimes wonder, what is real and what is a concept in physics: is that force , energy, ...?

There are often two ways to solve physics problems: one describing the problem with forces, the other reasoning with energy. So they look like the two faces of the same coin. Hence the question: which one is actually real?

Some quick arguments for and against

Energy:

+ converts between mechanical, chemical, thermal, radiative types, and even mass

+ quantum particles, when interacting, exchange energy

- looks like an integrative quantity (in the sense of mathematical integral)

Force:

+ feels very real, when you receive a ball in your face

+ we talk of fundamental forces, not fundamental energy

+ explains momentum, deformation well

- my physics teacher used to say "nobody ever saw a force"

- force is undistinguishable with acceleration

- at the quantum level forces are actually particles interacting

- at the quantum level, the uncertainty principle makes the newtonian force pointless (pun?): seems like we could know the vector's origin or the direction but not both

It would be bearable if they would just be rich and shut the **** up.

I will be on the job market soon

I will change decade this year

I still have not found my passion nor encountered the big project if my life. I am interested by too many things and have too little agency or perseverance.

In the small town were I lived as a teenager, there was a successful garage owner who had a Ferrari. It was during the early 90's. One evening after a dinner at a restaurant with friends, a young woman insists to come back as a passenger in the Ferrari. They were later found dead in the crashed Ferrari, which took fire. The woman was in the driver seat. So it seems the woman later insisted to drive the car.

The cautionary tale seems rather to be: if you have a Ferrari, _never_ let anybody else drive it.

Recently, Claude (through Copilot) found a hardware issue on our product. I was asking it to find an issue in a specific feature of a device driver, that could cause what we observed. It determined the feature was correctly implemented.

Then it hinted that depending how the hardware is implemented, it could cause the observation. It turned out the hardware was implemented as suspected by Claude.

I was already convinced it knew the codebase, somehow, more than I do. Now it is just as if its knows the product and its use as well.

Do people solve business problems with OR-tools? I suppose yes, but what can you say about the real applications?

Replying to myself

Christmas 2023: I ordered a number of books from the local bookstore. One failed to delivered, so

Christmas 2024: I ordered most of my books from Amazon. No two deliveries went the same (see above), total randomness.

Christmas 2025: I ordered ALL my books from the local bookstore (+600$). I started shopping earlier (end of November) and everything went smooth! They kept my individual orders at the shop and I could collect them all in one go. No stress.

The online shop of my local bookstore is simple and efficient. I can read book excerpts, just like on Amazon. But the total absence of clutter makes for a much more efficient experience and a huge amount of time spared.

My local book store accepts online orders and I can fetch my books from the shop a few days later. I am finding this more convenient than Amazon, even if a little more expensive. I also appreciate to have a book store in town, for the few times I have to find a present and have no idea and little time.

For the convenience aspect: Amazon deliveries routinely fail, require me to fetch the parcel at the entrance of my condo at inconvenient times, or require me the get my parcel at the condo concierge, again at inconvenient times, or the parcel is dropped at a random place.

I never had to return a book bought at the store. I do not even know their return policy. It may definitely be an issue someday in the future.