ncclporterror

The way the article is written, it appears that the formula is used as: 1. Observe market parameters (volatility of the underlying and risk free rate) 2. Plug into formula 3. Deduce a price for the option.

My point is that it is used in the opposite way: observe prices to deduce market parameters. You claim my point is obvious, but I'm not sure it would be obvious to a reader unfamiliar with modern finance reading this article, which is the target audience.

In modern finance the Black-Scholes formula is not used to "price" options in any meaningful sense. The price of options is given by supply and demand. Black-Scholes is used in the opposite way: traders deduce the implied volatility from the observed option prices. This volatility is a representation of the risk-neutral probability distribution that the markets puts on the underlying returns. From that distribution we can price other financial products for which prices are not directly observable.

> And of course quite a few countries still using English because they were formerly colonized/oppressed/etc. (take your pick) and might have a thing or two to say about having to deal with the British flag.

What about the fact that their language would be listed as "English", therefore reminding them it originated in England? Is listing the language as "English" significantly different from listing it as "<UK flag> English"? Should we rename the language to "Irish" ? Then what about the inhabitants of Ireland who don't identify as Irish?

You can always take the most offensive interpretation "This flag is claiming that Irish people are English, therefore contribute to historical oppression, etc".

But you can also take a more natural and charitable interpretation, which is that most people associate the UK flag to English, and the flag is therefore a convenient visual indication.

> it's complicated for English and it doesn't really get any better for other languages.

I agree, there is complexity and arbitrariness in any "language -> flag" mapping. I am arguing that you can make practical decisions even in the presence of complexity.

> Telling people to grow a tougher skin isn't particularly user friendly or that helpful.

Arguing you can't do something because someone will be offended is also not very helpful: you can almost always find some offensive interpretation of anything.

Thanks, these are indeed good arguments. This made me reconsider but I am still not entirely convinced. I would argue that the association of the flag with the current government rests largely in the mind of the reader, not in the convention itself.

The website makes further arguments: English is the official language in many other countries, therefore choosing the UK is arbitrary.

You could define a complicated rule to make it less arbitrary, but then the choice of the rule itself would be arbitrary. I think the point that any mapping will be to some extent arbitrary is correct.

The problem for me is arguing that because any arbitrary convention will be offending or confusing to some, then no convention should be chosen. As opposed to the practical idea of just picking a convention that makes sense.

The website argues that using a flag for a language may confuse or even offend users. It argues English would most appropriately be represented by the flag of England, but few people know the flag of England, so English is usually represented by the flag of the UK or the US, neither of which are appropriate because other languages are spoken in the UK and English does not originate from the US.

I would argue that using either the UK or US flag is less likely to confuse anyone than not using any flag, and that anyone offended by this needs to grow a tougher skin.

The fact that any mapping from a language to a flag is to some extent arbitrary does not imply that no mapping at all is better. This sounds like a variation of the Sorites paradox.

Furthermore, I find it amusing that a website dedicated to languages, which are roughly sets of arbitrary conventions we use to communicate, is offended by the choice of another arbitrary convention to communicate.

LLMs such as ChatGPT are very useful to craft or explain command lines for you. It doesn't replace knowing the tools and reading the man pages, but great to get started.

The CV of Thomas Vidick, one of the two people that found the bug, is quite impressive. Undergrad at ENS in France (ranked 1st), PhD at Berkeley (3.97/4.0), postdoc at MIT under Scott Aaronson, and now full professor at Caltech. He literally wrote a book on the topic (Introduction to Quantum Cryptography). So, yeah.

Birth rate is not a law of nature that can be naively extrapolated. Increased pace of technological development implies an increased pace of societal changes, which will impact birth rate.

Predicting birth rate for 2060 from today might be roughly equivalent to someone in 1850 trying to extrapolate birth rate to 1950. They would have been completely wrong because there was no way they could predict the level of development.

Even ignoring that, shouldn't we expect birth rate to be autocorrelated, as the impact of having children, and therefore people's decisions to do so, would depend on the population count itself?