sinkasapa

Nothing about Uqbar? I swear, mirrors and gen AI are hateful.

Maybe it makes for a closer analogy. Neither the time machine or the flying car are real, but we react to the "inventors" differently. We're not haters. We just have taste.

Has there been a good study that firmly demonstrates that tax rates are the primary motivation that rich people have to live in one place or another?

A department chair at a university is usually not the most productive researcher, as far as I can tell. And if they are, they tend to leave the position quickly to refocus on research. As far as I've seen it is not unusual for people who are engaged with what they do to avoid admin tasks. A dynamic like that would seem to push less engaged or capable people into admin.

You can get cheap wired earphone splitters and share what you're listening to on long bus rides or flights. I miss that. Maybe one wants something between needing to be on and conversing and the isolation of separate bluetooth listening.

Having a detailed and auditable report of how money is being used is really helpful for creating the understanding you are talking about. That is what accounting is for and why it is so essential to modern life.

The site is obviously just an advertisement for a weird camera surveillance system, but the concern about incomplete accounting is very real. In many places one might want to contribute to non-profit efforts, IRS information isn't even available. In my work in Ecuador, I have seen a lot of fraud, and half-baked charities. Some rich NGOs sometimes walk in on some field trip that donors have paid for, make some statements about all they are going to do and disappear without follow-up. Basically they are just tourists on a free vacation taking publicity photos. There is a specific organization that comes down to build environmentally safe toilets. Not only are these built by young middle class volunteers that know nothing about building anything but their CVs, the communities they are helping don't even need new toilets. The building supplies tend to be repurposed after the volunteers are gone, every single year. I'd like to know if I paid for that. There are seeds of merit in the program, but also unnecessary waste.

Despite negative examples, there are many worthy things that are done, and could be done in the region. Northern money can go very far in the areas I work. It can do a lot to not just improve but transform people's lives. So you suggest that an answer to money misuse is to have personal experience with any organization you donate to. How many people who have the money are going to spend any real time in Amazonian Ecuador? They aren't there now. What is going to change? Since there are few people with money who can be personally involved, does that mean that no effort should be made to better people's lives there? Obviously, that is what accounting is for. I think the article is absolutely right about that. I find their solution to be creepy and invasive. Maybe just having better auditing and reporting standards makes more sense than pointing cameras at hospital patients, but what do I know?

Lean 4 is uses constructive logic. If a closed world assumption requires that a statement that is true is also known to be true, and that any statement that is not known to be true is therefore false, that is not true of constructive systems. I only use Rocq, but I believe the type theories in Rocq and Lean 4 are basically similar variations on the Calculus of Constructions in both cases, though there are important differences. In a constructive theory something is true if a proof can be constructed, but the lack of a proof does not entail that something is false. One needs to prove that something is false. In constructive type theory, one can say, that something is true or false.

Those are both valid reasons to use both languages. The "only" (whether true or not) is what the argument hinges on. It is roughly the same as saying that the only advantage of X is that it is popular, but Y is also popular and has additional advantages, therefore, Y is better than X. That is a valid argument, whether the premises are true or not.

It is interesting how accommodations can reveal dysfunctions in educational practice. In my courses, requests for accommodations generally change the course design for all students. This is because the accommodation does not alter expected learning outcomes, but it is clearly something that aids students with difficulty learning the material succeed. My goal is that all students succeed in the expected learning outcomes. I don't want the course to be challenging for the wrong reasons. So often the request reveals something I was doing that is unnecessary and makes the class more difficult for little reason. That isn't to say that there are not learning environment that should add additional stress. Sometimes such conditioning is needed so that one can succeed in the challenges they are being trained for. That isn't the case for my students.

I want to be happy with proton but their poor linux support across all their products makes it difficult.

It seems like the central claim of the study is that there is an increased use of center embeddings in legal texts in comparison to non-legal texts and casuals peach. I'm seeing a lot of debating and presentations of opinions about various aspects of legalese in the comments, but the number of center embeddings in a document is measurable, and is in no way associated with clarity, or precision. It is known that beyond one or two center embeddings, most people find a sentence incomprehensible. There is no way that a sentence like "The dog the cat the rat chased ate saw the man wink." is more clear than some semi-paraphrase, which does not use center embeddings, such as "The rat chased the cat who ate the dog who saw the man wink." It seems reasonable that the only explanation the researchers could find for such behavior is that it seemed to have some sociological value in invoking authority. There is no sense in which center embeddings help to avoid lexical ambiguity. They are simply difficult to parse.

I got turned off of F# because it seemed like knowing C# libraries and tooling was assumed if one wanted to do anything non-trivial, kind of like some of the functional JVM languages always assume some amount of Java knowledge and use of Java tooling. F# seemed nice, but it didn't seem like a real stand-alone language. Unlike Elm or Purescript, where one should also know JavaScript and its tooling, I don't find learning all the C# and Java stuff independently compelling enough to use F#, Scala, Frege, etc.

It is called evidentiality. It doesn't have any direct relationship to time, as one would expect with a tense. Southern Quechua has a reported event evidential affix as well. A friend who is a speaker of Quechua was once horrified, hearing that a man was going to be given a life sentence for murder in Bolivia. They played a portion of his confession over the radio, and the accused man used the reported event evidential through the entirety. Literally, saying that all his words were second hand, dubious information. To my friend, the implication was that he was saying what the police had told him to say. Apparently, those judging the case were not aware of the subtlety, and it did not come through in the Spanish translation of the confession, resulting in a conviction. Whatever the facts of the case were in the end, what is interesting is that for Quechua speakers like my friend, due to the use of the reported event evidential, there was no confession, even though all of the events of a murder were stated in the first person.

It definitely seems misleading to talk about coca leaf use as cocaine use, given the common expectation for what that means. People reading the newspaper probably don't know all these details, and it isn't spelled out. I can't imagine some guy in a club not feeling like he was robbed after paying for a powdery drug and then receiving a handful of leaves. I can't imagine an Andean woman sitting down for morning tea being pleased to have a bunch of powder dumped in her cup.

I suppose the better term would be synecdoche, since the similarity in pronunciation isn't coincidental, like "The sun rose in the morning." and "Look at the pretty rose petals." but is a form of motivated polysemy.