sqrt
Joined 15 years ago
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86
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29
Member since
Nov 29
Recent submissions
Comment · 5 years ago
Funny thing: clicking the "past" button on this submission doesn't work—seems like Cloudflare doesn't like the query and blocks the request.
Comment · 5 years ago
FYI for anyone on OS X Catalina (and likely Big Sur): this doesn't seem to work, as it's not detecting AVFoundation support in ffmpeg. See this issue: https://github.com/cytopia/ffscreencast/issues/31
Comment · 6 years ago
I found Ada Palmer's post on the Renaissance a couple months ago to be a good read, though it's a bit long for one sitting and there are a few tangents: https://www.exurbe.com/black-death-covid-and-why-we-keep-tel...
A taste of what you might get out of it, from the preface:
> This post is for you if you’ve been wondering whether Black Death => Renaissance means COVID => Golden Age, and you want a more robust answer than, “No no no no no!”
> This post is for you if you’re tired of screaming The Middle Ages weren’t dark and bad! and want somewhere to link people to, to show them how the myth began.
> This post is for you if you want to understand how an age whose relics make it look golden in retrospect can also be a terrible age to live in.
> And this post is for you if want to ask what history can tell us about 2020 and come away with hope. Because comparing 2020 to the Renaissance does give me hope, but it’s not the hope of sitting back expecting the gears of history to grind on toward prosperity, and it’s not the hope for something like the Renaissance—it’s hope for something much, much better, but a thing we have to work for, all of us, and hard.
Comment · 6 years ago
Thanks for sharing this—I'd heard about the points system but I haven't seen any personal accounts of going through the process before, so it was illuminating to read one.
Unfortunately, there's no scheme to allow foreigners to stay as a resident if they work remotely for a company that doesn't have a presence in Japan, as I do. (I'd even be willing to pay taxes in Japan!)
Of course, such a provision is pretty rare, but it's still a bummer. I wonder if immigration policy might ever consider such situations—such a worker is basically injecting money into the Japanese economy for little cost on Japan's part. But perhaps there are downsides that I haven't considered.
Comment · 6 years ago
The city of Seattle commissioned a separate study on Uber and Lyft driver pay in Seattle (mentioned in the NYT article): https://irle.berkeley.edu/files/2020/07/Parrott-Reich-Seattl...
The authors of the Seattle-commissioned report have written up their own criticism of their report to the Cornell/Uber/Lyft report: https://irle.berkeley.edu/files/2020/07/Comparison-of-two-Se...
Comment · 6 years ago
Northeastern University (in Boston) has announced that they're joining MIT and Harvard's lawsuit: https://twitter.com/Northeastern/status/1280961230233100297
Comment · 9 years ago
But plenty of us are US-born! A glance often isn't enough to distinguish between international and domestic students.
Comment · 9 years ago
They didn't mention political correctness, though...?
Comment · 9 years ago
> I think the best way to pick what you want to do is to find [...] what the world values.
> Don’t chase other people’s ideas of what matters.
Er...
Comment · 9 years ago
SF, Oakland, or Berkeley. My family and friends are in the Bay Area. The weather is nearly unparalleled. The food variety is solid. Transit is not that bad, if you compare the cities I mentioned to the rest of the US.
I guess the tech scene is decent, but the other factors I mentioned mean a lot more to me. (I would almost prefer it if the area weren't as much of a hotspot, actually...)
Comment · 10 years ago
I'd be shocked if more than 5% (and even that's a stretch) of fresh high school graduates in the US knew what a Markov chain is.