thewayfarer

If the loss amount is adjusted to 33%, then on average over time individuals will make a net profit. A 50% win will more than compensate for a 33% loss (0.67 * 1.5 = 1.005).

Vector Calculus, Linear Algebra, and Differential Forms, A Unified Approach by John H. Hubbard and Barbara Burke Hubbard.

Because we shouldn't think about the media categorically one way or the other, as if it's either all fake or everything in the media is true. The media gets things wrong, and we should correct their mistakes.

However, the political aspects of discrediting entire news outlets or the entire news community because of critical or negative coverage of certain politicians or political parties is an attitude that promotes mistrust in our society and creates an environment where nefarious political actors can successful avoid scrutiny.

> Under iOS 11.2.0 the effect is even more pronounced.

No, the effect is exactly the same as you can see from the charts since they peak at the same benchmark scores. It is the distribution of those effects that is different, with the performance being negatively affected for more phones. But keep in mind that under iOS 11.2.0, most iPhone 6S's that are tested are probably about 2 years old. Under iOS 10.x, most iPhone 6S's probably about 1 year old. I'd like to know the distribution of the times that these Geekbench benchmarks were run. If scores for one phone model in one month are one average score under iOS (x) but is substantially lower the next month under iOS (x+1), then I would consider that to be a significant act of "planned obsolescence".

But really Apple should probably be more transparent about this. And the bottom line for users is that if you notice any kind of significant performance degradation, whether it is fast battery drainage or sluggish performance, you should consider taking the phone in.

> Wasting half your energy-budget on spoon feeding the compiler is just as bad as spending it on managing memory manually in C.

This isn't quite a fair comparison. Manual memory management increases the risk of producing incorrect or buggy programs. Satisfying a strict compiler increases the chance that your program is written correctly.

And for what it's worth, this boilerplate dance for "type erasure" will be solved with what the Swift team calls generalized existentials, where you'll be able to use nominal types like Any<Sequence where .Iterator.Element == String>. "Type erasure" isn't the result of "aiming so hard for perfection" as you say, but because Swift is still a young language and there is only so much the creators can work on at any one time. Most Swift devs (think iOS apps) aren't running up against this problem much, and I haven't seen a single situation in an app where implementing a "type erased" generic type was necessary. At this point in the Swift timeline, just making Swift code compile faster would make devs much happier.

> it's still a mine field of exceptions

Unlike languages that actually use exceptions, which really are mine fields of exceptions in a different sense :P

Strictly speaking, AnySequence is a generic type, whereas AnySequence<Int>, AnySequence<String>, and AnySequence<Any> would be three different concrete types.

Our educational culture has us convinced that we need to have some kind of complete mental process before we produce an answer for some problem. In school, you answer a question by recalling information, making deductions, and only after eliminating your doubts to a sufficient degree do you scratch your answer on a piece of paper. Oh, and a good student is always afraid of being wrong. It's a mentality that we carry into adulthood only to be paralyzed by it. If only we taught kids to instinctively do and produce even at the risk of being wrong or looking like a fool later. We should habitually be exploring, doing, and engaging with problems and ideas. Pursuing the right ideas in your career should amount to selecting from your experiences and the experiences that others have shared with you. What ideas worked and what didn't? How did the outcome conform to your expectations? It doesn't have to be a complete and finished product. What did you learn from making this prototype? What surprised you? No doubt you've have many bad ideas over the years. We all have them. What projects are providing value to you because you enjoy working on them, and what projects look like they could provide real value to others in the world? Those are the projects worth pursuing for the long run.

> (Can’t wait until we can have variadic generic parameters!)

This.

Exactly. I have no idea. It would make sense for a large, capable predator to try out eating a human, but they just don't. Maybe humans don't have enough fat on them to be appealing? ...but orcas also eat birds, which don't have a lot of fat. Maybe because orcas are intelligent collaborative hunters, they have instincts not to eat other intelligent species like humans? ...but orcas also eat dolphins, which are similarly intelligent hunters.

I would also expect any large predator to spontaneously act aggressive at times, but this very rarely happens. Or at some point I would expect it to make a mistake and kill a human even though it doesn't actually want to eat him/her, but this has apparently never happened.

I find it all very interesting, but I'm at a loss to explain it.