lahvak

"In 2023, it became the first metro system in the world to operate entirely on electric power."

That is very confusing. Most of the article seems to be about metro systems (a.k.a. underground, subway, the tubes, etc.). What happened in Oslo in 2023 is they electrified their bus lines (i.e. surface transport). I think most actual metro (sub surface) system have been entirely electric for quite a while.

I remember in the summer of 89 having to wait several hours in Uzhhorod for exactly this reason. I don't remember if they kicked us of the train or if we wanted to use the opportunity to do some sightseeing, but there were no sights to see in Uzhhorod in 1989. The most notable thing we found was a local "wall of shame": a display case with pictures of local miscreants, together with the listings of their crimes. Being at the height of Gorbachev's prohibition, the most common crime was "drinking alcoholic beverages in public". I think that if I had to live in Uzhhorod in late 1980's, I would probably end up drinking alcoholic beverages in public as well.

Just go and look into the nearest septic tank, I bet it's gonna be a similar experience.

First, I never liked Gnome, I remember trying it few times years ago, and quickly returning back to fvwm2 every time. On the other hand, I never understood why window managers put icons on the window title bars, and in my own fvwm2 config, the max and min icons were the first thing I removed. I mostly used keyboard to toggle between maximized and unmaximized state of a window, and if I really needed a mouse for it, I would double click the title bar with the same effect (I also used keyboard to toggle vertical only and horizontal only maximization). With practically unlimited number of virtual desktops, I never needed to minimize a window, and I usually had too many windows open for a taskbar to be useful, instead I had a popup menu for finding windows (both just this desktop and all desktops). Now, after switching to i3, my windows still have no icons on title bars, and I use rofi to find windows, so still no taskbar.

Olympics are a great point of national pride for the organizing country. I don't understand why these days we still let each Olympics be organized by a single country. It could very easily become a global event, where different disciplines would happen in different parts of the world.

More importantly, though, Olympics have become a major capitalism fest, its increasingly about consumption, and a small number of already very rich people making shitload of money at the expense of the public in the organizing country.

I believe you've got it backwards. The theory of relativity would be wrong if GPS did not work, the theory of electromagnetism would be wrong if radio did not work, etc. The only thing that working radio tells us is that certain mathematical model that we call theory of electromagnetism happens to agree with the real world (whatever that is) to a sufficient precision. For many purposes (like for example building radios), that is enough.

A bit different take on the situation:

https://jacobin.com/2024/05/georgia-ngos-eu-membership-democ...

Writing novels and analyzing novels are completely orthogonal skills. I bet there are many great authors who would completely suck at explaining other authors' works (or even their own), comparing different works, or explaining how literary works fit into and interact with the rest of the culture.

Another phrase I truly despise is "all but". First, it seems to mean exactly the opposite to what it actually means. Second, why even?

> What if the standardized tests aren't administered by the teacher? That seems like it would be an easy solution to get around the cheating problem.

In order for the test scores to be granular enough to be used as measure of performance of individual teachers, the testing would have to be done fairly often. The schools and school districts that are already lacking funds for basic stuff like maintenance and teacher and staff salaries would have hard time to pay an additional subject to administer the test.

With the frequency and volume of testing, it would likely be too costly to do the testing in an external testing facility (which most districts do not have), so it would have to be done on site. I remember my kids telling me that every time before they took a standardized test (it happens once a year around here), the teachers told them basically "we cannot give you the answers, but look around, the answers may already be there, there may be a poster hanging on the wall or something else like that that may be helpful."

Years ago I used one of the first pis as a music/podcast player in my car. The problem was that there was no proper shutdown process, you turn of the car, and the power cuts off, so I set it up to create and mount a ram disk while booting, and do all writing to the ram disk. From the comments here, it looks like the newer pis have this as a config option now.

I think I'll have some yellow ones.

Look at 'netrw" plugin, which has been bundled as one of the default plugins with vim for years now.

Yeah, and what in the world is a "temporary email"?

Ha, emacs is an "extensible text editor", while vim is a "powerful text editor"!

A mandatory nitpick: you cannot do conditional probability without multivariate distributions, but you are right, you do not need linear algebra for a basic introduction. Even continuous distribution can be introduced, you just start with discrete cases, introduce areas in a histogram, and then approximate the histogram by a continuous curve. You can even get to the Riemann integral that way if you want to. And nobody actually calculates normal probabilities by integrating the Gaussian function, it's kind of hard to do.

> so much like high school physics will not teach thinking but simply knowing how to apply the right formula at the right time...

Unfortunately, that seems to apply to a lot of high school math, including a lot of calculus classes. And, to shoot into my own ranks, college math and especially statistics classes are far from immune to this as well.

Chain rule is a bad example. If you cannot remember the chain rule, you do not understand the theory at all. And if you do understand what a derivative is, the chain rule is trivial.

> And these people upload the content that we all enjoy watching.

Maybe you should speak only for yourself. It is possible that most people uploading to youtube do it because of the adds, but there are plenty of people who have other reasons. Most people I watch regularly do not even have enough views to get any add revenue. There are plenty of us who prefer contents that was not created with adds in mind.

I really do not understand what the complain about IBM is about. Are they saying that if you request a source code from IBM, they will stop developing Red Hat and there will be no future releases? Or are they saying that if you request the source code, you will be blacklisted by IBM from buying any future versions or upgrades? I am no fan of IBM, but it seems to me that what they are doing is completely withing not just the letter, but also the spirit of the GPL.

Can someone familiar with OCaml comment on this:

> The reason for this is that the language prominently features garbage collection, a feature which deletes code not in use by the machine. Using this results in "uninitialized data [which] can be really problematic."

Does the OCaml GC really trash data that are still being used by the program?

> ... which is the industry term for hydrogen that naturally occurs in the layers of the Earth’s crust underground in northeastern France.

That is an awfully specific term. What do they call it when it occurs in other countries?

Therefore, Hamburg is not a city in Europe.

> There is no world in which it would be better for anyone to be able to claim they are selling an iPhone with iPhone branding and everything over it while selling an old Alcatel feature phone.

Except that it would not happen. In a word without trademark protection, people would be like "what the heck is an iPhone, what does it do?" because the word iPhone would have no meaning. You would have to sell based on capabilities, rather than brand name. There would have to be sufficiently strong laws against false advertising and deceptive marketing, but I can see number of advantages over the current system.

I agree with the rest of your post. The whole case is increasingly looking like a successful publicity stunt by the two companies to me. I don't think I would know anything about Bad Spaniels otherwise, and while Jack Daniels is well known, the way addiction works I would not be surprised if a large number of people were hitting their local liqueur store after seeing this case on the news.

Ad 1.: Multiplication of complex numbers is a very intuitive operation on complex plane, the moment you realize you need to use polar coordinates.

How does Vivaldi compare to Nyxt? Anybody has experience with both and can provide some comparison? Thanks!

Do you want the TeX code to be converted to svg in the browser at rendering time or are you ok with converting the figures to svg beforehand and including them in your html files?

For the former I would look at TikZjaX (https://github.com/kisonecat/tikzjax) which takes tikz code and convert it to svg on the fly, just like MathJaX converting TeX equations. It may be slow, though, especially for complicated plots.

If you are OK with creating the figures beforehand and serving the generated svg, there are several options: Asymptote (https://asymptote.sourceforge.io/) can generate svg and even html files that you can embed in an iframe. You can convert any TeX figure to svg with dvisvgm (play with the --font-format option). If you insists on using pstricks, I am pretty sure you can convert a resulting postscript file to svg as well. If you are using metapost, then mptopdf will convert metapost source to pdf, which you can then convert to svg.

I don't know about females, but I totally would!

Reminds me of the time when I and few of my friends were staying in my dad's and uncle's cabin in the hills for few weeks one summer, when we were about 15 or 16. One day one of us went down to the village to shop and came back with a very large basket of cherries. After eating about half of them fresh and growing tired of them, we decided to cook something with them. For a while we considered a cherry cake, but none of us ever baked a cake before, and to bake anything we would have to start the stove, which meant chopping wood, ..., so at the end we decided to make cherry dumplings, as those can be cooked on the propane burner. Them are fiddly little things, though, you have to wrap every individual cherry in the dough, and boil them just for the right amount of time. Our first batch was little bit overcooked, but mostly a success. Towards the end we got tired and started putting two or three cherries in one dumpling, and it worked fine. So in the second batch we put 4 or 5 cherries on each dumpling. You can probably guess where this is going. Few of them broke in the pot, but most of them were fine. We had just enough cherries and dough for one more batch, when one of us had a brilliant idea: let's make one large dumpling and put all the cherries in it. Well, it was a complete disaster. The whole thing came apart, and we ended up with a pot full of slippery mess, with overcooked cherries and pieces of slimy dough floating in it. It ended on the compost pile.