lambdadmitry

It's both. Look up council complaints and demands for the HS2, they're full of unreasonable NIMBY stuff like asking for the line to be put in a tunnel because it comes closer than 100m to an industrial estate. They didn't get it of course, but as a "compromise" they got high berms after a lengthy consultation/bargaining, both of which inflate the cost.

We do though! The first geological storage is going online next year in Finland https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_re...

There is nowhere to leak when we're talking multi-cm copper casks, metres of bentonite, and half a kilometre of bedrock.

The first geological repository goes online next year in Finland https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_re... . It's not in the sparsely populated north of the country either. There are no problems to speak of when you bury something under 500m of bedrock in thick copper and even thicker bentonite clay. There just aren't.

We do though. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_re... is going operational next year, and the amount of research that went into it guarantees that it's safe.

This podcast has lots of details if you're interested. https://omegataupodcast.net/368-nuclear-waste-disposal-and-s...

Something else that came to mind while I was reading the comments: you do want phonetics/pronunciation classes when you're C2+. Do learn IPA and learn the sounds, it's crucial not just for your accent but for understanding others. I found [1] very useful, but only combined with a great tutor.

Something I didn't appreciate enough is that we don't actually hear sounds when we hear people speaking. We hear phonemes, which are clusters of physical sounds that make semantic difference in the language. The clusters themselves aren't fixed either, they are very loose and mostly defined through what they are not — i.e., the difference that we perceive in "lip" and "leap" is not absolute, the actual sounds might easily overlap between speakers, but we adjust to the particular accent/speaker using the fact that they probably still have two separate phonemes there.

It works very well until one starts to learn a second language that might have not just different "clusters", but a different number of them. My first language is Russian, and in Russian there are just fewer semantically meaningful vowels; I honestly thought that the word "milk", молоко, has three roughly equivalent sounds, whereas in English that'd probably be heard as two or three distinct vowels ([məɫɐˈko]). Similarly, Russian "soft" sounds like м in мята are widely heard as having "j" in them, "m-ya-ta", while native speakers just don't hear that.

Phonetics training helps to start actually hearing all those sounds, to adjust our inbuilt clustering and start perceiving things that natives do. You suddenly start understanding native accents much better, and gain a new appreciation for the language and its beauty.

It's just as much about perception as it is about accent.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimal_pair

Two things I observed while slowly getting better at English.

First, the "sophistication" can backfire. There're a lot of comments about reading here, but there're very fine lines between

- "simple English", think a stereotypical ESL speaker

- "well educated" English, think a native posh college alumni

- "colloquially broken" English, the way native speakers speak to their friends

- "out-of-place highfalutin" English, a hallmark of someone who didn't have a chance to experience the variety of contexts growing up in an English speaking country.

It's quite hard to balance those, but I guess it just comes with time and practice while being mindful of it. For me personally it worked in waves, from unnaturally-broken to too-correct to feeling comfortable enough to break the grammar in natural ways to noticing more unnaturalness to… you got the idea.

Second, and I'm forever grateful to the person who first introduced me to this idea, is realising that high level language acquisition can only come with a new personality attached. It's very weird and disorienting if you're not aware of it happening, but it's a natural and necessary part of it. You need to grow a personality to feel in your second/third/etc language, to react to jokes on the spot, to make friends, to dream, to live in that language context. It often differs from one's identity/personality in the first language, and that's fine, it's just as valid. Embracing the process and the difference makes things easier.

I don't think it's possible to do that through learning though.

It's a shame Vinay disappeared from this thread.

Why speculating then? There is plenty of hard data on skin testing of various sunscreens. There are physical sunscreens, too, which were around even longer. We have MUCH better understanding of biological processes as well than in asbestos times. What is this drive that makes supposedly technologically literate people flock to the GP question and come up with unfounded paranoid theories?

I believe I have a solid hypothesis for what happened there https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33889445

If they indeed ordered a valuation for the whole plot as they did with the environmental assessment, it explains both the "£1M+ independent valuation", the £7k sale, and what the actual piece of land is.

I'm very eager to hear what leashless has to say.

Oh my god, looking at one of your reports [1] I just realised what could have happened

Please tell me you didn't get a valuation for the whole plot HP123436 instead of the sliver that is actually in that title and is described on the page! Because while the text on the page says HP123436 and the reports were ordered for it, you are not selling the whole patch, you're selling a tiny piece of it, otherwise you'd include a bunch of other properties like [2] that are indeed worth way more

Edit: or maybe that's by design, the "complex deal" you are talking about actually does include those other properties, and the matterium page is designed to make a sale of a much larger property look like a sale of a £7k property to avoid SDLT and a bunch of other complications, while going through a shell company that clearly doesn't have nearly enough money for the whole thing. Surely you aren't doing that?

[1]: https://passport.mattereum.com/West.London.Lets.01/01_Identi...

[2]: https://search-property-information.service.gov.uk/search/su...

Indeed, it makes it worse.

You're replying to a different person, I'm not phphphphp and I didn't call you evasive.

Reading through a sibling subthread with phphphphp, I just can't understand how you can tell that with a straight face. What "complex deal"? What "transaction fee"? The title literally says "last sold for", so unless you're saying the transaction involved elaborate tax evasion designed to hide the real price that's what it was sold for.

Then there is the other party in this $1m+ transaction that's supposed to be serious. Someone called Idris Anjary, whose only claim to fame on internet is a bunch of press releases for this deal, before that they're just a normal self employed person helping people get planning permissions for minor renovations [1] and building sheds [2] while operating from an office over an off licence [3]. All their companies together never saw more than one hundredth of the money you're saying that deal is worth.

Come on, let's be serious for a second. Either it's a sham, or the actual purchase and the person and the company doing it are just fronts, which is not exactly confidence inspiring.

Edit: btw, your environmental survey is off, the mini map on page 3 makes it clear the report is about the larger plot of land, not the part of it included in the sale. The Southern Water report is very likely wrong too, it says there's a public sewer there but the only connection on the map is from the larger plot.

[1]: https://planning.islington.gov.uk/NorthgatePublicDocs/004225...

[2]: https://www.activearchitecture.co.uk/portfolio/outbuilding-o...

[3]: https://goo.gl/maps/NDdM5og2Sh6EvXK68

[4]: https://passport.mattereum.com/West.London.Lets.01/01_Identi...

That's not a rando, that's Vinay Gupta https://twitter.com/leashless/

Edit: staying more factual

The buyer is a one person company with £14k in cash and £16k in debts as of the last year https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/c...

They have an empty cookie cutter website https://westlondoncitylets.co.uk/our-work.html and its owner has an empty linkedin https://www.linkedin.com/in/idris-anjary-24000b171/

The same guy owns Tokenized Properties Ltd which is an empty husk of a company https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/o... and shares its address with West London City Lets Ltd

However, they do have another cookie cutter website selling that "development opportunity" https://tokenized-properties.com/ and repeating the $1.25m price tag

According to the title (and corroborated by the entry on mattereum) the only land in it is the one I marked in red https://imgur.com/a/5h6c8Zi — it's literally a cliff, plus the title talks about right of way on the paths marked there for the next twenty years, so it's impossible to build on

This right here just perfectly encapsulates everything wrong with the crypto industry, I'm very disappointed to see Vinay openly defending this sham

Russia doesn't have refugees, it has a tiny number of people seeking asylum after protesting against the regime. Middle class Russians fleeing conscription are not exactly comparable with people seeking refuge from Russian bombs, are they?

I don't understand though how do you explain those transaction to your tax authorities and pay taxes. Surely it can only be so long that you can get massive (by local standards) and fairly constant salary month to month and not get them interested in the source of funds?

Between bots, wash trading, and algo traders it doesn't say much about real world adoption.

Indeed, that's the classical game theoretic view. However, consider two possibilities:

- what if deployment of an effective BMD is covert and piecemeal, and is presented as fait accompli? The first to do that wins, and we only have one real contender. You might say that's a very dangerous gamble, but…

- what response do you envision if the cover is blown? Yes, classic game theory suggests launching everything, but let's think about, say, Putin's options. If he launches, he is guaranteed to die very soon and have his country obliterated. If he doesn't, his nuclear deterrent is indeed worth less now, but it's not given he'd ever need it. Both because it might not be needed during his long and happy life, and because the US is not very keen on attacking random dictatorships despite some historical precedents. So the choice for him is between immediate death and potential problems in the future, and hey maybe it's not actually BMD or maybe it's not very effective, right? Covert/deniable deployment helps here, a lot

So between those two possibilities, I think it's not given that an effective BMD would be as dangerous as you suggest.

It would require quite a lot of it because you need to significantly change the orbit, especially if you want it to still be plenty fast on impact.

And it doesn't make much sense either. A billionaire can just pay a few millions to send a guy in a car bomb or a cessna full of explosives. It's way simpler and just as undetectable until the explosion happens.

What do you mean "it's not working"? We already have BCIs for paralysed people, they're quite bad: very invasive, very expensive, very poor user experience, e.g. [1]. What Neuralink is doing right already looks much better than those and they're only in the business for five years.

You need to separate the hype from the tech, especially so with Musk. The tech looks great.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9oka8hqsOzg

According to [1] and [2], most German plastic waste goes to Netherlands. Moreover, apparently a third of it gets incinerated or recycled domestically. So yes, officials turning a blind eye to developing countries pseudo-recycling plastic waste is a problem, but 1) it's not as clear cut as you present it 2) surely building a few incinerators is easier than reinventing all logistical chains to not use plastics?

[1]: https://www.destatis.de/EN/Press/2022/06/PE22_N035_51.html

[2]: https://waste-management-world.com/artikel/germany-s-problem...

If you live in a developed country, your contribution to the microplastic problem is minuscule regardless of the amount of plastic packaging you use. Landfilled, or better yet burned in industrial setting plastics don't get into the oceans, they are either fixed there for millennia, or don't exist anymore. Plastics are a non-issue for countries with functioning waste management, which is coincidentally the countries that can afford caring about it the most, so in a sense there is a self-contradiction in this debate.

International treaties forcing developing countries to get their waste management together combined with targeted investment there would help way more.

Until you encounter an instance that blocks any instance federating with what they consider undesirable. Then you have to choose.

There are at least three distinct use cases that Twitter somewhat covers:

a) participating in already existing, well-defined communities. Mastodon works for that, but so does Discord, Gemini, Gopher, tilda communities, IRC servers, and so on. Mastodon's peculiarities like tiny scale instances, inter-instance admin wars, non-existent search are perfectly fine for this use case. That's what it is made for, effectively.

b) connecting with friends and following their interests. This is just miserable with Mastodon: you might be on different instances that mute/ban each other, you might not find each other if you don't know their instances, if instances are interest-specific you have to follow on a number of instances, if their instance admin gets fed up with it and shuts it down you need to reconnect somehow, etc. Mastodon is not an identity-first design, it's community-first, and it's a problem for this use case.

c) following celebrities or creators famous in the world of atoms. Celebrities would want massive following, which requires massive scale, which is hard to achieve for something effectively run by volunteers. If it's smaller scale celebrities, they'd also want discoverability, which is hampered by the lack of search, federation bans, etc.

Mastodon is widely presented as a "twitter backup/alternative". It's just misleading unless the person moving to it only wants (a). There is nothing wrong with wanting (a)! However, it means that Mastodon has very little similarity to Twitter if people want (b) or (c).

You are right that simplified reimplementations make good property tests, but in this case I'd go the other way around: generate an AST, render it a in test case-dependent way (adding whitespace as you said, but also parens etc), inject known faults for a fraction of test cases, and check that the parsed AST is equivalent to the original one or errored out if a fault was injected. Rendering a given AST is usually simpler than parsing it.

Thing is, for something like an AST parser you want a property test, not a bunch of autogenerated boilerplate.

Generally, if something is boring and repetitive it's probably shouldn't be written, better code generation is rarely a good answer.

Trading is not exactly zero sum. Trading is price discovery + arbitrage, both of which are useful even if imperfect.

Yes, it seems the split was triggered by the war, but the censorship/promotion/collaboration with the government [0] were not worth breaking the ties.

A cynical view would be that it's only now that the association became bad for business.

[0]: By the way, Yandex was showing Crimea as unqualifiedly Russian territory since 2014, until the war, when they just removed borders between countries completely

Edit: qualified the remark

It's interesting how diligently they wiped our any and all mentions of Yandex from their website, to the extent that Google struggles to find meaningful mentions apart from a few exceptions like [1]. Quite peculiar considering that just two years ago, according to that presentation, they were still considering themselves a Yandex project, even the link in that tweet is https://clickhouse.yandex .

For those unaware, Yandex is a Russian internet megacorp, think Google but in cahoots with the authoritarian government: cherrypicked news coverage friendly to the government, effectively a monopoly across multiple verticals (eg they bought out Uber in Russia), etc. In 2020, the year that deck seems to be from, they were already censoring their news feed [2] and tweaking search ranking to promote pro-government results [3] for years.

[1]: https://presentations.clickhouse.com/meetup40/introduction/

[2]: https://meduza.io/feature/2022/05/05/my-zamuchilis-borotsya in Russian, but google translate does a reasonable job

[3]: https://www.svoboda.org/a/30580605.html same

It still doesn't, unless you mean as a cause for activists. Stocks are here to stay too, and SP500 returned about 12% since mid-20th century while being much lower risk and having no withdrawal restrictions. Why settling down for 4% when you can have multitudes of that with lower risk? There is no financial sense to do that, and "voting with your wallet" against your financial interests is by definition activism.

What you're saying is effectively "staking is a donation to Ethereum future", which I don't mind as long as it is explicit. In Ethereum's communications, it's anything but.