neilparikh

I think you’re using the typical aesthetic definition of fantasy vs. sci-fi. You’re right that under that one, Tower of Babylon would be considered fantasy.

Ted Chiang has an alternate definition though, I prefer that one to be honest. His definition is about whether there are certain “special people” to whom the general laws of the universe don’t apply [0]. Under that definition, even what we would colloquially call magic (ex. turning lead to gold) would be called sci-fi, as long as everyone could do it; once you have that, you can do things like mechanize it and make factories to do it at scale, and there’s where you get the interesting second order problems.

Under that definition, I think Tower of Babylon is better considered sci-fi, because there are no “special people”. The new rules of the universe also lead interesting second order effects: the tower gets so tall that entire families live in the tower, and people are born and die in the tower [1].

[0] - better explained him here: https://boingboing.net/2010/07/22/ted-chiang-interview.html, see “You have very specific views on the difference between magic and science. Can you talk about that?”

[1] - I don’t know if Chiang intended this, but I think you could probably draw a parallel to missionaries to the new world.

This data structure is called the zipper, and the neat thing is that you can generalize this to more complicated types like trees: https://www.st.cs.uni-saarland.de/edu/seminare/2005/advanced...

I built a similar system for my school’s CS club. I considered using a door sensor, but the eventual solution I settled on was a light sensor, because it’s almost always true for us that the lights are on iff the door is open.

This way, we don’t need to mount anything on the door, we just have a microcontroller plugged into one of the machines.

Our previous solution was a webcam that pointed to the lights that did a similar thing (implemented by someone before my time) but then it stopped working due to some driver issues, and I didn’t want to spend time investigating them.

> my wife with iphone pops up browser, I pop up mine with firefox and ublock origin. Internet is utterly useless and horrible place on her phone, while completely fine on mine (plus I get youtube ads blocking as a bonus)

I recently set up NextDNS on my iPhone and browsing the web has become much more usable (previously, I would get webpage crashes!). Something to look into in addition to or instead of Wipr.

Somewhat related game: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1533050/Press_Ctrl/

When I was traveling abroad, I placed an order on Walmart, shipping to my home address, so that it would be there for me when I got back home. Walmart cancelled the order, "due to location restrictions on placing and shipping orders", even though the delivery address was in the US! I have no idea why the physical location of the computer placing the order should matter to Walmart. Eventually I just had to get my friend order for me.

Many streets in parts of Asia (Korea and Taiwan for example) are similar. A majority of the "side" roads just don't have sidewalks, and people walk on the road. I was a little nervous the first few times I encountered it (having grown up in very car oriented suburbs and then lived in Canadian downtowns after that), but it definitely grew on me.

The point is that this is a societal issue. One person paying doing some charity on their own doesn't solve the societal issue.

As analogy: "It sucks that my peers earn less than me because they are part of <X disenfranchised group>"; You: "Why don't you just take your extra income and give it to them?"

This is a classic coordination problem: you need all the sellers to leave together so that individual merchants don't take a loss. And coordination problems like this are one of the main areas government action can help!

For Uber and UberEats, turns out you actually can disable marketing notifications, under the communication settings, it's just hidden away.

The funny thing was that even Apple violated that rule themselves: https://marco.org/2014/12/01/app-store-rule-5-6

I watched the movie first, but enjoyed the written story more (though I still thought the movie was great!). The big difference for me was the inclusion of the physics in the written story, and how it was connected to the linguistics.

Capital One credit cards have this feature.

I don't think it's clear that PFOF is bad for retail investors. Many people argue (see Analysis section of the article you posted, and also Matt Levine's writing about it on Money Stuff) that PFOF is actually a net good for retail investors, getting them both price improvement and lower commissions.

Also:

> In the United States, accepting PFOF is allowed only if no other exchange is quoting a better price on the National Market System. ... Transactions must be executed at the best execution, which could mean the best price available or the speediest execution available.

Many of my professors would mention the problem numbers for both the current version, and the previous version, to deal with that specifically.

> Europe does not have skyscrapers so it is possible.

I'll steelman your argument to be "Europe has less skyscrapers than NYC" (which I think is true, IIRC).

If you need to get away with less super tall buildings, you need to spread out the density elsewhere; that is, have medium density everywhere. In US and Canada, we've decided that the suburbs are untouchable, so the only solution is to have super tall buildings in a few areas. That's how you get 30 story apartments literally next to 2 story houses [0]. This is an intentional choice. I think it's the wrong one, but overcoming it is going to take a lot of convincing.

0 - https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo-stock-photo-aerial-view-of...

It was changed because of a California law IIRC.

You'll also want `set show-mode-in-prompt on`.

Note that this feature is broken when you have a PS1 with a \n in it, in an older version of readline/bash (I am not sure which), so if you're having this problem, just upgrade your bash version.

> not regulating the real-estate industry

Are we talking about the same city? SF real estate is super regulated, it’s my go to example of real estate regulations taken to an insane level. This is the city where any citizen can appeal any project for just a few hundred dollars, and basically every medium-large project is a negotiation with the SF board of supervisors (and often random non profits too, just look at what happened to 469 Stevenson St).

> In my eyes, the only problem I had is that I thought school was a meaningless chore. Should we make children take meth because they don't like the system they're in?

This is what the problem was for you. It's quite a leap from there to assume that all children on ADHD medications also happen to have the same problem.

For many people with ADHD, the difficulty is beyond "the system they're in". Being regularly late to events, zoning out when talking to someone, living in a chaotic/messy living space etc. (common problems with those with ADHD) will still be a problem in a hypothetical better school system or post-scarcity communism society.

The real answer (IMO) is that ADHD is both under-diagnosed and over-diagnosed. I know many people who would benefit from a ADHD diagnosis, but aren't diagnosed yet, and just kind of struggle through as best as they can. On the flip side, it's also somewhat common for people to be diagnosed incorrectly (either due an over eager doctor, or because they sought out the diagnosis to get the drug).

So really, it's a question of improving accuracy overall, not just "let's make things stricter" (which would make it even harder from those are not diagnosed yet).

(I know you mentioned prescribing, not diagnosing, but I think it's a broader issue beyond just the drug).

> wealth is not zero-sum

Land is zero sum. The easy (partial) solution to that is just to build more housing on the same land, except older homeowners spend their time blocking new housing, which has essentially turned housing into a zero sum market as well.

> greed of corporations who are not increasing wages

Increasing wages will do nothing if those wages end up chasing the same fixed amount of housing/land.

Now, people are going to point out that the US is a big country and there's lots of land and so on. And that's true, but a lot of the economic growth and opportunity is concentrated in the cities where housing growth is being blocked. The same problem occurs in Canada (and a few other Western developed countries too).

> provides strictly fewer choices when problem solving.

If you view programming as trying to avoid writing the "wrong" program from the state space of all programs, this is a good thing.

I guess it's a matter of priorities/viewpoints: whether your goal is to make writing the correct program easier, or make writing incorrect programs harder.

Japan is much more child friendly in terms of that. For example, young children are regularly sent to do errands on their own (see the Old Enough tv show for an exaggerated version of that). So people may believe it to be the case, but I'm not convinced our zoning style achieves that goal.

I think it's similar to many of the people I interacted with in high school/university. They're not close enough that I saw them much outside of school, and I lost touch with them after graduation, but I still thought the interactions I had with them were net-positive and worthwhile.

> Dermody Properties LLC, a commercial real estate developer based in Reno, Nevada, is buying the property and will convert it into warehouse space

Is more warehouse space really the most efficient/needed use for land in the Bay Area?

I'm guessing their point was that in many other countries (ex. Canada), tap to pay is pretty much universally supported for many years, to the point where I'm surprised when a merchant doesn't have it. The majority of my transactions in Canada were tap to pay as far back as 2018.

It's also worth noting that Apple Pay isn't its own protocol, it just does the same thing as the tap to pay built into cards, so not at all within Apple's control how much it's supported or how the terminal works.

You can flip the order of the steps and it works pretty well imo: answer on Slack, and then once the discussion is complete, clean up the messages and put them into the docs.

This has the added benefit that you can have some back and forth to get to the root of the question before documenting it.

The key thing is that you have to make sure to actually do the step after (transfer to docs), even if it's a quick copy-paste with minimal editing.

The longtermist EAs do suggest that, but by dollar donated, the more traditional global health stuff is still a large chunk of what EA do.

> I read some posts about this movement, and from them it seemed like EAs are more interested in the far off stuff

You can’t really use that as a metric to judge the movement, since there’s only so much one can write about “donate money to AMF”, but you can write pages and pages about the far off stuff.

> proper taxation and wealth redistribution

All the mainstream political suggestions for taxation/wealth distribution focus on correcting wealth inequalities within a rich nation. Very few (if any) suggest redistributing from wealthy western nations to the global poor.