tlocke

Very well put.

Good to hear Bradford On Avon mentioned, the town where I grew up. Is there a link to the place where they're installing Linux?

The Tithe Barn in Bradford On Avon was the medieval equivalent to an Amazon warehouse!

Could IPFS be the solution here? https://ipfs.tech/

I'd have thought there are many tech angles. For example, in a possible Greenland invasion, what are the implications of the US having control of dominant platforms such as Windows, Android and Apple? Not to mention all the dominant cloud platforms.

I must confess, the Python driver pg8000 which I maintain doesn't support pipeline mode. I didn't realise it existed until now, and nobody has ever asked for it. I've created an issue for it https://codeberg.org/tlocke/pg8000/issues/174

Exergy is the amount of work that a system can potentially do. It was on my physics course in the UK I'm fairly sure.

The least well-off don't have cars at all, but suffer from their ill-effects the most. So the least well-off benefit the most from congestion pricing.

I was 18th on the list, thanks for the donation!

There's also the approach to funding that looks at things from another angle, and says we should have a basic income, or negative income tax, for everyone.

I work on Chellow, an open source Web app for checking and reporting on UK electricity and gas bills for large organisations https://github.com/WessexWater/chellow . It's a mature project that's used by two organisations. Please get in touch if this is something you're interested in.

For nuclear, the subsidies are often in insurance and decommissioning and long-term storage of waste.

So looking at insurance, it's impossible to fully insure a nuclear power station, and so the state effectively insures it.

With long term storage of waste, the material has to be securely stored for about 10,000 years. As far as I know, only Finland is doing this so far.

With decommissioning, it always costs more than is set aside, and so the taxpayer gets left to pick up the pieces eventually.

With your example of Ontario I don't know how these costs I've outlined will be handled, but if it's anything like the UK the costs will be pushed onto the taxpayer.

Comparing electricity costs between countries probably says more about government subsidies than the underlying cost of generation. Nuclear fission is an expensive source of electricity (see the high subsidies for Hinckley C) and so I suspect France's nuclear power is heavily subsidised.

The Android app StreetComplete is an excellent start for updating OSM I found. There soon become occasions when you have to bring out the big guns and edit it using the web editor at https://www.openstreetmap.org/ , which is possible to do on a mobile phone if it has a big enough screen, but much easier on a laptop.

I know the light switch idea as Thomson's lamp:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomson%27s_lamp

I used it as an interview question many years ago. I wasn't very rigorous about it, basically any plausible answer was good enough for me. Answers fell into two categories, the theorists (it's an infinite series that doesn't converge) and the pragmatists (you couldn't physically do it).

True, I struggle to think 10 years ahead these days. The horizon for predictions is definitely shrinking.

Yes, fertility is heritable.

I'd like to see an option for automatically adding indexes for performance.

Perhaps a background process could re-run the query planner for frequent queries and add an appropriate index if there's a big speedup.

I met Simon once ages ago when I was due to speak at a PostgreSQL conference. It was my first time speaking at a conference and he was a nice bloke and gave me a bit of advice afterwards. He said not to worry about having to be entertaining, it's enough just to get the points across, that's what people were there for. I found that very reassuring!

For my projects I prefer a permissive licence, specifically the MIT No Attribution Licence. People argue that corporations will just take your code and make it proprietary. They might, but an internal fork like that means that it's difficult to benefit from improvements in the original project. So in my experience corporations don't create an internal fork, they use the code as it is. Then if they find a bug for example they will contribute the fix to the project rather than forking, because it's the easiest option.

So in other words, corporations are more likely to use code that's licensed under a permissive licence, and so they're more likely to contribute, simply out of their own self interest.

The way I think of it is that with permissive licences the freedoms can be removed from the code, but with copyleft the freedoms can't be removed from the code. By freedoms I mean the freedom to study the source code, to run it for whatever purpose you want, to make modifications and to share the code with other people.

> “I’m so fit that I can afford to expend valuable energy to show you how strong and robust I am compared with the other gazelles.”

Is this why humans dance?

Out of interest, whereabouts in Europe is that?

Interesting. In the language feature list, what is 'try star' ?

I'd argue that even though it's well defined behaviour in Python, it still appears to me as a programmer as weak typing. For example, Python lets me write:

  if 23:
      print('hello')

and it'll print 'hello'. But I'd prefer a strongly typed approach where this code would give an error saying, 'a bool is expected here'. Sure it's a subjective thing, and this is just my preference.

Interesting, so I did a little test:

  python -m timeit 'sum(1 for age in range(100000) if age > 17)'
  50 loops, best of 5: 5.08 msec per loop

  python -m timeit 'sum(int(age > 17) for age in range(100000))'
  50 loops, best of 5: 7.96 msec per loop

  python -m timeit 'sum(age > 17 for age in range(100000))'
  50 loops, best of 5: 4.78 msec per loop

Someone else has mentioned it, but I would have gone with:

  sum(1 for age in ages if age > 17)

with the other method you're treating a boolean as an int. Weak typing.

OpenStreetMap does hold opening hours of businesses. Here are the details (including opening hours) of my local cafe https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/485163917 I go round entering OSM data using the StreetComplete app. It's slightly awkward if a shop doesn't display their opening hours, because then you have to go in, and I feel I need to buy something and then ask their opening hours.

I work on pg8000 https://pypi.org/project/pg8000/ which is a pure-Python PostgreSQL driver that works well with pypy. Not sure if it would meet all your requirements, but just thought I'd mention it.

Agreed, AI training should respect the licence of the code it's being trained on.

Some open source licenses are fine with AI training, eg. MIT No Attribution https://choosealicense.com/licenses/mit-0/ and BSD Zero Clause https://choosealicense.com/licenses/0bsd/

My view is that it's good to allow AI training to use your code. This democratises AI models, otherwise AI will be the exclusive preserve of wealthy corporations. So I say, let's license our code under permissive, no attribution licences!