tokyoseb

Indeed. As a young voracious reader I used to think that more reading is an unmitigated good until I came across Schopenhauer and his aphorisms. I try now to be more selective, life is short, and to engage more deeply with what I read.

"The art of not reading is a very important one. It consists in not taking an interest in whatever may be engaging the attention of the general public at any particular time. When some political or ecclesiastical pamphlet, or novel, or poem is making a great commotion, you should remember that he who writes for fools always finds a large public. A precondition for reading good books is not reading bad ones: for life is short."

“Reading is merely a surrogate for thinking for yourself; it means letting someone else direct your thoughts. Many books, moreover, serve merely to show how many ways there are of being wrong, and how far astray you yourself would go if you followed their guidance. You should read only when your own thoughts dry up, which will of course happen frequently enough even to the best heads; but to banish your own thoughts so as to take up a book is a sin against the holy ghost; it is like deserting untrammeled nature to look at a herbarium or engravings of landscapes.”

The Nikkei 225 may be below its 1989 peak in price terms but you can’t ignore the dividends which an actual investment in the index would have paid during that period. On a total return basis (if you had reinvested the dividends into the index as you received them) the Nikkei passed its 1989 peak in 2021.

I must say it looks pretty good, wish I had tried it when I renovated my apartment.

But all the other similar software I tried ultimately were a big disappointment. In my experience, once the design is complicated enough they tend to fail: some objects start to glitch if you move them by a certain amount, I could never get the right angle between walls, etc. It seems to be difficult to implement a way to put robust set of constraints on geometry yet keep the software easy to use by everyone. Perhaps it works well with more rectangular designs where the walls all have the same thickness though, my place has some weird shapes.

Ultimately I gave up on specialized software and ended up re-drawing everything at scale in Affinity Designer. Of course, it's only 2D and it's basically free-form vector drawing but at least you control everything and it's not too complicated to create your own library of object like windows, doors etc et re-use that. I was very happy with the result.

Really well made! The magnet-based propeller is really clever. I was curious to understand how the depth control worked and the associated blog is very informative. Turns out this is version 4 and he had tried other approaches before. The video makes it look too easy but seems he went into a lot of trouble to keep everything sealed properly.

https://brickexperimentchannel.wordpress.com/rc-submarine-4-...

Credit card fees are already regulated the EU, i.e. card interchange fees are capped at 0.3%.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interchange_fee#European_Union

As to why it's not a fixed payment: I'm not sure if some of their costs/liabilities would scale with the size of the transactions?

That example is interesting. The Japanese word for real estate, 不動産, actually came from French [1], 'immobilier' (real estate, by opposition to what is movable or 'mobile' such as 'meubles' or 'mobilier', i.e. furniture). And of course the French word comes from Latin...

[1] https://ja.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E4%B8%8D%E5%8B%95%E7%94%A3

The Japanese would treat the whole combination as a single word (in my experience) and wouldn't analyse the components either (although 'they make sense'). The etymology is often more apparent in Japanese and Chinese thanks to the characters, whereas it's not always easy to see it in other language (unless you speak Latin or Greek..). But this is a borrowed word and in this particular case it's very intuitive to French speakers as immobilier / mobilier / mobile are all common words.

This reminds me of the Gerbils Museum [1], although this one is obviously a real museum for humans visited by penguins, rather than a museum built specifically for penguins.

[1] https://www.boredpanda.com/quarantine-gerbil-art-gallery/

If you’d like to read Wittgenstein but don’t know where to start I would recommend reading “How to read Wittgenstein” by Ray Monk, as an introduction before moving to “Philosophical Investigation” (rather than starting with his first book, the Tractatus, which is really cryptic). I saw this advice on another HN thread a while ago and for me it was it spot on. I also read Ray Monk’s bio of Wittgenstein but found it a lot less interesting.

I can’t pretend I understood 100% of his Philosophical Investigations but it definitely made me see things differently. I like his approach to try to “turn unobvious nonsense into obvious nonsense” and show that a lot of the seemingly “natural” ideas we rely on to describe our mental activity rest on very shaky grounds.

Wittgenstein didn’t come come up with the idea of a “private language” but in his Philosophical Investigations he famously argued that the concept itself is nonsense (not via a single logical “proof” but using several thought experiments).

The idea that a private language exists (ie. ‘mentalese’) is taken for granted by a lot of authors. I recently read Stephen Pinker’s book The Language Instinct and he never seemed to doubt the concept for instance.

Other good choices for French are the Trésor de la Langue Française informatisé (1994) developed by CNRS, and the various editions of the Dictionnaire de l’Académie Française.

They can be accessed here (along with a few more dictionaries) http://www.cnrtl.fr/definition/

There is also a decent iPhone/Android app to search the TLFi (not free, requires internet access) https://dictionnaire.app/