This is a bit different but also an example that made me realize I unconsciously recognize some things I'm unaware of (the difference between pouring hot and cold water):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ri_4dDvcZeM
I work for an organization that helps smallholder farmers farm more effectively and sustainably through digital advisory (precisionag.org). Things we try to do are change pesticide behavior (recommend safer pesticides, get people to use only when necessary and in safe amounts), change fertilizer behavior (help them allocate money effectively for replenishing the right nutrients), decrease soil depletion and erosion (adjust tilling practices, increase crop rotation, that sort of thing).
The hope is of course that this results in better yields with less damage, but the Jevons paradox has already been mentioned and it's hard to say what the effect will be in the long run.
Personally I've just decreased material and meat consumption very significantly, and I try to be careful with flying (but need to do so occasionally for my work).
I'm not too hopeful, the main economic systems are fully based on constantly increasing production (which mostly has a physical basis) and effective action would require significant international collaboration (the world does not seem to be getting more united). We will see - maybe once things really start going wrong and we get into crisis mode effective action suddenly becomes possible.
Yeah I really recommend the documentary 180° South [1] which has both Yvon Chouinard (Patagonia) and Doug Tompkins (The North Face) and has them talking about their philosophy and conservation efforts as well. (A guy retraces a journey these two made in Patagonia back in the 60s.)
The idea that a piece of meat is more nutritious than the same mass in plant matter is not in conflict with the idea that an ecosystem can feed more vegetarians than omni/carnivores.
I don't know if you find spacemacs disturbingly slow while editing or just when it starts. I was disturbed by the latter and have emacs set up to run in daemon mode and have the following in my .bashrc:
function em() {
emacsclient -nw "$@"
}
so that I can call "em" with any necessary arguments and start an emacs session without having to wait. Works for me (though depending on the language I might still prefer vim).
At the end you mention you may have found a good resource to improve your writing. Which resource is that? It's something I want to get better at as well.
I'm working mostly in Erlang and from what I can tell there is quite some demand for Erlang and Elixir developers. Also there seems to be a lot of demand for Scala developers which while based on Java is not the same as those 10 languages. I've also used PostScript in a work context (which is stack based like Forth).
Pretty cool! My vision keeps shifting to the left though if I don't actively counter-rotate to the right. It makes it a bit hard to keep looking at the same object.
Docker is not only about having reproducible environments. I mostly work as a single developer and I use Docker all the time, mainly because I like the isolation properties and because it's super easy to launch certain services (e.g. set up a postgres database). In the past really often I would have issues with conflicting dependencies, that's all gone now. The fact that your shell script did the job for you is obviously a good thing, but maybe that just means that in this particular situation Docker didn't have much to offer for you.
Yeah biochar is very interesting. We definitely shouldn't massively start using it in the short term though - its effects are not so well understood. Most "knowledge" is based on terra preta, Amazonian dark soil which is hundreds of years old and man-made with charcoal, pottery shards, bones and other organic matter. There have been field trials but many of them by biochar organizations/companies who might not be completely objective and once we put it in the soil we can't really take it out anymore.
I think the evidence suggests that turning waste into biochar and applying it to fields at a local scale has a lot of potential. Growing trees for the purpose of biochar might be a different story (this has many of the downsides of biofuel production).
I like using Fargate for one-shot tasks that are easy to split up. I used it a couple of times for summary tasks on large batches of satellite data (100s of GBs). Set up a docker image that takes the month for which to do the analysis as environment variable and then launch 50 or so Fargate tasks in parallel. Fairly easy to set up and can save quite a lot of time. If it's for short running jobs the increased price is not much of an issue. For more complicated, long-running services I feel like I would prefer managed Kubernetes.
Thanks for the kind words! I would honestly be curious to see a low light comparison with (older or newer) DSLRs. You might be right that the comparisons on this blog post exaggerate the performance because the XS is just terrible, but the process described in the post where a series of images are merged together in post processing and you can make long-exposure hand-held shots is just not something that's going to work in DSLRs easily. I can imagine that there are situations where this would make certain shots feasible that would have motion blur on a DSLR. Then again, I've imagined wrong before.
GKE and EKS are very expensive which in my opinion makes using them unattractive for smaller scale projects. But Digital Ocean now offers managed Kubernetes for free, I've played around with it and it actually seems really easy to set up and manage. Would be great if the competition would follow suit.
It seems, nothing! I was just wrong about GKE being expensive, not sure why I thought that (though it seems that until late 2017 they did have costs per cluster).
I feel like this is a good place to recommend the Radiolab episode Words [1], though it's not so much about consciousness as about language, the development of language, and communication without a shared language. I found it a very intriguing listening experience, hope others will enjoy it as well. Part is about the man without words mentioned elsewhere in the comments as well (a person who learned language as an adult).
I'm using Erlang for a production system at work and I completely agree, the error messages tend to be terrible. Once you've run into many errors you start recognizing patterns though (part of the problem is that the errors are not English sentences but data dumps with indicators like `badfun`, these you just have to learn to interpret) and Erlang makes up for the bad error messages in other ways. But yes, often I end up reasoning through the code to solve the problem, with the error message only roughly pointing me in the right direction, to a larger extent than in other languages.
Mainly because the relup functionality is a bit complicated and not always clear, Learn You Some Erlang explains some context [1]. It does depend a bit on the situation, in some cases it's easy to recompile a module in a running system and it might not be much of a problem. But when there are multiple modules being updated, which depend on each other, which possibly require updates to some data structures, it becomes very messy very quickly. Also when modules contain anonymous functions this can cause some issues (badfun errors) because the old version might get lost, but can still have references in the running system.
I did not downvote but possibly because the idea of "good" and "better" programming languages does not mean much. Different tools have different purposes. If you want to write a network driver for the Linux kernel C++ is probably more suitable but if you quickly want to build a simple chat system Erlang is almost certainly going to make your life a lot easier.
Not sure if you're asking, but I'm not repeating someone else's rumor. I started the set-up I work with using hot loading (after all that is one of the things that attracts to Erlang) where I mean just reloading modules on the VM. Unfortunately I would get module order wrong from time to time or I would forget dependencies, and I've seen many badfun errors as well (I admit I used too many anonymous functions). With only 1 node doing the work (I haven't used Erlang on large clusters) that's a bit more risk and those problems have gone away completely since I switched to a strategy where the whole system just stops and starts.
Yeah mnesia is extremely clever and very fun to learn. Also being able to store basically any term without having to do conversions is very useful.
I've found some practical aspects a bit painful though. It took me a while to figure out how to make backups, migrate schemas to different sets of nodes, that sort of thing. Also there are size limits on disk-based tables which are a bit limiting, and while you can use table fragmentation to get around that to some extent it doesn't seem straightforward to use (I haven't dared so far). I also don't like the way it deals with netsplits - when nodes reconnect it tends to require manual action to resolve.
I don't know you, but it doesn't sound like programming is the problem. 100-120k is objectively a lot of money and it sounds like you're comparing yourself to others who have shinier jobs and higher salaries. Maybe it would be healthy to focus less on accomplishment/prestige and more on enjoyment.
Scientists have made progress in terms of pinpointing exactly how much carbon whales keep out of the atmosphere; one study suggests that every year, sperm whales help sequester as much carbon as 694 acres of U.S. forests do. Another found that in Hawaii, the swimming motion of 80 whales can absorb the equivalent carbon of 208 acres of U.S. forests.
The title of this article made me expect more. Unless they mean the 694 acres is the contribution per whale (the article doesn't provide references).
There are actually people exploring this. I saw a documentary at one point about passive ocean pumps (using wave energy) transporting water from lower layers upwards to increase plankton growth. It seems the company Atmocean is doing things like this and James Lovelock wrote a letter about it to Nature, I'm not sure if this is necessarily related to the docu I saw though.
They are two different mechanisms though, it could be that the swimming motion mechanism has a far smaller effect. Google tells me there are 360,000 sperm whales, that would make the combined effect of the swimming of all sperm whales similar to that of 60 km x 60 km of forest.
The next weakness might not be "as weak" though. Sure, many might start doing something else, but it will not be as profitable or as easy (otherwise they would be doing it already). The world won't suddenly be perfect but it will be progress.
Interesting thought that I had not considered. But I'm also not sure I share your belief that the population density is more a result than a cause. The whole fact that adjusting the subway is very expensive suggests to me that there needs to be a population worth serving prior to construction. Seems like a bit of a chicken/egg problem, would be interesting to see some population stats pre/post subway construction.
There are really many places in code where you really don't care about performance that much. And in that case conciseness/expressiveness/correctness can be extremely valuable.
Also there are different aspects to performance, and when (for example) it comes to latency, a platform like Erlang/BEAM makes it particularly easy to get low latency in certain contexts without thinking about implementation much. In Haskell you can accomplish similar things with green threads. It will probably need more clock cycles for a given action than a tuned C implementation but that's not always what matters, and the code will probably be cleaner.
I don't think this "you don't need to feel guilty if you're not a frequent flyer" narrative is useful at all.
A flight uses between 2 and 6 liters of kerosine per 100 km for every passenger [1]. You travel around 800-900 km per hour on a passenger plane, which means your rate of fuel use is fairly high (let's say 30 liters per hour). Putting it in these numbers allows you to compare it to filling up your car and puts some things in perspective.
Taking a flight now and then is not going to end the world. But it does provide an easy opportunity to reduce emissions.
Unfortunately many of the offsetting strategies also require additional natural resources which puts more and more pressure on the whole system. It's also not really fair that access to resources then ends up determining how free you are (e.g. in terms of mobility) to a large extent.
driving yourself to the same location is generally worse for the environment
Curious what this is based on, taking road construction, car ownership, etc into the calculation? Because as for fuel consumption clearly it depends - if you're a family, taking 1 car is generally going to be more fuel efficient.
It’a amazing how much more freedom of choice you get if you limit your spending to necessities. You can choose only jobs that you enjoy, work part time, take sabbaticals, save money/retire early... I honestly think reducing your standard of living can be one of the best ways to improve your quality of life.
I'm interested in chatting and have emailed you earlier but never got a response. Our organisation (precisionag.org) also works in Kenya among other countries, we provide smallholder farmers with personalized agronomic advice over SMS and voice systems. We're always looking for partners and we use a lot of experimental economics to fine tune and validate our approaches. (One of our founders just won the Nobel prize for economic sciences.)
In the Netherlands our main way of growing food is in greenhouses. It causes a lot of light pollution and I actually found it a quite disturbing sight when I flew over one of the greenhouse areas by night once (there are columns of light in the sky). We export lots of tomatoes, bell peppers, etc. I guess if you have space and a sunny climate the value proposition isn't there, but if you have a cooler climate, a high population density (land is very expensive), and a high-tech agriculture sector it seems to work out differently.
I imagine if you have a longer future to look forward to that also changes the incentives for investing in yourself. So not only would the people who invest in their futures be able to use their knowledge for longer, more people might invest in their future as well. The fixed costs of building a life are pretty high (let's say 25 years) and they're expected to pay off over the following 40 years of so - if this 40 becomes 70 or 100 that changes a lot.
I think that's exactly the point that I'm trying to make. Most of the population ends up spending a much larger time of their life investing in skills and knowledge. So the total amount of knowledge in society would end up being far larger.
I'm not sure how you read that in my comment. Maybe you could, but I think in general regardless of the length of a life it makes most sense to have most of the investment phase in the first part of your life (although when science/tech evolve you need to stay up to date of course).
We find that the near-miss group naturally received significantly less NIH funding in the first five years following treatment, averaging $0.29 million less per person (Fig. 2d, t-test p-value < 0.05, Cohen’s d = 0.28), which is consistent with prior studies. Yet the funding difference between the two groups disappeared in the second five-year period (Fig. 2d, t-test p-value > 0.1, Cohen’s d = 0.02).
From the paper [0]. This does not look like the rejects found similar opportunities in more suitable places.
I deploy the Erlang system I use at work using Docker and it's working very well for me. Like you say, it's not a zero-downtime relup but rather just replacing one app container by an updated one. It was a little bit tricky to get the image built properly (the right combination of dependencies, ERTS inclusion, etc) and things like remote_console are slightly more cumbersome than they would be otherwise (it becomes a docker exec command) but overall I feel like the advantages (mainly very smooth deployment and declarative configuration) outweigh the disadvantages.
I agree that some of the problems that OTP solves can now be taken over by Docker/K8s if you modify your architecture a bit. I.e. if you only have a few processes running on BEAM it's likely you could replace them by a few containers with a supervisor that restarts containers with errors, though you would have to start thinking about how they communicate (HTTP?) and some other things. It wouldn't scale to the same extent either (you don't want 1000s of containers on a single node) and Erlang provides some other benefits as well (e.g. single interface to manage all your processes, consistency if all your services are in Erlang, efficient threading). I would say that the main use case is when the model of using 1000s+ of processes helps you build an easy to understand architecture, which can be in messaging, streaming, gaming, or other applications with many simultaneous users/clients.
Except our last common ancestor with plants was single celled so we’re unlikely to share many multicellular behaviors. Commonalities will be sub-cellular.
Interesting to see that they're no longer only looking at oceans (which is a good thing I think - rivers seem much easier to clean up). Also a pretty elegant design. Looks very similar to Mr. Trash Wheel [0] though, I wonder to what extent this is really TOC's invention.
Consuming more vs working less is totally within an individual's control though. Current productivity is amazing, even with a relatively average salary (let's say $50k) it's completely possible to spend only a third to half of that if you don't have children. That means for every week you work you get 1-2 weeks of life with no work responsibilities.
You'll have to choose that though, it means you adjust the location where you live so that rent is reasonable, and it means not constantly buying new shit. Of course if you're working for an employer you more or less have to do what they tell you but I don't think there has been any time in history that it was this easy to earn your freedom.
