This makes sense to me, I was thinking of the situation where I’m from, where you don’t get much more than a pat on the back and the good feels of helping out when you donate blood.

It’s honestly kind of insane to me that there is a system in place to get desperate people to literally sell their blood for money… No one should ever be made that desperate :(

Ok, so systems for donating blood are different in different places, I get that. Where I’m from, the only benefit you get from donating blood is a thumbs up, pat on the back, and a popsicle or a coffee cup or some other small gift.

Some people just say to lie for every question.

People say this? I’ve never heard anyone donating blood say this, and I personally would say that all precautions taken by the professionals that collect blood donations should be taken very seriously. It’s not, at the end of the day, up to me to be the judge of what is or isn’t a condition serious enough that my blood shouldn’t be accepted. I’ll give the professionals as much information as possible, and then let them judge whether or not it is safe to give my blood to someone else.

I would never even dream of lying in order to donate blood, when that could end up actively harming someone, and I honestly cannot see the argument in favour of doing that. The whole point of donating blood is helping people.

You keep saying this “power vacuums do not exist” line, and I’m wondering what you mean by it, because it’s used to refer to a phenomenon that we can observe everywhere, all the time.

Do you mean that the situation in which no person or group has the power to control the people and resources in a region has never existed? Because that’s what a power vacuum is: When no person or group has the power to make and enforce a set of rules in a region.

The first example that comes to mind of a power vacuum is when the substitute teacher leaves the fifth graders alone for fifteen minutes, and comes back to find the class playing “tag-but-the-floor-is-lava” on the tables. Of course, the fifth graders have an internal hierarchy, so they’ve already established some new norms and rules with some unofficial leaders to bout that have filled the power vacuum left by the teacher when they left the room. Regardless, this serves as a great illustration of the concept of a power vacuum: When the teacher is in the room, they are the centre of power. When they leave, the students take on the role of making and enforcing their own rules, thereby filling the power vacuum created by the absence of the teacher. The short in-between period from when the teacher has left until a new set of rules and enforcement mechanisms has been established is typically referred to as a “power vacuum”.

Saying “enforcement never prevents any crime” is just naive. Say what you want about the american justice system, but even over there, they’ve incarcerated repeat offenders of assault, robbery, etc. where the incarceration itself most definitely prevents them from harming more people.

If you’re talking about actual prevention, just look to the programs enforced in several European countries that have provably been very effective in taking people who have been living off crime and turning them into productive citizens of society.

Yes, it’s been shown several times that fear of punishment is extremely ineffective at preventing crime. That doesn’t mean law enforcement doesn’t prevent crime. Putting a person that abuses their family in jail most definitely prevents them from continuing to abuse their family.

You say they’re arguing against strawmen, but do nothing to refute the arguments or show why they’re strawmen. Let’s say you have what you want: Rules but no rulers, direct democracy, and government but no state (please explain the latter in more detail).

The local hospital needs to decide how much money (read: resources) to spend on constructing a new wing, and who should do the job. A power line has to be built to replace the one that just fell down, and your direct democracy decided last week that you want to do something to incentivise the farmers to produce healthier and more sustainable food, rather than easy to produce and unhealthy food, but you haven’t ironed out the details yet. The next option you have to affect these decisions is later today, when you’ll have some kind of meeting or vote to decide on the matters. How you will find a time and place that allows everyone to have their say is an obvious issue, but I’ll leave it to you to explain how to overcome it.

These decisions need to be made, and when everyone doesn’t agree, there needs to be a mechanism to get stuff done regardless. I haven’t even gotten started on how to deal with internal groups or outside forces that want to exploit the system or the society as a whole.

Please explain how this is solved without some kind of hierarchical system where some people make decisions and enforce those decisions on behalf of the group as a whole. These are the roles we typically assign to “rulers” or “the state” (i.e. the bureaucracy).

In this specific context it is quite relevant that they’re an atheist, and therefore presumably relatively sceptical of religion in general. That’s a bias colouring their response that they’re disclaiming that they have.

What? No? The way I understand the comment at least, it’s suggesting that males are more socially solitary. There’s plenty of evidence suggesting that women, from a biological perspective, are more heavily tuned towards socialising (e.g. are more adept at giving and recognising subtle social cues, and maintaining larger social networks).

If that is the case, it makes sense that the men, who likely maintained smaller social networks within whatever group (family, tribe, etc.) they came from, would leave that group and integrate with the women group, rather than opposite.

set -e

I actually enjoy this part, where I’ve written some intricate code of sorts and get to spend some time writing a memo that explains how it works.

I usually don’t even end up reading them, because the process of writing a good memo will make me remember it.

Not running any LLMs, but I do a lot of mathematical modelling, and my 32 GB RAM, M1 Pro MacBook is compiling code and crunching numbers like an absolute champ! After about a year, most of my colleagues ditched their old laptops for a MacBook themselves after just noticing that my machine out-performed theirs every day, and that it saved me a bunch of time day-to-day.

Of course, be a bit careful when buying one: Apple cranks up the price like hell if you start specing out the machine a lot. Especially for RAM.

Don’t worry, referring to yourself in third person leaves enough of an impression that what you answer probably doesn’t matter all that much.

I wholeheartedly agree: In my job, I develop mathematical models which are implemented in Fortran/C/C++, but all the models have a Python interface. In practice, we use Python as a “front end”. That is: when running the models to generate plots or tables, or whatever, that is done through Python, because plotting and file handling is quick and easy in Python.

I also do quite a bit of prototyping in Python, where I quickly want to throw something together to check if the general concept works.

We had one model that was actually implemented in Python, and it took less than a year before it was re-implemented in C++, because nobody other than the original dev could really use it or maintain it. It became painfully clear how much of a burden python can be once you have a code base over a certain size.

That’s a great quote! I just did some searching: I’m thinking about false vacuum, and can live with the fact that if our universe does decay, it will (according to this theory) happen at the speed of light, so it will be impossible to observe before we are instantly wiped out, which is a calming thought.

I have next to no experience with TypeScript, but want to make a case in defence of Python: Python does not pretend to have any kind of type safety, and more or less actively encourages duck typing.

Now, you can like or dislike duck typing, but for the kind of quick and dirty scripting or proof of concept prototyping that I think Python excels at, duck typing can help you get the job done much more efficiently.

In my opinion, it’s much more frustrating to work with a language that pretends to be type safe while not being so.

Because of this, I regularly turn off the type checking on my python linter, because it’s throwing warnings about “invalid types”, due to incomplete or outdated docs, when I know for a fact that the function in question works with whatever type I’m giving it. There is really no such thing as an “invalid type” in Python, because it’s a language that does not intend to be type-safe.

Thank you for the kind response!

I was kind of considering that you might have meant the question that way (“why does nature obey whatever underlying law there is”), but as you say, it quickly takes us into philosophical territory.

If I were to give my honest opinion on that as a scientist, I would say that we can never know what the true, underlying guiding principles of the universe are, or even if there are any at all. We can only ever measure the laws of the universe indirectly through observations. This precludes us from ever being 100% certain about the true underlying principles that guide what we’re observing, or even if there are any.

As an example, there’s a hypothesis (can’t recall what it’s called) which postulates that the entire universe is in an unstable state. If that hypothesis is correct, the laws of nature as we know them could in fact change abruptly, with the change propagating at the speed of light. This change could amount to stuff like changing fundamental constants, which would pretty much break the universe as we know it.

To that I would answer that things don’t “obey the laws of physics” in any greater sense than that the “laws” of physics are principles that we’ve formulated based on how we’ve observed that nature behaves.

We have exactly zero proof that there is some inherent property of nature that always and forever will prevent heat from moving from cold to hot, even though that would violate the second law of thermodynamics. It’s just that we have never observed a process that violates the second law (people have tried very hard to break this one), and have a decent explanation for why we’re not able to break it.

If some process is developed or observed that violates the “laws of physics”, that just means we need to figure out where the “laws” are wrong, and revise them, which is how science moves forwards!

So short answer: Things obey the laws of physics, because whenever we observe something that breaks the laws, we revise the laws to allow for the newly observed behaviour.

This is what makes science fundamentally different from most belief systems: The only core principle is that anything can at any time be disproven, and everything we think we know is potentially wrong. By truly internalising that core belief, there’s no amount of proof that can turn your worldview upside down, because your core principle is that everything you think you know is potentially wrong, only being a more or less good approximation to the true underlying nature of the universe, which we can never really know anything about.

I would argue that the Higgs mechanism is just that: A mechanism for explaining where mass comes from. You could explain charge in a similar way by saying “because the particles are made of a certain amount of up or down quarks”.

Neither of these explanations answer the underlying question “but why does the Higgs mechanism give things mass?” or “but why do up/down quarks give things charge?”.

My point is that, at some stage, you get to the point of “the Higgs boson has mass because it’s an intrinsic property of the Higgs boson”, which is tantamount to “they just do”.

Unironically, magnetism is similar to charge, which is similar to mass.

You (probably) wouldn’t ask “But why does an atom weigh anything?” or “why do opposite charges attract?” All these things are just intrinsic properties of matter: they just have them.

So the answer to questions regarding why anything has mass/charge/magnetic moment really come down to “they just do.”

Now, if you want to talk about how and why magnets work at a macroscopic scale, we can have a long and interesting chat about long range ordering and phase transitions, but I’ll leave that for now :)

Fair enough, git clean does exist. However, if the button saying “discard all changes” is really a button that runs git clean, that’s just a plain terrible design choice. git clean is “delete all untracked files”, which is specifically not discarding changes, because there can be no changes to discard on an untracked file. Even talking about “changes” to an untracked file in VC context makes little sense, because the VC system doesn’t know anything about any changes to the file, only whether it exists or not.

That’s not even mentioning the fact that the option to “git clean” shows up as one of the easily accessible options in relation to a staging process. Especially if you’re coming from the git CLI, you’re likely to associate “discard changes” with “git restore”.