accident. Noun. something bad that happens that is not expected or intended and that often damages something or injures someone

It’s partly about it being preventable, but mostly about it being expected.

The expected outcome of drunk driving or speeding through crosswalks is hitting someone. It’s preventable by not driving drunk or not speeding.

A careful driver in the Netherlands killing a cyclist in a city center on a 20mph road is unexpected and fairly surprising - that would be a true accident. A drunk driver hitting someone on an American stroad is depressingly normal. It’s hard to call it an accident.

Colloquially, accidents are random events without intention or fault.

That’s why there’s a push to use neutral terms like “crash” that don’t imply that the “accident” was just a random accidental mistake.

And fault is often a bit of a misnomer. Many crashes are the result of bad design, but the courts would never say “this pedestrian fatality here is 40% the fault of whichever insane engineer put the library parking lot across a 4-lane road from the library but refused to put a crosswalk there or implement any sort of traffic calming because that would inconvenience drivers”.

It doesn’t have to be on purpose. Accident implies that something was just a freak occurrence beyond anyone’s control. You can’t fix accidents. You can fix crashes.

If you’re driving negligently - drunk driving, not paying attention, etc then it’s not an accident.

If it’s due to bad road design, then it’s not an accident.

Pure functions should be referentially transparent; you should be able to replace them with whatever value they evaluate to without changing the semantics of your code.

Throwing is referentially impure: what value do you get from calling x => throw new RuntimeException()?

Instead, functional languages prefer to return a tagged union of the value or the error.

Functional languages typically have type inference, so the type signatures are entirely optional. I haven’t looked that deeply at unison, but I’d be entirely unsurprised if it had global type inference and if all or most type signatures were optimal.

It’s less that you have to declare something can do IO or throw an exception, and more that you’re calling something from the standard library that does IO or throws an exception.

Most stuff does neither. There’s a type level distinction between normal, regular pure code, and impure effectful code, so it’s easy to tell from the type signature whether a function is pure or not.

7 million is “retiring doctor” or “retiring Google engineer” rich.

It’s generally considered safe to withdraw 4% of your nest egg the first year, and adjust that for inflation moving forwards. $7 million can sustain a $280k/year retirement. That’s certainly rich, but there’s a world of difference between that and a billionaire. A billionaire can safely spend $40 million a year.

These seem like they can circle for rather longer than a rocket could.

There’s a bit of a difference, tactically, between a rocket with 2 min of fuel vs a prop plane with 5 hours of fuel.

I’m not sure that it does. All the articles I can find word it as something like “has a range of 710 kilometers (441 miles) on a sunny day.”, without actually explaining it. I’m assuming that’s going from 100% charge to 0% charge, plus all the range gained by charging during the day.

They don’t actually say anywhere I can find how quickly it charges.

Also, looking up some other articles about it, apparently there’s a bunch of extra fold-out solar panels in the trunk

If you wanted maximum range, you’d start before dawn, drive most of your battery away, park somewhere all day to use that solar awning for all its worth, then continue driving at dusk.

It’s not that it’s far-fetched. It’s just impractical. Solar panels don’t really generate that much power per square foot. Charging a car with just the roof can take days.

One model of solar roofed electric car on the market recharges ~20 miles per day with the roof.

Charging stations are a way better idea for road trips in electric cars, as is plugging the car in overnight. This is great for a remote hermit, but more interesting for the hack value than a practical option.

Netanyahu’s popularity tanked after October 7th.

70% of Israelis want him to resign. But only 25% want him to resign now - most want him to wait until the current war settles down. Which unfortunately gives him and Ben Gvir some perverse incentives, because there’s no way they remain in power after the dust settles.

I mean, to make that argument about the holocaust you’d need to lie about the numbers.

There were 17 million Jews worldwide in 1939, but only 11 million in 1945. In Europe, the population went from 9 million Jews just before the holocaust to only 3 million Jews continent-wide after it - even counting those in allied and neutral countries.

Poland, before the holocaust, had over three million Jews; 90% of them were murdered by the Nazis. Those people didn’t just evaporate.

Meanwhile - did I lie about the numbers? Keep in mind, 2 million is the current number of Israeli citizens of Palestinian heritage.

What exactly is the map going to tell you?

There’s almost two million Palestinian citizens of Israel. In 1952, Israel gave citizenship to the ~160k Palestinians living in Israeli territory who hadn’t fled during the 1948 war; they lived under martial law until 1966.

No one is displacing Palestinians in Israel; Israeli settlers are displacing Palestinians in Palestine.

The 1931 census, carried out by the British, found a total population of a bit over a million people. Looking at other estimates doesn’t have it increasing that much between 1931 and 1947.

Israel’s population is currently about 9.7 million, which doesn’t count the ~5 million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. So about 15x the population as in 1931.

In Israel, there’s currently around 7 million Jews and 2 million Arabs. About 80% of Arab- Israelis are Sunni Muslim, 9% are Christian and 9% are Druze.

So, uh, it looks like the Muslim population of the land that is current Israel has more than doubled since 1947?

The problem is mathematical.

To win the presidential election, you need to win a majority of the vote in enough states to win a majority of electoral college votes.

If no-one gets 270 electoral votes, then the House of Representatives meets. Each state delegation gets 1 vote. Right now, that means that the Republican wins, due to e.g. Wyoming and Alaska getting just as much of a vote as NY and California, and Republican gerrymandering of swing states.

There’s literally no way for third party candidates to be elected president. The best that a third party has ever done was in 1860, a 4 way race between a Democrat, Republican, Southern Democrat, and Constitutional Unionist.

Lincoln, the Republican, got 39.8% of the vote but won 18 states and 180 electoral votes. The Democrat, Douglass, got 29.5% of the vote but only won a single state. Breckenridge got only 18.1% of the vote but carried most of the southern states. And Bell got 12.6% of the vote and carried 3 states - Virginia, Kentucky and Tennessee.

So Douglas ended up with more than twice as many actual votes as Bell, but got over 3x the electoral vote. And Breckenridge only got less than half as many electoral college votes that he’d need to win, and could realistically have only picked up Bell’s.

The last time a third party candidate won a single electoral college vote was in 1968, when George Wallace won Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas and Louisiana. He was the former governor of Alabama, and had left the Democratic party after the 1964 civil rights law and 1965 voting rights law were passed by Johnson.

The Democrats are also more of a big tent than most parties in counties using party list PR would be. In Italy, AOC and Manchin wouldn’t be in the same party, while in the US they basically have to be to win.

The two party system exists for structural reasons. Plurality only works well in two candidate elections; third parties only do well in districts where they functionally replace a major party. Getting rid of the two party system is possible by changing the structure - switching to e.g. STAR voting in the senate and presidency and using e.g. MMP or STV in the House. But burying your head in the sand to pretend the structural issues don’t exist just doesn’t work.

What are some places that don’t look like Linux but actually are?

I’d think most PC games and other desktop GUI software runs on windows and looks like it runs on windows. And I’d imagine that a web browser on windows isn’t secretly a Linux environment.

But yeah, I’ve written way more code that runs on a web browser or a Linux server than runs on windows.

Homebrew is fairly different from pip, cargo or npm in that only python developers use pip, only rust developers use cargo, etc. And those are mostly used to manage libraries, rather than executables.

Meanwhile, essentially everyone who uses the console uses homebrew regardless of what programming languages they might or might not use. I was making a joke about how good, useful and basically required homebrew is.

Ultrasound vaccines give you ultra-autism.

Israel has been involved in several wars against multiple other nations - for example, in the 1973 Yom Kippur war, it was invaded by Egypt, Syria, and a coalition that included Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Cuba, Jordan, etc.

Israel is located at a fairly strategic location. Britain and France used Israel during the Suez crisis to stage an attack against Egypt over control of the Suez Canal. The Suez Canal is one of the most important global trade routes.

US support of Israel is a combination of funding American arms dealers and wanting Israel as a strategicly located partner. That’s why we fought proxy wars with the soviet union over it like the Yom Kippur war. The aid is intended not to fight Hamas, but to keep Israel strong against e.g. Iran and other neighbors. They’ve had peace with Egypt for decades, but that might be more because of Israel being strong enough to not be worth attacking.

I doubt Biden personally supports the Gaza war, but a lot of this stuff is more about realpolitik and strategic concerns than anything else.

Homebrew might as well be default.

Keep in mind, though, AI progress is often more like punctuated equilibrium.

Each new approach gets you much further, and polishing each approach gets you slight improvements until the next approach comes along. Improvements to chatgpt might plateau until the next big breakthrough architecture. Or maybe not.