'Once in 300 years'???

While the functional form of the statistical distributions themselves might still be valid, certainly the old parameters are no longer so.

That is a severity scale using anecdotal past events. It isn't intended to be a sound statistical claim.

It's not even that, it's just the heaviest rainfall recorded in 300 years

Nobody knows the future. Most of the time we just use historical data directly, or project linearly.

These kind of headline is very misleading. Need better way to communicate these.

Does this comment apply to the current crop of American politicians? (Just curious.)

Well, lack of trust in that case .

That’s what I was referring to. The concept that comprehensive laws can substitute leaders with integrity is ridiculous

I need the brights at night for deer (in N. America) and kangaroos (in Oz).

Steering them away automagically from oncoming traffic is a better solution than abandoning them altogether.

(And yes, I do have cataracts. So oncoming lights _are_ a problem for me.)

Isn't that what high beams are for? Why are the low beams so bright these days?

Steering them away? You’re supposed to turn them off when there is oncoming traffic.

Steering them away to where? Into the eyes of the deer and kangaroos?

Yeah, I'm not a human either.

(Edited to add: that was from Safari. Chrome worked. YMMV.)

[1] is a real-time forecast for the auroral oval. See if you are in with a chance. Clear Skies!

[1] https://www.spaceweatherlive.com/en/auroral-activity/auroral...

They seem to be scraping the forecast images from https://www.swpc.noaa.gov/communities/aurora-dashboard-exper...

Hmm. It says my city has 0% chance of visibility but I'm looking at it outside right now.

Atlantic Canada is sorely underrepresented on the city charts, even though many locations would have amazing viewing.

I miss Frys...

The one word answer to this?

Linux.

It got this way because 99% of people are happy running what's in the app store, and the security protections are more valuable than being able to run arbitrary code.

Linux as an answer doesn't address the needs of 99% of people, so 98% will never adopt it. It's better to meet people where they're at and push for sideloading and alternative app stores.

The article is largely about phones, where the barrier to install a truly open Linux system are high and getting higher.

There are plenty of smartphone companies locking down their bootloaders, but there are others that will let you unlock your bootloader by just running the basic command.

A much bigger problem for running Linux on phones is that standard Linux runs like crap on phones. It doesn't have the mainline driver support amd64 computers have, and the battery life optimizations that make Android usable need to be reimplemented on top of Linux to get a day's worth of use out of your phone. Unfortunately, most Linux applications are written for desktops where they expect the CPU to be running all the time, the WiFi to be accessible whenever they want, and for sleep/suspend to be extremely incidental rather than every two minutes.

Have an optimised web browser for the OS and you don't really have to worry about 3rd party software performance any more or not that much

I do run GNU/Linux on my smartphone. No Android or iOS.

Sure, until the software that you need to participate in modern society no longer supports Linux.

As long as common PCs can boot an iso we should be good to go.

Only as long as Google doesn't force Web Environment Integrity through. Running a custom OS won't help if important websites refuse to load unless they're running in an approved browser with a set of approved extensions, on an approved OS, on top of approved hardware.

I've been beating the drum that we need mobile drivers licenses and pairwise pseudonyms. It is a path to beating spam and bots in a way that doesn't hand control over to private entities.

Some folks don't like digital identity controlled by government, but it seems like the alternative is digital identity controlled by oligopoly.

The three word rebuttal?

Banking on GrapheneOS

Works just fine for me. Perhaps consider moving to a bank that's more aware of alternates than just the existing duopoly.

Joseph Stalin said some version of "It's not the people who vote that count, it's the people who count the votes."

(Mixed rating, according to Snopes.)

'I care not who casts the votes of a nation, provided I can count them,' Napoleon failed to remark." — New York Times editorial (26 May 1880) [0].

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/1880/05/26/archives/imperialism.html

Snopes has this as mixed because Stalin may or may not have expressed this sentiment at some point, but it seems impossibly unlikely to me that this pun works in Russian as it does in English.

This Jupyter (CRDT-based) extension appears to solve the BIGGEST HEADACHE I personally have with Jupyter(lab). Jupyter notebooks allow me to hack code/parameters too fluently, and I can't recover earlier positions in code/parameter space that produced interesting results.

Jupytext and git goes some way towards fixing that, but I don't save to git after every cut/paste of a parameter. This extension is effortless.

As a bonus, the extension appears to allow SubEthaEdit/GoogleDocs style collaboration too. (I haven't personally used that yet.)

Check it out.

For me, a python user since the late '90s, the answer has always been simple:

Guido has taste.

He stepped back and now we have the walrus operator.

At least we don't have to use it.

Guido approved the walrus. It was the negative response which he said led to him quitting.

Casual python user here. I wasn't aware of this controversy.

Why was there a backlash for this operator? (looks kinda neat). Was it breaking things?

I am not a keyboard warrior who got caught up in the nonsense, but I think some people were simply annoyed at adding syntactic sugar for very marginal benefit. “There should be one way to do things” mantra.

I have a long list of grievances with Python, but the walrus situation would never crack my top ten. Put effort into removing cruft from the standard library, make typing better, have the PSF take a stance on packaging. Anything else feels a better use of time.

Whatever, it won. I will never use it, but when I see it will have to scratch my head and lookup the syntax rules.

It was against many people's aesthetic sense. Including mine. But in theory it can be ignored completely, and in practice it is barely ever used (and indeed nobody forces you to add more uses).

You may be interested in https://learning-python.com/python-changes-2014-plus.html for a sense of what some old-timers' aesthetic sense is like. (I agree with many of these complaints and disagree with many others.)

Larry Wall thought deeply about how human languages work, not just what a programming language should do mechanically.

Maybe. He was on the BLACKER VPN project for high-assurance, secure VPN. It had strong requirements for configuration management. Larry Wall was a smart, but lazy, programmer that tired of tedious administration. So, he wrote Perl to automate that.

Maybe he did some kind of deep, programming design. It just sounded in that account more like he threw together whatever solved his problem with some nice ideas baked in. Again, that's if it was true that he invented it to automate tedium during BLACKER VPN.

BLACKER is described here: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/213253

For public examples of A1, look up SCOMP, GEMSOS, and VAX Security Kernel (VMM). Those papers describe the assurance activities required for A1 certification. At the time, due to bootstrapping requirement, tools like Configuration Management didn't have to be A1. People used all kinds of stuff, like Wall building Perl.