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Jakob

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Riddle solved: Why was Roman concrete so durable? (2023)

news.mit.edu
4 points·by Jakob·19 วันที่ผ่านมา·2 comments

Claude, Author of the Humanitas

greaterwrong.com
2 points·by Jakob·2 เดือนที่ผ่านมา·0 comments

Month of AI Bugs

monthofaibugs.com
3 points·by Jakob·9 เดือนที่ผ่านมา·0 comments

comments

Jakob
·21 วันที่ผ่านมา·discuss
Less than Singapore for sure. Less than European cities, I’m not so sure. I don’t have the numbers but if you do an image search of Jakarta (probably one of the worst vegetation-wise and boasting a population of a quarter of Germany) it still has trees in every picture and many more than let’s say Frankfurt or Madrid. The latter has many photos without a single tree.

79% of all German trees are sick. Monocultures and beetles play a role but the problem is much bigger than that: https://www.bmleh.de/DE/themen/wald/wald-in-deutschland/wald...
Jakob
·21 วันที่ผ่านมา·discuss
Yes, Singapore is great for that. But to be fair with the other cities, it’s very hard _not_ to have abundant vegetation in tropical rainforest climate. Everything grows rapidly and stops at nothing in its way.

In other climates, like European ones, this becomes much more complex. Germany struggles even to keep its forests alive with long stretches of missing rain, higher temperatures, and new pests. Single trees in cities constantly die. Spain is in large parts a desert etc.

I really hope we find a solution/adapted plants to keep cities from heating up so much.
Jakob
·21 วันที่ผ่านมา·discuss
I would see that as an absolute win. Socialization is the main point I send my kids to school.

Socialization leads to discourse which leads to learning.
Jakob
·23 วันที่ผ่านมา·discuss
I really like Mimestream, which is a native client for Gmail.

Very fast and supports all the usual native macOS keyboard navigation, e.g. shift or command to amend selection in a list.
Jakob
·2 เดือนที่ผ่านมา·discuss
Maybe not in your corner of the internet, but businesses used server side includes (SSI) for that, not iframes.

You add “include” tags to your HTML file and your web server like nginx or varnish would replace it with the fragment at runtime.

  <!--#include virtual="../footer.html" -->
I saw this was quite popular for big publishing houses with millions of articles still relatively recently 10 years ago. They would only write the HTML body of a new article and the other fragments would be included by the web server.

Very cheap, stable, and very big changes across the whole website could be done instantly since cache invalidation is trivial (the web server knows all modified dates of all fragments).

Also, no additional CDN or caching needed. Later, with CDNs there was even a variant where these fragments were hosted at the edge (ESI).
Jakob
·2 เดือนที่ผ่านมา·discuss
We have been authoring HTML by hand for decades with ease. Text editors are very good at it, and many have commands to auto-wrap, auto-close etc. Reading and writing is simple.
Jakob
·2 เดือนที่ผ่านมา·discuss
For a long time this was a common concept: that more central authorities should only come in where more local cannot effectively do it (subsidiarity). This was of course pretty universal until recently. The oldest counter-example I can think of is the French Revolution that started to centralise.

The church works like DNS in that regard. (Without the caching. ;)

While it was always decentralised, the standardisation of the documents was with the Council of Trent ~1550 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Council_of_Trent
Jakob
·2 เดือนที่ผ่านมา·discuss
My partner and I are from two different European countries that speak different languages.

When we wanted to marry in the country of my partner, both our (catholic) churches needed to sync. They did so in their common language: Latin.

That was a fun surprise.
Jakob
·4 เดือนที่ผ่านมา·discuss
Speed is a quality in itself. We are so bugged down by slow stuff that we often ignore that and don’t actively search for another.

But every now and then a well-optimised tool/page comes along with instant feedback and is a real pleasure to use.

I think some people are more affected by that than others.

Obligatory https://m.xkcd.com/1205
Jakob
·6 เดือนที่ผ่านมา·discuss
And recently even dropping the negation itself while keeping the meaning: “je sais pas”

I never thought about that. Interesting. This negation related cycle is apparently called Jespersen’s cycle and happens in many languages. The English equivalent

I say not -> I “do” not say -> I don’t say. -> ?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jespersen%27s_cycle
Jakob
·7 เดือนที่ผ่านมา·discuss
Yes. There are lots around; whenever the original word becomes too short for the importance people want to give it.

Tuna fish, chai tea, Enter the room -> enter “into” the room, French: hui (today) -> aujourd’hui (day of today)

Keyword: pleonasm
Jakob
·7 เดือนที่ผ่านมา·discuss
Yes, this is unfortunately still the way and was very common back when iOS Safari did not allow embedded video.

For a fast start of the video, reverse the implementation: instead of downgrading from Websockets to polling when connection fails, you should upgrade from polling to Websockets when the network allows.

Socket.io was one of the first libraries that did that switching and had it wrong first, too. Learned the enterprise network behaviour and they switched the implementation.
Jakob
·7 เดือนที่ผ่านมา·discuss
Contemporary historic preservation sees itself as the guardian of historical substance. The content of a monument is bound to the preservation of the inherited material.

Georg Dehio’s principle of "conserving, not restoring" is often invoked as a synonym for this self-conception. Old and new need to be clearly separated.

It is a counter-movement to the 18th century historicism which ”destroyed” a lot of old monuments beyond repair.

Personally, I think we went too far on the conservation angle (at least in Germany, not sure about other countries), and should restore a bit more again with the knowledge we have. But much more intelligent people have debated that for centuries, so I guess their answer would be the same like https://askastaffengineer.com/.
Jakob
·8 เดือนที่ผ่านมา·discuss
iCloud surprisingly works without issues for me. You can switch on “keep downloaded” for the folder in question.