The number €115 is in the second chart as the per capita German expenditure on rail infrastructure in 2023. I don't see €477, but it's pretty close to the €480 figure for Switzerland in 2024. My guess is they saw an old version of the page when the first chart had numbers for 2023 and have kept using it without noticing the update.
It's saying that 40% of the tons of cargo loaded onto ships is fossil fuels, but this makes up about 50% of ton-miles, because fossil fuels travel further on average than other cargo. Not the easiest headline to correctly parse.
This is the same calculation behind the observation "you spend much longer in front of red traffic lights than green ones".
It's an interesting observation, but it's playing games with the meaning of "mean latency" and I'm not sure this is a very helpful way to look at requests to a web service - slightly slowing the fastest responses to requests would improve your time-weighted mean latency.
It's a better metric for looking at outages - instantaneous outages don't affect anyone, and time-weighting correctly discards them. On the other hand, average outage length is a very suspect and gameable metric unless accompanied by uptime %.
> What you want is 40% black onto white to have a similar difference in intensity as 40% white onto black, otherwise your darkmode font will look significantly different at the same intensity as your lightmode font. This is why it doesn't make sense to do it in a linear colourspace
Thanks for putting this clearly. I had not given this argument enough thought and respect previously. Would you agree if I said this is about maximizing the amount of useful information given to the reader (even if it deviates from approximating a printed page) and a perceptual colour space is the way to measure that information?
I should mention that I can find plenty of resources that suggest you should use a different font for dark-on-light vs light-on-dark (although I'm aware I'm not a good judge of the quality of said resources). This is not necessarily opposed to your point, since your reasoning can be extended to conclude that identically shaped printed text subject to blurring in linear colour space would be perceived differently depending on whether it's light-on-dark or dark-on-light (including when it's naturally blurred due to imperfect eyesight).
> Note that the Wikipedia article is wrong, given that photoshop uses a nontrivial gamma exponent
If we set text rendering aside, and consider something like games which prioritize photorealism rather than legibility, would you agree that linear colour space is the sensible one to do antialiasing in? This is for essentially the same reason you should do image resizing in linear color space, for which Wikipedia's citation [6] provides a convincing demonstration.
> There's no physical underlying lighting process, so it doesn't make sense to use physical light units.
I disagree with you here. Text rendering specifically is incredibly complicated, but for antialiasing in other contexts, the problem can be seen as trying to approximate what would be seen if the display had higher resolution and the viewer has blurry eyesight. In this model, a linear color space makes sense - if 60% of the pixels within a region on a higher dpi display would be lit, then that is best approximated* by a single pixel emitting the same number of photons as those pixels would (which is 60% as many photons as there should be in the situation where all pixels on the higher dpi display would be lit).
*there are better filters if you're looking at more than one pixel at once
> Using perceptual blending, the antialiasing will be exactly the same efficacy in both cases. Using blending in linear space, these two test cases will look very different and render incorrectly!
Whatever color space you do your blending in, 40% black onto white should look the same as 60% white onto black.
Yes for me (although difficulty varies depending on what you're trying to install). I would have started programming 2 years earlier than I actually did if my first attempt to install tools to run a programming language had worked.
You have to precisely follow a sequence of instructions without the experience to understand their purpose, or any idea of how to fix things if you make a mistake.
Web technology is an exception to this. People already have a web browser, and ignoring mobile devices, browsers come with a js REPL.
a) Anthropic believe that AI is an extinction level risk and that they are the only leading AI lab which takes safety seriously. In combination this puts them in the position of believing that they are the only ones who can save the world, which is reasonable to call a god complex.
b) Anthropic are engaging in actions which aquire and consolidate power in the form of control over powerful AI.
c) "The history of brilliant people convinced they know what humanity needs is a sordid one, precisely because they have convinced themselves that their intentions are good, justifying actions that very much are not."
I'm describing claims from the article and would not word them so strongly myself. But this explicitly does not assume evil intent.
I'm a bit more interested in what it teaches about the hyperbolic plane than I am in it's effectiveness as a note taking app (although the way it supports an exponentially growing tree does seem appropriate for depicting knowledge - I'd be interested to see something like a force directed graph of Wikipedia plotted on the hyperbolic plane).
The points and arrows do move and change shape appropriately while panning, but the images and text do not. It might be possible to use feDisplacementMap (an SVG filter effect) cleverly to get the deformations right. This would probably make performance worse, and I'm not sure how readable the text would be, but it would mean that things wouldn't start overlapping each other while panning.
> As seen after the Black Death, a scarcity of labor drives real wages up and lower the cost of basic goods and rent.
Does this still hold when the majority of labor is no longer closely tied to a finite supply of land? At the time of the Black Death, the majority of men's labor was farming, and having more land directly made labor much more productive[1]. The modern economy feels much more complicated (e.g. if your job involves transporting things/people from A to B, it probably decreases in efficiency as the density of people decreases).
I'm open to the possibilty of AI conciousness, and there is some desparation related to the concept of a higher being:
There are many people who will categorically rule out the posibility of AI consciousness due to near-unshakable belief in a higher being. This argument resembles "Christians should not be worried about our climate since God is ultimately in control." Such views make it harder to collectively prevent dangers from a sentient AI, or harm to a sentient AI.
I do not claim that everyone who believes in a higher power believes concious AI to be impossible, or vice versa; just that it would be very hard to change the minds of those who adhere to this reasoning.
Very cool. I was expecting it to make circles bigger rather than making needles smaller. Take a near-circle consisting of N lines. As N tends to infinity, the near-circle would have a diameter close to N*L/π, so would touch N*L/πW + O(1) lines twice each.
Many people move to London when they want to make money, and move out when they want to do anything else. Pretending that London is independent of the rest of the country's children and retirees is misleading.
> I don't think it's possible to tile the sphere using more than 20 exactly identical pieces.
I was wrong about this (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhombic_triacontahedron). It still seems possible to me that there's a limit to the smallest tile that can tile a unit sphere on its own. (Smallest by diameter as a set of points in R^3).
Not quite - you need 12 pentagons in a mostly hexagonal tiling of the sphere (and if you're keeping them similar sizes, Gosper-islands force hexagon-like adjacency). I don't think it's possible to tile the sphere using more than 20 exactly identical pieces.
You could get a Gosper-island like tiling starting from H3 by saying that each "Hex" is defined recursively to be the union of its 6/7 parts (stopping at some small enough hexagons/pentagons if you really want). Away from the pentagons, these tiles would be very close to Gosper islands.
No idea if they are doing this, but you can use Gosper islands (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gosper_curve) which are close to hexagons, but can be exactly decomposed into 7 smaller copies.
Your other points are more relevant to the content of the article, but point 2. relates the practical consequences of undecidable type-checking, so I'll reply to that.
I don't have a problem with compile time code execution potentially not terminating, since it's clear to the programmer why that may happen. However, conventional type checking/inference is more like solving a system of constraints, and the programmer should understand what the constraints mean, but not need to know how the constraint solver (type checker) operates. If it's undecidable, that means there is a program that a programmer knows should type check, but the implementation won't be happy with; ruining the programmer's blissful ignorance of the internals.
Decidability of a type system is like well-typedness of a program. It doesn't guarantee it's sensible, but not having the property is an indicator of problems.
Once you have paid him the Danegeld, you never get rid of the Dane.