> I work from home and value it but it never would occur to me to strike for that.
I believe that the value from WFH varies a lot from person to person.
If you were working from the office before and the company changed to a WFH policy, you might see it as a nice to have. You already made some life choices to accommodate going to the office. Maybe you even go to the office anyway.
But, if you were hired when the company already had WFH, you probably made some life choices based on that (buying a house far away from the city, having kids, not buying a car,...). In that case, mandatory RTO is a complete disaster (especially with the housing crisis) and you pretty much have no option other than resigning.
I assume NYT was doing WFH since ~2020, so a lot of employees probably took decisions based on WFH, therefore the strikes.
Unrelated to the word "daemon", but related to the article, I was a bit surprised by this assertion:
> Eventually, though, the theory of quantum mechanics showed why it wouldn't work.
I was familiar with the information theory arguments (the same presented in Wikipedia[1]). Is that why they mean here by "quantum mechanics" or is there another counterargument to Maxwell's daemon?
It seems to come from measuring the particles at all. One result is that the demon has to store information about the particles, and erasing that information to free up memory increases the entropy of the gas/demon system.
Which confirms my suspicions, but also sheds lights on how old the confusion is !
There are a bunch of assumptions that are easy to make (because they almost always are true), but very hard to get rid of when they aren't :
- that entropy is objective/ontological rather than subjective/epistemic
- that entropy is equivalent to disorder
- that temperature can always be defined
- that entropy is extensive
(- I think there was at least another one, but I had to do something else in-between and I don't remember now)
- oh yeah, maybe it was that there's a difference between a distribution and a macrostate ? (not sure about it myself)
Now, I don't know what the Bayesian framework can bring to the table here (not being sufficiently familiar with it down to the nuts and bolts of calculations), but if it can prevent us (and future students) from making these mistakes over and over and over again, it would be real progress.
They claim to fix the criticisms, see the section "The Bayesian arrow of time."
Who knows how well they did though.
As far as I can tell they're still making impossible assumptions, because certain Bayesian problems can't be calculated under a certain amount of energy, and some can't be calculated at all while embedded in spacetime (excepting time travel, and sometimes even then).
I think it's necessary to increase (on expectation) the entropy in a closed system when measuring, unless you take measuring to be magic and not a physical process.
Thanks, I need to look into those whenever I can find the time, however it also sounds like they are trying to fit General Relativity in there ?
I can't say for sure if this is doomed in the first place because GR infamously is not compatible with quantum mechanics (and trying to match them by force is only going to produce confusion and nonsense), or potentially revolutionary in actually managing to reconcile them...
The main requirement for the hole is that it's small enough that (with high enough probability) only at most one or a handful of molecules will make its way through.
And that size is completely independent of the size of your molecules, and only depends on how many there are per unit volume. There's a lot of 'empty space' between molecules in a gas.
Good question. I was going off the linked article which states:
> In the middle of the divider was a tiny gate, just large enough to admit one molecule of gas.
Still, that's quite a small hole relatively speaking. So you'd have to be fairly precise about both position and velocity. Potentially more than is allowed by Plank's constant. I dunno though, this isn't one of the counterarguments in the Wikipedia page, so probably you're right.
Air molecules are large and massive, so their de Broglie wavelength is actually much smaller than their physical size (and that's much smaller than the hole needs to be to let in one at a time at ambient pressure and temperature), and you don't need to know their speeds all that well, eg if you just want to 'pump' all the air from one chamber into another.
So all in all, a classic description would work reasonably well. (Remember that quantum uncertainty is related more to de Boglie wavelength than physical size.)
I'm not sure I understand - why is the wavelength size relevant? In my understanding, the standard deviations of position and momentum are at least some constant multiple of Plank's constant.
It probably (if the calculations are right) is unable to actually do much of anything useful (because it's too complex to avoid being extremely correlated with the rest of the universe ("embedded")), and even if it could it wouldn't be better than a standard ASI in most real-world situations.
That's assuming you aren't trying to claw back more energy than you lose, I'm pretty sure that's not possible to reliably do without crazy hypothetical physics.
I don't remember the whole details, but I believe it installed an autorun.inf file on all USB drives so that inserting the drive on another PC would install it automatically.
> Seems like they didn't pursue it in future consoles
I don't think this is entirely true.
Sure, there was nothing like the Net Yaroze, but the PS2 came with Yabasic[1] on the demo disk and had a Linux distro[2], and the PS3 also had a Unix support[3].
While some of this might have been for tax benefits, I still think it fits in the spirit of Net Yaroze.
I think that, in its current iteration, it is not that easy to know.
I haven't tried GPT 4 (which I've heard is much better), but my experiences with 3.5 have been extremely frustrating and underwhelming. I absolutely hate when it starts making stuff up and I have to fix it via the traditional way, it just wasted my time!
I guess this boils down to personal preference, but so far I just prefer a good old Google search.
I was quite happy with copilot auto complete, though. Mostly because of how low friction it was.
One of the issues I have with "languages that don't suck anymore" is that, even after the language gets all the cool new features, you'll still end up having to use some libraries targeting old versions.
So you end up having to choose between stable libraries in the old style or experimental modern libraries.
While some features can be retrofitted to work with old code (e.g. Java 8's SAMs were smart a way for old libraries to support the new lambdas), in a lot of situations you'll have to wait years for the stable libraries to support the new features.
Having said that, it's nice to see PHP catching up. I haven't used it in a long time, but I like to check the changelog once in a while.
It really doesn't apply with PHP though. I mean that.
Nowaday you use composer so your versionning and compatibility is done for you, everything is made out of libraries instead of monolithic bloc, and no major libraries use anything below PHP 7.X
I don't think you can find any sort-of-major library that doesn't work on PHP 8, nor anything with any kind of serious usage that isn't working on PHP 7. That's sort of the point of PHP making sure backward compatibility remains.
And if you mean "but my code can't use the good stuff", actually nothing stops it, even the type system stictness is decided caller side, specifically to avoid the issue you mention.
> One of the issues I have with "languages that don't suck anymore" is that, even after the language gets all the cool new features, you'll still end up having to use some libraries targeting old versions
Can you name any PHP libraries that don't support the latest version, that you wanted to use, and held you back from upgrading?
I think you just need the Wohnungsgeberbestätigung from the landlord and fill the registration paperwork at the Bürgeramt (which, depending on your city, might be a bit hard to get an appointment), you might also need to take care of the TV bill stuff.
While not awful, comparing to Portugal, where I just need to register in a website an then wait to get a confirmation code by mail, it feels like going back to the stone age.
And then there's the US where is no legal requirement to have a permanent address even if, as a practical matter, you sort of need at least a quasi one.
Why do you need to "register" your address? Why do you need any of this?
I've found that's the question to ask with paperwork.
For instance, France is also extremely bad regarding paperwork and administrative red tape and people are so used to it that many can't imagine that many of it is not actually needed for society to function. I noticed when I moved to the UK: Suddenly all that was absolutely necessary to protect civilisation and the Republic (I only exaggerate a little bit) did not even exist and everything still ran smoothly.
Telling example: During the Covid lockdowns, the French administration decided that people had to fill and sign an official form to keep on them every time they left home. Basically "I swear that I am only doing my daily excercise. Date, signature" to be shown to any police officer who might ask, or "zut alors" you're nicked.
One advantage of this is e.g. that you do not have to register for elections at all in Germany. You get automatically notified of all elections based on your residence and can vote without further steps.
Part of it is that there's just more of a tradition of keeping track of people in many places compared to the US. As a visitor staying in a hotel, you're shielded from a lot of it most places because the hotel takes care of it. But I was staying with a friend for a couple weeks recently in a European country, and they had to take my passport down to some office and fill out some paperwork.
Compared to the UK where you need to have some utility bills or bank statements as proof of an address, having an ID card with an address is a lot easier in practice.
But, yes, different societies have different approaches there and they are kind of designed around it.
> Compared to the UK where you need to have some utility bills or bank statements as proof of an address, having an ID card with an address is a lot easier in practice.
Well, no.
You already have bills in your name, so there is nothing to do.
On the other hand, regarding ID cards (in France): First there is no obligation to keep the address on it up-to-date (so why is there even an address on it?). Second, if you do want the address to be up-to-date then you need to follow the administrative procedure to get a new ID card, which involves providing... a proof of address in the form of an utility bill!
So France is different from Germany where you can get the address updated and you are supposed to do that. And proof of address is not a utility bill there, but either a form from your landlord or land register.
Same conclusion: You still have bills, tax bills, etc, so there is still no need for anything else if you wanted to keep things as simple as necessary.
> And proof of address is not a utility bill there, but either a form from your landlord or land register.
Because you've decided to do that, not because there is a practical requirement, which is my point.
Not really, as you still need to show a passport that you and the bills go together (which is still conjecture, to be honest, if the name is common). Why have two things?
Edit: because the decision was to have a strong ID system, so when people show an ID with an address the confidence is high in that being correct.
"Why do you need to "register" your address? Why do you need any of this?"
Control.
So the state knows in theory, who is living where.
With the joke being, that those institutions, where that information would actually be useful, don't know anyway. And so you still have to submit your adress everywhere (and then again, and a third time, to be sure).
"you might also need to take care of the TV bill stuff"
You mean what was formerly known as GEZ?
No worries, nowdays that got easier, they just help themself. In my case they just took the money straight from my bank account without consent or asking first, or without me even giving them my current account. (No idea how that was possible, it was the same account as some years ago, but I was living offroad for some time and never gave them permission, but suing them is a fools errand)
> I tried using it for coding but it made up APIs constantly or had subtle errors.
This has been my experience so far as well. I also find it very tiring to have to review all the iterations of the code.
I do find GitHub Copilot quite valuable at work, especially when it recommends one liners (they are easy to review, so I just feel like I'm writing faster).
To be fair to ChatGPT, on one of my recent experiment it actually said something along the lines of "you need to integrate with the library/API yourself", and it only started spewing garbage after I insisted to write the code. I see a lot of people online complaining that GPT is getting lazy, but I would rather have it lazy than wrong.
I was surprised that both Fira Code and Fira Mono were options, that was a bit cheeky.