I'm quite happy with my Prius. I think it's a skill issue. Roof racks and a tow hitch on a normal sized car handle the vast majority of cases where people imagine they need a truck or SUV. But I remember a young couple showing up to buy a mattress from my roommate, and being flummoxed when the mattress wouldn't fit inside their Subaru Forester with built-in roof rails. I had to show them how to tie it on the roof. They never did return my rope... If you can only imagine putting things inside the vehicle or in the bed of a pickup truck, then having a truck or a big SUV must seem essential. What makes it even weirder is that the Prius has more interior space than a lot of SUVs.
Yes. The merger with McDonnell-Douglas, which resulted in McDonnell-Douglas's leadership getting control of Boeing despite the fact that they had already run McDonnell-Douglas into the ground.
> Good software teams are led by competent, technical management.
...or perhaps with no managers at all. I'm less and less convinced of the importance of management in engineering except to give investors an illusion of control.
I sort of agree, and I do think it’s possible depending on the team. But unfortunately developers can be too opinionated and get focused on low priority things.
> Penrose claims that human intelligence relies on quantum effects and demonstrates certain structures in neurons that makes it at least a plausible argument.
Except that Penrose's argument is biologically nonsense, which probably means that he has an incorrect definition of intelligence, since I'm pretty confident in his ability to reason from axioms.
That's because they're very closely related languages. English is a mix of Anglo-Saxon and Norman French, after the Norman invasion of England in the 11th century. Norman French is how the Norse diaspora in Normandy mixed their Germanic tongue with the local dialects of Latin. And the Romance and Germanic languages are both pretty closely related branches of Indo-European, which is also a pretty narrow language family to start with. For example, 'tu' from French comes from mixing Norse 'du' with Latin 'tuus'...both of which come from deeper roots. Proto Indo-European reconstructs this as 'tuH'.
There's no need to explain French tu by looking at Germanic languages. It descends pretty uneventfully from Latin tū. However, French and Latin tu are cousins of German du and English thou.
Markets are at best a tiny piece of the question on housing. It has more to do with zoning, infrastructure planning, incentives among the various roles involved in building, the foibles of real estate sales, the voice of incumbent residents who moved there because of the state of affairs that now has insufficient possibility for housing...
At the far end of that you have a market for what is there. It's nearly impossible to buy a well designed, well built house in many places because there aren't any. But the invisible hand of the market largely just skyrockets prices for limited, poor buildings because it doesn't have much real effect on the rest.
The fact that we call the curve fitting/optimization/compression that we do to fit machine learning models to input data "learning" is really unfortunate and leads to this kind of conflation.
If we trace the path of how we ended up here, it's similar to how people incorrectly refer to loci of DNA as genes. We have behavior analysis where we speak of learning as the conditioning via the antecedant-behavior-consequence loop. There was the Hebbian theory of how the ABC loop manifested physically in neurons. Early neural net papers took inspiration from that that mechanism and called it learning.
Meanwhile, actual learning is far, far richer than the Hebbian theory of synaptic strengthening, and has a lot more going on than just operant conditioning.
So, please, it's time for everyone to stop pretending that the fact that ML inherited the word "learn" as a term of art for curve fitting has any philosophical weight.
> If you want to learn about Sparta, it's pretty easy to find
Oh god. Why Sparta? Why this particular historiographical can of worms, where the history of the history is far more convoluted than the history of Lacedaemon itself?
No. Someone without a pretty solid knowledge of Ancient Greek history and historiography and the skills to be able to track the changes in the research literature is going to have a damn hard time finding the best book on Sparta.
I spent some time working on replacing the formulation of descent as a tree of species with a chain-complete partial order of organisms. Then you start trying to define things like "species" or "strain" or "genus" on that and realize that they don't correspond to any typical clumping of graphs.
Someone else already linked to ring species. In microbiology, the definition of species is "stop asking, we agreed to stop fighting about that, no, really, la-la-la-la." Horizontal gene transfer between species is ubiquitous.
In the end I started talking about populations occupying a niche in a specific place at a specific time, and very cautiously tracing properties among linkages of those. But I'm also the one who kept insisting to my labmates that a gene is not a locus of DNA.
