Fair enough, I guess my overall point was more that we’ve all at some point taken that first step of doing something that now feels mundane, but at the time felt like we were doing something very advanced.

For what it’s worth, medieval (and other historical) societies in general had pretty high respect for women in childbirth. In was commonly seen as among the more heavy and challenging things anyone could face.

Let’s be reasonable: We were all at some point at the stage where doing anything at all in the terminal made us feel like a god.

I don’t really have any big issue with the students self-regulating exam rule violations, but if it is to have any hope of working, the students would then also need to have supervisors at the exam, if only because it’s ludicrous to think that honest people that are focused on their own exam will be aware enough of their surroundings to catch others cheating, let alone call them out when they’re likely in their close social circle.

As the name implies, this was originally an “honour system”, based around individual students self-regulating based on an idea of honour. That probably worked well enough in the 1800’s and early 1900’s, but it sure as hell won’t work in a modern society that values “getting ahead at all costs” above near anything else (as the numbers show).

Wait? These people were having unsupervised exams with access to their phone and now they see that they need to do something? I mean, the numbers speak for themselves when 45% of students say they were aware of an “honor code violation” during their time as students. I was at uni for five years, and I literally don’t know about a single case of cheating on exams among my peers.

Seems to me that cheating was already rampant, they just found a new excuse to do something about it.

To be clear by the way: Our exam “supervision” literally consisted of some pensioned seniors that got paid to come in for a day to hand out exam papers, receive and archive your response, and otherwise just hang around in the exam hall so people wouldn’t feel safe just blatantly bringing notes or their phone.

Are people backwards here or something? You’re explicitly stating that you’re not defending them, and you’re completely right in what you’re saying. A company can have record revenues and record losses (negative profit) in the same period. That doesn’t mean meta and zucky are anything short of horrible, it means the headline is crap. An informative headline would be “<Company> reports <value> profits and announces <number of> layoffs”. Saying they have record revenues tells us exactly nothing about whether layoffs are justified or not.

Case in point: My buddy’s startup had record revenues this year, more than doubled since last year, if they keep going at this pace they’ll be bankrupt by this time next year, since their income is smaller than their wage expenses.

Gold is a valuable catalyst in chemical industry, and has value as a very efficient conductor that is very malleable and corrosion resistant. Sure, most of its market value comes from people wanting to put it in jewellery and other decorations, but it’s objectively far, far, more valuable than most other materials.

Does gold “burn”? Not in the common sense, but it can both melt and vaporise (at about 1000 C and 3000 C respectively). It can also form stable oxides, and is probably more likely to do so when condensing from a liquid or vapour state mixed with air. So the answer is twofold: A lot of the gold would melt vaporise before precipitating as very fine particles that are spread with the wind, while an amount of it would likely form oxides in the process. The result would be a bunch of gold and gold oxide dust spread over a vast area, probably taking years before all of it reaches the ground.

I think it’s cool that you like to plan/practice for survival situations, and I think I can give some pointers:

Regarding “water tight container”, I was thinking primarily for carrying water (e.g. bottles). You’re probably going to want at least 4.5 L of water capacity unless water is very abundant where you are.

Regarding tools: I would say your no. 1 priority is a good, big, slightly heavy multipurpose knife. Basically, something small enough to clean a fish, but big and heavy enough to cut down a tree. My personal favourite is one of these.

In general I think my major tip regarding all kinds of gear (especially clothes) is that you want to minimise the number of pieces of kit you’re carrying. You don’t need several pairs of shoes, you don’t need shorts, etc. to be perfectly clear: I have ONE set of kit that I use from +30 C to - 30 C. There is not a single piece of kit that I carry in summer which I don’t also carry in winter. So, some starters:

• If it’s not either wool or an outermost (shell) layer, you don’t need it.
• Your shell layer has one job: To keep the elements (water + wind) out. Its job is not to keep you warm. A jacket that you can only use in winter, because it’s too warm in summer, is not a jacket you need.
• Always think in layers. If it gets colder, add more. If it gets warmer, remove some. You should not be carrying one sweater for + 10 C, and another for - 10 C, you should instead be carrying an innermost layer for 20 C, and 2-3 progressively thicker layers that you add on top as the temperature drops.

So basically, any idea of “summer clothes” (in the sense I assume you mean) can probably go straight away. Wool socks, a thin wool t-shirt, and a pair of hard-shell trousers with good air openings are summer clothes, they just happen to also be winter clothes when combined with other layers.

I think my best tip to get a feel for this is to pack a kit with everything you think you need, then try to hike maybe 20 km / day for a day or two with that kit. My bet is that your kit will be halved (at least) after the first couple attempts, as you notice how much weight you can cut out.

Finally, I would say that the single piece of kit I have with the highest weight/utility ratio (besides a knife) is possibly my sleeping mat. A good sleeping mat is the difference between feeling alive or not after a night outside, and it weighs next to nothing for what it’s worth.

There are some basic initial conditions to consider before you can even start answering this:

1. What climate are you in?
2. What kind of terrain are you in? (Mountains, lowland forrest, jungle, coastal…?) 2a) Do you have the option to get to a new type of terrain / climate?
3. What kind of tools/materials do you have access to from the start (we’re talking, do you even have a hatchet/knife, jacket, backpack, water-tight container, etc., or is this a “the clothes on your back” situation?)

I have some experience in some of the worst survival conditions you can imagine (far sub-freezing coastal and mountain climate). In those conditions, your by-far first priority is heat and shelter. The cold will kill you in hours if you don’t know what you’re doing. Even in far better conditions, knowing how to survive just being outside (before you even consider food) is what will probably get most people in an unsupported survival situation.

Fact is: You can survive for a week or two without food, but most people would probably be so preoccupied and exhausted by just existing outside unsupported over more than a few days that they wouldn’t have the capacity to do anything more than exist. The first prerequisite for survival is to have enough experience and good enough routines when it comes to keeping yourself dry, warm, and rested, that you actually have leftover capacity to start thinking about things like finding food, moving to more advantageous terrain, making tools, improving your shelter, etc.

If this is a hobby to you, I could recommend trying to do some minimalistic camping. Learn how to build a good shelter, and how to make a fire with a fire steel (is that what it’s called in english?). You could start out with as much gear as you need, and cut down on gear as you get more comfortable. Figure out what you need to do to stay warm and dry, even if you’re outside for several days in the rain/sleet/snow. Maybe most importantly, you’ll get some experience on what different conditions are like when you’re outside in them constantly, and can’t go inside to fix and dry your gear.

Regarding food: My personal experience is that the most reliable source of food you can find is probably fish. Fishing requires very minimal gear and works year-round pretty much everywhere in the world. I’ve been on a couple self-sustained trips just living off the fish I caught (not more than a few days, but I caught enough that I didn’t go hungry). If I were in a long-term survival situation, the first thing I would need to know is probably how to preserve fish more efficiently than I do today. If you have fish and berries, you should be able to keep chugging along for a couple months, which should be enough time to start developing even more long-term solutions.

Bottom line: I think that in a situation like the one you describe (surviving unsupported outside of civilisation), most people would be done-for by exposure within a couple weeks. Some people would be able to survive past the first couple weeks before succumbing to starvation. If you’re able to make it more than the first couple months, that’s when you can even begin considering things like “what is a good farming strategy”. Of course, this is not considering the people that would survive off looting, occupying buildings, etc., only considering people that try to survive in the wilderness.

betting on all the outcomes equally isn’t going to probabilistically give you the payout equal to what you’d buy in.

Exactly. That’s why I’m differentiating between games of skill (i.e. sports) and purely statistical “casino games”. It’s possible to beat the house in sports betting, but only if you are genuinely better than the house at considering the odds. Of course, the house will always try to set the odds in their own favour, but it’s impossible for them to know the exact odds. Thus, a well informed player can, in principle, identify the games where the house has under-valued an outcome and exploit those.

This basically boils down to the fact that in a casino game, the probability of every possible outcome is known exactly, so the house can trivially set a payout that benefits them. In sports, it’s impossible to know the exact probability of a given outcome, so the house can make mistakes.

I think you’re misunderstanding my point. You’re completely right that the house sets the odds it it’s own favour in order to make money, I’m not arguing against that.

My point is that setting odds in casino games like roulette is trivial, and there are no confounding elements that can suddenly make your odds wrong. In sports betting, setting the odds is highly non-trivial and pretty much impossible to do exactly. The better can look at the odds and consider whether they think the house has under-valued a certain game, which is possible, and bet on that. If the better is more well informed than the house, it’s actually possible that they make a net win. That’s completely different from a casino game, where the odds will never be in your favour.

I would argue that sports betting is a fair game, in the sense that the house sets odds, and you can consider whether those odds are in your favour or the house’s favour. Obviously, they will try to always set them in their own favour, but (also obviously) they can make mistakes that are exploitable to a well informed better.

it is in the interest of sports books for a rumor like that to propagate.

Oh, definitely. I’m not sure about this at all, please don’t take it as fact.

I completely agree with you. My point is just that with sports betting the playing field is actually fair, in the sense that anything can happen and that the bookies and the betters are considering the odds based on the same publicly available information. That differs significantly from games where the house is mathematically guaranteed to win in the long term, while the gamblers are guaranteed to lose.

Not necessarily with sports betting though: Then you have a legitimate possibility of being more well informed than the bookies. A casino is mathematically rigged such that you will lose over time, that doesn’t apply to games of skill (sports).

I don’t gamble myself, but I seem to remember reading that the average person actually makes a net win in football betting (that is, more than 50% of gamblers are winning). Apparently, the betting companies make it up because you have a relatively small fraction of people that are losing big, and losing consistently.

Sure it can, as long as it retains behaviour according to whatever standard it needs to comply to. My point was rather that I would be very surprised if the actual implementation (at memory level) was a linked list.

If I’m understanding you correctly, they’re basically doing the same thing as Python under the hood and using a heap-allocated array (vector) of pointers? If so, that should still be orders of magnitude faster than a linked list.

If their implementation is actually a linked list, colour me shocked. My impression was that JavaScript is “decently fast”. I’ve never even considered writing high-performance code in it, but I’ve heard that the compiler can optimise extremely aggressively, and it’s used so widely that I couldn’t imagine that it had glaring performance issues like what I would expect to see if every array was actually a linked list under the hood.

And FORTRAN (I do nothing but SCREAM in FORTRAN anyway)

I wondered the same, then my SO got one, it’s a seam that makes it look real funny when not worn.

I think it’s unfair to downvote you for playing devils advocate here, especially when you’re making it obvious that that’s what you’re doing. People should do better and rather challenge themselves to explain why you’re wrong in a way that can convince the devils advocate. It serves as a nice exercise for re-thinking your position and arguments.

For my attempt: They’re “wasting” water in the sense that liquid water at ambient conditions is a limited resource. They’re taking that water, and either turning it into steam, or heating it a lot before releasing it back to the environment. Both uses reduce the amount of liquid water at ambient conditions available in reservoirs connected to infrastructure made to extract it for public use. That is the resource we use for everything from drinking water, to showering and cleaning, to making food and filling radiators.

You could say that “wasting water” is imprecise, but I would argue that it serves as a convenient shorthand for “wasting liquid water at ambient conditions accumulated in reservoirs that are connected to extraction and treatment infrastructure”, which becomes a mouthful when you say it often.

The heat you have available in a data center is pretty low-quality (cold) heat. If you’re not familiar with the field, a (very) basic introduction is looking at the Carnot efficiency: In principle, you could increase the pressure in the water with a pump, then let it evaporate, before extracting work in a turbine. Then, you condense the steam (by heat-exchanging with the ambient) before sending it back into the pump.

Now, if this process is ideal (frictionless pumps and turbines, perfect heat exchangers, etc.) we can figure out how much of the heat energy that can be converted to useful work (turbine output - pump input). Assuming the ambient (our cold side) is about 25 C, and the racks we’re cooling (our hot side) operate at around 100 C, we get a Carnot efficiency of about 0.2. That means only 20 % of the heat can actually be converted work. Again, this is the ideal case. It is not thermodynamically possible to get better than this. Realistically, you could maybe get 10 % or something.

So, bottom line: The racks aren’t really hot enough to extract meaningful work. A better proposal would probably be to build things like this in places that are cold and require heating, so that you could use the waste heat as a district heating source. In that case, you could more or less completely eliminate the need for other heating sources in homes (which are far too often electrical). Then, we would be using the electrical power (which is high-quality) for something “useful” (disregarding whether or not a data center is useful in the first place), and use the low-quality heat for what it does best (heating things to moderate temperatures).