I find it interesting how the term shifted from a (mythical) temporal concept to a spatial concept, to now often a social concept (e.g. the Fourth World).

I remember that Justice Antonin Scalia objected: “I hope we can continue calling it the golden disk. It has a certain Scheherazade quality that really adds a lot of interest to this case.”

<https://www.supremecourt.gov/oral_arguments/argument_transcr...>

But it also left me somewhat confused. The author’s note at the end states that “[the] story is 100 % fictional, except for all the parts about the EU AI Act having no enforcement teeth, which are unfortunately 100 % true”. The story chronicles a paper describing a solution, and the reaction of the main character who wishes he should have thought of this himself first. The solution is laid out high-level: AI self-awareness of potential problems, auto-pause until human review at first sign of potential problems, coupled with blockchain auditability.

So what is this story? An invitation for researchers to work out the details, and actually write the (thus-far fictional) 47-page paper? A teaser that such a paper might be forthcoming? A hope that this solution might materialize? Or just a fictional tale to vent some professional frustrations?

However, the metaphor isn’t that educationally helpful anymore. On more than one occasion I found myself explaining how card catalogues or even (book) dictionaries work, only to be met with the reply: “oh, so they’re basically analogue hashmaps”.

However, due to a mistranslation the Roman pontifices got it wrong at the introduction of the Julian calendar. The Romans counted inclusively, which means: counting with both the start and end included. (That is why Christians say in a literal translation from Latin that Jesus has risen on the third day, even though he died on a Friday and is said to have risen two days later, on the next Sunday.)

In the first years of the Julian calendar, the Roman pontifices inserted a leap day “every fourth year”, which in their way of counting means: every 3 years. Authors differ on exactly which years were leap years. The error got corrected under Augustus by skipping a few leap years and then following the “every 4 years” rule since either AD 4 or AD 8. See the explanation and the table in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_calendar#Leap_year_erro...

Also note that at the time, years were mostly identified by the names of the consuls rather than by a number. Historians might use numbers, counting from when they thought Rome was founded (Ab urbe condita), but of course they differed among each other on when that was. The chronology by Atticus and Varro, which placed the founding of the city on 21 April 753 BC in the proleptic Julian calendar, was not the only one.

The Latin prepositions cum (with) and sine (without) are always followed by the ablative case. German has grammatical cases too, but no ablative. The German propositions mit (with) and ohne (without) are followed by the accusative case.

So c.t. = cum tempore = mit Zeit = with time (or with some delay), and s.t. = sine tempore = ohne Zeit = without time (or without delay).

There is no generally-agreed-upondefinition for “continent”, in the same way that there was no generally-agreed-upon definition of “planet” prior to the IAU 2006 General Assembly.

Continents are identified by convention (and there are a few competing conventions) rather than any strict criteria.

I was taught (in Europe) that there are 6 continents, 1 of which close-to-uninhabited: Europe, Asia, Africa, Oceania, America, Antarctica. This convention is the same as the one for the UNSD “continental regions”. The five interlocking rings of the Olympic flag represent these five inhabited continents.

There’s another convention that considers Eurasia to be a single continent. And another that even considers Afro-Eurasia to be a single continent.

Some timezone identifiers have changed, e.g. Asia/Calcutta to Asia/Kolkata in 2008 and Europe/Kiev to Europe/Kyiv in 2022. But the TZ DB maintainers are rather reluctant to make such changes, and require “long-time widespread use of the new city name” in English before deciding so.

The naming conventions for timezone identifiers are written out at https://ftp.iana.org/tz/tzdb-2022b/theory.html#naming

on this particular instant, in Iceland, 28 minutes were skipped because Iceland changed from the offset of Reykjavik’s mean solar time, rounded to the nearest minute (UTC–1:28) to the offset of Reykjavik’s mean solar time, rounded to the nearest hour (UTC–1).

So only from that moment on, Iceland was using UTC–1.

As adastra22 points out: some authors define the term inflation primarily as the increase in the money supply (“monetary inflation”), others primarily as an increase in (consumer good) prices (“price inflation”).

At least in modern economic literature and usage, the term “inflation” (without modifier) is more often used to denote price inflation rather than monetary inflation.

The insistence that the term “inflation” ought be primarily rather used for “monetary inflation” goes back to at least Ludwig von Mises, The Theory of Money and Credit, 1912:

“In theoretical investigation there is only one meaning that can rationally be attached to the expression inflation: an increase in the quantity of money (in the broader sense of the term, so as to include fiduciary media as well), that is not offset by a corresponding increase in the need for money (again in the broader sense of the term), so that a fall in the objective exchange-value of money must occur.”

So yes, the Drake Equation is dimensionally sound.

It is also a true equation. Not observed to be true, but reasoned to be true. The right hand side is the left hand side multiplied by some non-zero factors, and divided by the same factors, and rearranged (into the multiplication of a time rate, 5 ratios, and a length of time).

There’s still a lot of uncertainty about the numerical value of some of the factors — but the math is sound.

Therefor I wouldn’t put the Drake Equation in the same category “mathiness” that the original article is talking about.

The old spec of YAML 1.2 section 1.3 explicitly said:

YAML can therefore be viewed as a natural superset of JSON, offering improved human readability and a more complete information model. This is also the case in practice; every JSON file is also a valid YAML file.

The revised spec 1.2 revision 1.2.2 (2021-10-01) no longer contains that sentence; but still says, in section 1.2:

The YAML 1.2 specification was published in 2009. Its primary focus was making YAML a strict superset of JSON.

and in section 6.8.1:

Note that version 1.2 is mostly a superset of version 1.1, defined for the purpose of ensuring JSON compatibility.

Given all these claims, Patrick Stevens’ observations that YAML really isn’t a superset of JSON, because YAML can’t handle all JSON number literals, and tabs as whitespace, really is surprising. At least to me.

When previously JavaScript/ECMAScript 2018 was found not to be a JSON superset, at least it was about unescaped occurrences of little-used characters U+2028 LINE SEPARATOR and U+2029 PARAGRAPH SEPARATOR in string literals. And even that got fixed (by allowing the unescaped characters) in ECMAScript 2019.

[YAML 1.2]: https://yaml.org/spec/1.2-old/spec.html#id2759572 [YAML 1.2 revision 1.2.2]: https://yaml.org/spec/1.2.2/ [ECMAScript 2019 feature Subume JSON]: https://v8.dev/features/subsume-json

I'm thinking of the LWN article “Morse code panics for 2.6.29-rc1” (2003) https://lwn.net/Articles/21858/

My first remark is VirtualStorage. As I understand it, T is the type the library user can associate with the items (nodes, files) of the tree. I think this library can be made more useful with VirtualStorage where U is a type you can associate with the directories of the tree.

VirtualStorage is then equivalent with VirtualStorage. (If I'm not mistaken, F# allows unit where a type parameter is expected, but C# does not allow void.) The use case I have in mind has been mentioned in other comments as well: keep a representation of a file system in memory. For such use cases, you could then use VirtualStorage

But also in other use cases, associating information at the directory level might be very useful.

Going even further, maybe a third type might be associated with links as well?

Yet the timestamping service which I trust the most, is the Blockchain-based one. https://opentimestamps.org/

No, it's not. When A buys stocks from B based on knowlegde that A has, A is under no obligation to find out whether B has that knowledge as well and has understood what that knowledge entails to the same degree as A does.

Buying stocks based on non-public or not-yet-publicly-dissiminated knowledge is mostly perfectly legal. Only when such knowledge has been acquired by being an insider to the company, or through personal relations with insiders from that company, does one run into insider trading laws.

[0] https://uzhupisembassy.eu/uzhupis-constitution/