Some years ago we ported some code from querying out the data and tallying in Python (how many are in each bucket) to using SQL to do that. It didn't speed up the execution. I was surprised by that, but I guess the Postgres interpreter is roughly the same speed as Python, which when you think about it perhaps isn't that surprising.

But Python is truly general purpose while the core query stuff in SQL is really specialized (we were not using stored procedures). So if Pypy can get 5x speedup, it seems to me that it should be possible to get the same kind of speed up in Postgres. I guess it needs funding and someone as smart as the Pypy people.

I once had to deal with many million data points for an application. I ended up mip-mapping them client-side.

But regarding sampling, if it's a line chart, you can sample adaptively by checking whether the next point makes a meaningfully visible difference measured in pixels compared to its neighbours. When you tune it correctly, you can drop most points without the difference being noticeable.

I didn't find any else doing that at the time, and some people seemed to have trouble accepting it as a viable solution, but if you think about it, it doesn't actually make sense to plot say 1 million points in a line chart 1000 pixels wide. On average that would make 1000 points per pixel.

I eventually installed Red Hat, started at university and lost most of my free time to study projects.

One of them was about building a habit. You find a small meaningless thing to do, it must have no purpose at all, and then you do it once every day for as long as it takes to become a habit, probably a month or two. E.g. you could fill a glass with water and throw it out.

I did the exercise (I would kneel for a few seconds when taking a bath) for a couple of months, and I think it worked for me. I've recently used the same tactic to build a useful habit.

Now building a new habit is not necessarily the same as changing an old habit.

I also found out that kneeling changed my perspective. I could think about a situation with some level of tension, kneel, and then my perspective on the same situation would be more humble and appreciative. YMMV.

The reason it hasn't happened yet is that they'd either have to increase tax income greatly, or reduce public spending greatly with financial support from Denmark. As I gather, infrastructure up there is really expensive.

They could have started some kind of certification thing for email providers and even funded a couple of certified email providers much more effectively than the digital post monstrosity.

That would have been awesome and forward looking, and perhaps even helped ordinary people get better security for their personal emails.

Perhaps we'll get there some day.

One thing to watch out for with immutability is that if you're dealing with personal information about people, immutability is probably illegal. You must be able to forget information, and not just simulate you've forgotten it.

I don't how universal this is at the moment, but I think it's likely to be more universal in the future.

As for being cost effective, onshore wind is probably the cheapest option, and I think it's hoped that offshore will come close to that once more of the learning curve has been traversed. Perhaps fossil gas from the North sea is still cheaper for now, if you ignore the external cost.

I think solar power is even cheaper, but doesn't deliver much in the winter so far up north.

Backup: Batteries are cost effective for short term shortages. For long term shortages, you'd fire up thermal plants, either biomass or biogas (fossil gas for now).

It doesn't make sense to back up wind with nuclear. Nuclear has a high capital cost and relatively low running costs, so you don't save much from being standby but you still need to pay back the loans.

I guess to effectively live a long life by eating other stuff, you need to be able to move, or what you eat need to be able to move to you.

But I think it was misguided. I'll note that 1/3 is not a number, it's a calculation. So more complicated.

And fractions are generally much more complicated than the decimal system. Beyond some simple fractions that you're bound to experience in your everyday life, I don't think it makes sense to drill fractions. In the end, when you actually need to know the answer to a computation as a number, you're more likely to make a mistake because you spend your time juggling fractions instead of handling numerical instability.

Decimal notation used to be impractical because calculating with multiple digits was slow and error-prone. But that's no longer the case.

It just explains that many of these things got traction despite the resistance against them only because the state needed them.

In the case of measurement units, one was that the natural units varied in size and could be gamed, which is a big problem for fair tax collection.

So I don't think the convergence idea is necessarily bad. It's perhaps somewhat niche, and it's not easy to pull off.

I almost never use a phone, so for me the major selling point of my tablet is no Android oddities or second-rate citizen vibes. I don't need to wade through an app store to do simple things. I'm not depending on a hardware vendor where support stops a few years down the road. Plugin a keyboard and mouse, and it's just like any other computer with a really small screen. I already have a desktop computer, so it doesn't replace anything, but the familiarity is still nice.

The touch experience is not as polished as Android. It's fine for my purposes, though. I'm mostly using the tablet as a night-time reader for epubs - dark background, light level at minimum, and then it works surprisingly well for when I wake up and need something to do before I can fall asleep again.

Perhaps I should add to this that they're actually super stable at slow speeds, compared to two-wheelers, especially when loaded. My wife prefers a cargo bike to her usual non-cargo bike, I think for this very reason.