Olympians being "people with really intense hobbies" is still weird to me. I haven't reconciled in my mind that the life of AA baseball players getting paid a little more than minimum wage plus a meal stipend is a dream for 90% of Olympians who, if they win, become national symbols of excellence for a week every 4 years.
„Early days“ is until 1990 in that case, which is surprisingly late. Some nations got around the ban by employing the athletes as soldiers and allowing them to prepare almost full time though.
There was also a prevailing concept of fairness, in which practising or training was considered tantamount to cheating.[176] Those who practised a sport professionally were considered to have an unfair advantage over those who practised it merely as a hobby.[176]
Yes it was originally, but now you gotta have the money and time to pursue that sport at a professional level if you want to have any chance of even getting into the Olympics.
Personally I think it would be better if it was just regular joes doing the Olympics again, but state political interests kept dipping their hand into the pool to try and secure wins for some dubious political points.
Hmm I've never thought of any Olympic victory as being attributed in part to like, the current President, and I'd be surprised if anyone thought that would be the case. But it's not dubious that Americans (including myself) love to see our country winning things, and if we suddenly started tanking at the Olympics most of us would want our country to get our act together.
Of all the things the state does having national pride in competition does not seem nefarious to me. I also love it when we win the various math/science olympiads. Means our country is still a powerhouse across the board.
This is much more an autocratic country thing. Or small countries trying to promote themselves on the world stage, usually by picking a particular event and focusing on it.
Everyone's already heard of America, they don't need the marketing.
Jamaican bobsled team is basically the nation state sponsored-ish equivalent of that guy from one of the plains states that won a bunch of medals in downhill skiing a few years back.
No comment on the article it's just always interesting to get hit with intense jargon from a field I know very little about.
I understood the statements of all five questions. I could do the third one relatively quickly (I had seen the trick before that the function mapping a natural n to alpha^n was p-adically continuous in n iff the p-adic valuation of alpha-1 was positive)
Haha, the thing about jargon is that is typically hiding something not so bad. (At least in this case, the solution is something you could explain to a high-schooler).
This is just a highly visible problem. Bots make getting reservations at popular restaurants impossible for normal people. So they aren't necessarily being priced out they're being excluded by not being in the know. Which is frustrating. I'm in the know, thanks to my wife, and we still sometimes need to try for weeks to get a reservation because we refuse to pay on the black market.
Couldn’t restaurants have required an up front non refundable deposit and required the name of the person eating at the time of making the reservation?
Airlines/rental cars/hotels have solved this problem without legislation.
There are five different airlines, five different rental car companies, and five major hotel chains*. There are a million different restaurants, most of whom handle reservations with infrastructure consisting of a phone, a piece of paper, and a pen.
So what? Demand ID from the booker for people on the guest list to be seated. This is a solved problem and something that restaurateurs can fix in less than one second. No need for any legislation, no need for any digital system.
The people that show up also probably spend more if they paid for the reservation.
I’m a little curious why the restaurants don’t just charge more. From my simplistic understanding of economics, this sounds like consumers are willing to pay more for it, but restaurants are letting scalpers eat the excess. There must be a reason, they know the market better than me, just curious what it is.
Restaurants want to be as busy as possible as much as time as possible and to sell as high value produce as possible and tip the waiter well. And to come back when they're not booked up.
Scalpers just want to skim a margin off the top at peak time, and don't give a shit whether people think they've overpaid for the experience and end up skipping dessert and ranting about how mediocre it was on social media. Or indeed whether they actually sell all the reservations at all they haven't paid for, especially if the profit maximizing fee is one that leaves it half empty...
I’m curious about that too. My speculation is they think there aren’t enough people to fill their dining rooms who are willing to pay that much more. They could probably do something like auctioning off a certain number of last minute reservations, but then they risk looking predatory.
I'm happy to have my identity verified to get a reservation at a nice, popular restaurant without having to pay on the black market, and most of the people I know are the same.
I could see that value being chosen so people have no incentive to game the cert expiry. For whatever peace of mind it gives them to rotate certs only at low traffic times of the week.
Tip awkwardness has played a surprisingly big role in me eating healthier. No I don't want to tip you for handing me a prepackaged muffin. But you're paid like shit with an eye on making up the difference in tips. So I guess the choice is to just not shop there. Which takes out almost all places I'd get a snack at during the day.
For nonfiction I think about Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets and The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood by David Simon (and Ed Burns for The Corner) a lot. They are very funny and very sad and really changed how I see the world. So I cheated, two books.
"Being a billionaire must be insane. You can buy new teeth, new skin. All your chairs cost 20,000 dollars and weigh 2,000 pounds. Your life is just a series of your own preferences. In terms of cognitive impairment it's probably like being kicked in the head by a horse every day"
Solitary confinement is a great comparison. But also not existing in the same reality is 99.99% of the population must really warp you too.
The ideas and conclusions remind me of OpenBSD’s pledge too. They privilege separate a lot of their in house software so the a bit that talks to the internet is separated as much as possible from the bit that does parsing, for example. But that was a just best practice they tried to follow with no way of enforcing it. Once pledge was created they found violations as programs started being killed for using disallowed syscalls. For their use capability based security enhanced and proved something they did already just informally.
I like the approach of “all randomness on a system should come from a csprng unless you opt out”. It’s the stronger of two options where you lose a small amount of perf for a much stronger guarantee that you won’t use the wrong rng and cause a disaster. It’s a shame that this is still a sharp edge developers need to think about it pretty much all languages.
In 2024 that's the right answer. But the programming world does not move as quickly as it fancies it does, so decades ago when this implicit standard was being made it would be tougher, because the performance hit would be much more noticeable.
There's a lot of stuff like that still floating around. One of my favorite examples is that the *at family of file handling functions really ought to be the default (e.g., openat [1]), and the conventional functions really ought to be pushed back into a corner. The *at functions are more secure and dodge a lot of traps that the conventional functions will push you right into. But *at functions are slightly more complicated and not what everyone is used to, so instead they are the ones pushed into the background, even though the *at functions are much more suited to 2024. I'm still waiting to see a language's standard library present them as the default API and diminish (even if it is probably impossible to "remove") the standard functions. Links to any such language I'm not aware of welcome, since of course I do not know all language standard libraries.
