I needed gcc 6 for testing and decided to upgrade the whole system about three weeks ago. It was very easy and it's still pretty stable. I might do a fresh reinstall now...
If you go from stable to testing (or unstable), it should work relatively well closer to release time when bugs in upgrade path are mostly ironed out.
I was talking about the freeze itself though. It affects testing too which is normally rolling. So if the freeze is too long, things start becoming annoying.
Edit: Wow a lot of bs going on in the comments. First of all, there's an immense number of ways a DNA strand can degrade, and only one of them splits the strand in two. The relative importance of all these pathways depend on the environment of the DNA, which obviously changes for each and every fossil you have. The global kinetics of "DNA degradation" are supposedly first-order, which implies constant half-life.
Hey, I know someone working on a plaintext email service which should be encrypted by default, without attachments. I can post to HN if/when it's public.
Standard SMTP and IMAP but only plaintext is allowed, no attachments. If it works out it will be encrypted by default with a privkey + passphrase upon account creation, and you can of course encrypt on your own on top of the defaults.
A report's good, but I care more about assurance of the integrity of the software I was running than having Windows Defender not quarantine my stuff. My build server has been remote-inaccessible all week when a simple 'no compromise of binaries that I know of, quite sure it's a false positive' would have sufficed.
I've often wondered how long Canada can stay an independent country. I doubt it can last 100 more years, unfortunately. Some patriots in 1837 asked this very question as well, wondering why we shouldn't just join the USA and benefit from "more of everything" without sacrificing democracy. They were hanged.
The way Trump has acted towards Canada, talking about NAFTA etc, made me think of someone who has an eye for the territories up north...
Looking at the situation right now I'd think the opposite. It seems dubious for the U.S. as it is structured right now with its internal political tribal conflicts to last 100 more years, whereas Canada is more stable and internally harmonious now than it was for most of the 20th century.
Quebec separatism is mostly quiet. There's a left/centrist government in Alberta for the first time, reducing provincial tensions between the west and central Canada. Trade links with Europe and Asia have been broadened or are broadening. The economy remains spmewhat tepid but stable.
Meanwhile the U.S. itself has progressed closer and closer into the depths of right wing extremism, and shows no signs of healing.
The U.S. is not simply progressing into the depths of right-wing extremism, its extremism on both sides. If you watch Fox News, the administration and the republicans can do no wrong. Change the channel to MSNBC or CNN and the president can't do a damn thing right and all republicans are morons.
Agreed to an extent, but I think we're going to have to wait and see what the next four years have in store for us. A lot of being Canadian has to do with... not being American. The only place in Canada where I feel there is a definite core identity (completely separable from "not being american") is Quebec.
Harper being so pro-monarchy, insisting on the War of 1812 as being a national foundational myth, trying to assert soverignty in the North seem to be a realization of this identity problem. Also take the current celebrations for the federation's 150th anniversary: the branding completely skips the fact that there were people in the region calling themselves Canadiens for roughly 200 years prior...
Add to that the recent underwhelming documentary on the country's history done by the CBC and the current Premier's own belief that the country has no core identity (being "post-national").
All in all I believe there's a good chance that Canada as you and I know it today will not be around to celebrate another 100 years.
Canada has always been an elitist kleptocracy profiting off shipping out resources -- Laurentian or other elites whose fundamental modus operandi has been to control the process of digging stuff up, cutting it down, pumping it out, or trapping/killing/skinng it... and sending it out of the country while doing the least amount of industry building at home. It's always been the Family Compact, the HBC, CN, CP. A small club of elites. The current Prime Minister is the epitome of it.
Those people are still in charge and not going anywhere. As long as there's something to dig up and sell to the world they'll hold on for dear life.
The thing with thinking outside the box is that you never really know if you're doing it right unless you hit the "jackpot". I.e. an idea seems obvious to you, but not to your co-workers/friends/bosses/whatever and is usually met with serious resistance from them. Especially in a work setting where you have to convince "non-technical" people. Sometimes it takes more than nice words to get your message across.
I'm a neophyte player (1250), actively learning. I can definitely see how learning chess to a respectable level (~1500) can help you make decisions in everyday life. I could elaborate a bit but this is a subject about which much has already been written.
I really don't think so. Getting really good at a game involving a discrete territory relies heavily on developing spatial intuitions that are specific to the game. Through experience and study of prior games, you get increasingly aware of the possibilities of positions many moves in advance; humans aren't built to exhaustively analyze game trees like the naive chess AIs of the 90s. If the game isn't a transparent metaphor for something else in life, then the intuitions won't apply either. Real life doesn't have things that move like knights, or shape the board like pawns.
An Elo score of 1500 is not considered being "really good" at chess.
In real life, you have to make choices. Some choices preclude certain futures while enabling others. Sometimes you can make a sacrifice now in order to "win" later. Etc.
I am not saying that memorizing complex mating patterns for example can be directly transposed to real life decision making. Rather, realizing these exist, and appropriating the patterns of thought that make such analyses possible is what is beneficial.
You are right that we aren't "built to exhaustively analyze game trees", but this is precisely what makes learning chess a good thing: you get to train your mind to do that. Transposing that skill in real life is, I believe, beneficial.
I had always assumed ELO was an acronym of some kind, turns out it's the surname of the system's inventor; Arpad Elo. [0]
And, according to Wikipedia, 1500 would be a mid-level player, so not really good, but certainly not beginner either.
> In general, a beginner is around 800, a mid-level player is around 1600, and a professional, around 2400.
Of course you are right, vut part of getting good in chess is learning to think ahead in the first place, to stop thinking just about what you want to do, but about what your opponent wants to do...I think up to ELO 1500 is just learning to basic discipline in your thinking
There are some basics, like thinking about your goal, thinking about your opponent's goal. A newish player will start realizing that they can advance their goal and foil their opponent's goal. A few shades beyond simply missing basic moves, and actively exploiting pins, forks, and skewers. That level, competent but far from elite, i think generalizes reasonably well.
I think you're at a much more specialized level. You need to see many moves ahead, and predict your opponent effectively. That won't generalize so well, because it's purely focused on the rules of chess.
Would you consider mathematics to help you in everyday life? I'm wondering because I know some people who argue that it doesn't, while I argue that it does. We might be confronted to a similar issue here?
> I'm a neophyte player (1250), actively learning. I can definitely see how learning chess to a respectable level (~1500) can help you make decisions in everyday life.
It won't. Chess is a game, you can learn chess to play a better game of chess and maybe you'll find other games where you can use the knowledge gained (but less likely), but you will rarely - if ever - be in a position where you apply a lesson learned in chess to a real life situation. And if you did you probably would end up making a mistake.
