I can't speak for all, but I came from a lower/lower-middle income family... when I was in my later teens, I generally didn't hold a lot of money to trust in debit purchases not overdrawing. Didn't even have a CC until I was nearly 30yo.
Ironically, I hear the ones that were shut down in Germany were some of the best maintained in the world and had very high "capacity factors" even when compared with other nuclear (fraction of time delivering power to the grid). It seems like the solution to poor maintenance is better maintenance? Some of the causes of recent poor French maintenance are analyzed here: https://player.fm/series/decouple/somethings-rotten-with-fre...
I assume you wouldn't seriously argue that rivers are the limiting factor to deployment of nuclear energy.
Being “anti nuclear” made a lot of sense until a madman decided to attack Ukraine.
And with the world economy stabilizing after that mad man’s actions it’s again making a lot of sense as nuclear continues to be far more expensive than other renewable alternatives.
It's cheaper to run your 30 year old, perfectly fine, perfectly safe, well-functioning nuclear plant than to build and run a new natural gas plant - which is what Germany decided to do.
As kevinwang has pointed out in slightly different terms: the hypothesis that seems wooly to you seems sharply pointed to others (and vice versa) because explanationless hypotheses ("changing the colour of the button will help") are easily variable (as are the colour of the xkcd jelly beans), while hypotheses that are tied strongly to an explanation are not. You can test an explanationless hypothesis, but that doesn't get you very far, at least in understanding.
As usual here I'm channeling David Deutsch's language and ideas on this, I think mostly from The Beginning of Infinity, which he delightfully and memorably explains using a different context here: https://vid.puffyan.us/watch?v=folTvNDL08A (the yt link if you're impatient: https://youtu.be/watch?v=folTvNDL08A - the part I'm talking about starts at about 9:36, but it's a very tight talk and you should start from the beginning).
Incidentally, one of these TED talks of Deutsch - not sure if this or the earlier one - TED-head Chris Anderson said was his all-time favourite.
plagiarist:
> That doesn't test noticing the button, that tests clicking the button. If the color changes it is possible that fewer people notice it but are more likely to click in a way that increases total traffic.
"Critical rationalists" would first of all say: it does test noticing the button, but tests are a shot at refuting the theory, here by showing no effect. But also, and less commonly understood: even if there is no change in your A/B - an apparently successful refutation of the "people will click more because they'll notice the colour" theory - experimental tests are also fallible, just as everything else.
Will watch the TED talk, thanks for sharing. I come at this from a medical/epidemiological background prior to building software, and no doubt this shapes my view on the language we use around experimentation, so it is interesting to hear different reasoning.
Good to see an open mind! I think most critical rationalists would say that epidemiology is a den of weakly explanatory theories.
Even though I agree, I'm not sure that's 100% epidemiology's fault by any means: it's just a very difficult subject, at least without measurement technology, computational power, and probably (machine or human) learning and theory-building that even now we don't have. But, there must be opportunities here for people making better theories.
> Some people just seem to have knack on being able to switch between layouts, but I just couldn't.
Did you put in serious deliberate practice time and still find that? If yes, what sort of time?
I suspect those people just did that sort of practice (even if maybe not really attending much to the fact they were doing so - I don't think that's a contradiction!)
I'm not saying that's not a thing, but if you're going to switch keyboard layout I do think that's objectively the least of your problems. Re-learning a huge list of common letter pairs, triples, etc. that appear in words in English / your native language(s) is a bigger task.
To make a hyperbolic comparison: seems a little like saying that learning cyrillic letters is a problem for learning Russian: true, but compared to learning the rest of the Russian language...
Of course if you just stick to a non-QWERTY layout and never use QWERTY, you don't have this problem. My solution to that has mostly been to use an external "mechanical" keyboard that I flash with a colemak layout. But on laptops I often type on that keyboard and use software to switch and that's worked OK for me too. Some programs use the key code instead of the letter, and that messes me up occasionally on laptop keyboards (maybe VS code, from memory?).
Colemak does keep C, X and V in the same places for this reason, but if you're a big hotkey user, that's only a small part of it.
It is useful, but it's worth knowing that most of the learning effort to get up to speed comes only after you've been through all the intermediate stages, just gradually speeding up on the final full-colemak stage. But it's a big help in not quitting early on from frustration I think. There's a few really painful changes like the changes in where R and S go, and making noticeable progress before that is a big motivator.
I just typed "leasning" instead of "learning" 3 times, all these years later, huh. I suppose because I was thinking about it!
I also switched for reasons of keeping my hands happy (as a prevention measure), not for typing speed.
I'm a bit slower than I was in QWERTY (at a guess, maybe if I race I easily get to 80 instead of 90 wpm or something, not sure). If I kept up with deliberate practice I'd end up faster than I was I think, but I don't really do that.
I think at this point I'm faster in Colemak than I ever was in QWERTY, but speed doesn't matter anywhere near as much as comfort and I also don't think I've ever really "thought" more than 30-50 wpm in real world practice anyway. Typing test scores are useless rote repetition exercises and don't reflect real world typing anyway. I've almost never encountered the need to just retype out everything I'm reading that someone else wrote outside of typing tests. (Though admittedly in the typewriter era that was a more useful skill, before digital files and copy-and-paste.)
There are games out there that help you learn the skill of switching quickly.
As at least one other person has commented, context acts as a switch even when you can't directly "find" the switch consciously. It isn't only the keyboard. I learned colemak on one keyboard while I continued with QWERTY on another, and it wasn't a big surprise that it was hard to do the reverse for a while. What did really surprise me was that I couldn't type QWERTY in the typing drill software I was using for Colemak, and I couldn't type Colemak in the online typing test where I was used to typing QWERTY! It wasn't a subtle effect, quite a dramatic speed plummet, especially in the former case - and just switching back to my normal text editor was enough to speed up my QWERTY again 30 seconds later!
I guess if you focus practice on finding that switch, for example with those games, that's just another skill you can learn like any other. Some people certainly have got very good at that with practice.
Yes, aren't we under-focusing a bit, right now, on the goals that in the past were achieved by writing code but will in the future be achieved by LLMs themselves (and their replacements)?
For example, maybe we write some code now with the goal of helping a customer service person do their job. But we all know that plenty of people are trying to replace customer service people with LLMs, not use LLMs to write tools to help customer service people.
I see that the LLM still needs to know what's going on with the customer account, and maybe for a long time that takes the form of conventional APIs. But surely something is going to change here?
