Roundup #25: Barber sign, Lex Fridman, programming, Europe vs Airconditioning, and some other random interesting stuff
The 25th roundup! It's a milestone post that is nicely all over the place. Check it out!
Why have we agreed on a globally accepted sign for barber, and why is it this?
From Wikipedia:
During the Middle Ages, barbers performed surgery on customers, as well as tooth extractions. The original pole had a brassen wash basin at the top (representing the vessel in which leeches were kept) and bottom (representing the basin that received the blood). The pole itself represents the staff that the patient gripped during the procedure to encourage blood flow,[5] and the twined pole motif is likely related to the Caduceus, the staff of the Greek god of speed and commerce Hermes, evidenced for example by early physician van Helmont's description of himself as "Francis Mercurius Van Helmont, A Philosopher by that one in whom are all things, A Wandering Hermite."[6]
Quite macabre, actually. I did not see that coming.
Lex Fridman: Found myself listening to a Lex Fridman podcasts, which I don’t usually do. I wanted to hear what David Heinemeier Hanson (DHH) had to say. Early on in the podcast, Lex said something that I felt is so typical for his style, and why I struggle to sit through these podcasts. He was talking about enjoying a big desk:
“Mostly because I love horizontal desk space”
Now, what in the hell is vertical desk space, Lex? Has anyone ever seen a vertical desk? It’s like an obsession with sounding smart that leads him to adding a lot of unnecessary adjectives to stuff. It can’t be just “I love a big desk”. It has to be “horizontal desk space”. Not “the competition it created”, but “the features that present the competition they created”. A bit post-modern.
Functional vs Object-Orienting programming: From the same podcast, DHH is the creator of Ruby on Rails, a programming framework built on Ruby. In a primarily object-oriented language like Ruby, there are classes (a table), and objects (table #5), that then do things (change their booking status). If Table #5 gets booked, a ‘method’ would change the booking status to booked. The fundamental paradigm seems to be that you sort of ask the table to book itself. I find it very, very difficult to understand this paradigm. In my mind, it would be much more logical if someone runs a function that books a table: if a bookings comes in, run the book function on table #5 and change it’s status to booked.
That is a more ‘Functional Programming’ way of thinking. Programming languages that are predominantly functional are Javascript and… Excel. All of my first programming experience is with Excel. And so I am very used to think:
=sum(A1:A10) instead of:
A1, please sum yourself with A2:A10Maybe it explains why I find Javascript a lot easier to follow than some of the other things I’ve tried over the years.
No bread in Paris.
“Day in the life of Successful Person” content is absurd. Is this guy serious? He doesn’t even explain himself further in the article. Is this an American thing?
The Radiology profession has enthusiastically embraced AI, and the labor force is continuing to grow
Paraphrasing something Melanie Mitchell pointed out to me, if you define jobs in terms of tasks maybe you're actually defining away the most nuanced and hardest-to-automate aspects of jobs, which are at the boundaries between tasks.
Can you break up your own job into a set of well-defined tasks such that if each of them is automated, your job as a whole can be automated? I suspect most people will say no. But when we think about other people's jobs that we don't understand as well as our own, the task model seems plausible because we don't appreciate all the nuances.
Pig Butchering Scams: Awesome podcast series from the same journalist that made “The Prince” about Xi Jinping: https://www.economist.com/audio/podcasts/scam-inc
Paywalled.
Noah Smith wrote a piece about Europeans vs airconditioning: I was somewhat baffled by this post about Europeans ‘crusading’ against AC. As far as I’m aware, even in the Netherlands tons of people are installing aircons and modern electronic climate control methods like heat pumps, that can cool in the summer and heat in the winter.
There is a kernel of truth, in that many older people in Europe don’t like airconditioning. Some people think it makes them sick. It is definitely true that many Europeans are annoyed at over-enthusiastic use of AC. In Singapore, you have to bring a sweater to the movie theatre, and many people in offices wear hoodies indoors. It is indeed true that this seems actually is both annoying (because you have to bring a sweater) and wasteful. But pushback against making indoor spaces so cold that you have to bring winter clothes, is not a crusade against aircon as a technology.
I don’t disagree with everything. Noah makes the point that Europe gets a high number of heat deaths that could be prevented with Aircon. That is a good one. Seems like with weather getting hotter, that will likely get worse. But Europeans don’t ‘crusade’ against A/C. Malls, cinemas, and offices are all air conditioned in Europe too. So we’re really only talking about AC in homes, I suppose. As I said, I know many people who are installing A/Cs in their homes, at least in the Netherlands. But apparently, there are countries that block aircon installation on emissions grounds.
This gets to what I think is the only good point of Noah’s post: Some Europeans believe that the reason the world is getting hotter is because of excessive energy use for things like aircon, and if everyone in the world just would stop using aircon we could reverse global warming. I agree with Noah that this is Degrowth ideology and it just doesn’t make sense. Not installing aircon in homes in Europe won’t do anything to prevent climate change. Europe should switch from a mentality of bringing down energy use to heavily investing in renewable energy to actually increase energy use, I do agree with that.
But Noah tries to make a lot of cultural points, and they all just sound absurd to me:
I kind of suspect that there’s a second, deeper reason why Europe so far refuses to install AC: protection of traditional culture. The thing about German elites pooh-poohing AC as an unnecessary American extravagance suggests that some Europeans view lack of AC as quintessentially European culture — a tradition by which Europeans can define their own uniqueness vis-a-vis the rest of the world.
First of all, culture isn’t static, and this is…. just A/C? Everyone has A/C in their car and office anyway already. And then he also claims that:
the resistance to AC technology is making Europe a more impoverished civilization. It’s a major reason why Europe now feels shabbier and more hardscrabble than America, despite its beautiful old cities and low crime rates.
[emphasis mine]
Resistance to aircon is A MAJOR REASON(!!!) Europe feels shabbier than America(???). Europe feels shabbier than America now? Dude… I mean, Rural Bulgaria vs Santa Monica, sure. But in general? Kind of an ‘all-in podcast’ moment with Noahpinion for the first time.
And what an absolutely, brilliantly perfect segue to the first quote from Erwin Knoll below!
New additions to my list of favorite quotes (link to all of them here)
Everything you read in the newspapers is absolutely true except for the rare story of which you happen to have firsthand knowledge.
Erwin Knoll
It’s easier to get to the top than to stay there. You can have the finest product in the world, but if you don’t go to sell it it’s worth nothing.
Estee Lauder
He who does not enjoy solitude will not love freedom.
Schopenhauer
To know what you are going to draw, you have to begin drawing
Picasso