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Cake day: June 24th, 2023

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  • I’m not too sure being non-religious from the start would lead to better education. Seems to me that religion was quite a big driver behind early education. You’ll also have some trouble separating history religion and science at that point, people told each other stories about things that happened or how they thought things worked. Some of those stories are rather more fantastical than they needed to be, but how would you tell if there’s nothing to kickstart intellectual discourse in the first place?

    And the whole religion stops crime through fear idea seems overly simplistic. It’s the same reasoning that bigger sentences would lower crime, and so far that hasn’t worked terribly well.












  • Not sure about the self-driving, but he had a video challenging the idea that electrons in wires that carry electricity. Basically arguing that it was the electric fields themselves that carried the power, which is largely outside of the actual wires.

    Not sure if that’s the same one where he asked what would happen if you used a light switch connected to a lamp by two wires. Apart from some truly egregious mistaken units (1s/c as unit of time), I vaguely recall thinking it was basically a huge clusterfuck of misunderstandings about what an electrical circuit diagram even is (stuff like real vs idealized components, parasitic capacitance / inductance etc.)

    They’re the kind of ‘Well actually’ half true factoids that you never hope to encounter in the wild if you actually understand the stuff. For someone claiming to be enthusiastic about science communication he did one heck of a job poisoning concepts with subtly wrong/misleading explanations that make it a lot harder to explain stuff to anyone with the misfortune to encounter his version first.





  • The images can get big, but they’re fairly clever about it so it is manageable. Performance wise they don’t take up more CPU and RAM than a regular application.

    There’s an (unofficial) image running nodemon on dockerhub about 250MB in size. The official NodeJS image is about 300MB (presumably they’ve preinstalled a bunch of stuff). You could start with the official image and install nodemon on it, that would probably be most future proof (no way of knowing if the unofficial image keeps getting updates, if any).


  • To understand it you’ll need to know roughly what an OS is. Very roughly speaking an OS provides a program with a way to access files, connect to the internet and launch other programs.

    What docker does is make something a bit like a ‘virtual’ OS with its own filesystem, network and task manager, and then start running programs in it (which then may launch other programs).

    Since you’re not making a VM which must simulate all of the hardware, this is a lot cheaper. However since a docker container gets its own filesystem, network etc. it can do whatever it wants without any other programs getting in the way.

    Among other things docker containers make installation a lot easier since a program will only ever see its own files (unless you explicitly add your own files to the docker container). To a large extent you also don’t need to worry about installing any prerequisites, since those can just be put into the container.

    Making a docker container is a bit (a lot) like installing a fresh OS, just putting the stuff you need in it and then copying the whole OS whenever you want to run the thing again. Except it’s been optimized such that it takes about as much effort as launching a program, as opposed to a VM which needs dedicated resources and are generally slower than the machine that hosts them.