I think they may be jumping on the "shit on AI assisted project" bandwagon. I am by no means reaching for ai tools at every turn, but to suggest its plagiarized is laughable.
The greatest housebuilding period was in the inter-war years, mostly driven by private development. This collapsed after the war with the creation of the post-war planning system that tightly rationed land.
I grew up in council housing built during this period. It's not exactly premium but it was built fairly well and they sold well when many of them eventually made it onto the private market many decades later. Good sized gardens and I remember the council doing necessary repairs and upgrades throughout my time there.
I'm not exactly familiar with buildings from ex-soviet eastern Europe but I'd be surprised if it was a much higher build quality.
This doesn't describe council houses I've seen in London and surroundings (e.g. Milton Keynes/Bletchley).
What I remember:
- small rooms
- mould
- no insulation
- in larger buildings gardens, if any, would be only for ground floor flats
- in smaller buildings flats would be split over 3 levels, with each level being rather small
- often wired entrance to the flats from outdoor gallery/balcony (in larger buildings)
- low ceilings (for my liking)
My experience is from the midlands, specifically in council estates that were predominantly terraced and semi-detached houses (small blocks of 4 or so houses at a time). No flats so that might be a big distinguishing factor (as well as not being in London...). Definitely had problems but rarely because of the build quality itself, some issues with neglect in some areas.
> But the quality of what was built was worse than what the commies built in the Eastern Europe.
The rural council housing built in post-war UK was of really high quality: these houses were built for durability and community. They were solid brick or stone construction, and had large gardens to promote self-sufficiency. I grew up in one of these houses, and my parents grew enough vegetables in the enormous garden that we only needed meat and dairy from the store.
The article is an awful jumble of free-market junk, and as others have mentioned, doesn't mention Brexit or privatization as two of the main causes of economic stagnation.
The coal used for reduction of iron ore to iron can be replaced with hydrogen through direct reduction. See Hybrit which has working industrial scale demonstration plant today, though at reduced capacity. Full capacity plants are planned in multiple locations by 2036.
What do you mean by motion detection? Scene changes?
But whatever you mean, the answer is probably VapourSynth. In fact, you can probably do whatever you are trying to do inside VapourSynth instead of ffmpeg.
Mixed-use high-rises are really cool. You can go to the mall, the gym, the pool, see a movie, go to the dentist, or go grocery shopping just by taking the elevator. They almost feel like resorts you can live in.
In many, probably almost all US cities any downtown areas is used for "business" - i.e. commercial offices. The living pattern is you wake up, drive anywhere from 10-40 miles, 10 minutes to 2 hours, and you park your car in a parking garage and then walk a block to a skyscraper where you go up into an office area.
After World War II the US built highways that destroyed most cities. Take a look at the 1949 image and then the 1981 to get an idea [1]. The root cause of many of America's continued problems, ranging from racism and classism, to oil and car dependency are linked to what we did over the years.
Most US cities have a central business district that is majority commercial office space, with just enough retail/dining to let workers take lunch breaks. These are the areas that are dying. No workers, so the surrounding retail/dining is failing.
Back in the 50s/60s, white flight was a problem for cities - most of the middle class, white families moved to the suburbs. Most cities didn't have a large tax base that lived inside the city. That started to change over the last 20 years or so. Couple that with off-shoring or moving of heavy industry out of city cores and cities will struggle financially without white-collar/knowledge workers commuting in and spending money.
Western Europe doesn't have the same level of suburban sprawl.
Edit - the white flight I mention is closely related to the inner-city highways mentioned in the sibling comment. Suburban workers needed to get downtown, so (usually minority) neighborhoods were split in two or destroyed to built highways from the outskirts into the CBD.
I grew up in Houston, Texas. As a kid I remember downtown as being 1. Big office buildings with parking garages. 2. Concert halls & auditoriums. 3. City and county facilities. 4. Restaurants catering to the visitors of the above. 5. Sears & Roebuck department store.
Nobody lived downtown, and most of it was dead after working hours. Most of the office buildings had no street-level retail shops at all – there was no reason to go there except to work, or in the case of 2-3 of them, to visit the observation deck on the upper floor. The small area where (2) were concentrated didn't even have much in the way of restaurants or shops open. If you worked there, you drove downtown in the morning, came home in the evening. If you wanted to a concert, play, or ballet, you drove downtown, enjoyed the show, then drove home.
There was, and is, one unique thing about Houston. The tunnels. There is a network of underground walkways and areas connecting many of the buildings. There are some restaurants and shops, and during the lunch hour the area was packed. But you couldn't get to those tunnels without going into one of the office buildings, and they were only open working hours. Most of the stuff in the tunnels opened at 10am and closed at 2pm.
Predominantly, downtowns will have a financial, medical, and government district.
Government: police, city hall, courthouse, administration for city, county, state, and federal agencies.
Medical: usually a major or university hospital with various outpatient services in nearby.
Financial: banks, banking services, property and financial services.
Typically, just these 3 things were enough to compromise over 50% of commercial downtown properties. We're not even approaching cities that have a major HQ or specialty (manufacturing, tech, media, print).
For a lot of cities once a major tenant moved out, they really only had government and medical as the city's economic engines.
My city I've watched transform from being a violent, crack infest dump to a very desirable, fair weather place to be. And because of the loss of so much commercial business in the 90s they managed to avoid the glut of commercial properties. We pivoted to residential/mixed-use development in 2003 and it's really paying off now.
Our downtown doesn't do anything in particular (except maybe crypto) except be a place for socializing.
There are usually "student council" programs that give a handful of elected students a regular audience with administrators, but most of these programs don't have any teeth.
Graduate student council programs in particular are often built as a compromise to prevent the students from forming an organization with greater efficacy.
Anecdotally, some PIs I know have had to directly contend with rising organization among students and handed out a raise and a bonus to their labs.
In Sweden, students and graduate students are well-organized/unionized, but the situation for PostDocs and other post-doctoral fixed-term employed academics is dire nonetheless, in particular for immigrants, for whom the fixed-term contracts cause problems with their residence permits, considering recent changes in immigration laws.
And recent changes by the government have actually made it worse. The irony is that the unions have been campaigning for these changes. It's really weird how unions think that requiring that postdocs must get a permanent position after 4 years would somehow lead to them getting those positions, while there is no more funding from the government, so no permanent positions are being created. I mean in our department academic faculty have to find 50% of their salary plus ~80% overhead from external funding. Really universities in Sweden tend to be more like research hotels, with lots of regulations that you have to follow.
It's not weird at all, considering where the unions are coming from. This is from Finland and from 10+ years ago, but from what I remember, the Swedish way of thinking was similar.
According to the spirit of the law, all jobs are permanent by default. Fixed-term positions require a valid reason. A project (such as completing a PhD) is a valid reason. The availability of funding is not. While an externally funded research project could be considered a project, it's reasonable to assume that someone in the university will apply for funding for similar research in the future. Because someone is planning to continue similar projects in the future, the need for that particular externally funded researcher does not end when the initial grant runs out. And even if those applications fail, the university still has other money for paying the salary. The employment should continue until the university decides to reduce the number of people doing that kind of research permanently.
In principle, it should be categorically illegal to hire fixed-term postdocs, but the academia does not work like that. Because the union is a union first and a representative of specific people only after that, it's extremely unwilling to let go of the "all jobs are permanent by default" principle. There must be a compromise that allows the international standard practice of hiring postdocs for a few years without letting the employer to chain fixed-term positions indefinitely. Whether 4 years is a good compromise is debatable, but it's easy to see why a union would want something like that.
Also, from a Finnish perspective, Sweden has a reputation as a country where it's relatively easy to get a permanent academic position.
I believe you are thinking about representative bodies (maybe the equivalent of UA for undergrads, or GSC for grads, at MIT) while the union in the news is employment-based and is the sole legally recognized entity to negotiate salaries, employment conditions, etc. on behalf of MIT graduate students.
Graduate students are employees of the university. There are usually other unions at universities for employees, and undergraduate students working in universities can sometimes be in those unions as well, but graduate students as employees face some unique circumstances due to their employment and as a result often form their own union.
Traditionally for better or for worse, undergraduate representation comes by way of a student council, with a single person elected to a chair on the larger university advisory council (the structure can be different depending on the university, I'm generalizing).
There’s a distinction in the US between fully-funded PhD graduate students (who receive a stipend contingent upon research/TA work in an employment relationship) and professional/masters students who pay tuition, even though the latter group is also referred to as graduate students.
Note that for instance if you're there with a fellowship and aren't getting a partial RA/TA assignment as well then you're not eligible. I know that some masters students pay for their tuition, so they might not be eligible either since they're not getting a stipend.
Including undergraduates, who are primarily paying consumers, would have muddied the waters. Graduate students are clearly workers under any definition.
Masters programs are typically where you pay tuition and receive training via classes. PhD programs don't have much classwork and instead are positions where students are paid by the university but are expected to perform labor to produce original research.
Hm, here in Hungary PhD students can opt to do zero teaching[0], and also the tuition is 4500 EUR/semester (and students from the EU can apply for grants that covers 100% of tuition). And on top of all this it's possible to work for the university, which apart from the salary also results in the elimination of certain costs (eg. if someone is not employed by the university they have to pay to have their thesis examined and pay for the exam committee or something).
All Ph.D. programs nominally charge tuition, but hardly any students (at least in STEM, don't know about elsewhere) pay it. They get a stipend plus a "tuition waiver".
I think the lack of reader macros really help here. Macros in Clojure are much more "functions that run at compile time" rather than "look at this fun DSL I threw together".
What I think it comes down to though is adherence to convention. A preference hierarchy has grown together with Clojure and it goes:
1. Can it be expressed using data structures, do that. For example a map/dictionary lookup.
2. If that fails, express your more complex idea using a function.
3. If you absolutely must, write a macro.
You usually end up with very few macros except for those in the standard library, and those you end up with are more commonly of the convenience kind. One example would be the standard web routing library of the early 10's called Compojure that relied heavily on macros where my current favourite Reitit uses just data.
The last time “macros in Clojure” came up, I searched through some of the libraries I’ve run across to see how often they’re used and, as you suggest, it ain’t much.
Re-frame has just one, and it looks like it’s used for testing. Clara-rules has eight that are used in the library, which implements a forward-chaining Rete rule engine. Core.logic has a handful, and that’s essentially “prolog inside Clojure.” So clearly those libraries get a lot of mileage out of data and functions, with just a dash of macro.
I have yet to reach for them myself, and I can’t imagine a situation where I’d need a macro instead of a function. I think they’re probably great for library developers who are smarter than me, and I’m happy to leave them to it.
I think they come in handy when you've got some functionality that has to happen in a context that you can't easily move between function calls... Then you benefit from the ability to template into the description of that context some actions to perform _before_ you enter into the "black box".
That's pretty abstract but honestly its not really such an earthshattering feature. I'd argue it's pretty much necessary for any "final" programming language to be infinitely metaprogrammable (i.e. a lisp-3) but we don't have a mature language like that yet. Probably it will arrive from laskell/hisp kinda synthesis.
