Neat read on the whole, but was fun to see how huge the author believes Estonia is:

> When Estonia, for example, became independent of the Soviet Union, some 245 million square miles of collectivist farmlands were simply abandoned.

To convert that figure to a more relatable number: the surface area of the Earth is just about 197 million square miles. With such an error I'm having a hard time trusting the article content.

Technically, if you're measuring surface area, it' important to remember that the earth is not a sphere. There's a bit of a paradox measuring shorelines: the shorter your ruler, the longer it gets, because you're able to capture more complex features. Pethaps the authors took an extremely precise measurement of the surface of Estonia, counting everything down to the sinus cavities of dogs sleeping in alleys...

Area isn’t notably affected by fractal boundaries. Only perimeter is.

Can you explain this more? It seems trivial to extrude a 2d coastline along a third dimension to produce a paradoxical areal calculation corresponding precisely to the perimeter paradox...

If you extrude a coastline into a wall the wall's surface area will blow up the same way the measured perimeter does, but that;s because you've turned a boundary-length problem into the area of a different object. It still doesn't mean the country's ordinary map area becomes paradoxical, the extra boundary detail only affects a vanishingly thin strip near the edge, so the enclosed 2D area stays well behaved.

Aha, so you've misunderstood my joke entirely. We agree about the math, please reread my original comment with the understanding that I'm insinuating that the article has deviated from "ordinary map area" and is instead measuring the fractal surface area contained within Estonia's perimeter.

[now that the joke is explained, feel free to laugh]

Common enough error in the US when dealing with square meters abbreviated to sq m. Only off but a factor of 2.6 million.

But yes, it does call into question the rest of the fact checking.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estonia Area • Total 45,335 km2 (17,504 sq mi)

Some people are just oblivious to six orders of magnitude mistakes, and then go off about "folly, mistake, calamitous hubris, neglect, and plain stupidity" ...

Assuming this is about Harju, it seems the author read "245 million sq m" and assumed the m was miles, not metres.

So the already large 24,500 hectare farm became a ludicrous 245 million square mile multi-planetary behemoth.

Reading sq m as square miles is a surprisingly common error in the US, but usually gets caught before production or publication because the result is orders of magnitude out.

Quoted straight from the piece, as written by dude who just made one of the smallest countries around have abandoned farms larger than the whole world ...

But many people are really like this, no notion whatsoever of order of magnitude plausibility. Has to be beaten out of engineering students, but I suppose the majority of the population is untreated.

(LLMs are going to be a lot of fun too)

I mean it's sort of hard to believe anything they say.

That website has some other more out-there stuff on it. (I love the tone because it’s impossible to tell how tongue-in-cheek it is)

Coffee and wine glass https://www.toxel.com/tech/2019/10/10/coffee-and-wine-glass/

Sofa made of pillows https://www.toxel.com/inspiration/2024/11/12/sofa-made-of-pi...

My version of that is to just use a (high-end) Chromebook. The OS never gets in the way, can’t remember the last time I had to change a system setting or manually upgrade anything

Ironically the UX on Reuters and AP wasn’t hugely worse than the blogspam: * the text of the blogspam is pretty faithful to the AP article * Reuters had a fullscreen paywall * the AP had a floating video ad and an interstitial you have to click to get below the fold

If I’m understanding right, he has a side hustle as a public speaker. So the website is an ad for him.

I agree it does a pretty good job of communicating that. I think the other commenters are pointing out that doesn’t show how to efficiently get all the smaller items left of the partition and larger ones to the right. While that’s probably second nature to most people who’ve taken an algorithms class or done a decent amount of programming, I guess it’s up for interpretation how obvious it would be to the “intended audience” of the ikea manual

It’s a class/geographical thing. In my early childhood in a fancy suburb of a big city, my parents and people in their social circle used mixes 0% of the time, but when we moved to a smaller town it was way more common.

You're talking about USA, I'm not.

When you’re too busy to spend the money you make, the observable effect of a pay raise is mostly the number in the account going up faster

Agreed. I work at a highly successful small company with a reputation for being grindy, and what that looks like in reality is probably 55 hours a week of largely focused productive work: typical core hours are 9-6:45ish, and you work longer a day or two a week and put in the odd evening or weekend hour. It’s hard to imagine working 9-9 every day

55 hours is still insane. I could only do it in a highly growing startup as an early engineer, with the expectation I'm out in few years.

Really? Ive yet to encounter a job that expected less than 55hr as general minimum.

I don't really like the comment I'm about to write but get a life and set foot outside that bubble.

It's also cringe how this kind of comments on "how long one works" come from north americans. It's not cool.

Yeah your comment says a lot about what kind of person you are. Not a good one.

I've not had much choice in life as to what kind of work I can get. I was not born with rich parents and could only afford a non prestigious Uni. I absolutely hate that this kind of exploitation is common (in USA).

Its nice that some people like you have a spoiled life and can dump on the less fortunate though.

If it's 3% + $0.30, that can easily be 5-7% for smaller transactions, which are the ones where I most often get asked to pay cash.