PhD itself is an abbreviation for "Doctor of Philosophy." The title is more about the original Greek "lover of wisdom" than about the modern academic discipline of philosophy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_of_Philosophy
Doctor is similar - in the US, when someone says "Doctor" they usually mean "Medical Doctor" but "Doctor" just comes from the Greek "teacher" / "scholar" which is more broad and the title can still be used officially and correctly for PhDs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_(title)
Just a little correction. Doctor is Latin and roughly means "someone who has learned a lot."
Science also originally referred to knowledge. What we think of as "science" used to be called the natural sciences. Sometimes people get confused because I have a B.S. in Classics because science has lost that broader meaning.
Indeed, in the Summa Theologica, Thomas Aquinas asks if theology is a science, and concludes that it is. He also gave lip service to logical rigor and falsifiability, in the latter case by encouraging the discipline of asking contrary questions and answering them. What he didn't do was appeal to empirical data, to any great extent.
I think the reasoning behind "doctor of philosophy" may be lost to history. All knowing Wikipedia suggests that it didn't happen at once. My take was that the requirements for a modern PhD were added long after the title was adopted.
I suspect there was a time when a person could be well versed in multiple of what are now separated fields, and that you had to be a philosopher to make sense of science and math. Also, as science was flexing its own wings, claiming to be a philosopher might have been a way to gain an air of respectability, just like calling a physician "doctor" when the main impact of medicine was to kill rich people.
It is still called natural science, but it used to be called natural philosophy.
And it is interesting, as you say, that when it comes to Bachelor/Master/Doctor of Science/Art/Philosophy (even professor), these are all titles formed from arbitrary terms that have been enshrined by the institutions that give people these titles.
I’m less concerned about the supply of handymen inflating and more concerned about demand falling. If AI really does replace a huge portion of the people with the money to hire handymen and plumbers and the property to need them where do they get the work from? More people will DIY out of necessity even if the results are worse because they won’t have another option and fewer people will have the property to maintain in the first place.
> Edit: hey, can your kids inherit your "digital content"? They can inherit your disc collection.
With arrival of the holiday season I brought out my Christmas CDs and records from storage. I use these exclusively for music in the house/car/etc., and part of why is that I have kids and I want them to be able to inherit these some day. I understand that physical media degrades and they may not be able to "use" these at some point, but they'll still have the objects and know exactly what versions they "grew up with" and could potentially track down / make replacements. (See also: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/217710-this-milord-is-my-fa...)
I've had family members pass and I've appreciated having physical things I can hang onto, especially things like tools, music, and books where I can use/listen/read and feel a connection with them.
(Full disclosure I also prefer physical games, music, and books in general both for my own consumption and for ownership rights reasons.)
This doesn't have to be an either/or situation: You can have the physical CDs, and use them for as long as they last, and also rip them to have the digital files that you own.
Sure, the HDDs and SSDs you store them on will degrade over time, too—but you can transfer the digital files to new ones, with perfect fidelity, as many times as you want.
it's actually a reasonably cost-effective way to collect music by going to used book stores and buying used CDs, then ripping them and serving them to yourself with something like Navidrome so that you have the convenience of streaming w/ the physical disk on a shelf somewhere
I can't stand the stupid streaming "But not on THIS service" model of movie watching, so this is how I do movies. $5 on ebay gets you pretty much any DVD you want, $100 or so for a box set of some television show, and ripping DVDs is literally one click. I've wanted to switch to BluRays lately, because HD, and they are barely more expensive than DVDs on ebay, but ripping blurays is NOT trivial.
Standard Blu Rays? Are you sure about that? I started ripping my blus at the beginning of the year and don't remember it being more difficult than buying any random Blu ray drive, downloading MakeMKV and clicking the start button.
Now, I'll 100% agree about 4K Blu rays. I got lucky in that I bought one of the handful of drives that supports ripping 4k disks (since its encryption keys were leaked?) but even after that it required finding and flashing custom firmware that was a hassle. But I got it working which is cool.
Even if X isn't the right solution to my use case I still often want to know _why_ X (or my implementation of X) doesn't work. The answer to that might be a really valuable learning independent of the problem at hand.
I was in university when Snake Eater came out and I got to play it when I went home during the Christmas break. I got to The End fight and had to go back. When I came back during March break I didn't have to win the fight because he died.
I hated that one, cause it wasn't game box but disk case, and in game I'd just picked up a disk and spent forever trying to figure out how to look at the case before looking up the answer.
You know the PlayStation Classic mini-console that came out a few years back? They incorporated that puzzle into the console's packaging: the back of the PSClassic's box includes thumbnails for the 20 or so games that come installed, and MGS's thumbnail is just a picture of Meryl's codec convo screen. It cracked me up when I first saw it.
4th wall breaking stuff is cool. A few other big games that break the fourth wall in boss fights: Arkham Asylum (Scarecrow), Undertale (Flowey), Pony Island (Asmodeus.exe). Nier does something similar.
I know I am in an (extreme) minority with lots of people considering it a classic, but honestly while it is creative I always thought that was total bullshit and an example of extremely gimicky game design. It literally made me never play another Kojima game after that.
IIRC, if you take long enough to figure it out, you can call your "support team" in-game and they'll give you hints about trying the second controller port.
(Also I love that this and the comment chain immediately above it are both Kojima games. Can't wait to see what kind of mechanics he throws at us in DS2.)
In the US I suspect "contract to hire" fills a similar function. I see that all the time but I don't think I've ever seen an official "probation period" on an employee role. (Could also be regional or industry dependent.)
The idea behind probation period is that it becomes much more difficult to fire someone after that due to labor laws. US doesn't have such laws, most states are at-will employment so you don't have to give any reason to fire someone.
Probation periods are seen in the US, despite "right to work" labor laws because A) the company is large and has employees in California, or another state where labor laws favor the employees a bit more or B) the company wants to minimize the chance of getting slapped with a wrongful termination lawsuit. Regardless of labor laws, it's universally illegal to discriminate/fire someone for their race, religion, gender, marital status, age, et. al. and I think companies, especially when they want to fire someone who might believe they are being discriminated against, want an airtight defense (usually a PIP). Even though the employer will probably win the legal case, they still would rather not have a lawsuit at all.
Another possibility is that women are more likely to choose to self report their status as "in a relationship" vs. men. (Which would be an interesting finding on its own!) I'm not sure which source they pulled those figures in the first line from, but elsewhere it talks about PEW studies and the Survey Center on American Life which are presumably working from self reported survey data? "Married" is easier to track objectively than "single" vs. "in a relationship" which is more subjective. Is having been on three dates a "relationship?" Is it a relationship if you never talked about it with each other in those terms? If you're dating multiple people non-exclusively are you "in a relationship" or "single"? (I'm not asking; just speculating that two people might answer those questions differently.)
The 60% / 30% figure doesn't pass the sniff test to me.
Edit: Noticed the comment about this data focusing on "young" women and men and the possibility that more women are dating men outside that range than men are doing the same. That's also a good explanation. This was mentioned in the article too; I was just initially underestimating its significance.
That’s a good point that the article doesn’t touch on! (and along with the other ones from the article, makes a lot more sense than the “10% of the men date all the women” meme I see repeated in this HN discussion).
I'm ok with not allowing multi "household" sharing in principle, but I doubt this can be enforced without causing problems for even for single household users and seems like an odd way to handle this. Thinking about travel especially. Restricting the number of currently streaming devices makes way more sense to me and should support "add a screen" up charges. Rather than fighting the "sharing" use case - why not find a way to monetize it?
I can hardly wait to see how this plays out in my family.
2 adults, 2 kids, multiple devices (Phones/Tables/AppleTV/"Smart" TVs), multiple homes, one 4 stream subscription. On average i would say each user has about 3 devices capable of watching Netflix, and on any given day i would say 8-12 different IP addresses are in use, depending on commutes to/from school/work.
Add to that the summerhouse which also has AppleTV.
And while i don't mind them trying to limit password sharing, i will not spend my time defending myself over legitimate use, so the second this bothers me i'm hitting the unsubscribe button. I have enough "time robbers" to deal with, and i'm too old to deal with stuff that doesn't work by itself once setup. Keeping the internet/wifi running is work enough, i don't need the extra stress of signing in my kids devices every n days.
They already are restricting the number of devices and charge you for extra.
Im paying for the 4K plan in the UK which comes with up to 4 devices simultaneously.
We have Netflix installed on the TV, consoles, mine and my other half’s mobile devices and based on the T&C when I signed up it’s ok because it’s a single household.
However I don’t see how they’ll enforce no sharing whilst not breaking existing household account usage.
The add a screen up charge seems like such an obvious move. There's an up charge for 4k, so why not this? It just seems like an easy fix. Would it eliminate 100% of the problem being addressed, no, but it would go a long long way for PR moves.
Then again, it's easy to arm chair other people's decisions.
> I like the Laundry Files approach - James Bond-esque action plus Dilbert-esque bureaucratic and IT disfunction. (Also monsters.)
On re-reading old Dilbert with an eye towards modern Scott Adams, I find it harder to enjoy, but more time with Stross, e.g., on https://www.antipope.org/charlie, just makes me enjoy the Laundry Files more.
On his blog as well as his speaking engagements, Stross does mention that he tried to make politics as absurd as possible yet reality seemed to make him seem like the "straight man" in a comedy duo.
Doctor is similar - in the US, when someone says "Doctor" they usually mean "Medical Doctor" but "Doctor" just comes from the Greek "teacher" / "scholar" which is more broad and the title can still be used officially and correctly for PhDs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_(title)