FredPret

6 ms·

31.
by FredPret 1y ago
This is unbelievably amazing. Instant favourite, along with the Apollo 11 replay site https://apolloinrealtime.org/11/
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by FredPret 1y ago
The Nazis built a secret weather station way up in Canada, out of a U-boat, and it stayed there until 1981. The batteries died after a few days, though. More info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Atlantic_weather_wa
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Weather Station Kurt(en.wikipedia.org)
5 points by FredPret 1y ago|1 comments
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by FredPret 1y ago
Agreed. If you love it, also read the Baroque Cycle, REAMDE, and Fall. Cryptonomicon is the best but it all fits together.
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by FredPret 1y ago
I grew to like vi after thousands of unpleasant exposures, but I'd like to see the day the New Yorker writes about vim at all, nevermind about how simple it is to use
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by FredPret 1y ago
I owned the tiniest sliver of a fraction of a percent of Apple, but I sold my shares due to a lack of technical leadership.
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by FredPret 1y ago
But do monocultures always stagnate? If Apple was made up of only top-end engineers led by a quality-obsessed maniac, would they put out better or worse products? Of course, not everyone can follow this philosophy, but they don't have
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by FredPret 1y ago
I should've typed fewer but better words!
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by FredPret 1y ago
Apple added too many features too fast, so they fell into the Feature Whirlpool. They're going to try and get out of it by adding more Features, Faster (I hope I'm wrong!). Instead, they should have stayed on the Straigth and Narr
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by FredPret 1y ago
Your argument was "there's no tribalism except what the whites brought to South Africa", remember? And elsewhere you say that because of this, violence against white South Africans are justified. This is not only insane, but
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by FredPret 1y ago
Moral relativism at its finest. Turn away now, because this is a dead end my friend. "ethnic cleansing is justified if the violence goes the way I prefer" is the red flag of all red flags.
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by FredPret 1y ago
Are you familiar with South Africa? There's at least a dozen different tribes, of which only two are white. There's been inter-tribal violence between all of them since time immemorial leading up to today.
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by FredPret 1y ago
Poor innocent descendants -> I did not call them poor, or innocent. Deny rage -> of course not. I'd be furious too. But singing songs like "bring my machine gun" and "shoot people from that ethnic group" just
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by FredPret 1y ago
It's "anti-colonialist" in the sense that it encourages the mass murder of the descendants of the original colonialists. I don't know the US well enough to give you an exact equivalent, but "shoot the WASP" mig
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by FredPret 1y ago
I just knew someone would bring up child labour / slavery. There's a big difference between gig jobs and very low-paying jobs that help free adults with no other options in life, and kids in work houses & coal mines, and you
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by FredPret 1y ago
It’s reality-based, empirical economics, not “mine”. Place that let adults choose who to work for and who to employ, and furthermore consider it improper to even use the word “let” in this context, universally have better employment situati
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by FredPret 1y ago
This really shows the value of saying “no” to use-cases you consider peripheral. If your customers live in one country, and you don’t care about cloud scalability, things can be much simpler. Of course, some applications really do need all
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by FredPret 1y ago
In addition to your very good points: an economy of people who take this live-and-let-live view is going to be far more flexible and efficient in different scenarios. An economy made up of people who think it proper to make entire classes o
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by FredPret 1y ago
Pragmaticstudio is just an awesome starting point for Elixir + Phoenix. I delayed signing up for a long time - wondering if it would be worth the money - but I need not have
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by FredPret 1y ago
BEAM / Erlang / OTP / Elixir feels different: - no JS (well a tiny bit ships with Phoenix but I never have to look at it), no NPM, nothing that breaks every week - the whole system lends itself to executing on multiple cores
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by FredPret 1y ago
Saying "no" to off-topic / dumb ideas in a consistent way is an amazing product development skill. It's like carving away all of the marble that doesn't look like David. Neal Stephenson wrote a really great Substack
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by FredPret 1y ago
AppLovin makes a gargantuan profit margin of 45%: https://valustox.com/APP Even so, I avoid stocks that don't have a sustainable, value-based business model.
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by FredPret 1y ago
Take the hourly billing for those of us who work that way. Multiply by family tech consulting time. It's probably cheaper to buy an iPhone for everyone! At least this used to be true in the halcyon days when iOS was simple.
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by FredPret 1y ago
BEAM + Elixir + Phoenix feels like I can control a whole system from the CPU processes (almost) up to the UI elements on a remote user’s screen, all in one easy-ish-to-understand system and language. Granted, I’ve only used it for smaller p
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by FredPret 1y ago
Off-topic, but do you think Harris is the likely D candidate? I'm a mere observer of American politics, but both Polymarket and electionbettingodds.com have Gavin Newsom in the lead to be the candidate, and JD Vance to win the election
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by FredPret 1y ago
But assets and technology itself is ultimately created by labour. There might be an exception for natural resources that are exceptionally easy to exploit even without labour, like sunlight or fresh air.
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by FredPret 1y ago
Bad news sells, especially about leading people/companies/countries. "${rich_guy} is doomed" will get more clicks than "poor people can now afford 5% more daily protein than last year".
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by FredPret 1y ago
This is exactly right and is what one would expect from improving technology. A fractal frontier of new niches crack open as the economy keeps expanding.
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by FredPret 1y ago
I agree with this but going on as if either fission or solar is the One True Electricity Solution is ideological. Every technology has tradeoffs.
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by FredPret 1y ago
In that case, yes. But for solar farms, it's the opposite. That's why I think we should end up with: - gas plants: easy and cheap to spin up, can provide district heating - nuclear: squeaky clean, issues are concentrated in one sp

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