FredPret

49 ms·

751.
by FredPret 2y ago
Probably both? If there were more of them, and each one was smaller, the situation would likely be better. But below a certain size, the effectiveness of an ISP drops off.
752.
by FredPret 2y ago
This is more than a free market vs state argument. This type of thing is a characteristic of any large system - there will be gaps. (I’m trying to explain but not defend these gaps). Unfortunately, some things only work if it’s a large syst
753.
by FredPret 2y ago
Ah, I guess you’re right. To me, “artisanal” means one / very few experts carefully crafted a custom product to their own exacting standards, driven by their internal need for perfection rather than guided by a spec sheet / qualit
754.
by FredPret 2y ago
Software is somewhat unique because the design, execution, and mass distribution can all be one step. So you really can be a software artisan, though the world needs the mass production kind of software too.
755.
by FredPret 2y ago
This is why it always pays to do your best work down to the smallest detail. You never know if, 400 years later, people are going to invent a way to examine it atom by atom.
756.
by FredPret 2y ago
There's definitely more plastic than we need. I've seen individual bananas sold in styrofoam. But I think that's a tiny % of plastic waste and the vast majority comes from the production processes. Factories wrap things up he
757.
by FredPret 2y ago
I’d like my carrots to cost less than $100/lb thanks
758.
by FredPret 2y ago
I wonder if the your argument holds true for organic food as well. The farmers have to fight off the same pests and weeds, just with “natural” compounds instead of strong, tailor-made artificial ones. But surely the natural spray and the ar
759.
by FredPret 2y ago
Though you are right about the pollution, plastic isn’t all bad. It’s much more efficient than other materials in many ways. If every single-use plastic container/wrapper had to be replaced by some kind of paper or waxed paper doing th
760.
by FredPret 2y ago
I did a deep learning project on stocks once. So I dug up old WSJ archives to research possible data sets. I got one from 1945! It was incredible. Not a word of clickbait. Zero politics. Zero outrage. No fear, no excitement. It was all crop
761.
by FredPret 2y ago
Glass shells! So these things are basically living sand?
762.
by FredPret 2y ago
Thank you! To add to your point, there's also other complexities like multiple currencies, keeping track of tax owed, and probably the biggest one: multiple people of all skill levels entering data into the system at the same time.
763.
by FredPret 2y ago
Bodega guy can probably get away with Excel (I shudder at the thought but it could work) or a very lightweight and cheap ERP (which doesn't exist)
764.
by FredPret 2y ago
It's interesting to think how much better and cheaper robotics would have to be to cover the super long and hairy tail of issues that a single human operator can handle for <$100k / year.
765.
by FredPret 2y ago
Understanding CS will be more valuable in future, not less, especially if you can get an AI to write some of the code.
766.
by FredPret 2y ago
One example of the “tech jobs drying up” in this article is an online marketing specialist. Another is an engineering manager who got another job with a 5% pay cut. The software engineer employment index is now at 80, relative to 100 in 201
767.
by FredPret 2y ago
Imagine it’s the year 1890 at Standard Oil and they have a building full of filing clerks. It’s run by the great John D Rockefeller, of which you can read more in the fantastic biography Titan . He’s a stickler for accurate accounting at a
768.
by FredPret 2y ago
This is a political argument, not a business one. Now that Uncle Sam has swung the banhammer on a particular country, pity the exec who exposes their company to doing business with the enemy.
769.
by FredPret 2y ago
I thought I would hate it (voicemail is the worst thing ever) but this is strangely compelling
770.
by FredPret 2y ago
Sturgeon’s law [0] apply to all sorts of things, including web visitors [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law
771.
by FredPret 2y ago
How is it stupid? You de-risk your enterprise significantly by cutting Iran out completely, and you only lose the handful of dollars this would’ve translated into down the road. Some customers aren’t worth having.
772.
by FredPret 2y ago
Looks like they're crediting the drop to the overdose treatment drug Naloxone
773.
by FredPret 2y ago
You never have to look at it. I have an Excel - one file a year - with a schema that makes sense to me, then a Python script to convert that to {year}.beancount. The script is triggered by fswatch. So I get a browser frontend with fava and
774.
by FredPret 2y ago
And living above ground. Whales and octopuses might be geniuses but they'll never have a tech tree because they can't melt metal
775.
by FredPret 2y ago
I always thought this brand belonged to a big food company, but turns out they're not only independent but doing pretty well too: https://valustox.com/CPB
776.
by FredPret 2y ago
Questions about whole population groups like these are best understood not through stereotypes or anti-stereotypes but through statistics. I found this study [0] that examines the relationship between age and things like winning the Nobel p
777.
by FredPret 2y ago
As with so many things, this is basically a map of GDP / area. In this case there's another layer on top of that where # of programming languages scales faster after a certain wealth threshold. For instance, the city of Toronto ha
778.
by FredPret 2y ago
There must be a billion corporations out there. What % can kill customers on the scale of Boeing and get away with it? A tiny number. And for the ones that can, it’s likely that there are strong ties to the same government that’s supposed t
779.
by FredPret 2y ago
Another book about a civil servant doing great things is “Racing for the bomb” about General Leslie Groves who built the Pentagon and led the Manhattan Project, completing both in record time.
780.
by FredPret 2y ago
Very interesting, thank you. He starts talking about this at 8:20

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