blagie

70 ms·

901.
by blagie 4y ago
Having worked at non-profits a lot, more money doesn't make them better. It brings in exactly the wrong sort of people. I would never donate to the university I went to, because the endowment is too !@#$$ big. It's more than enoug
902.
by blagie 4y ago
Which ones? Most of the ones I know are former colonies. If you wanted a Double Irish With a Dutch Sandwich, that never hit any current UK country. Ditto for Caribbean nations. UK is deep into sleazy financial schemes, but I didn't thi
903.
by blagie 4y ago
I feel like a lot of the West is living beyond its means, funded by debt. England in particular, might be starting to unravel. England enjoyed a central stage in the world, due to the British Empire, and is used to being in that position. I
904.
by blagie 4y ago
It's a little different. For some of the fashion domains I'm thinking of don't have "normal" consumers, and most goods cost about the same as half of my entire wardrobe. For others, shopping is more like entertainme
905.
by blagie 4y ago
I do see a fundamental reason: The current crop of AI tools are horrible at logic. It's a complete inversion of how we think of computers. If I want to convey happy emotions in the style of Rembrandt, SD or DALL-E will do brilliantly.
906.
by blagie 4y ago
I almost never return, but there are domains with business models build upon massive numbers of returns. This includes some parts of fashion. You buy online. If it doesn't fit, you return and buy another. There are hobbies which are si
907.
by blagie 4y ago
Lots of things are fraud. Most of them are not theft. The greatest ThinkSpeak the media industry pulled was to redefine copyright, contract, and license violations as "theft" and "piracy." Saying something is not theft&#
908.
by blagie 4y ago
A lot of that was not technical, but I think I'd call roughly half of those random. For example, I feel like what Linux did uniquely well was the development process. The Linux development process, circa 1995-2000, was unparalleled: -
909.
by blagie 4y ago
I didn't know about tauthon. If I had, I would have thrown my support behind it. That makes a lot of sense. With programming languages, I feel like there's so much dumb, blind luck involved in which ones win. I personally dislike
910.
by blagie 4y ago
What would I want the Python 3 community to do now? For a start, I would like the Python 3 community not to post attacks like yours. To quote you: "Wow, how reading this makes me hope Ubuntu Pro fails catastrophically." This sugge
911.
by blagie 4y ago
I agree it's possible to make a lidar unit for $25 down-the-line; there's nothing fundamentally expensive. However, it's not just a question of volume. It took decades of Moore's Law before computers became cheap. Optica
912.
by blagie 4y ago
I live in a location where human drivers, cyclists, and pedestrians have lots of kinks to work out. As I'm getting older, I think I'll soon fall into the category of "human drivers with kinks to work out" too. I'm p
913.
by blagie 4y ago
You shouldn't blame Ubuntu here. The Python development community did this to itself. It offloaded a huge cost of porting literally everything in the universe mostly for syntactic niceties like print and parenthesis. That was an astron
914.
by blagie 4y ago
I don't mind paying $25/year/desktop nearly as much as I mind the twenty clicks to find out the $25 is an annual fee. Look at it: https://ubuntu.com/pricing/pro Whoever did this web design should be shot
915.
by blagie 4y ago
My experience is that corporations use self-serving pseudoethical arguments all the time. "We'd like to keep this proprietary.... Ummmm.. DEI! We can't release it due to DEI concerns!"
916.
by blagie 4y ago
I like #2 and #3. I don't like #1. Democratizing access to science is dramatically more important the democratizing publishing: 1) At the end of the day, anyone can publish on arxiv or similar. 2) If an elitist, exclusive journal charg
917.
by blagie 4y ago
At this point, machine learning has seeped into a lot of my workflows. What I can do and how well is capped by video memory. This is useful enough that it's just a matter of time before this makes it into mainstream tools. There are GP
918.
by blagie 4y ago
I buy cards primarily on: - Machine learning / GPGPU support - Stability - RAM A 16GB card for $349 is a good deal. That's more than a 3080, and same as a higher-end 4080. If Intel is ever able to ship stable open-source drivers s
919.
by blagie 4y ago
> No worries, I'm here to discuss and learn things, so happy about your reply! Thank you! I enjoy discussions with folks like you. > Maybe for the first time. If we're having regular bank failures, we're going to enter
920.
by blagie 4y ago
This is dumb. That's not an insult -- I'm not calling you dumb, but just your argument. 1) Banks are FDIC-insured, so unless the federal government goes under, my money can't be lost. If the US disappears, so does the dollar.
921.
by blagie 4y ago
I'm kind of inclined to agree. We want to avoid structural damage: Lost jobs, bankrupt businesses, lost mortgages, and so on. Structural damage leads to loss of real productivity, and real harm to people's lives. The only way I kn
922.
by blagie 4y ago
He is generous. That said, when I've seen this happen, 9 times out of 10, it's not intentional. It's happened to me too: * You see something. * You forget about it. * You re-invent it yourself a few weeks later. I'm fort
923.
by blagie 4y ago
You can run the numbers yourself. You're not going to come out with different numbers with any sane assumptions. A high-filtration mask costs $1-$2. Multiply by 350 million people, and you're at $12B to give everyone a new mask ev
924.
by blagie 4y ago
For the record: I am unaware of anyone forced to take the AZ vaccine anywhere, and I do as lot of global work. It's perfectly possible someone somewhere might have been forced, but forced on everyone? You should know that's dishon
925.
by blagie 4y ago
The older Moderna / Pfizer shots also prevent deaths and serious hospitalizations, if that's what you're worried about. It's not what I'm worried about.
926.
by blagie 4y ago
No, this is not an example of politicians being idiots or incompetent. In crisis scenarios, you do things to mitigate risks. You can't project capacity for an unknown threat, and the costs of over-preparing are much lower than the cost
927.
by blagie 4y ago
In abstract, I don't see a lot of downside to compiling down to SQL as an intermediate format. Or vice-versa, for that matter. In practice: 1) Most attempts to do this historically have missed the point of an RDBMS (e.g. most ORMs). 2)
928.
by blagie 4y ago
It turns out that most SQL databases, when used as a key-value store, shard better than most NoSQL databasing. You run into issues with things like JOINs across shards, but there's literally no upside even there to NoSQL versus using a
929.
by blagie 4y ago
No. I'm not. I said: 1) "RDBMS is the right paradigm." That's high praise. RDBMS is exactly the Right Thing, with a trademark and all. 2) "SQL is imperfect, but it's good enough to not be worth replacing."
930.
by blagie 4y ago
"Replacements" for SQL have been around as long as SQL. Remember the OODBMS rage of the eighties and nineties? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object_database I also wanted to kill old, obsolete, crummy SQL whe

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