cwp

20 ms·

151.
by cwp 5y ago
Policing thought crime never ends well. Intolerance toward intolerance sounds great until you get into the thorny questions of "what even is intolerance" and "who gets to decide what's intolerant"? I mean, it's
152.
by cwp 5y ago
Sounds like motivated reasoning to me. We've had 40 years of pretty successful economic policy, but we'd really, really like to spend a huge amount of money when there's already a shortage of workers. But hey, who really kn
153.
by cwp 5y ago
Eh, kinda. Calling something a "best practice" is basically an appeal to authority. It means, "this is the right way to do things, for reasons I don't have time to explain." There are times when that's appropri
154.
by cwp 5y ago
I wouldn't call it reassuring, but it is the pattern so far. What gives me hope is that we don't have a single unassailable monopoly. Instead, we get a chance, every five years or so, to choose something better. We just might figu
155.
by cwp 5y ago
Not quite. Yes, network effects are important, but if that were the only important thing, then Facebook would be the only social media site. The opposing dynamic is that it's not hard to be on multiple sites at the same time. So if the
156.
by cwp 5y ago
I think the main motivation for doing it in Svalbard is the seed vault, which benefits from the cold, dry environment in the permafrost. And sure, that the remote location lends its self to Foundation-like restore-civilization-after-the-dar
157.
by cwp 5y ago
Yup. Consider that all compression boils down to some form of a model that can predict the next bits of information, and then an encoding that only includes the deviation of the actual data from the prediction. Machine learning gives us new
158.
by cwp 5y ago
I don't have any expertise here, but I don't really see anything in the article to support the idea that the problems are fundamental. That's certainly the conclusion their experts come to, but it all seems to be based on l
159.
by cwp 5y ago
Have you looked at Fortress at all? It was designed on just this premise, and came to some interesting conclusions before being abandoned. For example, where the natural data structure for Lisp is the list, the natural data structure for Fo
160.
by cwp 5y ago
Nixpkgs is quite good. It has the package I'm looking for most of the time. According to Repology[1], it's got more packaged projects than any other package repository, and more packages that are up to date than any other reposito
161.
by cwp 5y ago
The learning curve is the biggest issue. Nix is different, and that makes it hard to learn unless you're already into functional programming. I like it too, but damn, it's so hard to get someone up to speed, even if they're s
162.
by cwp 5y ago
You're not wrong, but that's a different problem. Nix makes sure that you get a predictable and reproducible tree of dependencies, and allows different applications to depend on different versions of the same dependencies. That is
163.
by cwp 5y ago
I understand all that. My point is that "debate" is about persuading people to hold your point of view, while this is a question of fact. You can't change a fact no matter how persuasive you are, because facts aren't sub
164.
by cwp 5y ago
This is stupid. You can't debate facts. Either SARS-CoV-2 escaped from a lab, or it didn't. Unless somebody comes forward to say, "Yeah, I tore my glove while transporting some test tubes and I got sick two days later,"
165.
by cwp 5y ago
Here are a few examples: - Japan and Korea were historically enemies. But they've been at peace since WWII, mainly because both have US troops stationed there. Any time tensions flare up, the US does a little diplomacy and they make ni
166.
by cwp 5y ago
Well, it's not like nobody has ever thought of that before. The best we've been able to do is deterrence, which requires developing advanced weapons like aircraft carriers, stealth fighters and nukes. I know this isn't what y
167.
by cwp 5y ago
An equally-quick but not-at-all-dirty version of this is to use the Accept header and do content negotiation. There is a solution to this exact problem in the HTTP spec.
168.
by cwp 5y ago
Meh. There's nothing wrong with tech hiring. Ok, sure, there are some companies out there that don't know what they are doing, and the very most prestigious companies have to do some very tedious stuff to deal with the fact that t
169.
by cwp 5y ago
As the GP says, this probably refers to the practice of having short pithy statements to guide decision making. That is, AWS uses "Tenets" to help guide their decision making, Niko found that useful and wanted to do the same thing
170.
by cwp 5y ago
That's basically what Canada did with the Grand Banks in 1992. They didn't ban fish imports, but they did deploy the navy to prevent other countries (eg, Spain) from continuing to fish there. This absolutely devastated Newfoundlan
171.
by cwp 5y ago
I guess I put more of the blame on the influencers because they are the ones making editorial decisions. Sure the platforms are optimizing for engagement too, but it's all content-agnostic. The influencers choose their words carefully,
172.
by cwp 5y ago
Yup. It's blaming smokers for second-hand smoke. We need to figure out the social-media equivalent of "no smoking" signs.
173.
by cwp 5y ago
Yeah, the analogy between toxic media and toxic chemicals is pretty good. However, I'd put they blame for that somewhere you might find surprising: influencers. Everybody likes to hate on "big tech" these days, but if there&#
174.
by cwp 5y ago
> As vaccine rumor hunter Heidi Larson puts it, "we don’t have a misinformation problem, we have a trust problem.” That about sums it up. The lies are fine, the problem is that nobody believes them. But let's imagine that the m
175.
by cwp 5y ago
+1 to the application/database mismatch. GemStone is really amazing. I never got to do commercial work with it, but damn is it a great environment. I've never seen anything like it.
176.
by cwp 5y ago
When you say "it is the norm in the industry" do you mean that accountants are moving away from debits and credits, or is it just that accounting software translates to signed numbers when dealing with non-accounting software such
177.
by cwp 5y ago
The CCP would make Apple stop manufacturing in China, which would effectively mean that they couldn't sell anything anywhere. Apple does have very deep pockets, but that would be an existential threat.
178.
by cwp 5y ago
Having a website doesn't make you a tech company.
179.
by cwp 5y ago
Yeah. I wasn't familiar with Quorn, but it does sound like what I'm talking about. You don't think we'll ever be able to improve on Quorn?
180.
by cwp 5y ago
Surely he means cheese made from milk produced by fermentation as discussed in the article.

More ›