ekidd

24 ms·

271.
by ekidd 2y ago
The rapid eye contact before totally ignoring someone is an urban thing. There are simply too many people. And the people who violate this norm are either really bad at social interaction, or they want something. Or they're lost and
272.
by ekidd 2y ago
Small town politics is based on voting and laws. I can participate in Town Meeting, or call the town manager, or volunteer for a role in town government. And unless I make a spectacular nuisance of myself (or ruin the groundwater or dirt ro
273.
by ekidd 2y ago
HOAs are not the only thing that controls where people can build abattoirs. In much of the US, this is controlled by zoning. And zoning is decided on via local politics, not via a HOA. I'll take a small town politics over an HOA any
274.
by ekidd 2y ago
In practice, Apple's warranty service isn't amazingly better than anyone else's. I buy Dell Precision laptops running Ubuntu, with "next-day" on-site repair. It costs me a few hundred dollars for 3 years of coverage
275.
by ekidd 2y ago
I have worked on a decent number of dynamically-typed Ruby and Python systems in the 50,000 to 250,000 line range, written and maintained by teams. This has never felt like a strong use case for dynamic typing. You end up losing: - A lot of
276.
by ekidd 2y ago
Rails is absolutely fantastic for projects below 10,000 lines with 1 or 2 contributors, especially if you want a classic forms-based UI. And you can get a huge amount done under those constraints in Rails. But as of couple of years ago, R
277.
by ekidd 2y ago
If you have not yet visited the site, you will see a popup stating "We and our 838 partners use cookies", with the usual options to agree or disagree. However, their opt-out process takes only two clicks, so at least the GDPR is w
278.
by ekidd 2y ago
> The next time people ask "why so much paperwork, why so many regulations, why is it so complicated": this is why. Yes, as the saying goes, regulations and safety rules are often written in blood. But that doesn't mean
279.
by ekidd 3y ago
Christian Science is a church founded by Mary Baker Eddy in 1879. They're most famous for believing in faith healing, which is part of a larger collection of beliefs with a "mind/faith over matter" flavor. They have chur
280.
by ekidd 3y ago
> It doesn't matter whether the general public are right or wrong. I think what we're hearing in this thread is mostly a developer viewpoint. Try to see it like the customers see it. As an open source developer, I have comple
281.
by ekidd 3y ago
My takeaway was that they weren't happy about upstreams, but didn't feel like there was anything that could actually be done: > We can't do much about upstream projects using it. As a potential upstream, I could potentia
282.
by ekidd 3y ago
I do write some niche open source projects, ones which: - Have been written with CoPilot enabled in my editor, and - which optionally use GPT 3.5 as a translation API, and - Which use OpenAI's text-to-speech model to generate spoken di
283.
by ekidd 3y ago
Remember: LLMs are basically trained to be really gifted improv actors. That's what all that "guess the next token" training boils down to. Once that base of "improv" is established, they're then trained to pla
284.
by ekidd 3y ago
> i don’t have a better answer, but this convoluted mess of bash is a smell isn’t it? It's a very old smell, basically. The central problem is that back in the 80s and 90s, there were scads of different Unix-like systems, each wit
285.
by ekidd 3y ago
Your first full-time sysadmin is an expensive hire. So is your first DBA. And even if your database backups are working now, there's a good chance they'll silently break in the next several years. The simplest thing you could do i
286.
by ekidd 3y ago
Clap is a really fantastic command-line argument parser, especially using the "derive macro" they now include. Once you start dealing with git-like subcommands, and other complex cases, it Just Works. You get help, short and long
287.
by ekidd 3y ago
Thank you for reading the diffs and reporting on them. And to be fair, lots of humans are already at least this bad at writing code. And lots of companies are happy with garbage code so long as it addresses an immediate business requirement
288.
by ekidd 3y ago
> In the Bay Area I see only a few full time positions. I remember the dot com crash. The Valley and the greater Boston area got flooded with out-of-work engineers. The secondary cities still had interesting openings if you knew where
289.
by ekidd 3y ago
> That said, along the way we settled on a notion of the "user's personal jurisdiction," meaning essentially that you have certain rights to universally control your own interactions. Blocking is essentially under this um
290.
by ekidd 3y ago
I bother with open source for a number of reasons: 1. I want to write a cool program, but I am painfully aware that it would make a lousy business. Why not toss it up on GitHub? 2. My employer wants to write a useful program that we need,
291.
by ekidd 3y ago
I forget the details of Scalzi's scholarship, but many prestigious private high schools in the US are happy to admit talented-but-broke kids on scholarship. Private high schools are judged based on how many of their graduates go to exc
292.
by ekidd 3y ago
Habaneros and Scotch Bonnets can have absolutely amazing pepper flavor: sweet, fruity and aromatic. The bell peppers I've had weren't even close. Alas, I don't maintain the heat tolerance to eat them.
293.
by ekidd 3y ago
First and foremost, a GPT is an improv actor. Given a text, it's trained to continue the text as naturally as possible. This is not terribly useful for many tasks. And like an improv actor, if it doesn't know what should come next
294.
by ekidd 3y ago
> For me, carefully adding context has largely felt like time wasted at card creation time I actually had several custom tools that heavily automated card creation—I could grab a sentence from a web page, or bulk import highlighted phr
295.
by ekidd 3y ago
> Did you ever feel like you were answering correctly, on close cards specifically, not because of an improved understanding but because you were associating the correct answer with the prompt/excerpt? I actually suspect that asso
296.
by ekidd 3y ago
One massively overlooked way to improve spaced repetition is to make easier cards. It's surprising just how easy an effective card can be. I started out using Anki to learn French vocabulary. I'd make pairs of cards, with English
297.
by ekidd 3y ago
> Sounds like bunch of gumbies putting each other's lives in danger. Not ok. One weird thing about Iceland (as of 2008) that might be related: They don't do warning signs. - Superheated geyser pool 3 feet from the foot path?
298.
by ekidd 3y ago
> My recommendation is to make sure your friends aren't other foreigners, but it can be hard to find English speakers (especially outside major cities) Korean is not the easiest language for Europeans to learn. But having learned
299.
by ekidd 3y ago
> I love how having a couple of new languages make older, hardened programs insecure in an instant. As someone who has been dealing with Unix since the early 90s, most of those old C programs were always security nightmares. There we
300.
by ekidd 3y ago
Inflation is the rate of change of prices. In calculus terms, it's the first derivative of price. (I'm not sure what you mean by "the rate of inflation growth." Do you mean the second derivative of price, maybe?) Inflati

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