ekidd

21 ms·

241.
by ekidd 2y ago
Some animals unfortunately pose a threat to human life. Where we live on the Vermont/New Hampshire state line, we've had a several hundred percent increase in problematic black bears over the last 3-4 years. Normally, black bears
242.
by ekidd 2y ago
I wanted to respond to you, because you had some excellent points. > Mostly because I’ve spent almost a decade earning rather lucrative money on cleaning up after companies and organisations which did it. For many companies, this is ac
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by ekidd 2y ago
Let's assume you're not a FAANG, and you don't have a billion customers. If you're gluing microservices together using distributed transactions (or durable event queues plus eventual consistency, or whatever), the odds a
244.
by ekidd 2y ago
When our kids were growing quickly, we went through a number of sub-$300 bikes, both new and gifted by family. I ended up doing about one repair every two weeks, including broken derailleurs, junky brakes, jammed wheels, you name it. And ou
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by ekidd 2y ago
Machiavelli's "The Prince" will give you a decent understanding of what people usually mean by "Machiavellian". The book explains what methods would allow an absolute ruler to stay in control of state. It does not
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by ekidd 2y ago
Juries absolutely do make errors, including ones which result in innocent people being put to death. In a number of cases, the Innocence Project has certainly managed to find hard DNA evidence that linked the actual murderer to the crime,
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by ekidd 2y ago
> Big companies can't use strong copyleft libraries in proprietary software, so that would be a no-go. Just to clarify: I have actually been involved in open source license enforcement efforts, because big companies do violate s
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by ekidd 2y ago
> I don't understand why an OSS author would select anything more permissive than that: Honestly? Because many things are too small to be worth paying a lawyer to write a letter to license violators. If I'm not willing to sue
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by ekidd 2y ago
> Because it is. Why would I even care about "queerness" (whatever it actually means) in an open-source project for a sound recorder or video player or game or what have you? Part of what "queerness" means here is &
250.
by ekidd 2y ago
Open source is business model, but it's not a VC-friendly, easily-scaled business model. Relatively few companies ever made it work, and it's only gotten harder with the rise of one-stop cloud vendors that host other people's
251.
by ekidd 2y ago
Assuming that we could develop much-smarter-than-human-AI, I would support a pause for exactly that reason: the Culture may be the best-case scenario, and the humans in the Culture are basically pets. And a lot of possible outcomes might
252.
by ekidd 2y ago
Sometimes, the actual mods in charge of the site have heavily penalized certain accounts, either manually or via an algorithm (I don't know the details). The comments posted by these accounts appear to start off "dead", thoug
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by ekidd 2y ago
Usually my rule of thumb at work is that if a key SaaS vendor gets bought by private equity, we start planning a migration project. We just about always wind up needing one, as the private equity firm tries to milk customers for all they&#x
254.
by ekidd 2y ago
The book Parasite Rex (2001) by Carl Zimmer is fantastic, and it inspired quite a few researchers to go into the study of parasites: https://www.amazon.com/Parasite-Rex-Bizarre-Dangerous-Creatu... The book manages to be g
255.
by ekidd 2y ago
I would be really careful with those deref methods. They return references, not pointers, which means you need to follow the Rust rules: - You can have any number of simultaneous readers, - Or one writer and no readers. - But if you eve
256.
by ekidd 2y ago
Usually, to trigger any kind of anti-trust law, you need to have massive market share. In this case, for example, Reddit almost certainly hasn't committed any antitrust violations, because they're a relatively minor player in thei
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by ekidd 2y ago
I personally feel that this kind of "exclusive search only by Google deal" should result in an anti-trust case against Google. This is the kind of abuse of monopoly power that caused anti-trust laws to be passed in the 1890s.
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by ekidd 2y ago
Here is a corrected link: https://guywaldman.com/posts/introducing-magic-cli#why-rust
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by ekidd 2y ago
Yup, it's a cycle. Take "agile", for example. Kent Beck (of "Extreme Programming" aka "XP" fame) is a joy to read. He thinks really deeply about software, and takes things to interesting extremes. But he&#
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by ekidd 2y ago
> So how does a ritual get successfully passed down for something like 500 generations? What must the observer get from it that motivated them so strongly to pass it along with the necessary vigor? I think small, pre-literate societies
261.
by ekidd 2y ago
> Once everyone has 50 year bulbs, you're out of business. This seems to have been the issue with the expensive Philips Hue LED bulbs (the ZigBee ones). We installed ours close to a decade ago, and we took them with us when we mov
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by ekidd 2y ago
> Note that we are talking about a different era and deployment of computer systems. Yeah, this is really important to understand. The machines of this era required some degree of physical access, they were shared by entire departments
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by ekidd 2y ago
> This is one of the few things the C++ type system almost gets right. You really can say for your C++ type no, it doesn't have a default. Rust does even better here, I think, for fairly subtle reasons: - Exceptions are replaced b
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by ekidd 2y ago
> it's no coincidence that corporations that own proprietary code don't have this problem. Proprietary programs have a different, interesting problem: They eventually disappear. In 1995, the year PCRE2 was born, I was doing c
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by ekidd 2y ago
> I've yet to see ANYONE (myself included) do an excellent job teaching the kind of programming employers want. I saw another comment here about how "programming" is simple, but teaching architecture and putting things to
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by ekidd 2y ago
Interesting. I find that Copilot is quite good with the borrow checker, at least if it can "see" the signature of the function that it's calling. Sometimes it inserts an extra "&" where it really shouldn't.
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by ekidd 2y ago
From the article: > Although most LLMs are trained on corpora that include several programming languages, we often observe differential performance across languages, especially languages like Rust that are not well represented in popula
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by ekidd 2y ago
TPM protects against two main threat models: 1. You don't trust people with physical access to the computer. For the average home user, this means you consider the hardware owner a threat. 2. You want to protect against malware that ha
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by ekidd 2y ago
> Chomsky reminds us every time we let him: human children learn to understand and use language — an incredibly complex and nuanced domain, to say the least — with shockingly little data and often zero-to-none intentional instruction.
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by ekidd 2y ago
The Texas Instrument TI320C40 digital signal processor had even weirder pipeline issues: - Branch delay slots ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delay_slot ), where one or more instruction(s) after a branch would be execu

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