jes5199

38 ms·

541.
by jes5199 6y ago
the internet has enabled a new kind of bureaucracy where we now engage with commerce by filling out paperwork ourselves rather than having vendors manage it themselves. It used to be a business cost, now it's an externality. It reminds
542.
by jes5199 6y ago
yeah I have a similar thing - I’m trying to read a computational geometry textbook (for a code project) and I end up skipping the equations and trying to glean the meaning from the prose... it’s a slow process. There must be a resource out
543.
by jes5199 6y ago
I agree that distributed governance is more functional than centralized, but the problem with shared platforms like Etherium is that it is very hard to predict what the unintended side effects of a system will be when scaled up. Ideally the
544.
by jes5199 6y ago
this “just do your job” talk only comes out when we’re talking about activism. the rest of the time y’all are saying “we’re a family of co-owners trying to change the world”
545.
by jes5199 6y ago
I always have the opposite experience! I find the designs attractive but ultimately I find the actual sound effects kinda dull
546.
by jes5199 6y ago
I guess I'm trying to split a hair here, but I feel like some ideas don't even minimally work until there's a critical number of users. Like if you're building a user-contributed database of any kind, it has to be useful
547.
by jes5199 6y ago
people are often wrong, too. Decisions made "because it will scale later" usually optimize for the wrong thing, and you have some completely other scaling problem that is made worse by the early "optimizations"
548.
by jes5199 6y ago
That depends on what you mean by "require" - one successful startup strategy is to make something that _functions_ for a small user base, but operates at a loss until it hits some critical size. Like, in the early days at Square,
549.
by jes5199 6y ago
it’s not just that our tools are poorly suited for non-programmers, they’re barely even suitable for experts! Today I lost 8 hours trying to get XCode to build our app after a library update. Last week I lost 8 hours wrestling with a build
550.
by jes5199 6y ago
what hardware does the netboot server run on?
551.
by jes5199 6y ago
yeah none of my tech works properly in an emergency. honestly, everyone should have analog walkie talkies for when the cell network gets congested
552.
by jes5199 6y ago
we can hardly observe running code on computers, even when we have the source. Programmers have trouble understanding what their own code is doing!
553.
by jes5199 6y ago
there’s no such thing though- all organizations are political. You can pretend that libertarian technocrat capitalist is neutral, but that says more about your politics than anything else
554.
by jes5199 6y ago
for one thing, USPS serves last-mile rural customers that UPS and FedEx do not find profitable. If you send a package to one of those places, FedEx/UPS will ship your package to the nearest town and then just _put it in the mail_
555.
by jes5199 6y ago
Hypercard couldn’t exist without Englebart’s UI, though
556.
by jes5199 6y ago
maybe. we’re more aware of the humanity of people in distant places. we’re more aware of the consequences of our societies’ choices. we experiment more, culturally. These are improvements in perspective. Some of the upheaval happening now m
557.
by jes5199 6y ago
I agree BUT there are new technologies that capture carbon into high-value molecules. For example, there’s a group competing in the Carbon X-Prize that has direct-air-capture that builds carbon nanotubes
558.
by jes5199 6y ago
yes, excluding subsidies. Excluding storage - not yet, or at least, not everywhere. But the cost of storage is falling rapidly, too.
559.
by jes5199 6y ago
oh gosh what was that article claiming that pre-internet, ads functioned as a monetary sacrifice that companies could make as a demonstration of their solvency. if you saw an ad frequently, that meant it was a big, stable company, that was
560.
by jes5199 6y ago
theoretically yes, but we have to scale production way up, there just aren't enough batteries in the world right now
561.
by jes5199 6y ago
as of about 2018, solar is cheaper than coal. natural gas is only cheaper because it's a byproduct of oil production. solar is still dropping in price due to technology improvements, and will beat natural gas within the next year or tw
562.
by jes5199 6y ago
there's a magic crossover point where cost-per-kwh for batteries gets low enough that it's cheaper to build an electric car than a gas car. There's some evidence that we've crossed that line in the last few months - now
563.
by jes5199 6y ago
birthrates are falling in every part of the world - most countries are well below the replacement rate. The effect is hidden by people living longer. We should hit peak world population within 30 years
564.
by jes5199 6y ago
ooh a bait and switch! I was going to talk about how people with different kinds of brains (you think anyone in this forum is on the autism spectrum? no?) have to code-switch and perform the normal cognitive style to be taken seriously... b
565.
by jes5199 6y ago
what we currently call “liberal” is another form of conservatism. It’s just that it’s conserving a slightly different set of principles.
566.
by jes5199 6y ago
in that case, using Facebook means you’re helping perpetuate white supremacy through the mass incarceration of Black Americans
567.
by jes5199 6y ago
still seems high to me
568.
by jes5199 6y ago
sorbet is relatively new and I've been avoiding ruby for the last two years
569.
by jes5199 6y ago
I’ve worked on several large Ruby codebases, and the thing is, the same qualities that make it easy to get a Ruby project up and working quickly make it a complete nightmare to maintain later. Its expressiveness and malleability mean that y
570.
by jes5199 6y ago
concentrating diffuse stuff is the new paradigm. the age of diffusing dense stuff is over.

More ›