jwestbury

9 ms·

1.
by jwestbury 3y ago
This is regionally specific. The US south, for instance, sees higher usage in summer due to air conditioning demand.
2.
by jwestbury 3y ago
> It can't tell you about f better learning is worth it It can, given sufficient inputs in terms of desired outcomes. Of course, desired outcomes are where subjectivity enters into things. :)
3.
by jwestbury 3y ago
Or just give the government reasonable power to enforce things. GDPR, as an example, has been very effective, because the fines which can be levied for violations are genuinely impactful to businesses. The maximum fine is 4% of global annua
4.
by jwestbury 3y ago
I'll go further: Three months is too long. Secrets which are used to authenticate and identify should be rotated far more regularly, using infrastructure which treats them as effectively ephemeral. The industry has learned to do this -
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by jwestbury 3y ago
One of the principal engineers I used to work with at AWS had a saying: "A one-year certificate expiration is an outage you schedule a year in advance." Of course, it's a bit hyperbolic -- but a ten-year expiration is almost
6.
by jwestbury 3y ago
University presidents hardly need to be distinguished researchers.
7.
by jwestbury 3y ago
Same -- FAANG, Dropbox, quant hedge fund on my resume, ~10 years of experience, senior engineer. I don't actually want a new job, to be fair, but I prefer to interview at least a couple times a year to keep skills sharp and get a good
8.
by jwestbury 3y ago
Have you worked at Microsoft? I have. Their engineering practices are suspect at best. Nobody in Office actually knows what's going on -- it's difficult to find anyone who actually understands more than a tiny, tiny fragment of th
9.
by jwestbury 3y ago
Membership is a hook -- once you have a member, they're more likely to buy from you. It's not really a marketing channel, per se, but it is a method of increasing sales. "Marketing" gets kind of murky at the edges, reall
10.
by jwestbury 3y ago
I've been in tech for over a decade. I know all of your examples -- except a11y and i18n. Numeronym proliferation is a bit insane right now, and really needs to be stopped. :(
11.
by jwestbury 3y ago
At least in media, it is. And, of course, King of the Hill skewered the idea by having Bobby get addicted to cigarettes when Hank used this punishment.
12.
by jwestbury 3y ago
> My theory is this: your favourite hobby store expands and adds one more aisle of fantastic products and five aisles of garbage. You’ll likely perceive quality as having gone way down. This is actually something which is borne out by re
13.
by jwestbury 3y ago
It's not, though - it's about blackholing unknown sources. Yes, this makes it incredibly difficult to self-host or to start up a new provider in the space. But from the perspective of anyone trying to protect their users, it mak
14.
by jwestbury 3y ago
> - Almost no brands allow people to request their data be deleted. I assume this has an implicit "in the USA"? Trying this in Europe would be an awfully bad idea -- GDPR has teeth, unlike most American consumer protection regu
15.
by jwestbury 3y ago
Honestly, confusion here is just poor driver education in the US. HAWK signals follow normal patterns: Amber is caution/be prepared to stop. Red is stop. Flashing red is "stop until clear," i.e., use as a stop sign. This is t
16.
by jwestbury 3y ago
Go ask a teacher about how many hours they work -- it's more than the 40 hours a week we in tech work, generally. And their summers are often full of required continuing education courses which they pay for out of pocket, much like man
17.
by jwestbury 3y ago
It's both, really. Even if we limit this to dynamically-typed, interpreted languages, Python is far more maintainable that Ruby both because the language and the culture take a stance of "there is one correct way to do something.&
18.
by jwestbury 3y ago
> Maintaining Ruby is a nightmare. Trying to escape that hell now. The problem with maintaining Ruby is that Ruby is heavily influenced by Perl.
19.
by jwestbury 3y ago
While I do I agree with you -- I studied English lit at university, have translated portions of Beowulf, can read Chaucer aloud in Middle English, and generally love all things medieval -- I also think that the general societal understand
20.
by jwestbury 3y ago
Just want to offer some additional context here: "in the US" isn't really necessary. Mental health care is generally broken everywhere. Over here in the UK, waiting lists for "talking therapy" are long, and access i
21.
by jwestbury 3y ago
And what happens when two users manage to get the same result? Does OpenAI need to implement an "/r9k/ algorithm" or something to prevent sufficiently similar results from ever being generated, because once a response is
22.
by jwestbury 3y ago
> With the price hikes, and also just how complicated it is to actually run and maintain IT-Operations in Azure (I can’t speak for AWS) we’re now in a world where more and more organisations here in Denmark are looking to get out of Azur
23.
by jwestbury 3y ago
I don't know - I lived <20 miles from an Amazon warehouse, but saw shipping suddenly become 7-day on Prime most of the time back in 2021. I'd already tried to disentangle myself from Amazon's ecosystem, but it was definite
24.
by jwestbury 3y ago
> We can't blame automakers for marketing whatever they think will sell best that passes the regulatory bar. Why not? This is such a cynical take, and I don't think it goes without saying that it's true. Unless you believe
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by jwestbury 3y ago
Likewise -- I played in CAL-M in Counter-Strike back in the day. This statement dates me, I realize, but for those who aren't aware, CAL was the top online Counter-Strike league, and CAL-M was the second tier. IIRC, there were ~10 team
26.
by jwestbury 3y ago
And yet, food in the UK is still markedly cheaper than in most countries -- and especially so when compared to the USA. My wife and I make about as much here as we did in the US, and despite higher taxes, we're actually doing very si
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by jwestbury 3y ago
A non-profit foundation generally exists to do more than just write code.
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by jwestbury 3y ago
The five-message limit isn't a result of the context window, but an arbitrary constraint applied after early results of the Bing chatbot were, uh... troubling[0]? 0. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2023&#x2F
29.
by jwestbury 3y ago
> since they embraced price gouging on tuition in the 90's. (Caveat that the following is US-centric.) I'd love to see the data showing actual price gouging, because the data I've seen has generally suggested that per-stud
30.
by jwestbury 3y ago
I outlined my current career as an English lit grad -- and my wife's as a math grad -- in another post. But I'd like to talk for a moment about why I think the humanities are important, especially in the context of my own career,

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