mmcdermott

9 ms·

31.
by mmcdermott 2y ago
I've had similar thoughts a few times over the years. "Let me lock myself in an office for a week with a pile of books and YouTube and I'll learn more than any conference" - and I say that as someone who kept a full day
32.
by mmcdermott 2y ago
The people who cheered about the firing of 80% of the Twitter staff largely believed (rightly or wrongly) that they were being adversely affected by them. While Google may be seen with more wariness in tech circles, I don't think the a
33.
by mmcdermott 2y ago
I've usually found that this breaks down when there are a lot of filtering conditions besides the join condition, and multiple columns used in the joins. The WHERE clause gets long and jumbled and it is much easier to separate join con
34.
by mmcdermott 2y ago
I don't think the point was organizational, that decisions by the IARC must be respected by the EPA, but more common sensical: if a substance is roughly equivalent in risk to food, which is ingested, then it surely can't be more h
35.
by mmcdermott 2y ago
Besides Amber, I found Jack of Shadows to be an accessible road into Zelazny.
36.
by mmcdermott 2y ago
For the longest time you could get away with this in cmd: > dir c:\progra~1 So if forcing people to handle spaces was the goal, it took a long time to force it.
37.
by mmcdermott 2y ago
I was talking to a fairly avid scifi reader who hadn't heard of the book before. It's always someone's day to be one of 10,000. https://xkcd.com/1053/
38.
by mmcdermott 2y ago
True, but `/` is also a shortcut for quick find in Firefox.
39.
by mmcdermott 2y ago
I could see software having a future as a Rube Goldberg machine of black box AIs, if hardware is cheap enough and the AIs are good enough. There was a scifi novel (maybe "A Fire Upon the Deep"?) where there was no need to write so
40.
by mmcdermott 2y ago
Same here. I've never been able to stick with any extension post-Vimperator. They've all just felt too clumsy. It's led to my tinkering with qutebrowser from time to time because it is seamless.
41.
by mmcdermott 2y ago
When doing architecture work, I'm generally thinking in terms of data flows and state changes. Programming seems more verbal to me than visual. It feels very akin to writing, I have an idea and I am talking through it. My editing of co
42.
by mmcdermott 2y ago
Agreed, but the post above draws a direct line between a taxes and basic law and order, but one could support scaling back any number of taxes and spending programs without opposing or endangering law and order.
43.
by mmcdermott 2y ago
While I'm sure that someone somewhere objects to paying for law and order, I think most tax grumbling comes from taxes rising (and, arguably, still not rising enough) to pay for bigger and bigger programs with an increasingly tenuous r
44.
by mmcdermott 2y ago
What I'm picturing is two divergent paths with very different impacts on human interaction. 1) Every human programmer becomes the surgeon in Fred Brooks's surgical team model ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The
45.
by mmcdermott 2y ago
Adoption takes time, for sure, especially when dealing with fixed assets like a factory. The difference I'm poking at is that electricity had a clear value proposition and improved over time. I see people looking for the value proposit
46.
by mmcdermott 2y ago
There is a disconnect somewhere. When I read online, I hear about how GenAI/LLMs replace programmers and office workers. When I go to work, I mostly hear the question of how we can apply GenAI/LLMs, apart from discussion of the ge
47.
by mmcdermott 2y ago
The moment you mandate fast clearance you get into a state where people game the system, which can have bad side effects in criminal justice. You would likely find that either the wrong person is charged more frequently or else cases are ru
48.
by mmcdermott 2y ago
"Till We Have Faces" may have some influences from his grief, but the primary subject was theological in nature, dealing with a character whose life is filled with questions and complaints against divinity and how those seem to go
49.
by mmcdermott 2y ago
I remember watching stuff during the pandemic with allusions to distancing or masking and thinking "I'm going to have to explain this to my grandchildren."
50.
by mmcdermott 2y ago
Just out of curiosity, why not use HTML5's built-in details/summary tags ( https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/de... )?
51.
by mmcdermott 2y ago
Banning bills that transfer powers around government would also hamstring regulatory agencies, wouldn't it? While there are some other rules in place, agencies making law is fundamentally a transfer of power from the Legislative branc
52.
by mmcdermott 2y ago
Which is strange, because I tend to feel like minimalism both avoids over engineering and is more mentally stimulating in practice.
53.
by mmcdermott 2y ago
It's hard to know how predominate views will change, but it is certain that they will change. If views change, the future generations must, by necessity, see us as wrong on some dimension(s) or else their views would have remained the
54.
by mmcdermott 2y ago
Killing millions for certain seems like a bad trade. After all, isn't the primary reason to avoid global warming to save lives?
55.
by mmcdermott 2y ago
Devaluating writers probably hurts, but you see the "weird first season" even in older shows. The 1960s series Get Smart and Dick Van Dyke Show had first seasons that were much weaker than what the show would become, to cite a cou
56.
by mmcdermott 2y ago
Most corporate law guidance is about risk mitigation, not about ethics. Less activity generally translates to less risk. You can see a similar phenomenon with security professionals. True, the only secure computer is one disconnected from t
57.
by mmcdermott 2y ago
The fish was derived from a Greek acronym. The wikipedia link above mentions this as well. Is there any evidence for an astrological significance?
58.
by mmcdermott 2y ago
It also assumes that big hits are the only ways for an author to make a living. I remember a blog where a fantasy author ( https://monsterhunternation.com/2022/02/08/analyzing-my-roya... ) advocated the opposit
59.
by mmcdermott 2y ago
I loved Operation Chaos, but I found the much later sequel to be disappointing.
60.
by mmcdermott 2y ago
Couldn't running an exit node be a cover for other activity? One that provides a reasonable doubt as to whether it was the operator or some other actor who did something unsavory from an IP address?

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