wpietri

25 ms·

271.
by wpietri 2y ago
You're right, this is a key question: > Who Gets To Decide What Is True? For any given statement, the answer up until a couple years ago was, "the speaker". Speakers get to decide what to say, but they're also respons
272.
by wpietri 2y ago
Google has always been a middleman between information producers and information consumers, taking slices of attention and converting that into money. If they kill off the information producers, they're dead anyhow.
273.
by wpietri 2y ago
For sure. Or, worse, choose to run a company in such a way that anybody making choices is insulated from that information.
274.
by wpietri 2y ago
Wow, this is impressively brutal. I don't know anything about search or ranking these days, but the way insist on putting an AI summary at the top of every page definitely is good evidence for the theory that Google doesn't give a
275.
by wpietri 2y ago
> This is a huge problem. I don't know where it comes from I think it's a bunch of things, but one legitimate issue is that software is stupidly complex these days. I had the advantage of starting when computers were pretty sim
276.
by wpietri 2y ago
Refactoring is improving the design of existing code. It shouldn't change behavior. And regardless, the way you prevent loss of important functionality isn't by hoping people read docs that no longer exist. It's by writing co
277.
by wpietri 2y ago
Agreed. The way I explain this to managers is that software development is unlike most work. If I'm making widgets and I fuck up, that widget goes out the door never to be seen again. But in software, today's outputs are tomorrow&
278.
by wpietri 2y ago
For sure. And I'd add that the specificity of unit tests is hugely valuable. If I do some sort of refactoring and found I've broken an end-to-end test, it may tell me very little about where the problem is. But the pattern of unit
279.
by wpietri 2y ago
The expectations can be pretty stable, but because they cover so much of the system, they tend to be more fragile. End to end tests are also often flakier because they're dealing with the system at levels meant for human interaction, l
280.
by wpietri 2y ago
I'm sure the ad revenue is part of it, but the commercial ones are also built for 24/7 operation over the course of years. And I expect another part of the added expense is that they know commercial purchasers aren't as price
281.
by wpietri 2y ago
It used to be the norm because releasing and installing stuff was hard and expensive. I agree we should be focused on the users, but I think the solution there is not to leave them on various outdated software, but to make it so easy for th
282.
by wpietri 2y ago
Yeah, it seems like "AI" has mostly become a marketing term for generative large models. For the people doing the stuff that is often called "machine learning", I see two reactions. Those seeking hype will call it "
283.
by wpietri 2y ago
Could you say a bit more about that? Normally I think "have to support people stuck on old versions" is something that happens when you're selling enterprise software to insurance companies. This is the first I've heard
284.
by wpietri 2y ago
Your point on interest is spot on. I moved a few of my personal websites to AWS's CloudFront and it cost me like a buck a month, way cheaper than maintaining a virtual server to do it. Except that somebody somewhere decided to try thei
285.
by wpietri 2y ago
This should perhaps have [2016] in the title.
286.
by wpietri 2y ago
Ah, this makes a lot of sense to me. Thank you. Interestingly, I think this problem exists in areas of back-end work. I know people who mostly do systems integration, where they're customizing some enterprise behemoth. But since that w
287.
by wpietri 2y ago
It is on behalf of investors that suits are bought. And when money is paid, it happens when a judge decides investors are harmed.
288.
by wpietri 2y ago
> I'm not sure why the parent comment decided to bring politics into it. The Federalist Society and their fellow travelers have been politicizing the Supreme Court for literal decades. To talk about the Supreme Court while avoiding
289.
by wpietri 2y ago
I don't think that's bilking at all. In the US we generally favor private enforcement over public regulation. E.g., the SEC doesn't go after every small bit of fraud and dubious corporate behavior. They're the big guns,
290.
by wpietri 2y ago
I don't think it's a question of raw intelligence so much as where the smarts are applied. Doing the crime and stepping back to put the crime in context and analyze the paths are two different topics and two different sets of beha
291.
by wpietri 2y ago
And let's not forget the paper that goes with the video, which has a stellar title: http://www.chabris.com/Simons1999.pdf
292.
by wpietri 2y ago
> My son, 4 years old, himself has > 100 books. So at least some people born today will have a connection to physical books! And people have surely given him lots of stuffed animals too, but it's the rare adult who hauls around a
293.
by wpietri 2y ago
I'm not saying they're the same. And I am sure some kids favor physical books. But the question for me is the extent to which any of them will spend a lot of effort building and hauling around personal libraries when the digital
294.
by wpietri 2y ago
Yeah, if the point is really about Adventists, I think it's better made with statistics on them. Ditto teetotalers or vegetarians (Adventists are often both). Or if it's about studying individuals with long lifespans, then great,
295.
by wpietri 2y ago
This was a low-priced consumer good, so I don't think anything is stopping you from doing teardowns like this on your own.
296.
by wpietri 2y ago
If an influencer is indeed able to monetize the content sufficient to match market price for the labor, then sure, that is also fairly valuing people's labor. But that's definitely not what's happening here.
297.
by wpietri 2y ago
All people are going somewhere. As he writes: "this library and I might share the same dissolution". What you and your wife are doing today isn't evidence against his point. The question is what happens to those books after y
298.
by wpietri 2y ago
If a company wants somebody to do a hardware audit for marketing purposes, they should pay money for that. Please fairly value people's labor, especially when you seek to profit from it.
299.
by wpietri 2y ago
The joke is that this tool is compelling enough that people might die from it.
300.
by wpietri 2y ago
For me tab accumulation is often related to fear of loss, sort of a digital hoarding of things that I might need someday. So it's possible I'd be better here knowing that my history was always there. I think it would be even more

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