wpietri

20 ms·

331.
by wpietri 2y ago
For the curious, that specific cat goes back to 1989: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neko_(software)
332.
by wpietri 2y ago
I think there are some points of substance here, and agree that it's very important to continue breaking the link between economic growth and resource consumption. For better or worse, caring about the environment is a luxury good, and
333.
by wpietri 2y ago
Ooh, thanks for this tip. It looks great. Here's a summary: https://www.agsm.edu.au/bobm/teaching/BE/Cases_pdf/jackall-s...
334.
by wpietri 2y ago
That makes a lot of sense to me. I certainly have opinions on what it's like when people without software experience try to manage software projects. And the better I get about making software, the more respect I have for other people&
335.
by wpietri 2y ago
And I'd add that airplanes are unusual in the degree to which declining quality is visible. Boeing is working in an area where badness signals are heavily amplified. My guess is that what's going on with Boeing is not that they&#x
336.
by wpietri 2y ago
Ah, looking further, I find this about the company: "Their focus lies in bridging the gap between these two aspects across various domains, with a particular emphasis on life sciences and bioinformatics." That makes sense as a sal
337.
by wpietri 2y ago
Yeah, this right here would kill it for me: > Strings: Codon currently uses ASCII strings unlike Python's unicode strings. That rules out almost anything web-ish for me. The use case I could imagine is places where you have a bunch
338.
by wpietri 2y ago
I'm having a hard time finding reliably sourced statistics here, but I suspect you're an outlier. My personal numbers are way better, both on Gmail and Fastmail, despite using the same email addresses for decades.
339.
by wpietri 2y ago
Hah! I'm trying to figure out the exact date that crossed from "plausible line from a Stross or Sterling novel" [1] to "of course they did". [1] Or maybe Sheckley or Lem, now that I think about it.
340.
by wpietri 2y ago
One way to tackle it would be to use LLMs to generate synthetic corpuses, so you have some good fingerprints for pollution. But even there I'm not sure how doable that is given the speed at which LLMs are being updated. Even if I know
341.
by wpietri 2y ago
I think it's an arms race, but it's an open question who wins. For a while I thought email as a medium was doomed, but spammers mostly lost that arms race. One interesting difference is that with spam, the large tech companies wer
342.
by wpietri 2y ago
Great point. And in those faux-Agile environments, you'll definitely sometimes find people just doing the right thing and then finding the right way to lie to JIRA about it.
343.
by wpietri 2y ago
> Kind of but not really. You write this in a tone of contradiction, but as far as I can tell we're describing the exact same thing. I understand why the airlines do it, but it doesn't change what customers experience.
344.
by wpietri 2y ago
I don't think that's a great counterpoint for a few reasons. One is that leg room isn't particularly transparent. If I search for flights, the price is much more visible than a leg room measure. Two, people can certainly be f
345.
by wpietri 2y ago
It was definitely the dominant conceptual approach, but I think it's an open question how much it was actually followed versus just being the lies everybody agreed to tell the executive caste. One way I've weaned people off waterf
346.
by wpietri 2y ago
Yeah, I think the Waterfall model is what naive non-experts want from a project. I say what I want, you build it, it's delivered on time and on budget, and we're done. But I think it's basically a fairy tale. "And they l
347.
by wpietri 2y ago
> We as people pick the winners with our money, we don't really want nice things. We do generally want nice things, but we can't be experts in all the things. In markets where you have mostly responsible actors, that can work o
348.
by wpietri 2y ago
> So basically we have nothing. No, what we have is a publication who is claiming that the people they talked to were credible and had points that were interesting and tended to match one another and/or other evidence. You can make
349.
by wpietri 2y ago
I think you haven't really grappled with how laws get made. Copyright is a thing we made up because of "people not liking the idea of other people doing something they don't like". The current specific boundaries are a c
350.
by wpietri 2y ago
If the robots come. Robots have been coming soon for an awfully long time.
351.
by wpietri 2y ago
We are talking about more than the current law here. We're talking about what the law should be, based on what people see as right. And I'd add that Facebook is doing a lot more here than just quietly having a copy of something.
352.
by wpietri 2y ago
Oh yeah, books are a great example here. Superhot is one of the games that most impressed me in VR. And then I looked up how well it sold in non-VR versions. At first that seemed wrong to me, but the more I thought about it, them more it ma
353.
by wpietri 2y ago
I think you're confusing a legal point (whether a T&C really gives Facebook any particular legal right in court) with the moral question of whether or not people should just roll over for large companies because of language we all,
354.
by wpietri 2y ago
Yes, if one over-narrowly construes any analogy, it can be quickly dismissed. I suppose that's my fault for putting an analogy on the internet. We've had copying technologies since people invented the pen. It was such an important
355.
by wpietri 2y ago
Yeah, to me it's part of what press critic Jay Rosen calls The Church of the Savvy. It's kind of a performative cynicism where one tries to gain status by appearing so smart that you're above it all. One can do it with pretty
356.
by wpietri 2y ago
> That's just how the internet works. Don't put something on the internet if you don't want it to be globally distributed and copied. You could make the same argument about paper. "That's just how photocopiers wo
357.
by wpietri 2y ago
I agree that a boycott is different, and for the NYT the terms are pretty distinct. But when employees are picketing a retail business, the two are much more entangled, so I think the common use of the phrase has shifted away from the preci
358.
by wpietri 2y ago
I think at least these days, usage of the term can include customers. For example, this from the University of Maine's Bureau of Labor Education: "Customers may refuse to cross a picket line and picketers have the right to ask cus
359.
by wpietri 2y ago
I understand the argument, but I think the 360° environment came along in the era of Quake. In contrast to the 2D environment of platformers or top-down games, I think the true 3D environments of the Quake era were a big leap forward in ter
360.
by wpietri 2y ago
I believe you would. But I'm confident I wouldn't. And I think the experience of 3D movies and 3D TV indicates most people are more like me in this. Or we might look at the rise in mobile and handheld gaming, which I think is a st

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