zem

8 ms·

181.
by zem 4mo ago
self help books aren't really my thing, but I have to say I love the guy's attitude in that post.
182.
by zem 4mo ago
the version I learnt the phrase from had the end of the chain as - oh we should paint it - we need a paintbrush - I hear yak hair makes the best paintbrushes - here I am, shaving a yak made more sense than the examples given in the op
183.
by zem 4mo ago
F is 15 in hex :)
184.
by zem 4mo ago
the problem, ironically, is that hucksters were selling other oils as "snake oil" when they didn't have the same omega 3s. the bad reputation was due to fake snake oil.
185.
by zem 4mo ago
explain like i'm fifteen, surely (:
186.
by zem 4mo ago
I feel like similar to the chinese, indian home cooking and indian restaurant cooking are very different; I can try my hand at a lot of restaurant style recipes at home but it's not what I usually cook or what I grew up eating at hom
187.
by zem 4mo ago
thanks, that was really confusing me!
188.
by zem 4mo ago
if growing up in dubai was any indication, what happens (at least for the next little while) is you get a steady stream of desperately poor people who work until they wreck their health and then get replaced by the next desperate person.
189.
by zem 4mo ago
I am guessing the people most disappointed with AI in the long run are the ones wanting some sort of arbitrage where they can generate products with low effort and then expect people to pay for access to them based on a paradigm where creat
190.
by zem 4mo ago
i just ran into a concrete example of why i would not want to run a tree of unsupervised agents churning out code. i have a project that generates large but repetitive .docx documents. i asked claude to add some graphics to it, it did a ver
191.
by zem 4mo ago
i've been running claude in what the blog calls phase 0 for the last 6-7 months. i'm perfectly happy with it, my development velocity has increased while i still have a good grasp of the entire app, and i've actually been mak
192.
by zem 4mo ago
it's the colour scheme that I remember most strongly. I still think "very prince of persia" when I see certain colour combinations, especially cream and purple.
193.
by zem 4mo ago
the solution might be checklisting in lieu of time tracking - rather than note what you spend each moment on, define tasks and subtasks, and work on one set of subtasks at a time. the checklist helps maintain focus because if you think of s
194.
by zem 4mo ago
AI has made this way worse - now the thinking is "well, the agent is doing all the work, why can't the engineers make sure it is running on all cylinders all the time, churning out useful code"
195.
by zem 4mo ago
the bit about glue work is interesting, because in my time working for megacorps this has been an explicit part of the annual performance review (google called it "citizenship" which I think captured the essence of it - basically
196.
by zem 4mo ago
the modern version is "ctrl-q to quit, ctrl-w to close the current tab"
197.
by zem 4mo ago
you might enjoy this post on complexity and why it is bad: https://tengstrand.github.io/blog/2019-09-14-the-origin-of-c... keeping things simple is not a bad thing, and often requires you to be smart enough not to over
198.
by zem 4mo ago
as someone who got into linux and open source in the early 90s I will never stop being sad that "hackathon" morphed into a competitive activity, rather than "let's all get together and build some free software collaborat
199.
by zem 4mo ago
people are not questioning whether they did the work, they are questioning whether the work was really necessary (i.e. if mythos is really so good that it needs safeguards to prevent malicious actors from using it)
200.
by zem 4mo ago
I think nothing has contributed to the depersonalization of social media more than the (facebook led, afaik) push to aggressively show as many people as possible everything you post. after the first few jarring reminders that random friends
201.
by zem 4mo ago
the analogy with experimental physics is a good one - being sure something is true is a good first step to developing an elegant proof of its truth.
202.
by zem 4mo ago
there is also a ton of grass-roots football in India, with kids kicking a ball around wherever there is a space for it. that doesn't translate to having good national teams simply because there is not much funding to develop the game,
203.
by zem 4mo ago
I think even the busiest airport terminal does retain a liminal feel, because the entire time you spend in it you are being palpably funneled along, with enough attendant unpleasantness to keep you in a state of constantly waiting to get a
204.
by zem 4mo ago
I'm a big fan of the pluggable jit strategy (I even gave a brief presentation about it at an earlier pycon). the idea is that you identify the seams in the interpreter where the jit interacts with the main interpreter loop, and then pr
205.
by zem 4mo ago
the we/you are different in each case. say I maintain some package, foo, and I want to publish foo-3.5 which contains a security issue. in the cooldown scenario I push the new version to the package repository (rubygems/pip/n
206.
by zem 4mo ago
when I was into legos (as a kid; I've sadly had too many hobbies and not enough time as an adult) I would jump directly to step 2. I only bought (asked my parents for :)) specific models if they had a lot of interesting new piece types
207.
by zem 4mo ago
I always think of the twain quote: There are wealthy gentlemen in England who drive four-horse passenger-coaches twenty or thirty miles on a daily line in the summer because the privilege costs them considerable money; but if they were offe
208.
by zem 4mo ago
sure, the premise doesn't hold up as rigorous "hard" sf, like anything else involving ftl (though I do like the idea in the eschaton series that fine, you have ftl, but that doesn't make spacetime magically non-einstein
209.
by zem 4mo ago
I think jumping back and forth via hypertext would be a bad reading experience; what you ideally want is two panes scrolling in parallel. (I read it keeping two copies of the book open on my kindle and phone but if I reread it I'll pro
210.
by zem 4mo ago
it's worth noting that the zones of thought universe literally had different physics; things like superintelligence and ftl travel were physically impossible closer to the galactic centre but commonplace further out. so the notion of &

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