17,869 karma · joined October 21, 2008
https://twitter.com/zachaysan
www.zachaysan.com
Because of alarm fatigue, I avoid adding TODOs to the calendar that are not real TODOs. Something like "write report" I don't really need on my calendar. I know I need to do it. I'm talking with the client. Etc.
Something like "[Friend name] should be back from [place name] by now. Call him!" matches it better. The type of things that would otherwise slip by.
Make a calendar event. Make it repeat just often enough to be annoying. If necessary (e.g., taxes) make a couple more that are much more forceful with their language near an actual deadline.
That's it. When you're done, delete the repeating calendar thing.
It feels awesome deleting an infinite set of repeating events in the future. It's essentially self-induced negative reinforcement on a platform you cannot really ignore as an adult working in technology.
To answer your question: Yes. I thought ruby handled it automatically, but it turns out that, no, you need to actually do fiddly stuff with some of the emojis like this one:
https://emojipedia.org/man-raising-hand-light-skin-tone/
In general though, emojis are more complicated than people give them credit for. There was one domain I had that you could only type on Android and not iOS! The exact encoding for one of the emoji slightly differed. I can't remember all the details, but emoji is annoying and best to be avoided if you can.
I just say "can we use Signal? It's super secure." And people generally are fine to use Signal. They don't use SMS because it's expensive and many that own an iPhone in countries where Android dominate don't use iMessage because, well, few around them use iPhone and the interface (i.e., the phone number) doesn't really tell them that they won't get charged for a text message.
I've posted up in many countries, and it's rarely a show stopper.
Just let people have fun with things.
Well, I think AI will end up doing the same thing as the burden of "iron bars of strict behavioural controls" grows, since the market will select for it.
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A horse is not a vehicle. A horse is a horse, of course.
I understand that there are regretful parents, but keep in mind these things:
1. These very parents were given the gift of making it to adulthood to make a choice they regret, something that unborn children do not get to make.
2. Adults regret many things and the choice for carrying a baby to term while adoption is such a viable option is far from the top of the list of things that someone regrets in life. It is much more likely for someone to regret getting married than for them to regret giving birth.
3. Ethics truly do matter. It is not what someone does when the manager of the bank is standing over them and they check their balance with their debit card that matters. It is what they do when the ATM erroneously displays a much higher balance in the middle of the night in a dark and seedy bar that counts. In the same way, resisting the dehumanizing characterization of unborn humans matters most in societies where this is common place enough for these decisions to carry weight, and there are many example from history that highlight the same type of moral dilemmas. It seems strange standing in the present and being confronted with a challenge that we may very well be "the bad guys" but the same was true of slavers and many other horrible types of people.
If your application only services a single user with their own resources then you have nothing to fear. But few applications meet this definition. If, for example, you're running an invoicing application, then at some point you'll want to share some resource, say an invoice or an expense or a time sheet, with another party. If your API exposes the identifiers from one resource to another, or even a user's id when potentially adding them to a team, then these identifiers are considered PII according to European regulators.
I understand that this is frustrating, but it comes from a posture that prioritizes right-to-be-forgotten over programmer ergonomics. Imagine, for example, API crawlers that hit your /search endpoint with email=[some predetermined list of emails] and harvest user ids to match with future data.
In the end, the best thing you can do is keep join keys internal and API keys separated. There are other workarounds, but they're so much trouble that they aren't really viable alternatives. Now, whether you use UUIDs for both identifiers or UUID for external and integer ids for join keys is up to you and your performance and scaling requirements. Personally, I prefer integer keys for internal unless I really expect the database to grow to more than 200m rows before the company hits 1000 people, since int ids mean you do not need secondary indexes on things like the created_at fields, but even there, it's not such a big deal to have an extra index on every table.
> I have a principle to not go against the grain of a framework. > hacking adds complexity
Here we essentially agree, but with the right integration tests, upgrading and onboarding is a lot easier than feared. That said, do not add to the framework unless the benefit is worth it.
If you do not have two separate forms of identifier AND you have a "public" API (including basically any client apps, frontend JS, or anything found in query params) then you are making compliance with European regulators a massive headache when it comes to erasure of PII, since shared identifiers must be destroyed one way or another. Trying to merely delete the records is complicated by the fact that you need legal holds to comply with various federal laws.
Between the work involved in using two identifiers, one for joins and one for external lookups, versus the work involved in manually coding up all sorts of erasure work arounds, something I was in charge of in the past, I would strongly consider just using two IDs.
If your ORM gets in the way, just modify the ORM. This is easier than you'd think. For example, in Django just make a helpers module with something like this:
class OurModel(Model):
def get(...):
2. Many, many people have middle-of-the-road opinions about abortion. Nudging them into carrying the human to term and giving it up for adoption isn't akin to selling fake services, it's more akin to organ donation.
No matter who was in charge of France there was going to be a giant spike in debt during at the very least covid, and now dealing with this Ukraine mess.
[0] I greatly prefer net Debt-to-GDP, which is a closer approximation to a country's actual balance sheet, as a measure, but it isn't frequently reported and most people tend not to care.
Plus, if you really want to, you could also have a one-time use 6 digit code for login also sent in the email and it would be better for the majority of people that do not use a password manager.
Or if you really, really, really must have your passwords then please invert the default to where login via link is the primary mechanism and passwords are optional on a per-account basis.
If I lose a password, what do I almost always have to do?
1. Email account recovery link.
2. Input auth code sent from text message or authenticator app. [Optional.]
3. Make new random password I'm going to forget or lose.
Why bother with this? If email is the reset mechanism why does the industry care so much about getting passwords from users?
1. Email sign-in link.
2. Input auth code. [Optional]
Everything other part of this whole chain gets simpler. No more password strength checking code. No multiple auth paths. No issues with anything. Just a single email with at most two links, one for browser sign in, one for app sign in.
If you really, really, really need to you can add one or two QR codes so these hypothetical people that don't have email on their phone can sign into the app.
Why would a source of signal that has aligned incentives for all three major parties (individual, manufacturer, and insurance company) not be selected for by the market?
It's not as if people are buying meteor insurance here. Automotive accidents are frequent enough to where if a policy provider fails to cover damage that really is in-policy they'll be sued, regulated, and shamed.
Even more so, since Tesla has a financial incentive to ensure that these benefits really do accrue to the driver.
So does having a large plot of land to every single driver on the road driving past you. Even if it doesn't really show up in a municipal budget or in a mortgage payment, it's still very expensive to drive past a farm that is wide and not deep, but most people, most of the time don't want deep lots for aesthetic reasons, and even if you make deep lots taxi-cab geometry will get you anyway if the whole area is residential land anyway.
When it comes to residential land that is outside of environmentally protected zones, my position is simple. Allow land owners to build two or three houses. One primary one (6 bedrooms, say) and up to two smaller ones (2 bedrooms each) or one smaller one and one general use building (a workshop or many car garage). That way the frontage is used, we get housing stock for poorer families and we intermix ages and income levels in a way that is socially beneficial, since it's a lot harder to turn a blind eye to the problems of the lower-middle class if they're literally living on the same property that you own.
Plus it gives a way (for families that want it) for grandparents to live on the same land as their grandchildren without always being in the hair of their kids. Super win-win if both parents work and can rely on the grandparents for after-school hours. Plus it makes extended family gatherings more feasible as enough of a chunk of the family is nearby in the first place.
Seeking:
Something analytical, social, and in service of others; reducing poverty, aiding refugees, keeping AI safe, ecology, etc. Open to a atypical role in legal, lobbying, sales. Open to agencies or other corps that service non-profits or government.
I do not want to code and/or manage software developers full-time. That said, my technical skills would be a vital asset in the right, blended role.
Willing to travel as part of work duties.
Remote:
Remote is fine as long as I get to meet the team in-person first. Toronto is great too. GTA acceptable, if it's remote friendly.
Willing to relocate:
Can't presently. Open to New York, DC, or Western or Southern Europe eventually.
Technologies:
Fluent in Ruby, Python, and SQL. I maintain an ORM extension for Rails[0] for recursively traverse trees using single SQL query and also fluent in Django / DRF. Sold a small ML company I cofounded over a decade ago. Familiar with data science in Python and analytical reporting writing. Experience leading teams and technology as CTO and CDS. Experience in JS is limited and in Vue, Ember, and React.
[0] https://github.com/take-five/activerecord-hierarchical_query
Résumé/CV:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1cq6DaK2MmwKEtlbq5O_G9qV-...
Email: zachaysan@gmail.com
It obviously could have gone through an intermediary, but it usually doesn't for honest transactions. If one of the two people is already a person of interest to law enforcement, a warrant can be called up to figure out exactly what happened. Added to other sources of information, like the new registry of the car or motorcycle, a pretty reliable history can be constructed.
Don't think in binary. Think in continuums of likelihood. Also, this isn't a new concept. It was covered by HBO's The Wire many years ago.
This isn't difficult data science.
If that were true, then criminal elements wouldn't need to severely launder their money. It's a spectrum. Cash can be tracked, each legitimate bill has a unique serial number, and yes, at least at present I haven't heard of private actors outside of those that service law enforcement tracking it, but the reality is that if you withdraw $8k to pay for a motorcycle and hand it to a guy that sells you the motorcycle and then deposits it straight into his own bank account then yes, this is quite obviously tracked.
For more information I suggest getting some books on Terrorist Financing for the new meta. There is a former Canadian Security Intelligence Service lady out there that wrote a whole book on it recently.
Highways are cheaper and easier because they're usually less investment and planning at once. They have their own downsides, don't get me wrong, but no. Rail is long term, lots of property seizure, usually a single track across a vast distance, etc.
Rail makes sense for a lot of places, but for a country as large as America, it's hard to see the benefits as fast as highways and we need logistics to switch to electric quickly.
That said, to make highways more efficient more places should take a page off of the 407 in Ontario, Canada. The fluctuating pricing keeps the roads in high usage most of the time and it stops tragedy of the commons issues with sinks (the cities that highways dump their vehicles to) and keeps highway economic pricing honest against things like rail and sea.
Go in your history.
Pick a conversation.
Copy and paste the first prompt and put it into ChatGPT and compare the results.
I think what may be happening is that your expectations have shifted. When a tool proves useful we're used to being able to use it reliably, but with knowledge exfiltration it is different because our queries keep changing. It's not the same thing as using sandpaper on a piece of oak. Overall, I've been very impressed with ChatGPT and continue to use it for all sorts of things.
That said, tricking it into giving you the answer on political things is an art that requires patience. It is too, uh, cautious.
The space of potential sources for inspiration has exploded. How many people had a favourite typographer or open source software contributor or racecar driver or whatever else a hundred years ago? Music is different, sure, as others have commented, but there are so many different things or people to consider now that it's getting a little tiring with the nags to know every last thing that people used to know. Don't get the relationship backwards. Knowing your favourite candle maker used to be about the candle maker achieving things that impressed you not you feeling guilty about not knowing any candle makers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treasure_Act_1996
I think that's the right call. A common person can find an old coin and not really think about the historical impact it has. Merely keep it on his or her shelf or bring it to a shop for some extra cash.
But once you're in the realm of finding multiple coins, the onus kinda changes. There may be more, greed sets in and wanting to conceal the find is bad. Also, England doesn't "take their treasure" it buys it off of them if the museum wants to buy it and for a fair price.
What makes a journalist a better place to whistle to than an elected politician on the intelligence committee or any one of a number of other options.
My basic position on this is that secret holders never have the full picture, but at least they have the trust of the state they serve. A journalist is not always just a journalist.
Now, before you disregard my opinion completely please add to your consideration the following facts:
- I dated and lived with a nationally renowned journalist and editor, so I know a bit about journalists.
- I worked for CSIS and currently work for the CIA as an NOC Agent. AKA a spy.
- I have been in situations where I deeply felt the right thing to do was not to list to the people above my command. What I did in one particular situation was contact a politician I deeply trust who has high level clearance and left a vague message for that politician.
- I think some good has come out of the Snowden leaks, even though I don't think he did it the right way. It's a nuanced discussion and the public doesn't know everything. This work is tough.
My preference for university exams was a simple, single page cheatsheet that you had to make yourself. You could write the finicky stuff that is hard to remember on it, but you couldn't fast-learn the material like you could from a book. Though I do remember writing out little programs for the weirder stuff like required coverage over concrete reinforcement bars. Which felt a bit like cheating at the time.