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PerryCox

557 karma · joined May 22, 2011

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PerryCox··on Emad Mostaque resigned as CEO of Stability AI
I interviewed at Stability AI a while ago and that interview was a complete shit show. They quite literally spent 40 minutes talking about Emad and his "vision". I think we actually talked about what they wanted me to do there for like 15 minutes.

I was not feeling confident about them as a company that I wanted to work for before that interview, afterwards I knew that was a company I wouldn't work for.

PerryCox··on Relativistic Spaceship
I think that is largely a difference between the lore and the gameplay. Alduin in lore literally eats all the matter in existence like a black hole. In the game he kinda goes against his purpose and wants to rule and feed on the souls in Sovngarde.
PerryCox··on Relativistic Spaceship
In Skyrim they didn't send Alduin into the end of time, just into the future (also there is going to be an Elder Scrolls VI so V can't be the end of time, but will likely be the end of the fifth era). It was one of the reasons that the Felldir the Old was not onboard with the plan to use the Elder Scroll on Alduin. They didn't know how far into the future he would be sent. Most people on Nirn at the time of Skyrim didn't believe that dragons were real, much less Alduin who signals the end times. The Dragonborn ultimately ends up defeating Alduin, but because Alduin is immortal (in a way that the other dragons are not) he will return at a time deemed by his father Akatosh and actually destroy all of existence in that universe.

Going back to your original point it's a little different than sending him to the end of the universe, they sent him forward in time, but they actually had no idea how far or where there were sending him.

PerryCox··on Crime rings trafficking sand
That was the first thing I thought of when I read this headline. That show is one of my all time favorites, very underrated!
PerryCox··on Buzz: A lightweight statically typed scripting language
This is an excellent point and I think that while most languages will fade away in time, if they even contribute one new idea the project is worthwhile. If we had asked programmers in 1991 what the point of Python was, the responses would have probably been similar to the parent comment, and look at where it is now.

I played around with Vala (a C# style language that compiled to C on Linux) back in 2010 and while I never used it for anything serious, it was fun to try out new ideas and see how they could work. There is value in these projects, maybe some of it will carry over into other languages, in others they may be the dominant language in 10 years.

PerryCox··on The moral character of cryptographic work (2015)
This is a very realistic take on the subject. From an academic perspective it is a tool to be used as any other and gaining knowledge on how to better protect data is worthwhile and provides value to humanity as a whole.

DRM is one use that does not favor consumers, on the other hand we have encryption being used in apps like Signal to provide the same high quality software to every day consumers.

I'm very interested in quantum computers, specifically ones powerful enough to break AES and other types of modern encryption. What will that mean for humanity and individuals?

PerryCox··on GPT-4 API General Availability
"Give me a daily schedule of a stoic hedonist" worked for me just now.

https://chat.openai.com/share/04c1dbc0-4890-447f-b5a5-7b1bc5...

PerryCox··on Russia’s Nukes Probably Don’t Work – Here’s Why
Russia has something like 4,000 nukes, only 1 or 2 really need to work to cause massive devastation. It's much more likely that more than 1 or 2 still work and that is more than enough.
PerryCox··on Jack's Ass
I have hemorrhoids and bought a bidet about 2 years ago. I have not had a single flair up since I started using it. I cannot recommend them highly enough.
PerryCox··on Over the past 21 months I’ve written a code editor from the ground up
The unit testing section is interesting because I feel like this may not be the perfect approach to them, but it is not a bad method. Too many times I see unit testing being used as the holy grail of debugging and then half of them get ignored because "Oh that's a known issue."
PerryCox··on Chronophoto
As my last image in round 5 I got a photo of WWF where Mankind was on top of the hell in a cell. I guessed 1998 because of the meme and got it correct! It was the only image I hit dead on.
PerryCox··on What it's like to live in Monaco
I personally don't like the Monaco GP due to how big the cars have become making it (nearly) impossible to pass. Still you are correct it definitely is a classic race.

Monaco, Spa, Suzuka, and Monza are some of the best and most iconic tracks in the world.

PerryCox··on The WFH Folks
Honestly I don't have any issues with this. Most of my team is in Europe and I'm in America so even before COVID and WFH became the norm, I was still talking to people via Slack, Teams, etc.

I think the best advice I can give is to reach out to people and have normal conversations when you don't need anything. If you only talk to people when you need something from them, they are going to be less likely to talk about things that they have going on outside of work. Talk about anything that they are interested in. Plus the beauty of messaging apps is that people can respond when they have time and if they are busy they can ignore the messages.

Also if you get some downtime in meetings or join early, ask how things are going, what the weather is like, or if they have any weekend plans. There usually is a bit of time before or after meetings where you can still socialize.

PerryCox··on Enter a command to see help text for each arg
This is a really neat idea! I wonder how close you could get the prose to actually explaining the codes purpose as opposed to just saying "this is a for loop"?
PerryCox··on Why programming is difficult (2014)
I do the same with my .vim folder. You can place your .vimrc file in there as .vim/vimrc and now everything is backed up in git. I've been working this way for a few years now and can get setup on a new machine in a matter of minutes.
PerryCox··on Boston Dynamics Spot SDK Repo
I think Boston Dynamics is the closest to making robots that could actually be useful in real life situations. I would love to develop code for one of these.
PerryCox··on For tech-weary Midwest farmers, 40-year-old tractors now a hot commodity
Because the bigger companies forced them out of business or acquired them.
PerryCox··on Why I use R
I think this is a very valid point. There are times when Python is not the absolute best choice for a given problem, but in most cases it can allow you to achieve the desired goal in a way that is easy for newcomers to the particular codebase to grok very quickly.

There are times when it may be better to use another language and there is nothing wrong with that. I default to Python and if I think there will be specific issues with it, then I can look at a more specialized language.

PerryCox··on Generalized Knights
The pawn movement is acknowledged at the end of the first paragraph:

> Pawns are a little weird, but in general they always have to move forward.

PerryCox··on Show HN: Change Python code while it's running using a reloading loop
Anyone else getting this error? I tried on Debian 9 and MacOS 10.14.6 after installing via pip.

  import reloading
  Traceback (most recent call last):
    File "<input>", line 1, in <module>
      import reloading
    File "/home/lucas.mccoy/.local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/reloading/__init__.py", line 1, in <module>
    from .reloading import reloading
    File "/home/lucas.mccoy/.local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/reloading/reloading.py", line 87
    exc = exc.replace('File "<string>"', f'File "{fpath}"')
                                                         ^
  SyntaxError: invalid syntax
PerryCox··on Breakthrough in Synthetic Vaccine Technology Requires No Refrigeration
> intelligent anti-vaxxers

No that's an oxymoron if I have ever seen one.

PerryCox··on Google is investing $3.3B to build clean data centers in Europe
Yeah this is a good point, if you have a product with good support, that's one way you can out compete them.
PerryCox··on Netflix’s biggest bingers get hit with higher internet costs
This is the type of world I want to live in, and it is entirely possible and doable here in the US. We just need to get our politicians on board, which is easier said than done.
PerryCox··on Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years (1998)
I strongly disagree with this. I read Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years for the first time in 2007 and was learning C#. I changed languages 20 times and each one taught me something different or a new way of thinking about an old problem. Those 10,000 hours will be a great investment in your success.

The rest of it is networking.

PerryCox··on Apple has pushed a silent Mac update to remove hidden Zoom web server
That doesn't solve the problem because the webserver continues to run even if you have uninstalled Zoom.

Source: https://medium.com/bugbountywriteup/zoom-zero-day-4-million-...

PerryCox··on Open-Source Slack Alternative Mattermost Gets $50M Funding
This honestly seems like a pretty good compromise if it works out like you have described it.
PerryCox··on How FZF and ripgrep improved my workflow
Setting up your vim environment is as cloning a git repository that contains your .vim files. Takes me about ~60 seconds to have vim up and running with all my favorite plugins. That's faster than you can download and install any other text editor. It's what I've been doing on just about every machine I've used for the past 5 years.

There are situations where git is not installed or I can't download those files for security reasons set by administrators, but those situations have been pretty rare for me.

PerryCox··on Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B
I think you might be surprised at how many people do know what a join is, they may call it another name, but it's not a hard concept to understand. It's a very common thing I've seen non-technical people do and use.
PerryCox··on Show HN: Zero – A fast, zero-configuration server for React, Node.js, Markdown
Having Markdown rendered as HTML is basically all I want when I'm standing up a single web page or a small website. This is definitely something I'll bookmark for later.
PerryCox··on This Cat Does Not Exist
Some of these are the stuff of nightmares.
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