Waterluvian

It’s just the best thing ever. Compiling at work took a minute for full builds with babel, and with rsbuild it now takes about 0.9 seconds.

The current U.S. regime is also replacing some amount of that legal certainty with regime fealty. Picking Chinese options over American ones probably runs a risk of upsetting their leader. I've got to imagine American companies are weighing this factor in their decisions.

Send them all my way. I could start a company. A company down by The Bay.

15,370 BCE feels like a lottery roll. I doubt I’ll live long.

Edit: oh it’s not weighed by population? I was expecting 99% of rolls to be in recent times.

I love this. Especially the part where you can ask the Government of Canada for beavers.

But it feels like there’s a bit of surprise to the idea that the environment takes on the form it takes on. And if you take away a part of it, it’ll take on a different form. And if you put that part back, it can take on the earlier form. There is no correct or canonical form.

Yeah… Fair point! I’ve always perceived NIMBY as “we want the benefits but we want someone else to deal with the geographic price.” I bet we could find people who legitimately want commuter airports but just not near their house… wait… how would that even work?!

There’s probably a reasonable methodology but it has a lot of multiplications and some base parameters that make the whole thing wildly sensitive.

Could you imagine the (rather justified?) NIMBYism for all the airports required for commuter flight? If rail can’t be done, flight definitely won’t fly.

It would be like if there was a console 1/5th the price of a PS5 for approximately the same features.

> I don't get how that can be considered a luxury good.

> You never need to play video games.

This is basically what defines a luxury good.

But isn’t the scale not really relevant? There’s entire classes of luxury that are exactly the same thing to people who can own an LV bag. Saving up to buy a faberge helicopter or whatever it is.

I’m not fully sure how to articulate the thought. But it’s that looking at specific instance details distract from looking at the pattern in the abstract. Or that the first order costs don’t really tell the story. It’s the second order: percent markup for practical vs. prestige that tells a story.

Playdate feels like a Louis Vuitton bag in that you buy it not because you need a bag but because you want a fancy luxury good that feels good for you to own. I’m not criticizing it, though. I celebrate that we have options. When I got my kid a Scratch + JS game dev handheld I found a dozen options with varying pros and cons.

But the petty, small part of me has this itch where I’m unnecessarily concerned that Playdate might actually believe it’s not just a Louis Vuitton bag and that it actually is a sensibly practical purchase. I think I’m sensitive to the desire for things to be honest about what they are.

This is the only regulation I feel is reasonable. When it comes to luxury goods like video games, it doesn’t make sense to dictate how the product is offered. But by all means insist they’re clear with what the transaction type is.

I can imagine the natural competitive wedge where GOG can say “Buy Game” but Steam has to say “Lease Game” on their buttons.

I look forward to your blog post about it and the allegory as it relates to software dev. (Otherwise why would you be plugging a tire?)

This is a wonderful Minute Physics or What If? idea.

I’d love to know the required bandwidth of the keyboard, too. PCI-e keyboard? Or would it have to be mainlined right to the NIC?

This is a term fellow devs have been using for years and years and my brain just cannot come to re-index its meaning. So I am immediately distracted by the context switch to sociopathic liars and related psychology.

Has anyone else had luck having a system level prompt for “express all responses in bullet point form unless full sentences are specifically necessary”? Because I’ve been having tremendous luck with that.

> According to Holden, in a review before Air Marshal Kenneth Porter, he was asked whether he agreed that "With the limited flying experience I had, the test would have been better left to an experienced and current Lightning test pilot", which he answered in the affirmative, following which Porter related some of his own unfortunate flying incidents.

I feel like there’s something between these lines that I don’t understand. Like is this some form of lawyer hacking without lawyers? Like a, “let’s have you admit to something that isn’t really wrongdoing just so we have a thing for the report.”

I’d sooner drink with hags.

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Being an artist has always been a pretty difficult career path. But lots of people do it because they love creating art. If AI actually does what people fear it will to programming, people like your son and mine can choose to be an artist as a hobby or make a go of it as a profession.

Well, almost everybody.

Once I’m done integrating blockchain technology and minting NFTs, I’ll catch up to modernizing for agentic development.

I think it’s partly about how many steps back you take. Take another step back and you might see a new option that will in ten years be added to your list of options lots of people use and have plenty of complaints about.

I’m not saying not to try or that there’s no value in turning the wheel once more. But I used to be excited about these kinds of things and now I’m not because I’ve seen the cycle a few times now.

How much of the language style outcome is a well-crafted result vs. being a somewhat unpredictable outcome of mucking with levers and knobs for a while?

My submission: there’s a writing competition with a $100,000 prize for the best AI-generated story. But to get an edge, the protagonist cheats by writing it themselves.

Spotify on Ubuntu one day stopped outputting audio and never again could I get it to work. How do you screw up the one thing your app needs to do?!

It’s not about bad actors. It’s about putting untrained people in a position where subjects might be vulnerable and come to depend on them being the trusted expert in the room.

Context matters. Otherwise we’re just being clowns.

For what it’s worth, I wasn’t even thinking about the physical danger when I was… shocked… that you only need a one hour online course. It’s that they’re interacting with people in a somewhat clinical way as an implicit authority. The shock would obviously cause discomfort and therefore stress (or why even do it).

I’ve never received $7M but a few times I’ve handled large sums (when buying a house and previous startup exit) and it felt so weird to be how completely normal it was. Like just… oh yeah go ahead and write a cheque for six figures. Or do an e-transfer into your chequing account for six figures. It felt like… no there has to be a whole special world for large sums, no?