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For those who don't know who this is: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz

Or to put it differently, "put your own small dent in the universe"

A couple years ago I built a new website for a local shop. It was a straightforward project - a problem I "could really solve easily" - but it had a real and material impact on the lives of some wonderful people who in turn had a material impact on their community. I sometimes look back at that work as being, in certain ways, more fulfilling than any of the more challenging work I've done since.

I think this is mainly a problem of social norms- there are few contexts today where people assume you want to have long-form discussion without you going out on a limb and stating it explicitly. Asking someone to coffee is one that still exists; I do this with friends sometimes. But another alternative is to just take that step and explicitly state what you'd like to do. It might be a little awkward, but I bet many people would be receptive.

1) Use rust-analyzer if you aren't already. It decreases the time it takes to see compiler/borrow error results by about 10x. This helps enormously when you're banging your head against something, taking guesses to see what might work.

2) It's often better to slow down and think through what's going on. Make sure you have a good understanding of pointers, allocation, ownership, etc, and if you've been fighting with something for more than 10 minutes see if you can actually understand why it's upset. Rust makes it easier not to accidentally mess these things up, but you will still be chronically frustrated if you don't have a good grasp on them.

3) I've found that the more I use it the more I get an intuition for what fixes certain errors. I don't feel great about fixing something without fully understanding it, but for certain common cases it can really help with the problem of iteration speed.

I honestly think the only solution is for individuals to recuse themselves from those networks (I say on one of those networks), lower the trust they place in digital information, etc. It's become clear that the downward spiral is intrinsic to the medium itself (or possibly just the scale). I don't believe that any amount of technology, or product-rethinking, or UX will change that. We just weren't meant to interact this way. My only hope is that people eventually get disenchanted or burned-out enough that they simply stop engaging.

I replied to the original tweet too ("what would you do if you were Jack Dorsey?"). I said I'd shut the whole thing down.

It used to be Jira. Thankfully my current company doesn't use it. Now it's probably DBeaver, which is hard to complain about because it's free and full-featured, but it has one of the worst user experiences I've ever encountered.

As others have said, I think this is a better argument against machines emulating humanness than it is against the broader category of "general intelligence".

For me it always comes down to: If we assume the human mind to be a physical, deterministic phenomenon, then an informational, deterministic system could simulate it. It's as simple as that. To take the brute-force route, every atom in a human body could be simulated, which would include its intelligence.

Now, that says nothing about time-scale or practicality. It doesn't even say anything about whether electronic computers as we know them can achieve the physical density necessary to simulate something so complex, given the natural resources we have available. But in principle, unless you believe in the metaphysical, there's no denying that AGI is something that can exist.

Perceptually, I think Rackspace was the first modern cloud provider that I'd ever heard of. Is that accurate? Were they early on the trend? Or did their name just advertise the concept really well?

You do a proper study. It sounds like the resistance is coming because they're trying to push it through and skip a step.

Clickbait title:

> But the idea exists only on paper...[Dr. Fauci said] scientists should first demonstrate that the coronavirus antibodies that are currently delivered to patients intravenously in hospital wards across the country actually work. “Once you show the efficacy, then the obvious next step is to convert it into an intramuscular” shot.

There's a school of thought that the descendants of expert-systems are the key to having auditable decision-making systems, where conclusions come from a composition of rules, and can therefore be explained (and corrected). There are lots of valid criticisms of this approach, but I have yet to see someone offer a compelling alternative.

That's some pretty broad-strokes-painting. I'm still on a video call every week, and I'm not in as many meetings as most of my coworkers. I'm also in two separate weekly online roleplaying game groups and we use cameras for those because it's much less fun without the added expressiveness.

People are suggesting just using tape, but the issue is when you want to un-cover it frequently (which is probably more common now than a few months ago). For a couple dollars you can get a thin, nice-looking little plastic cover that you can actually slide out of the way when you need to use it. Most of these are thin enough not to be a problem, but they vary, and even the really thin ones usually don't quite let your Macbook close all the way, potentially putting pressure on a narrow point.

They probably had people come to them with broken screens and they wanted to establish a policy to waive responsibility, which is understandable.

Microsoft has also heavily invested in the web ecosystem via VSCode, TypeScript, and NPM. Not to mention that Office is now chiefly a web app. My guess is that, among other things, they see it as a way to cultivate fields adjacent to Azure and attract customers to it.

> But there is an existing system for funding things with widespread benefits to society. It’s called the government.

Not if you ask the current ruling party. Even a cursory glance at the state of the Union should make it obvious there's nobody left who cares to fund things with widespread benefits to society.

> The problem is compounded by companies that sell inexpensive "support" for LibreOffice, but which are not involved in its development and are not really able to provide that support. Those companies "file all their tickets up-stream and hope they are fixed for free". Companies working in that mode have no problem pricing their offerings below those of the companies doing the actual work (and thus winning much of the business that does exist). In addition, they simply call their offerings "LibreOffice", which actually looks more authentic than services from other companies, which are trying to build their own brands around LibreOffice support.

Is this not a cut-and-dry case of trademark violation?

Question for someone who works in music/audio: is this actually useful as a workflow tool, or is it just a cool tech demo/toy?

It's a question of tradeoffs between professional accountability and improved working conditions in a given field, based on factors like how bad things can get in that field without accountability, how well (or poorly) employees are currently treated and paid, how likely employees are to take advantage of unaccountability, etc.

People very much care about accountability when it comes to law enforcement, because compared to regular employees in most fields they have very direct and outsized power over society. And police aren't exactly underpaid either.

I would tend to think the key is the "soft" aspects of your business. The things that can't simply be copied or commoditized. Customer service, being in tune with your target market and their wants and needs, responsiveness to feedback, institutional knowledge.

Everyone still uses Slack even though it is not an especially hard product to build, and even though Microsoft and Google have both shipped clones that work fine and integrate with their other products. Why? Part of it is brand recognition and a network effect, but I think an important factor is that this is all that Slack does. Slack really really cares about making the best chat tool for people to use at work. They put all of their energy into constantly improving it; they give it their human attention. The same is partly true of Dropbox vs Google Drive and OneDrive.

Google Meet and Microsoft Teams don't really matter to those companies. They'd like it if you used them, they'll allocate some cash to keep them going. But it wouldn't be a huge deal if they lost the battle and those products died. A company's culture, institutional knowledge, and focus can't simply be copied.

What about "may"?

Does anyone know the progress on exposing browser APIs (and hopefully real JS objects) to WASM directly? I think its use-cases will remain pretty narrow until then, but I haven't heard much noise about those developments lately.

In some ways it should be faster because it isn't garbage-collected. But I agree that would be a much better benchmark for what should be possible.

Very interesting. Is this the first time a major city has fallen within a reservation?

On top of that, like being in cars, it lobotomizes our empathy towards those we're interacting with, creating the perfect storm of toxic interaction.

People panicked at first about the GL Apocalypse when Apple decided to use Metal instead of Vulcan.

But here's the way I look at it: OpenGL was created to abstract over graphics hardware and operating systems both at once, and yet was intended to be high-level enough that it could be called out to directly by application developers (including game developers).

It was what people needed at the time, but I think it was trying to do too many things in a single layer of abstraction, and these days it isn't doing a great job at any of them. It's known for being slow. Most people don't write it directly anymore; they use a game engine or library and only write shaders directly. It performs inconsistently between OSes.

Whereas Vulcan, and even more so Metal, are decidedly lower-level. They abstract over the hardware and that's about it. This enables the higher-level libraries and engines that people were already using to be more fine-tuned and performant while still allowing graphics hardware to remain a commodity.

In this context WebGL is interesting because it's also an abstraction over Vulcan/Metal/DirectX, while remaining lower-level than most of those other libraries and engines. It's really very much like we've split the OpenGL layer in two and ended up with one layer focused on performance within a given OS, and another layer focused on providing a modern, ergonomic API across all systems.

All in all, I think this is a pretty good way for things to have progressed.

Game developer. It's a highly-competitive field riddled with crunch culture, lowballed salaries, and employment-instability, but if it weren't for all of that I think it would be the most fulfilling thing I could be doing.

Like I said, often it's not that simple. Each iteration on re-inventing the wheel usually incorporates some new lessons learned. I won't disagree that more perspective on history would be a good thing, but that's no reason to dismiss it all wholesale.

> I don't see any reason to keep the worlds of online and offline plotting so completely disjoint

I would guess it's less about "online and offline" than "in a web browser and out of one". The web offers several powerful standards for rendering 2D visuals - SVG, canvas, WebGL - all of which are much easier to bootstrap and to use directly than anything that's ever made it to the native desktop, and all of which come with first-class support for interactivity.

Even today, just creating a desktop window that you can draw to using OpenGL is a significant hurdle for someone who isn't used to that sort of thing. Now, do want that GUI code to also work on multiple systems? What about your graphics code? macOS has deprecated OpenGL. Do you want to interact with it using your mouse? What about rendering text, which is a whole other hurdle? Heaven forbid you want a higher-level vocabulary or dev tools with live inspection. I suppose writing to a PNG is easy enough- but then you lose any chance at interactivity.

The web is simply the most straightforward option if a plot is to be embedded in any kind of interactive app.

Hate is a way of acting toward other people. It doesn't have a particular creed or political party or belief. Fighting hate with hate makes the whole world cancelled.