amccollum

My uncle (John Monsour) worked on this movie as the “24 Frame Computer Sync Engineer”. Because film cameras and CRT monitors have different frame rates, you needed to use specialized electronics to synchronize them with the camera frame rate otherwise you would have banding and weird moving artifacts on all the screens. It’s crazy to imagine needing to do this for all the screens visible in these shots.

Later monitor technologies like LCDs don’t have this issue because they don’t have the same moving electron beam illuminating each line of pixels, and it also became cheaper to just replace all the computer screens with CG, so eventually this specialized technical work wasn’t needed anymore, and my uncle ended up doing other things on the movies he worked on.

Ben & Jerry's actually adds/discontinues like 5+ flavors / year. I was told that flavors don't go to the flavor graveyard unless they have an interesting story, but it seems like they just haven't been adding any for a good while now.

The standard tax deduction for car travel is $0.70 / mile in the US, which accounts for things like insurance, gas, maintenance, and depreciation. So $500 / month is around 700 miles, which probably around 90% of US drivers surpass.

I used to feel this way. In the early days of "ride sharing," I preferred Lyft and would sit up front so I could have a conversation with the driver, which they encouraged. It was really fun for a while, and I enjoyed meeting people from different walks of life. Over time, though, transportation became much more functional for me, and now when I take non-autonomous rides, it's more irksome than enjoyable when drivers strike up conversations.

Why the change? I think a big part of your experience is the fact that you "rarely take taxis." Once you're doing it daily or near-daily, the amount of smalltalk becomes more tiresome. Also, with kids and a busy life, I'm usually either looking to get things done or enjoy a rare moment to myself as I'm moving from place-to-place. I agree with OP that Waymo is a huge step up on those dimensions. There's no other human in the same space to feel awkward around.

The fact that they drive more safely and smoothly is a huge improvement, as well. Ironically, I thought this was going to be something I would hate about Waymo. "You mean it drives the speed limit and follows all the traffic laws? It will take forever to get anywhere." It took approximately one ride for my perspective to completely flip. It's so much nicer to not feel the stress of a driver who is driving aggressively or jerking to a stop/start at every intersection. It's not like you can tell them to just ease up a bit, either. When we ride with our kids, we feel massively safer in Waymos.

Yes, it will be disruptive, and I don't particularly love the dominance that big tech has in all of our lives, but I do think Waymo is a marvel, and I hugely appreciate it as an option. As soon as they can take kids alone to all their various activities, it will be yet another massive unlock for parents.

They're not, at least not really. From Wikipedia:

  In April 2016, Rovi acquired TiVo for $1.1 billion.[8]
  
  In December 2019, it was announced that TiVo would merge with Xperi Corporation. The merger completed in May 2020.[9]

Xperi itself also split apart in 2022, so it's effectively 3 companies removed from its original roots. Basically at this point it is only valuable for the vague nostalgia consumers have for the brand.

If everyone is using LLMs to write new code, and LLMs are trained on existing code from the internet, that creates an enormous barrier to the adoption of new programming languages, because no new code will be written in them, therefore LLMs will never learn to write the code. It is a self-reinforcing cycle.

I've experienced this to some degree already in using LLMs to write Zig code (ironically, for my own pet programming language). Because Zig is still evolving so quickly, often the code the LLM produces is wrong because it's based on examples targeting incompatible prior versions of the language. Alternatively, if you ask an LLM to try to write code for a more esoteric language (e.g., Faust), the results are generally pretty terrible.

People were saying we would all be getting in our cars and taking a nap on our morning commute. We are clearly still a pretty long ways off from self-driving being as ubiquitous as it was claimed it would be.

The story of the bank built from bricks sent through the mail reminds me of the time I completed a move from Austin to Boston by packing all my possessions into rubber tubs and sending them by parcel post.

The delivery date was a range, and I wasn't there on the day of the first attempted delivery. When I called the post office about it, their response (in a thick Boston accent) was, "oh, so you're the tub guy, huh?"

All in all, it was a really convenient way to execute a cross-country move, assuming you don't have a lot of stuff!

I don't know about the author's case, but often asset purchase agreements will make the principals / shareholders party to the agreement personally with specific liability provisions. If there are no assets left in the company, the buyer has no recourse against it, since it is essentially an empty shell (in certain cases, insurance could be an exception to this). As a buyer, you will want to have some protection against issues you don't know about at the time of sale (perhaps because you weren't told about them, or the seller was negligent).

This usage of "learnings", while certainly more common in "business jargon" today, was used by Shakespeare:

https://www.opensourceshakespeare.org/views/plays/play_view....

Take it up with Shakespeare?

https://www.opensourceshakespeare.org/views/plays/play_view....

Maybe because JS files (specifically add-ons) run from the local filesystem are given escalated privileges compared to normal usage, perhaps for ease of development. I'm just speculating, though.

If you're interested in these challenges (and trust me, these things all seem simpler than they are in practice), consider coming and joining us at Philo (https://about.philo.com/jobs/)! We're hiring for basically all technical (and plenty of non-technical) roles/specialties/platforms, so if you're excited about dragging TV kicking and screaming into streaming age, drop me an email: andrew@philo.com

Ha, yes — I haven't been at Facebook since well before they acquired Instagram, but you're right to note a certain amount of irony in the situation! Of course, I don't mind the comment, and happy to post another way to see what we did with the project!

Yeah, totally, there are some pictures of the process and the final result here:

https://community.glowforge.com/t/little-painted-lady-little...

It shows some of the design elements, too, so maybe folks would be interested in that. I haven't written up anything about the door sensor part, but that was pretty basic, and mostly an excuse to learn about using the Raspberry Pi.

We have a Little Free Library (https://www.instagram.com/paintedladieslibrary/) that we painted/decorated to look like our house using a laser cutter and a lot of wood glue to mimic the decorative woodwork. Recently I installed a door sensor connected to a Raspberry Pi to collect analytics on how often people open it and how long they browse for. In the past week, it has been opened around 200 times with an average browse time of just over a minute.

At Philo, we believe so strongly that people need to take time off to do their best work, that we took it one step further — we pay people $1k / week to take at least 2 weeks off during the year. We also have unlimited PTO, and to my knowledge, have never rejected or discouraged a request for PTO.

It's also worth pointing out that most normal expenses (rent, food, etc.) don't stop when you take time off, so we decided that if we want people to feel like they can actually take a vacation and get away, we should actually be giving them a bonus from their normal salary to enable that.

We try to do a lot of things to respect our team and create a culture of positive work/life balance, and so far, we feel really good about the results of the tradeoffs we've made.

If they were going to do that, why wouldn't they just put it in the same bill? It would be extremely naive to assume that they are going to do anything on top of repealing the current NN protections.

From your post:

It makes more sense for Congress to come up with a lasting solution that isn't subject to regulatory bounce-back, and this is what the bill being described in the article seems to do.

From the article:

But from what we know about Lee's bill so far, it appears the proposal wouldn't impose any type of net neutrality rules to replace the current ones.

Wherein lies the so-called "lasting solution"?

I actually took this course in person when Professor Schocken visited Harvard. It is a fantastic course that is extremely valuable for everyone from those who only have basic programming skills to advanced CS students (I took it as a senior after already having taken classes on operating system design and programming languages). In the class we did jump around a bit in the later chapters, and so I feel like one could probably approach the material in many different ways.

The exercises are very straight-forward and will not be extremely time-consuming for those who are already skilled at CS, but the course is best treated like a tour through CS rather than an in-depth study of any particular area.

I have pretty much moved to using CoffeeScript exclusively over JavaScript. One of the minor complaints I have (overall, it is magnificent) is that the looseness of the syntax sometimes leads me to doing a kind of guess-and-check style of programming where I write something, then try to compile it to see if it did what I expected. An example of this is when calling a function, you need a comment to continue the function arguments onto the next line, unless the argument on the next line is an object literal.

The only real problem is that debugging with CoffeeScript adds an extra layer of complexity. I know that this is more or less inevitable, but it is really the only major pain point that I encounter on a day-to-day basis.

Actually, it should be "Scott Adams's Controversial..." (http://www.grammarbook.com/punctuation/apostro.asp)

Actually, Python does use a Boyer-Moore-Horspool variant internally for substring matching (I'm not sure about Ruby, though). See:

http://effbot.org/zone/stringlib.htm

Here's a link to the file in the Python SVN repo:

http://svn.python.org/view/python/trunk/Objects/stringlib/fa...

Yeah, the title is misleading because really the problem described in the blog post is to store some unknown number of ints between 1 and 10,000. The better solution than a straight bitmap of 10,000 bits is to use all 4KB and devote three bits to each slot. Then you can remember up to 7 occurrences of each integer.

There's no need for bloom filters here because you can already cover all the possibilities using a bitmap.

I wager this system is very popular with house guests...

Yeah, but their templates are specifically designed by them with this in mind, which is why there are only a handful to choose from and they aren't very interesting.

Since we allow anything that can be done with CSS, and allow people to upload their own templates, the problem of exporting to different formats is significantly more difficult.

Yeah, we implemented a build process that combines and minifies all the CSS and JS files, and also converts all the images to sprites to cut down on requests. The hash is to facilitate more efficient caching (you can set it to never expire).

I've been toying with the idea of open-sourcing it, but it would definitely need some cleanup first.

Yeah, we're working on making "plaintext" styles right now. Even ASCII could use a little JobSpice love.

You can look browse the available styles in the Styles tab.

Yeah, we'd obviously love to have this, but the Word formatting engine is horrendous... just try taking any html document and importing it into Word and see what it looks like.

Hopefully, we can eventually replace those large internal systems that process Word documents with real tools that can search and categorize the structured data.