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billsmithaustin

400 karma · joined July 30, 2014

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billsmithaustin··on What if Jev spoke Arrow?
gRPC uses Protocol Buffers for serialization. You can serialize with Protocol Buffers without making remote procedure calls with gRPC.
billsmithaustin··on Initial effects of AI technology on employment look positive
Does anyone here question the integrity of the US government’s jobs report two months away from a mid-term election?
billsmithaustin··on Professor denounces mass AI fraud on an exam at Brown
A similar thing happened in a first-year CS class at Purdue this year: https://thecheatsheet.substack.com/p/432-cheating-at-purdue-....
billsmithaustin··on Stop picking my Go version for me
Or not a Golang bug at all but rather a new Golang feature that the developer chose to use rather than trying to be backward compatible with some older Golang versions.
billsmithaustin··on How to Bike Across the Country
Congrats to the author. I plan to do Oregon -> Virginia next year but I'll take more like 80 days than the author's 51.
billsmithaustin··on FBI: Largest homemade explosives cache in agency history found in Virginia
He probably started out wanting to make just one pipe bomb but you know how it is, you get a great discount if you buy the ingredients in bulk. So he made his pipe bomb and then he had all these leftover ingredients just taking up space in his closet. And so he went ahead and made another 149 pipe bombs.
billsmithaustin··on A Diver Found a Ring Lost 50 Years Ago Near Barbados
Destroy it now.
billsmithaustin··on Why "founder mode" is a rebranding for micromanaging, top-down leaders
"Moreover, even for those who would like to rightfully consider Airbnb results positive, there’s a huge price on culture companies managed this way have to pay. We can get a glimpse from a few Glassdoor reviews I found, all subsequent to Chesky’s new approach..."

Glassdoor reviews are a poor measure of a company's culture.

billsmithaustin··on Tesla Transport Protocol over Ethernet (TTPoE)
Or perhaps Elon is not personally involved in what network protocols they use on their Dojo AI supercomputer.
billsmithaustin··on A $10k stipend is available for anyone moving to Cumberland, MD
For you cyclists, the Great Allegheny Pass trail and the Chesapeake & Ohio towpath meet there.
billsmithaustin··on Zen, a Arc-like open-source browser based on the Firefox engine
You're suggesting one of the developers went through all the trouble to create a browser, then allowed someone to add assets to the repo without the developer reviewing them first?
billsmithaustin··on Hydrothermal explosion at Yellowstone National Park
Just playing back what you said because it's surprising. You're saying that explosion was not caused by water that was superheated by the supervolcano below the greater Yellowstone Caldera? It was heated by some other source?

Interested because I was there a few weeks ago.

billsmithaustin··on Instead of “auth”, we should say “permissions” and “login”
My experience: a lot of the confusion in technical conversations is due to two parties using the same term for different but related concepts. Relabeling the concepts to clarify the distinction is the right thing to do.

>> or could we just use longer words?

Agreed: relabeling, with longer words when necessary, can help.

billsmithaustin··on Most of Europe is glowing pink under the aurora
All of that. Plus, wrap your head in aluminum foil.
billsmithaustin··on Going in circles without a real-time clock
I guess that's what the article meant here: "This particular Pi doesn't have a real-time clock. The very newest ones (5B) do, but you have to actually buy a battery and connect it. "
billsmithaustin··on The Great American Rail-Trail
The GAP trail from Pittsburg to Cumberland is especially awesome. It’s well-maintained, the trail towns are welcoming, and the scenery is fantastic. The folks who live near the trail are lucky to have it.
billsmithaustin··on CT scans of coffee-making equipment
Moka pot rubber gaskets are replaceable.
billsmithaustin··on Traffic safety “nudges” can cause number of crashes to increase (2022)
In at least some Mazda models, you can replace the firmware in the entertainment system to eliminate that message. I’ve done it.
billsmithaustin··on IronOS: Open-source soldering iron firmware
Even better would be closed source firmware with an annual license fee.
billsmithaustin··on Rapid Covid tests miss 90% of asymptomatic cases
I had COVID a few weeks ago. You will remember.
billsmithaustin··on Eight-mile frieze of Ice Age beasts found in Amazon rainforest (2020)
I would not have guessed any of those were mastodons.
billsmithaustin··on What if you did the exact opposite, like rogue bees do (2020)
Bruce Schneier made a similar point in his book, “Secrets and Lies: Digital Security in a Networked World“. Quote:

Society needs defectors. Groups benefit from the fact that some members do not follow the group norms. These are the outliers: the people who resist popular opinion for moral or other reasons. These are the people who invent new business models by copying and distributing music, movies, and books on the Internet. These are people like Copernicus and Galileo, who challenged official Church dogma on astronomy. These are the people who—to take a recent example—disrupt energy auctions to protest government responsibility for climate change. They're also people living on the edge of society: squatters, survivalists, artists, cults, communes, hermits, and those who live off the grid or off the land. In 2011, U.S. Marine Dakota Meyer received the Medal of Honor for saving three dozen of his comrades who were under enemy fire. The thing is, he disobeyed orders in order to do so.

billsmithaustin··on Generate a Cover Letter by Pasting the Job Post and Your Resume
What would be an example of a non-bullshit form?
billsmithaustin··on NPR cancels 4 podcasts amid major layoffs
I see Morning Edition and All Things Considered on KQED's weekly schedule (https://drive.google.com/file/d/1PrFgenUlR9TW8bZJ26LopRObTuB...). KQED pays NPR for that content.
billsmithaustin··on The cloud backlash has begun: Why big data is pulling compute back on premises
Anyone have a non-paywall version?
billsmithaustin··on Dow said it was recycling our shoes. We found them at an Indonesian flea market
I agree that if the shoes were perfectly good, it would have been better to keep them. Are you asserting the author recycled perfectly good shoes, or are you just describing a hypothetical? If the former, what in the article suggests the shoes were still perfectly good?
billsmithaustin··on Netheads vs. bellheads redux: the strange victory of SIP over the telephone
As late as the 70’s, you could get in trouble with the local telco for using an acoustic coupler on a residential phone line.
billsmithaustin··on Subverting the software interview (2021)
Another in this genre: https://aphyr.com/posts/342-typing-the-technical-interview
billsmithaustin··on Added 49 volumes of Arkansas, Mississippi, and Tennessee law
That would depend on the restrictions accompanying the money. The federal government has had mixed success funding technology projects. The Feds aren’t necessarily experts at solving state/local-level problems.
billsmithaustin··on Rereading: The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder (2017)
I used the MV/8000 at a SCADA company where I worked part-time in college. It was a nice step up from the 16-bit DG Nova machines we used earlier.
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