blacksmithgu

I have a family member who is quite into "ancient aliens" and who has read all of von Danikens books. The main thing I realized from arguing about it with them was that rigor and science did not really matter and would not convince them of anything. It's an emotional and spiritual belief for them - a way for them to rationalize how humans went from mud to computers. They don't believe in human creativity being powerful enough to lead to modern society and think an external force was required. Ancient aliens is a convenient and fun theory for how it could have happened.

I want to learn how to sleep well again. The difference in how I feel when sleep deprived versus fully rested is staggering.

Everything is peak software. Extremely fast, can be bound to a global keybind to bring up anywhere. I use it so often now that I forget to recommend it to people sometimes.

People would turn to games and other forms of escapism even if the governments were stable and honest and the churches preached only love and acceptance. Reality cannot compete with the sense of progress, exoticness, and control that games offer.

The titan submersible made for good entertainment while the migrant ship did not. This isn't a grand moral failing, it's just business.

I'm sure people have thought about it, it's just hard, annoying, and asking a lot of mostly unpaid OSS contributors. Many mod developers are high school / college aged.

Sandboxing Java code running in process requires ugly and obscure security APIs and restricts you to having to have a common modding API (Forge). Many mods use bytecode patching and would be broken completely.

Individual contributor means people who directly write code (individuals who contribute), as opposed to people who manage (managers and project managers).

Being social nowadays is like exercise - it not longer naturally happens frequently in our lives and so we have to consciously choose to do it. Also like exercise, it seems impossible when you start and takes months of effort to really feel comfortable about it.

Given only ~25% of the US population exercises regularly, this bodes poorly for actively being social. I suspect we need to "artificially" engineer living conditions to push people together naturally.

Violent crime in general is dominated by men who have faced "major life stressors"; it's just a fact of life that is unlikely to ever change. Men are much more likely to react to heavy stress violently, and struggle to both find and accept help.

Finding men who may be going down a dark path is a good first step, but genuinely helping such individuals (beyond trite therapy) is challenging. I suspect the problem is only going to get worse as society becomes more and more isolating.

$10000/video seems crazy to me, but it makes sense if each video is averaging 10M views for ad-friendly content.

It'd be interesting to see how many Youtube channels make it to this size, and if there is anything that differentiates successful channels from obscure ones (beyond quality).

Speak to more humans.

ChatGPT could probably pass most FAANG programming interviews - it's successfully done linked list inversion, binary tree searches, dynamic programming like knapsack, and will even do program design if you ask it how to design a data structure or class.

CSV, for all it's faults, is probably the closest thing we have to a "universal 2d table format you can import anywhere."

I messed up the wording on the above comment - I'm only skeptical of all the "performative charity" that you see on social medial.

Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon, or simply the "frequency illusion". Or maybe just dumb luck :)

There is definite survivorship bias; I suspect it's so strong that virtually all "do-gooding" you see on social media is for gaining status. It makes me extremely cynical of charities; perhaps just trying to do good "in the small" for the people around you is the best that one can do.

I'm not sure there is really anything to fear here. "Traditional white Christian" is a declining demographic on all three axes, and no amount of pronatalist thought will be enough to save it.

I respect the opinion in this article that Linux should be simple and Rust is adding a lot of complexity to the build and ABI, but the advantage of Rust is not just memory safety.

Rust is massively more expressive. You get actual tagged enums, modules, sane dependency management, generics, polymorphism, optionals, no unchecked nullability, collections, and many other things. Writing systems software with it - even if you completely ignore memory safety! - is a very pleasant experience once you've grokked the language.

I would say closing that gap is exactly what engineering is - optimizing your existing systems to maximally use the hardware. Its very quantitative and extremely detail oriented; you usually just improve Linux or add system calls for better performance, instead of baking up a whole new operating system.

Obviously part of this is just arguing over semantics though :)

I think "systems engineering" has won out over "systems research" - optimizing existing systems instead of creating new ones. Part of it is that we are constrained by our hardware, which forces us into specific paradigms; but I think also systems end up becoming fungible and it a point it doesn't really matter what RPC protocol you use - just that it's fast.

This is amusing as a thought experiment, but it would end up being new-age feudalism.

Can you imagine the crazy tricks people would use to evade taxes? Adopt a child and buy the rights to their tax, then move all your assets to them. Build up hype and sell futures on your own tax asset before going bankrupt. Have your life controlled by predatory taxlords who offer tax discounts for living in specific housing and buying specific products.

No, we don't need more "smart" people working on important problems in transportation, health, education, and so on. We already have plenty of smart people with good ideas, they just have no institutional power to affect anything.

These fields need zealous reformers and activists with the time and money to push through mountains of entrenched interests, complacency, and politics. The work sucks, and people capable of doing it will always be in short supply.

I expected more multi-monitor setups. I feel half as productive with only one screen - how do people do it?

I've noticed a visible split between product-facing teams and customer-facing teams where I've worked. The customer teams generally all used real selfies. The development teams all used random avatars and icons (myself included).

Frankly, it seemed to work fine in each context. You could always look up someone directly on the company registry if you want to put a face to a slack handle.

Beauracracies can be extremely cruel without a single cruel person. All is takes is diffuse, disconnected decision making to produce ridiculous rules.

I would say languages hardly matter at all - pick lucrative fields and then just adopt whatever the standard tooling is there. You'll probably have no issue picking up all three languages if you need to.

Not OP, but at at least most corporate pawns are cynically aware of how artificial the system is and that you need to play games to get ahead (or just coast along if you don't care). Academia has a luster of meritocracy when in reality you need to game things just as hard to become successful.

The issue is that novel paper ideas will be split across multiple years (and even multiple conferences), making it much harder to actually see the whole picture for a reader. Each little piece of the paper will often also be bloated with unnecessary extra detail in order to reach the threshold for "minimum publishable paper".

This is not a good deal. The price is not that much cheaper than a 4 year loan (~500 vs 750/mo), you still need a down payment, still pay for power and insurance and parking, and you don't even get equity!

I can't see this being used by anything other than short term rentals and corporations who like stable expenses.

The core problem I see is Rust tried too hard to avoid allocations/copies and a heavy async runtime. The result is confusing and difficult types and very unclear errors due to apis producing ridiculous types like Future<Arc<Box<dyn Thing>>>.

The language should have defined a consistent async model (like coroutines with message passing) and kept "raw async" confined to high performance special libraries and embedded use cases.