cgrealy

Eh, I’m at the point in my life where a more relevant title would be “your life matters - if some work happens to get done, that’s a bonus”

Even if you’re available weekdays, the kids are not (they’re in school)

If you are on-call, you are not on vacation.

> The American system of relying on centuries of tenuous interpretation of a fairly short document just isn't as much of an improvement as you think.

False dichotomy. Getting rid of the monarchy does not mean you have to follow the US model.

Yep, Australia, NZ, Jamaica, PNG and others.

Probably not, but it will almost certainly spark renewed conversation in countries like Australia and NZ about becoming republics (but still Commonwealth members).

Technically, I believe she can dissolve parliament in NZ and Australia.

It's probably worthless now. Give it to me, I'll dispose of it responsibly :D

Two cars are driving from A to B. Ideally they want to get there as quickly and efficiently as possible, without driving dangerous or stressing the cars.

Car 1 takes 15 hours to drive from A to B. Car 2 takes 10 hours.

Why is that? Well, car 1 has a 1.3l engine and took a wrong turn because the navigator can't read a map.

Car 2 stopped 3 hours in because it had a flat, but they got going again much faster.

The speedometer won't tell you any of those things. It can't tell you WHY you're going slowly (you're under-resourced or you have a problem that needs fixing) or if you're going the wrong direction.

That doesn't mean it's useless. It can still tell you if there's a problem, or if you appear to be doing well but you're not making any progress, maybe you're going the wrong way.

Just to play devils advocate, I 100% do not want this.

I understand your reasons for making this and I fully support them, but the day Amazon make the Kindle into something other a way to read books is the day I drop the kindle for another reader.

The whole point of a Kindle for me is that I can use it to read and not be distracted by notifications or wondering what's on HN or whatever.

I am the same, but there are people who don't have that choice.

Your job may literally involve entering data at a remote site with sketchy-to-no internet (mines, farms, geological surveys, etc).

I have previously made an effort to acquire a taste for them, partially because I'm aware how important they will be in the future (at least, if all the sci-fi I've read is to be believed!).

But nope, it's not the preparation, it's the ingredient.

Morally, I am 100% behind this. If we can reduce the carbon footprint of food, we should.

However, everyone's morals have a limit, and mine is eating mushrooms. Nothing against people who like them, I just can't stand them.

If I had a dollar for every time I've done that I'd have...

checks screenshots folder

$78 dollars!

Exactly.

And you also need to understand your timing requirements.

If all you care about is recording a date on an invoice, you really don’t need to worry about leap seconds or smearing or whatever.

App and website are really interchangeable here. Both are just clients.

You can absolutely implement offline in a web application (Google drive does this). Obviously, you need to be online to get the app in the first place, but once it’s cached, you should be good to go.

Again, it’s a cost-benefit analysis for the business.

Just because you’re off the grid doesn’t mean you’re not working.

You might be at a remote site, or on a plane with no Wi-Fi.

But, yeah, if those are common use cases for your app, you should absolutely be designing for offline.

Does anyone actually believe this?

Even the most inexperienced developers I’ve worked with are well aware that time, and timezones in particular, are really difficult.

I’ve yet to meet anyone that has suggested using anything other than a battle-hardened standard library for time.

Again, it really depends on the application.

Maintaining multiple sources of truth is hard, especially if multiple people are working on the same data.

That’s doable, but it’s not without its own issues.

Plus, you frequently don’t want to architect your client code the same as your server code (you’re not going to run a bunch of micro services on the client side for example)

Offline mode adds significant complexity to the service, since you are essentially replicating your entire server side stack (logic, storage, etc) on the client.

Offline mode adds a cost to every new feature, even if it's just deciding if you are going to support said feature offline.

If you're dealing with sensitive data, it also means you need a way to secure that data on the client device.

I'm not saying apps shouldn't have an offline mode, but software engineering resource isn't free and most businesses would need to justify the cost of offline (even if it's just an opportunity cost).

> What makes humans special though?

We’re the most intelligent thing we’ve discovered in the universe. Also, I am human, so I have a vested interest in bad stuff not happening to humans.

> AI will be born on Earth so we will share that common trait with it

Covid-19 was also born on earth. That wasn’t too flash for humanity.

> perhaps one should have humility to accept that future doesn’t belong to a weak species like humans.

Not sure how you class humans as a “weak species”? Unless you’re comparing organically life forms to hypothetical digital life?

Anyway, I suspect if any kind of life form could expand to the stars, it’d be digital.

Imagine a bunch of chimps capture a human. They put them in a cage surrounded by tigers and spikes and remove all weapons from the human.

The human uses their phone to call for rescue.

That is us trying to contain an AGI. We probably cannot even conceive of the ways it can get out of any pitiful cage we put it in.

That, or it’s so dumb, it’s not worth making in the first place.

I don’t buy that. The gap between “no AGI” and “AGI but it’s a child” is orders of magnitude greater than the gap between “5 year old” and “smartest human”.

I don’t understand why you would want AGI. Even ignoring Terminator-esque worst case scenarios, AGI means humans are no longer the smartest entities on the planet.

The idea that we can control something like that is laughable.

I tend to think Carmack is right in that the “seed” code that generates an AGI will be relatively small, but I think the “operating” code will be enormous.

There is a story in “Masters of Doom” about Carmack getting rid of his cat because “she was having a net negative effect on my life”.

That’s cold.

I’m not sure I get your argument. I’m saying that it’s impossible to distinguish between machine written music and human written music.

You could maybe make the argument for distinguishing between a human and a machine playing a piece of music.

But if I write a song that just goes A, D, C, G on a loop (plenty of songs like that), how would you determine that a machine song that goes A, D, G, C is not human written?

I highly doubt that’s even theoretically possible, given the vast range of variety and quality of music created by humans.

.Net Core* is supported

> cloud.gov supports applications written in Go, Java, Node.js, .NET Core...

.Net framework is tied to Windows, and is now considered legacy tech. Both AWS and Azure support Windows containers if you really need them, but they're nowhere near as easy to use as Linux.

* I'd assume that .Net 5/6/7 are also supported (insert rant about dumb MS naming conventions).