cschneid

$1.2 million seems so low of a dollar amount, for an multi year effort. Isn't that just like... 1 engineer's salary? $150k/year, 1.5x multiplier to account for benefits and other expenses of hiring somebody.

I was watching a bit of youtube this morning, and there was a wendy's ad. It ended with "All this for $5!" as the final pitch for whatever meal it was. If they do dynamic pricing, they'll cut themselves off from that kind of ad entirely right?

You (generally?) can't advertise one price, and charge a different one when the customer actually shows up.

that is a different case. That was a payment on a real debt, just earlier than intended (and due to a mistake).

The top comment was talking about money that wasn't even billed. They don't have any actual service or product it was tied back to. Also if they do have agreements with that insurer (just no payments pending), there is going to be a contract overriding default law which probably covers how to handle mistakes.

My dad was in a similar situation ~10 years ago. Stage 4 lung cancer, although a different underlying mutation (ALK). Prognosis was less than a year. But he got on some new-at-the-time inhibitor drugs (Crizotinib iirc) which eliminated ("no evidence") the cancer. What is left does slowly mutates around the drugs, and he goes in for regular monitoring and has had some radiation therapy to knock down specific growth spots, but he's still here with us.

I can't speak to the one in the article, but the drugs he's on aren't chemo, but they interrupt one of the pathways the cancer is using to infinitely grow. They have side effects, but not bad ones comparatively.

The best solution would probably be one of those micro "laptops" like a GPD Pocket. I think it has the ports needed... a few usbs really.

My current setup is VNC from ipad to the rpi for ham radio stuff. It works well enough, with the ipad being keyboard & screen in a small space. And lets me take an ipad with me for other uses. But the rpi4 is so darn slow at a full desktop experience, especially when then feeding it over a network connection.

Similarly, I saw some youtube videos just the other day talking about intel's (newish?) N100 chip. You can pick up a small mini pc for under $150 new, runs windows or linux, and is on-par speed-wise with the 8500 iirc. Plenty fast for small server use cases, although you do give up the raw GPIO pins.

Also of note, it's x86, which has me interested as a field-portable ham radio computer. Most software runs on rpi (my current setup), but x86 is universally supported by stuff. Just need to figure out the monitor situation.... maybe vnc from an ipad? :)

Chase gave me a stack of ¥2000 notes when I pre-obtained some cash in the States before a trip. That caused some confusion when I got there and tried to buy a suica card. And I didn't even realize what was going on until a local coworker was surprised at me having them.

1. That worked after some tweaking. 2. I had to lower the context window size to get LM Studio to load it up. 3. LM Studio has two distinct checkboxes that both say "Apple Metal GPU". No idea if they do the same thing....

Thanks a ton! I'm running on GPU w/ Mixtral 8x Instruct Q4_K_M now. tok/sec is about 4x what CPU only was. (Now at 26 tok/sec or so).

Data Point: I am currently having issues getting Mixtral Q4_K_M running in LMStudio on my 32gb M1 Max. I'm trying Q3 to see if it fits.

I can have it run in on 'cpu' which is very slow, but offloading to the GPU runs out of memory.

That doesn't kill LG OLEDs thought, that results in a nearly black screensaver (just a small slow "firework" effect). Wastes a touch more energy than turning the tv into sleep mode (since nothing actually turns off anymore), but hard to believe that would shorten life much.

as far as I can tell, it only executes the trace when asked. It's not an APM like newrelic. Most likely the trace meaningfully slows down the individual request.

When I was at ScoutAPM, we built a version of this that was stochastic instead of 100% predictable. We sampled the call stack every 10-50ms. Much lower overhead, and it caught the slower methods, which is quite helpful on its own, especially since slow behavior often isn't uniform, it happens on only a small handful of your biggest customers. But it certainly missed many fast executed methods.

Different approaches for sure, solve different issues.

Can I ask for a real example of it? I'm a senior dev, worked in software for ~18 years now. We work in a medium to large sized Rails codebase, with some idioms for things like logging and error handling that have been built over time. We mostly deal with detailed business logic.

I have really wanted to like AI assistance, but I can't figure out when it really helps. I'm an expert at ruby already, a targeted google search is faster than asking when it comes to an api I know exists, and I just need the order of arguments. It generates annoyingly "wrong" code, since it doesn't know our idioms.

Copilot is basically just a context-aware one line autocomplete. I can't figure out how to use it for more.

I recently had a 6 month stint using hello fresh, and now cancelled. I find it's really useful to get out of a rut, and teach you some small tricks. This recent one has me:

* Using much more citrus, juice & zest * Chickpeas + spice mix + touch of liquid in a pan is an easy go-to (we're veggie) * Broth / onions in rice. * Template of flatbread + stuff on top, which they had 3 or 4 in their rotation. Easy to riff on w/ whatever you have in the fridge.

None of these are earth-shattering revelations, but the repeated practice has ingrained some of these much more, and got me cooking a little differently.

We do this every few years, it seems worth it for a while, but I can't stick with it because I hate the waste, and the recipes get pretty repetitive after a bit, doubly so w/ vegetarian meals which have fewer options.

When I worked at ScoutAPM, that list is basically the exact areas where we had issues supporting. We didn't do full-on tracing in the OpenTracing kind of way, but the agent was pretty similar, with spans (mostly automatically inserted), and annotations on those spans with timing, parentage, and extra info (like the sql query this represented in Active record).

The really hard things, which we had reasonable answers for, but never quite perfect: * Rails websockets (actioncable) * very long running background jobs (we stopped collecting at some limit, to prevent unbounded memory) * trying to profile code, we used a modified version of Stackprof to do sampling instead of exact profiling. That worked surprisingly well at finding hotspots, with low overhead.

All sorts of other tricks came along too. I should go look at that codebase again to remind me. That'd be good for my resume.... :)

https://github.com/scoutapp/scout_apm_ruby

There's a common complaint I see across many local housing discussions, which goes something like: "We need affordable housing, but we shouldn't build to become <nearest metro>!" and of course the shorter "We're full!". But that then ignores the fact that the United States doesn't have internal movement controls. If somebody wants to move to a city, they can. The richest / most motivated group of those people will purchase housing until the housing is gone. In extremes this means knocking down old housing stock and rebuilding new (but not new density), or massive gut & remodels.

Assuming the city is desirable enough (ie. a mountain town). You get this, and you must choose two:

* Allow people to move into your city (Must choose this one).

* More units / Affordable Units

* Keep city 'character' by avoiding density.

Some places choose character. Much of the Bay Area for instance, with 1.5 million dollar single family homes, and not one apartment as far as the eye can see. And others choose to build lots of units, although it's hard to find examples in the US. Tokyo is the one that comes to mind. Many people in Japan wants to move to Tokyo, and they build tons and tons of apartments to support that. The character of course was already big city, but it's grown into mega-mega city.

I have a fun little addin board for my 7300 - https://www.radioanalog.com/ptrx-7300/ - Install was pretty straight forward, maybe 10 minutes.

It taps the internal wiring to grab IQ output, suitable to then feed into a SDR (RSPDuo for me), then into a computer from that.

It's receive only, but works pretty well. And you can always hook up the (natively supported) USB connection on the radio for transmit.

Not sure on the fees part of that - cash handling itself is expensive, both for direct reasons, and anti-theft reasons. Anywhere from time spent counting drawers to full-on armored car service. All of that is expensive, and not present when credit cards are used (and conversely, a network fee doesn't exist on cash). I think all payment methods end up with some costs to them.

I've seen similar situations too. It seems that people see minor social transgressions like littering as a percentage of guilt.

Already 20 pieces of junk on the ground, whatever, one more is 5% of the total.

Nothing there, My thing would be 100% of the junk on the ground, can't do that.

What's the current state of database access? Last I looked a while back Diesel was really cool, but didn't play nice w/ Async.

For shelves, he's using a track system from home depot that I was looking at for a different project - it has 16 and even 20" deep shelf options.

Fun video. I enjoy this angle of hacker news - where it really is somebody going unnecessarily deep into some tech. Not for practical use, but just because it's there.

Plus we have a demon horse at the airport. Really spices things up.

Some less than fully formed thoughts, but what I think:

I'd say Colorado is (at least) 3 different states in a trenchcoat.

1. Cities mostly clustered together. The state is sort of weird geographically. Giant open plains to the east, and big ass scary mountains to the west. Lots of cities formed along the boundary between them, forming what is now called the 'Front Range'. Denver, Boulder, Colorado Springs, Fort Collins, Longmont are all along here. Most of the population lives along this long corridor.

2. Rural farms and ranches. Both on the plains, and in the mountains, and the Western Slope (an area sorta coming out of the mountains towards the far west end of the state). This is fairly conservative, matching what other rural people in neighboring states. Include poorer mountain towns here, which are often farming focused.

3. Rich mountain towns. Skiing, or other attractions. Aspen, Vail, Breckenridge, Steamboat Springs, etc. The areas are very attractive due to natural beauty, but typically have geographical or weather reasons they can't really grow huge. That leaves richer and richer people driving out others. Many of these end up with a 'theme park' feel to them. Rich people have a condo that gets used a few times a year, and rented out another few times, but no real residency.

Generally though, the common theme through all of those is a love of the outdoors. Even those who want to drill aggressively for oil are out hunting and 4-wheeling. Granola hippies are out hiking, skiing, and backpacking. But practically everybody has at least a passing interest in the outdoors.

As for the comparison to other states that have swung super-conservative in recent years, I'd guess that it's to some degree that a more liberal western state had to exist somewhere, and it ended up as Colorado. If you want to move west, smoke pot and ski or hike all day, you go where others are already doing that. Other than accidents of history, I don't see any reason Wyoming couldn't have been shifted that direction. Colorado and Wyoming are very similar states geographically, and early-on economically. We both have ranching, farming, oil, mining. It'd be interesting to really dig in and figure out why one went one way, and the other a different way.

I haven't tried it, but I believe you can even get them into bare zigbee mode, entirely disconnected from the Hue system. At which point, Home Assistant and similar systems can control them directly.

I'm on Fort Collins internet right now - branded 'Connexion'. I have 1 gigabit per second symmetric, for $70/mo. It's more stable & reliable than Comcast's was, and the time I had to call tech support, I had somebody who clearly knew details of how DHCP & IPs worked and was able to collaborate with some investigation on my end.

Rollout took a few years to get to me as they ran fiber. But it was a steady pace, doing a neighborhood at a time.

Get yourself some local broadband. It works well. Comcast could have run fiber through the whole city, but they never did. And they charged 2x or more for their slower cable, with worse service and worse reliability.

That's cool, thanks for the code pointer. I knew I was probably wrong in the strictest sense, especially with all the work that's gone into the various approaches to JIT and performance work in Ruby.

I should go read some of the interpreter code at some point - fun work going on there.

Sorta? Like you're right, there's not compiled machine code that does a jump. But Ruby's case statement has nice semantics to make clear code out of what could be a complex if/elsif/else chain. The use of the === function is powerful, and lets the reader of the code focus on the condition, not the function call to check it.

    if (patternA.match(input))
    elsif (patternB.match(input))
    else
    end

vs

    case input
    when patternA
    when patternB
    else
    end

And since it uses ===, you can define that on your own classes too. Hypothetically for instance, you can make fairly complex policy type classes to make reusable boolean statements.

    case current_user
    when NotValidatedEmail
    when NotCompletedOnboarding
    when SomethingElse
    else
    end

and then you can use those elsewhere in the code by leveraging the more global use of ===

    [user1, user2].any?(NotCompletedOnboarding)

I moved us up from 2.4 to 2.7 last year trivially. Basically just changing the version base in our dockerfile. A few gems had to go up too, to support the kwargs changes. But like... 1 day of work. I'm looking to go to 3.x soon too, after I get our EOL'd rails & lots of gems updated.

What features in particular are you looking at in Ruby 3.0? The type system stuff seems really cool, but I haven't been hearing much about it in the wild.

Not literally, but in style. They are clearly trees.

But they exist in a large underground network of roots, and spawn trunks upwards over that large area, not unlike how many funguses do. Convergent evolution of an approach to life.

Cost of living is weird, since it ignores the fact that shopping on Amazon costs the same everywhere. I imagine it'd result in feeling like physical goods are incredibly cheap vs anything that requires local labor (restaurants, private schools, construction, medical, etc).

Buying a big TV or a new iphone would be a lower % of total salary since those wouldn't scale w/ the location. And then you'd turn around and pay $20 for a cocktail. But what do I know, I live middle of the country :)