cupofpython

My typical quick turn-around process is: type SQL in text editor, test sql in database, create a view, connect to the view from excel, use native excel features to display whats needed.

Usually I create a summary page as well which uses sum-ifs and such on the query result for the high level detail rather than go through the SQL process for it separately

I ended up in a situation with MMNNA all colored on the same row. AFAIK there is no word for that

popularity is also skewed young. income is skewed old. VHS was a much better fit as a lowest common denominator. If a product is trying to be a popular medium, cheap is necessary.

That said, once the medium is established - people will still happily pay a lot for a high quality product within the medium. iPhone popularity is a good example of this. People bought expensive VHS players with bells and whistles too.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant_colony_optimization_algori...

>I have this crippling feeling of not doing enough

These two things are not unusual to find in the same person, and a talk therapist can probably help with the details.

Tbh, I had a similar thing. What I resolved in therapy was recognizing that the feeling was a mental shortcut; a mechanism / engine running under the hood indiscriminately. It wasn't wrong, but it was incomplete.

In response, I expanded the wiring a bit. I now feel it as "there is always more I could do" which basically wired my choice into the mix. Then I exercise that choice. "There is more I can do, but this is enough". the part for me that is hard to put into words is that "enough" is a soft line. doing enough doesnt mean i need to stop doing.

I say that last line there bc there was, for me, a related feeling of "Everything I do must be efficient" bc that gets more done and i can never do enough. This needed to be dismantled / rewired as well

Taken together, "never do enough" and "always be efficient" created an impasse where doing more than enough was inefficient. And I could not view my life as being enough without self-implying that it should end. Being busy justified my existence, and if i could not justify being busy then i could not justify myself. Obviously this is not a rational conclusion, but that's why therapy helps. I did not realize this kind of irrationality was emergent from my subconscious heuristics until the right line of conversation bubbled it to the surface. I said the words and realized the issue at the same time. Once I noticed it, I could of course handle the work of correcting it on my own time.

this feeling demands deep personal reflection and / or extended authentic conversation with someone who knows you well -- nothing a text forum will be able to give you so do not be discouraged if you read a hundred posts of advice and none of them do anything for you.

If you want to explore more of the philosophy of this kind of feeling then I have a recommendation. There is a popular podcast called "Philosophize This!" by Stephen West that actually went into a multi-episode dive on "The Creation of Meaning" recently. It starts on Episode 157. The podcast is a casual conversation-style lecture format. The first episode is 25 minutes long.

>Yet we focus on these artificial goals set by childish dreams, society or life events.

In my experience goals are used to resolve unmet needs. Children are very needy and have lots of goals. If you need more money, you set a goal to get it.

Is it possible that you have no goals and see no point in anything you do because you have nowhere to go but down? You are safe. You are fed. You did it. Maybe it is time to kick your feet up and enjoy.

If you use something for free, dont be surprised if it isnt there tomorrow.

taking a guess that your app is an API wrapper of some kind? the $ you move is basically through your account from customer to service provider on each call and you charge some low flat rate per month for access?

that's not even entirely tongue in cheek either. speeding is very rarely the cause of collisions imo. As a disclaimer, I also believe drivers are solely responsible for accidents rather than phones taking partial responsibility when texting and driving is applicable, so maybe I am not aligned with the public on this subject in general

this way you can build a community consensus on top of whatever youre able to data-mine

the download better be secure, but that's very doable

eh, most people will prefer the first product they see - so by the time they get to competitor X, they just dont have the energy to do a full sweep of details. Especially if the first one had everything they were looking for and after a couple other searches their pricing doesnt seem unreasonable either

i wonder if round-trip efficiency really is all that negligible when solar panel development and shipping is no longer subsidized by fossil fuels and must also use the energy-storage tech of choice as the predominant source of energy for anything not directly hooked up to the grid. a 20% RTE efficiency has a 5x impact on required energy to do anything. Are there enough good locations for solar to cover the needs of all long-term storage needs 5x over? Do we have enough raw materials for that many panels? Seems plausible tbh but idk

In any case, isn't ammonia incredibly toxic? whats the work-around there? we assume perfect handling of it by all parties at every level of a globally large scale operation? A gasoline leak is bad enough, but an ammonia pipeline bursting? that seems like a hard sell

https://www.maltainc.com/our-solution

Some alternative methods and related companies:

https://www.greenbiz.com/article/big-money-flows-long-durati...

Extracting from the winter / summer cycle, the day / night cycle, and the consistent deep ground / surface air temp differential.

Granted day / night might not have enough variation to take advantage of in a lot of places - but surely some cool tech has come out of desert areas right?

Is this related to flow batteries? Right now I think pumped storage is winning (where applicable), but I've heard flow batteries are more powerful

>What needs work is economical ways to get carbon out of the air

Isn't it kind of wild that too much carbon is a problem? A core building block for life on earth. I agree though, next decade is important for carbon research as well. Olivine is interesting

https://energsustainsoc.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/2...

>Do we really need AI for anything?

The current research is a valid next step in automation which has always shown to have good ROI imo. I dont think it's very "I" but the algorithms have proven very good at outperforming prior heuristics. this enables automation in areas that have unknowns that cannot be explicitly defined as required by prior tooling. the use-cases it settles into are going to be undeniably better for it, but there is a lot of noise right now with people trying to use it for everything

Paying money to shoot in the dark for miracle theories is a luxury. If you dont have enough food, and you are paying to research how to get more food - it's not luxury research. If you are paying to study string theory instead of importing more food because "you never know what we might learn, maybe world hunger will be solved" then I consider that a luxury. If we disagree on that it's okay and we can move on to other points as that is a fringe point.

No one funded general relativity, they funded Einstein. And the government did not fund Einsteins early theoretical papers AFAIK. To use him as an example is disingenuous. He had already made significant and applicable contributions (which is an understatement). He was definitely funded by a government (as part of a team) to create new technologies which in turn won WWII for that government.

I am not aware of any scientific evidence that government funding is necessary to produce groundbreaking theories. In other words, it's possible that genius happens and self-motivates without prior good-faith funding. I do see historical precedent for huge technological advancement through paying theoretical physicists to stop working on theory and start working on application though.

>I can't think of anything worse than governments directing technology development.

Why? Governments historically have funded an incredible amount of successful bleeding edge technologies. Especially in the defense sector. The atom bomb is one of them.

Part of my point here is that we need to take the effectiveness of what our government is capable of with technology in terms of defense and apply that level of competency to other areas - incentivizing the relevant researchers to be hands-on with application development

Controlled viewing comparable to directTV / OnDemand was the main selling point. Being able to binge an entire show at will. Breaking Bad hitting its peak. I think they would have gotten away with it

Yeah we all know that. My post was sensitive to that. You're not wrong, but there is a cost to that.

>I take it you wouldn't have funded a patent clerk in Switzerland in 190x

Please cite sources on Einstein getting funding for his research from the government. I do not believe that happened, at least not while anything was theoretical. His PhD advisor worked for free, and Einstein published multiple significant papers on his own accord.

He was later paid by the government to take his theory and make the most out of it in reality, which is what resulted in the development of the weapons that won the world war.

So before you dismiss what I am saying for being a bit counter to the typical narrative about science funding - please be aware that what you want is what Germany did in that situation. Which was continue to develop theories of new fringe ideas instead of taking the new golden goose egg that was discovered and making something useful out of it right away

Speaking of relating scientists to labor workers..

There is a lot of value to be earned by closing the gap between cutting edge, but proven, science and easily understood training documents for contract workers.

I would say most people would not care if we stopped using tax dollars to fund string theory research or finding 'habitable' planets, and a host of other luxury topics. we need to fortify our infrastructure (in every sense of the word) with all the things we have established as 'known ideas' today. it doesnt feel like we are in the golden age anymore where we can afford luxury research. at least not this decade.

imo The only 3 research fields still worth investing tax dollars in is long term energy storage, AI, and GMO. Everything else can kick rocks and start pitching in with more necessary labor or do it on their own time. the reason for those exceptions is that based on what we already know, there is a potential for resolving some unknowns that would result in global disruptions. IE self driving cars have proof of concept, resetting cell age has been done in mice,and the energy crisis demands a need for energy storage research to be exhausted

This standpoint is very specific to the world we live in today. Such luxury research is the reason we are where we are today and we should continue it in the future, but given what we know now - we should be in a heavy transition period towards getting the most out of what we already know. We've reached the part of the brainstorm session where the new topics being introduced arent exactly wrong, but it is borderline annoying and distracting in relation to accomplishing anything and it would be nice if our smartest people would contribute to the project

We about to get some new entries

It sounds like your CTO did not just operate quickly, but also sloppy and chaotic. From what I am gathering from this thread, the best practice is to move quickly AND organized such that refactoring is reasonable.

I try to be up to date by the end of each month because i also scan receipts and like having them for reference when looking over my spend for month. That said Ive still got some march notes to scan in. I dont review them at all in relation to scanning them. I am making a digital archive of things Ive written down for any reason. If it is not worth archiving then i can delete it later, which i often do.

What helped me most with becoming consistent with it was a few key things listed below - and the overall process can be picked up and put down whenever i feel like it without causing chaos

1) Respect the page. when taking the note, I do not assume context will exist for it later. If a stranger were to get a photo dump of all my notes, they have a reasonable chance of organizing them appropriately. Missing context is written on the page first before putting it away, like date, page number, header keywords

2) I scan everything with my phone

3) I move scans from my phone to a single 'destination' folder on my computer / cloud and delete from my phone.

4) Within the destination folder, I subfolder for items of multiple pages. Not categories or dates or anything fancy. Just a very simple grouping of page x of y situations. No thinking involved. Similar to a stapler

5) I move things out of that scan dump folder into my regular digital file organization as needed, if needed. Personally, I have a "Handwritten Notes" folder - and within that folder I have an "Unfiled" folder which is my scan dump location for #3. After Im done with step 3 I move everything up a level out of the "unfiled" folder

In general, most of my digital file organization is with shortcuts anyway, so at this point im done with the scanning process. I find getting things scanned is meaningful by itself, and i dont see the need to comingle my handwritten notes with my digital notes. shortcuts used whenever i want both types of things in the same folder

Does it really? I feel like I spend many minutes filling out the page, and a few seconds taking a picture of it.

And I still have the paper.. I do not need to take a picture of it right away. I scan my notes with my phone in one batch setting.

Remarkable seems very expensive to save me from a 5 minute scanning session after a few hours of writing notes. On top of that it's another thing i have to carry and charge and possibly troubleshoot.

honestly, it is kind of silly to me that remarkable tries to sell itself as a place to take notes. It's main selling point to me is that it is a kindle I can take notes on. but I dont read enough to warrant purchasing an ereader

It will be in a states best interest to create a tax structure around autonomous vehicles from other states performing services within its borders. Possibly a defensively high tax rate in order to promote in-state ownership of in-state autonomous vehicles.

Good point, we could also expect {"foo": "42", "bar": "[1,2,3]"}. JSON does assume that the values have types (like a list) and that is inconsistent.

As for equivalent representations, I do not think what you want is universally applicable. 42.1 does not equal 42.10 until you use logic to rule that what you are working with are Numbers

In government regulations related text, for example, 42.10 could be 9 items after 42.1 and you might expect to see 42.1(a) and 42.10(a) as other items in the same set or related value sets.

Any way you cut it, the real problem seems to be that when data entry happens - a certain amount of context is assumed - and those assumptions have enough variance to need to be handled differently when the data is consumed. Which makes sense

for example - when parsing json with python, you can apply the same principles you would to python objects. That is, assume the item is the format you know it should be (or test it first to be safe)

so even though the json is {'43' : ['bob','alice']} - you can do an int() cast if you need to do something with that data that requires it to have a type. Otherwise it is represented as it was typed.

I do agree with the article overall though!