dbreunig

There it is, the 9th and 10th paragraph:

> One issue in the debate is that "electrification" doesn’t mean the same thing to everyone. For one thing, the definition of “using electricity to heat their homes” used by the federal energy office appears to mean the use of electrical resistance baseboard heating versus natural gas heated-air furnaces.

> But, in the Energize Denver initiative, city officials are talking about heat pumps versus gas furnaces, which means a different set of cost calculations.

This writer knows which headline to write to get clicks. Now it'll circulate on everywhere people think heat pumps and electrification are scams to make people dependent on big companies and the government. Great work, Scott Weiser.

Funny, they don't link to the report. Wonder why.

Elon did what he's done for the past decade. Can't help but play to a crowd and let the lawyers figure it out later. This is a cocktail of calling a rescue diver a pedophile, mocking all skills that aren't coders, and unnecessary cruelty when laying off workers.

If Haraldur intended to bait him, it was a near-flawless execution. I'm sure there are countless labor, disability, and health info privacy lawyers lining up in Halli's DMs.

Well you could ask paulg, who said that. But use email, not twitter.

Dude, go blog this and submit it instead of pasting it on everyone one of these threads.

People don't generally die because of a YouTube video. And if that were a risk, you could report it and Google would take it down.

I think you can't separate the scale of Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, etc from their product. As has been demonstrated by the wave of "twitter replacements". But if you could separate scale, I agree. And I think that's the direction we're going: small, semi-private networks which can be moderated economically.

Only a crazy person would start a true Twitter replacement these days. The moderation costs and agony don't make the juice worth the squeeze.

Companies cannot control their "AI" because their output is beyond the scale of their ability to QA.

BTW, this is precisely why companies also cannot control the moderation or content of their networks. The number of people posting on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, etc. is well beyond their ability to perfectly QA the content they host.

If either were forced to be responsible for their products -- the content they host or the "AI" they ship -- their financials would look dramatically different and entirely unappealing. And the number of competitors and choices we would have would be remarkably less.

This is probably more a discussion about output-per-worker, technology scaling the volume of products a finite number of individuals are able to produce, and their corresponding ethical and legal responsibilities when they do so. Forget AGI and sentient machines: the problem is the amount of responsibility people and corporations have for the products they ship. That's more pertinent and just as impactful when dealing with Facebook or Scott's hand-wringing about "murderbots".

You mean the guy who said he named his other co "Alameda Research" so it wouldn't sound like a bank, even though it basically is, might be shifty?

Doctors and lawyers have to sacrifice more for similar pay because their work doesn’t scale. A lawyer and doctor serves one customer at a time.

A programmer at your average SaaS app produces work that serves many, many customers at once. And for long after they performed the labor.

This effect is also very apparent when you look at the avg cost of goods and services by category over time. Things that don’t scale — legal, healthcare, education — have skyrocketed in price relative to everything else.

So long as this state of affairs doesn’t change, programmers and anyone else whose work can be replicated and distributed effectively infinitely for no cost will continue to make more, more easily.

Maybe don't bury the answer in the 16th paragraph of the article, Knowable? This is bullshit framing. Almost as bullshit as the Y axis in the Land Use chart.

What I was told by a friend at an OEM is that lower-end the demand for lower end Subarus and Hondas was so high in the NYC area that it made sense to turn down the all cash offer as they'd likely sell the car with a loan the next day.

It doesn't. Dude's riding his hobbyhorse into a wall.

Most cars that left the road were the oldest and heaviest. New cars bought under that program tended to be economy cars and are already a decade+ old. To suggest that it took inventory off the road affecting today's markets doesn't hold water.

The biggest issue is that car companies make more money off reselling the loan than they do off the car. Years ago we tried to buy a Subaru in the NYC metro area in all cash and were continuously turned away. Dealers didn't make money off the cash sale, they were spiff'ed off the loan. We had to take the loan and then pay it off in order to get the car.

Since then it's gotten worse. Expensive cars (luxury, trucks) are sold with 72 month loans and are underwater shortly after purchase. It's been a race to the worst terms and empowering the worst purchases to the worse equipped buyers. I'm continuously amazed it's gone on as long as it has.

I'm not optimistic for the lab or workshop use case. The filters in the ears likely don't filter VOCs and in a woodshop you'd be replacing the (likely costly) filters very frequently due to the size and volume of the particulate.

People aren't APIs.

The tone and approach here is exactly what I'd expect from a man whose chief complaint as a band leader is that jazz musicians interpret his music too much and classical musicians follow it too literally.

The tell is the author had to resort to using the Buzz Lightyear movie as an example of rehabbing a villain.

I think they dramatically misread Toy Story, which is disqualifying given the subject of their thesis. Biased and lazy, a twofer.

But the package that's generating all these numbers, handlebar-helpers, does precisely that. Sure, the spammer gets internet points, but those don't matter.

But from the average programmer's perspective this is clearly something they want. I see this general trend as a symptom of the inadequacy of JS to out-of-the-box address the tasks it's used for, which (as we note here) opens an outlet for spamming and security liabilities.

Panic has a history of delivering thoughtful, well-made software. Their initial foray into games (Firewatch, Untitled Goose Game, Nour) were all excellent and novel. Combine that with Teenage Engineering's similar novel and excellent track record with hardware design and you've got a very interesting product to those that like Panic's software and/or like good hardware design. If nothing else this product will be novel and well considered.

If that's not your cup of tea, cool. But there's a lot here for several communities.

They answer their own question:

>Most of us don’t use punch-cards anymore, but that ease of authorship remains one of CSV’s most attractive qualities. CSVs can be read and written by just about anything, even if that thing doesn’t know about the CSV format itself.

Yes, we keep CSVs. If you care about metadata and incredibly strict spec compliance, then yes: avro, parquet, json, whatever. But most CSV usage is small data, where the ease of usage, creation, and evaluation wins.

One of the problems with CSVs he cites is a great reason why I like CSVs:

>CSVs often begin life as exported spreadsheets or table dumps from legacy databases, and often end life as a pile of undifferentiated files in a data lake, awaiting the restoration of their precious metadata so they can be organized and mined for insights.

A benefit of a CSV is a skilled or unskilled operator can evaluate these piles of aging data. Parquet? Even SQLite? Not so much.

For small-to-medium sized datasets, CSV is great and accessible to a wider user base. If you're relying on CSV to preserve structure and meta, then meh.

Nearly 70% heavier than the Switch. That's a deal breaker for me, sadly.

Lucky for you, it's also a golden age for frontend GIS. I'm a big fan of https://vis.gl/

Relatedly: the appendix section "SQL Primer" in Obe and Hsu's 'PostGIS in Action' is my favorite quick intro to SQL and the first stop I give anyone looking to learn about the language.

https://www.manning.com/books/postgis-in-action-second-editi...

This right here. GIS is accessible to anyone who knows Javascript, Python, and SQL thanks to the open source GIS ecosystem. Previously it was the sole domain of ESRI priests.

Now this is a net good thing, but there are downsides. Generalists wielding specialist tools means that a lot of the wonky basics aren't known until things break. But this is a blip compared to the step-change of making an entire field accessible to anyone who's a decent programmer with a healthy appetite for research. It's crazy how much you can spin up with PostGIS, Python, Mapbox and/or Leaflet...no ESRI license needed.

Our vaccine effort is a perfect example of this. We got heroic, efficient results in developing vaccines because the requirements were so clear.

Distribution is much, much harder!

Same. And the constraints of living on a sail boat have led to super interesting decisions about power consumption and computing.

You've hit on the key design challenge for mass market networks with massive content libraries: how can one build the best product for the largest audience without being boring to the niches. It's why Facebook uses algos to recommend content, which spurs another interesting question.

If algos are the tool for recommending the best version of content, the idea of 'archive' and 'preservation' of original forms falls by the wayside. The FB feed you see is different than mine, as are your Google results for the same terms. How would we deal with your Tom & Jerry or other content being different? For the most part it would just be funny quirks (like film edits for airplanes or cable TV).

This gets even crazier as contemporary tools for creation can capture and store countless takes that would usually be discarded on the cutting room floor. Now they're just waiting for an alternative cut.

I wrote about this 9(!) years ago, but the issue has only accelerated: https://dbreunig.tumblr.com/post/13923466229/multisignal-too...

Some wishful thinking here...

> For one thing, the promise of being able to stream the ENTIRETY of the classic shorts could generate a tremendous amount of publicity for Max, in the process providing strong incentive for T&J collectors, animation fans, historians, and adults to subscribe to the new platform.

That is a very small audience compared to the very large audience of families who would be upset if the their kids auto-played into unexpected blackface.

Yes these problems can be solved with UX, yes it would be nice if we can access everything as it existed forever... But the reality is unfettered yet contextualized access to archival Tom & Jerry episodes isn't going to be high on their backlog.

For the purposes of access for historical archive purposes...why focus your complaints on streaming? Streaming is great for ease of access, cheaper price points (at least monthly), and breadth of selection. As a format, it's doesn't deliver well for archival purposes.

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