efitz

When my data structures are messages to be sent over a network, I always start with msgId and msgLen, both fixed width fields.

This solves the message differentiation problem explicitly, makes security and memory management easier, and reduces routing to:

switch(msg.msgId): …

Not every damn thing needs to be “social”.

That's precisely why you want it in a safe.

What about drunk driving laws?

To an LLM, answering “no” and changing the mode of the chat window are discrete events that are not necessarily related.

Many coding agents interpret mode changes as expressions of intent; Cline, for example, does not even ask, the only approval workflow is changing from plan mode to execute mode.

So while this is definitely both humorous and annoying, and potentially hazardous based on your workflow, I don’t completely blame the agent because from its point of view, the user gave it mixed signals.

The government operating automatic camera citation systems, almost never is interested in improving safety or even minimizing undesirable behavior- often the placement of such cameras is done to maximize revenue (as when red light cameras are placed at long-cycle-time intersections vs intersections with a history of accidents). And it’s been documented that some cities have reduced yellow light times (which almost always leads to more citations) rather than increasing yellow light times (which usually leads to fewer people running the yellow, because people are less likely to take a chance after the light has been yellow a long time).

There’s a lot of compelling evidence that these systems are just revenue machines.

I don’t agree but I take your point. After seeing the recent scandals regarding US AID etc. I have very low confidence that the majority of nonprofits have altruistic motives.

I also don’t buy the “most of our money goes to staff and directors salary and expenses because what we do is organize volunteers”. Why? Why can’t the staff and directors be volunteers too? Why do they need to even have any funding if it’s just volunteer coordination? We do lots of complex things with just volunteers- Linux, for example.

And I’m unable to differentiate the behavior of most nonprofit hospitals from for-profit hospitals, with only a few exceptions.

Im reading through all these comments and it amazes me how the perfect is the enemy of the good, for many computer people.

Ofc there are edge cases. So since there exist a handful of edge cases where a zip code maps to two states, or the more frequent (but irrelevant in the US) case of two or more city names per zip code, we should make everyone suffer?

Ofc if you are making a web form you should ask for the zip code first, and auto complete state and city. Let the user edit them if they don’t like what you chose. Or do as some have suggested here and present the official USPS data as a drop down of 2 states or 2-3 cities; thats way better than having to type all of it.

And I curse everyone who thinks it’s a good idea to break zip code or phone number or OTP into multiple fields, or if you’re too lazy to set the input type to number.

I believe that many (most?) non-profits are a combination of grift and money laundering.

I would love to see requirements that 75%+ of all non-profit revenue has to pass through to the community, that non-profits may not transfer funds to other non-profits, and that directors and officers cannot be compensated and have very modest limits on expenses.

I would love to see this but don’t want to run the code. Could you link a video? I understand if you have to omit or mangle sound to avoid strikes.

I worked at Microsoft for many years and blogged there.

Microsoft was unique among the companies I worked for in that they gave you some guidelines and then let you blog without having to go through some approval or editing process. It made blogging much more personal and organic IMO; company-curated blog posts read like marketing.

I didn’t see the original post but it looks like somebody made a bad judgment call on what to put in a company blog post (and maybe what constitutes ethical activity) and that it was taken down as soon as someone noticed.

I care much less about whether the person exercised good judgment in posting, and don’t care (and am happy) that there was not some process that would have caught it pre-publication.

I care much more if the person works in a team that believes that copyright infringement for AI training is a justifiable behavior in a corporate environment.

And now we know that is a thing, and I suspect that there will be some hard questions asked by lawyers inside the company, and perhaps by lawyers outside the company.

Random UUIDs are not compressible. They are also frequently stored as 38-character strings.

It seems like it would be a killer for any sharding systems.

I’m going to vibe code an app that lets you register a computronium unique id (is that name taken?) I’ll corner the market.

I’m also going to devise a standard that arbitrarily breaks it into groups of hexadecimal digits of arbitrary length in the spirit of UUIDs, and reserve a prefix space for Planck-unit timestamps (computronium-ID-7) so that you can lexicographically sort your COMPID7s.

Man I got to get out in front of this.

The headline (“violate ethical constraints, pressured by KPIs”) reminds me of a lot of the people I’ve worked with.

Why EPA and not FTC?

This is why agents can’t have nice things :-)

Blameless postmortems are for processes where everyone is acting in good faith and a mistake was made and everyone wants to fix it.

If one party decides that they don’t want to address a material error, then they’re not acting in good faith. At that point we don’t use blameless procedures anymore, we use accountability procedures, and we usually exclude the recalcitrant people from the remediation process, because they’ve shown bad faith.

The paper touches on a point (“sustainability “) that is a sacred cow for many people.

Even if you support sustainability, criticizing the paper will be treated as heresy by many.

Despite our idealistic vision of Science(tm), it is a human process done by humans with human motivations and human weaknesses.

From Galileo to today, we have repeatedly seen the enthusiastic willingness by majorities of scientists to crucify heretics (or sit by in silence) and to set aside scientific thinking and scientific process when it clashes against belief or orthodoxy or when it makes the difference whether you get tenure or publication.

Although the Anglican Church is a hybrid of Reformation era Protestantism and of Catholicism, I think that the US tradition of Protestantism is generally (not always) more positive and less fatalistic.

I believe that the cultures of both nations are heavily derived from their religious traditions; even if you never practice religion in either nation you imbibe its effects from early childhood in the cultural values and norms that it influenced.

For example, one of the key aspects of Protestantism is evangelism, which would not make sense if people thought they could not be successful.

So I think a lot of American culture in particular is based on this tradition that encourages optimism and repeated trying even in the face of failure. Hence the way we select heroes.

No word games at all.

Every American, even the president, even (gasp) Donald Trump, has the right of appeal of judicial orders and rulings. I could just as well say that people and organizations who oppose Trump's immigration policies go "judge shopping" or "jurisdiction shopping" to find sympathetic judges, which happens all the time (For example, there is absolutely no justification for Judge Boasberg in the DC Circuit to have adjudicated the issue of the deportations from Texas; it should have been a local judge in TX).

Inferior court judges (i.e. judicial branch judges that are not Supreme Court justices), only have judicial authority as granted by Congress, and it's not clear whether they do or should have jurisdiction outside their circuit- the Supreme Court is currently deciding that one. Congress explicitly has denied judicial branch judges from jurisdiction over immigration issues, in favor of immigration judges. I believe that most of the judicial actions against the administration wrt immigration are largely lawless (illegal) actions by judges, but I am very much not worried about Trump because his administration is NOT ignoring court orders.

There is a lot of FUD in the news that you have to do a bit of reading to understand (for example, why district court judges may not lawfully order a halt to a deportation that has been properly adjudicated by an immigration court).

My bottom line is that I don't see a Constitutional crisis in Trump's actions, although I very much see many reasons why many people would be upset; he has a very polarizing personality and demeanor.

Senators aren’t hereditary and never were; they used to serve at the will of elected officials but were isolated from electoral influences.

Where is Garcia now? In the US.

Who brought him back? Trump

Repeal the 17th amendment - popular election of senators - and all of a sudden it gets much easier for states to amend the Constitution in ways they want.

Popular election of senators has been a disaster, it essentially turned to the Senate from a deliberative body into a pure partisan body like the House.

The justice department IS part of the executive branch; it’s a department headed by a cabinet secretary.

What do you mean no one is willing to buck the trend? It’s almost a certainty that Republicans will lose the house this year and maybe the senate.

On the other hand we have federal district court judges in podunk deciding that they have the unilateral ability to stop the president from exercising executive authority. It wouldn’t be so comical if they didn’t ultimately lose in most cases; our judges are the real Constitutional crisis right now.

I have not seen the Trump administration fail to obey a single court order; I just don’t see Trump as a crisis. His policies, you could make a good case. His rhetoric, yes. His official acts, not so much.

It’s a feature, not a bug. The United States federal government was set up as a representative republic, not a democratic republic, and not a democracy. We are supposed to be a federation of fairly-independent state governments with just enough federal scaffolding to keep the peace between the states. We were not set up with the intention of having a do-everything federal government ruling over the states.

Someday a delta engineer will go fix the UI bug where the labels for the difficulty levels were inverted in order compared to the enums used by the chess engine.

What is the percentage of US adults who even know who Jerome Powell is?

If only a tiny minority of surveyed adults knew, then I really doubt whether the poll tells us anything useful.

I think that these polls mostly tell us that:

- Trump is polarizing and unpopular

- Congress is always unpopular

- the Supreme Court is popular or unpopular based on how recently they ruled for/against an issue that the respondent is passionate about

- for people in politics, the less well known you are, the less unpopular you are

This is awesome, thank you for doing this work; it’s not glamorous but it’s a key feature to making computers productive.

I know it’s not a popular opinion here but I think that Windows has two killer features that are always overlooked- the standard print dialog (and all the underlying plumbing), and the standard file dialog (at least until Windows 8).

The ability to print and to interact with files, that just works, without having to retrain people every time a new OS comes out, and without having to reprogram your apps or write your own drivers and/or UI, is incredibly important.

Yes, I know Linux and Mac have the same, but IMO Windows was light years ahead for decades, and is still more consistent and easy to use.