erikw

A lot of Japanese Kei cars fit that description, and they are available in every big market except the United States. I like to daydream about an alternative universe in which Suzuki was still operating in the US.

I liked his podcast Lexicon Valley so much that I went back and listened through every episode. It’s had a large impact on my thinking about language and empathy for communication. I went from thinking there was a “right” way to use language, to understanding that it’s all about communication, and there are nearly endless patterns in which languages are structured.

I’ll echo this sentiment. While it may take a while to figure out how to do something initially, the great thing about NixOS is that you only have to figure out how to do it exactly once. As far as my main desktop OS, I figured out a config that I liked several years ago, and haven’t really tweaked much since then. I ran the rolling release for a while, but I’ve moved back to the stable release, which is… well, stable.

I reached out to Microsoft to try to buy the rights to it several years ago. They referred me to the original developer in Germany, but they either weren’t interested, or the ownership was too complicated. I’d love a modern version of Urban Assault, although the original is still completely playable. I’m not aware of any other game that managed so well to combine RTS and FPS.

Anathem and The Baroque Cycle both took me two tries as well. The second half of Anathem is an action-adventure book mix of Zodiac and Seveneves, so it gets really engaging. The Baroque Cycle eventually sucked me in because I felt like I really got to know the characters, but it never gets fast-paced.

OnShape is definitely more limited, even compared to Fusion 360. However, I've moved to it as my main CAD tool, since it works on Linux and Fusion 360 licensing is so problematic. Fusion 360 also has a web interface, but it doesn't support Linux, and even on Windows doesn't work very well. The only thing I've needed to go back to Fusion 360 for is thread modeling.

I really missed out back in the early 2000s when companies were throwing away their old plotters and replacing them with massive inkjet printers. I've since gotten into 3D printing as a hobby, and recently have been playing around with attaching a pen to the printhead. This works quite well, and is more fun than I expected. If you're looking to get into CNC pen drawing, an inexpensive 3D printer might be the way to go, although I can't fit an entire leaf of paper on mine, so need to limit the size of my drawings. I've also experimented with extruding plastic directly onto the paper which surprisingly works without warping, but I haven't come up with any creative use for it yet.

As an example of what you can do, here is someone who has gone beyond just attaching a pen like I did, and actually integrating a pen changer to use multiple colors: https://youtu.be/pxt_TbyBImc

Sorry, I didn't intend to apply a causative relationship, and should have worded it better. What I mean is that the policies of modern Peronist ideology clearly aren't effective, but (outside of the failure of the centre-right Macri administration) I haven't seen any serious attempts at something new. It's always "More wealth distribution!", "More grandiose infrastructure projects!", "More involvement of the national government in the economy!", and things along those lines.

Edit: To clarify what I mean about Macri- no one has been able to marshal a national consensus to try something new. I still can't believe Macri got as far as he did. Most of my friends call Macri a far-right extremist, but I would say that the policies of the Macri administration were centre-right by the standards of most western democracies, and would be considered leftist by US standards.

I was hoping for an in depth historical treatment of Argentina's fall from the club of wealthy nations, but this article feels much more shallow. It's immediately clear that the author is neither an economist nor sociologist, and I would hazard to say has never lived in Argentina. While strictly true that the Macri administration's "neoliberal toolkit" failed, I feel like the article suggests that there is some inherent flaw in neoliberalism, whereas in reality Argentina is uniquely ungovernable. I'm reminded of the classic quote: "There are four types of nations- wealthy, poor, Japan, and Argentina". There is so much wealth in the county- you see these massive infrastructure projects everywhere: huge hydroelectric dams, well-constructed pristine highways in even the most remote parts of the country, beautiful parks... but for the most part, these projects are used to feed the corrupt state. The amount of corruption and bureaucracy is difficult to grasp as an outsider. I remember the first time I visited Chile by bus. At immigration before we got off the bus, they made an announcement that we should not try to bribe the Chilean police, as they wouldn't take kindly to it. They couched it in terms of the police being too proud to take a bribe, as though there were something abnormal about that. This illustrates the key sociological problem to me- beyond the normalization of bribery, there is a pervasive bureaucracy used for resource extraction by the political class, and I think it has too much momentum to end.

To return briefly to the economic side and why I think a bit of neoliberalism would be a breath of fresh air, I'm reminded of when the government banned beef exports. They wanted to lower the price of beef, and thought they could do this by banning exports. I don't think it's uncharitable to say that any moron could predict how this would play out with a bit of thinking. Ranchers stopped raising unprofitable cattle, switched to soy (which the government then also raised export tariffs on) and other crops. Argentina is rife with this type of economic magical thinking, not just in the political elite, but in the popular classes they pander to. Argentina has been poor since the advent of Peronism, and yet the average person- perhaps like how a fish might not be aware of what "water" is- continues to support the same policies that continue not working 80 years later.

In summary, I think that the author should take a more in depth look at the sociological and economic currents that make Argentina such a unique case of a poor country that by every right should be wealthy.

Edit: I feel like the above comes off as too negative, so I want to add that Argentina is a great place to live, especially if you are a person of means, and not tied to the Argentine Peso. There are a lot of world class software developers in Buenos Aires, and apparently Argentina is one of the top spots to buy 0day exploits. The culture, food, weather (you can choose anywhere from arctic to tropical depending on your preferences) are all perfect for me- I just can't stand the bureaucracy and corruption.

Unfortunately if you have equity in the business, you'll get taxed. However, if you are only an employee, you get an exemption on something like $150,000 of income, housing, and other expenses. So as a US citizen, you can avoid taxes only by living outside the US, and being an employee of a non-US company. If anyone knows otherwise, please correct me as I'd greatly benefit!

I miss the excuse to ride my bike on a commute every morning, but I'm definitely not going back to an office anytime soon. Hopefully companies will become more open to remote working. There is supposedly a shortage of software developers in the US right now, but:

1. Most companies only hire within a small physical distance of their office(s);

2. Of those that hire remote workers, most will only hire them if they are physically located in the US, or with luck Canada / Mexico;

3. Of those that hire globally, most will only hire through an agency, so there is some middleman taking a sizable chunk out of salary.

Bonus: When you finally find a company that hires remotely, hires internally, and hires globally... they will only offer what they think is the minimum needed in your country.

So... no thanks! I'll keep contracting independently for now. I'm not opposed to working for a company, but until US companies start recruiting reasonably, they are leaving out the majority of people- even the majority of English speakers if that is a requirement.

I'd be interested to hear more about how you're using NixOS if it isn't something you've already written about. My guess is that you're mostly leveraging the declarative configuration and immutability for internal infrastructure use. What I'd love to see would be consumer devices using NixOS, allowing updates (especially security patches) to be deployed to endpoints without too much fear that it will brick something. I think that would allow companies to more inexpensively maintain their IoT devices throughout their lifetime. I imagine a device where it could automatically revert to the last working generation if a new config fails for some reason.

NixOS is the perfect OS for embedded Linux use, and I'm surprised that it hasn't seen any commercial uptake. I hope that some company adopts it for an IoT product or something so that it gets some love. I've been messing around on a Raspberry Pi and Beaglebone today with Debian, and I'm constantly frustrated having to use an imperative OS. I'm not using NixOS because even though it officially supports Raspberry Pi 3, I have not found it to be stable on that platform.

I'm excited about Mobile NixOS though. I've found the NixOS community to be motivated and friendly, but there is only so much progress that a small group of volunteers can make.

The linked PDF doesn't seem to mention anything related specifically to C++. It says that it is possible for bit flips to affect software. They then suggest that Toyota should have used the following practices:

• “Near-perfect” software

• Design out single points of failure

• Justify real time scheduling with analysis

• Watchdog timers that have real “bite”

• Good software architecture

• Good safety culture

This seems like mostly good concrete advice, although I think we can all agree that simply creating "near-perfect software" is a goal, not a solution. If you read up on Toyota's unintended breaking legal issues, it appears that it was most likely driver error, as Toyota did not issue a firmware change to the affected vehicles, and no software problems were ever identified.

I don't have the numbers, but I suspect the brain-drain is near total, and irreversible for a few generations. The last time I did a round of interviews, about two years ago with half a dozen companies in Chile, at least half of the senior engineers, and many of the hiring managers, were Venezuelan. None of my Venezuelan friends plan on going back, although they do visit, and I think would like to go back if conditions were different- Venezuelan culture is quite a bit more "latin" than Chile, so there's a fair bit of culture shock for them. As it is, they are putting down roots, starting families, opening up businesses, etc, and I don't think they'll be leaving soon, if ever.

This looks like a really interesting take, in that it doesn't implement an i3 style bar, but rather keeps the native Windows taskbar interface. I'll be giving it a try when a binary release is available. I gave Workspacer a try, and found that it is very slow to switch between workspaces- maybe 500ms. Something I've always wondered is, would it be possible to create an alternative display manager? I know that the Windows display manager is fully isolated, but I'm wondering if it also handles how graphics are drawn, so that it would not be practical to replace with an alternative. With the new Windows Terminal and Windows Subsystem for Linux, I could imagine myself using an alternate display manager, and not even realizing that I'm running the NT kernel...

SEEKING WORK | Chile (UTC-3, overlaps with US continental timezones) | Remote

I work with my wife to help businesses sell online. I mostly do software development & ops, and she mostly does design, marketing, & Shopify. We both recently left our fulltime jobs to work together, and most of our clients so far have been small fashion brands who needed ecommerce solutions.

Rate: US $25/hr for software development, flat fee for Shopify sites

Technologies: React / TypeScript, Shopify, and I’d loooove to do something in Svelte or Elm

Languages: native US English, native Chilean Spanish

Website: https://www.geminisestudio.cl

Portfolio: https://www.geminisestudio.cl/portfolio

Contact: hola@geminisestudio.cl

Interesting- they mention an example of adding a return type if you've "identified a slow part of your code". How would you identify that the complier is struggling in a particular area?

Elm enforces this since 2014 at the package manager level. They are able to do this because since the language is pure, the compiler knows if a function's signature has changed. If you are changing implementation details that don't affect data transformation, then that would just be a dot release. I haven't actually published an Elm package, but from what I've read this seems like a great setup.

Many countries have a minimum salary limit which qualifies you (and potentially your family) to live there. For example, last I looked into it several years ago, Spain's minimum salary for a remote working visa was USD $36,000.

What is the tooling and workflow you use for this? It's not something that had occurred to me, but now that you mention it, it seems like something I'd like to try.

Edit: It looks like none of the major bundlers support this feature out of the box, but there is a project called in inliner that does exactly this: https://github.com/remy/inliner

I don't think this is actually true. I have not been able to find any sources referencing an actual bug and patch. Toyota, NASA, and the NHTSA did not report any issues. Nevertheless, Toyota lost a jury trial with this rather hilarious quote available on wikipedia[1]:

"Michael Barr of the Barr Group testified that NASA had not been able to complete its examination of Toyota's ETCS and that Toyota did not follow best practices for real time life critical software, and that a single bit flip which can be caused by cosmic rays could cause unintended acceleration. As well, the run-time stack of the real-time operating system was not large enough and that it was possible for the stack to grow large enough to overwrite data that could cause unintended acceleration."

So... maybe the computer could have physically failed, or a stack overflow, or some other error? Regardless, I still feel like drive-by-wire is scary. The Revisionist History podcast also covers the unintended acceleration recall from more of a psychological perspective[2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009%E2%80%9311_Toyota_vehicle...

[2] http://revisionisthistory.com/episodes/08-blame-game

Cool, it looks like this addresses one of the toughest parts of running a small ISP, which is a chicken-and-egg problem of having enough support operatives for your users, and enough user revenue to hire for support. Fortunately big ISPs have set a loooooow bar for support, but you're still facing an uphill battle against coax providers that are already in buildings, so you have to go above and beyond.

It looks like you're in Ecuador, and that makes it a lot tougher.

1. Are you an agency or a solo developer? If it's just you or you and a friend or two, you might get a better response building up your personal brand rather than representing yourself as an agency.

2. I can't judge your technical chops, but I can see that you have room to grow in UI design. I like this youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/DesignCourse, but there are tons of design resources available.

3. You might need to focus more on sales. Is there a small business you like that doesn't have an online store? Call them, email them, go visit them in person- try to make a sale. You could offer the work in exchange for products at first- once they are happily selling online, they will tell other business owners, and you can get more referrals and raise your prices.

For small businesses that are able to move online, there is no shortage of revenue available. In the article they mention a yoga studio owner closing up her shop. I agree that a yoga studio is pretty tough to move online. They also mention a jewellery brand, and that is exactly the type of boutique business that can be successful right now with the right marketing and ecommerce solution. My partner does online sales and marking consulting, and every one of her clients has at least doubled revenue within one month of onboarding. Most of them now have problems maintaining stock, not making sales. I don't know if these healthy sales will last, but for now I'm not seeing any ceiling for small businesses who make something or sell a service that works online. My guess is that a lot of SME owners just aren't aware of how to approach online sales.

The linked Techcrunch article is pretty light on actual content. The actual Cloudflare blogpost describes what this product is: "We are extending our CPU limits to allow customers to bring all of their workloads onto Workers, no matter how intensive."

https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-workers-unbound/

I enjoyed this podcast, but they seemed to imply that this economist invented the idea. A currency tied an inflation-sensitive basket of goods is an example of a "unit of account"[0], see for example the UF[1], which Chile has used since 1967. Things like houses, medical insurance, and even some SaaS products are priced in UF.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_of_account

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unidad_de_Fomento

Wow, this should at least provide for some very interesting natural sociological experiments. For context, I make less than this as a software developer in Chile, and still have no problems saving and living a comfortable lifestyle. This is going to significantly impact the lives of folks working in these factories, and it will be interesting to see how it will affect the individuals, their communities, and the quality and competitiveness of the factories.

I too am curious about the internal motivations of people who work for Facebook. Something I've noticed about myself is that I would be okay with working for a US defense contractor, ie a company which makes machines that literally kill people, yet I could not picture myself working at Facebook. I struggle to square this morally, because I also believe that defense contractors have a greater net negative impact on society than Facebook does, but there is something "icky" to me about Facebook.

I used to commute with a group of folks from Facebook, Oracle, and Amazon, and none of them seemed to have any moral qualms about their employers. My buddy from Oracle invited me to apply to work on his team, and in explaining why I couldn't consider working at Oracle, I mentioned some recent terrible thing Oracle had done in the open source community. His response was that Amazon contributed even less open source (which I believe is true). So I think in the end, the internal justification is "Yeah, maybe I'm contributing to something immoral, but it's less immoral than X & Y".

Nix seems to be heading toward a critical mass in Germany. I use NixOS for my work computer, and couldn't imagine using any other OS. I keep a LinkedIn search open for nixos, and almost all of the hits are German. I'm interested in what kind of an organization might try out something like IHP? I've had a tough enough time introducing Typescript and more functionally oriented patterns in my team, so my guess is that organizations that would seriously consider IHP probably have a significantly different corporate culture.