examancer

You try 3D printing a house on a Pentium, or running inference models. We needed the compute. We need so much compute it boggles the mind and we don't know what to do with it.

Only then, as we are drowning in compute, does it spill over into other areas and allow that compute to be used as leverage towards enhancing or automating areas compute has yet to break into. Only then are crazy ideas like having large clusters of transistors act as neurons in a neural net actually possible, and efficient enough.

This is at least what I mean when I occasionally say something flippant like "(technology/computers/software) will eat the world". Maybe our relentless pursuit of more compute isn't the best way to solve complex problems, but it increasingly seems like it may be a way.

Denver is taking the same approach, and, really, it's the only tool we have for preventing huge increases in traffic as population increases and actually getting people to rely on public transit. I live in a transit-oriented development zone near train+bus stop and love how easy it is to walk to anything I want.

Transit-oriented development is the only sensible approach I've seen to scaling a modern city.

We continue paying more for demonstrably worse care and outcomes than our global peers.

Single payer needs to happen, now. Medicare for All.

I learned some cool new features coming in Ruby 2.7 and I am very much looking forward to them now.

The rest of this post is drivel, complaints, and ends with begging questions answered in his opening bullets. How does this optimize ruby for happiness? Flexibility and choice.

Backwards compatibility is maintained. You can write the same old ruby you wrote before if you want to avoid change. I'm very happy to have some new syntax tools in the toolbox.

This is good for everyone. Hopefully the adoption is swift and we can pretend the myriad Thunderbolt/USB-C/USB 3.0 issues, differences, and confusion never happened.

The Incredible Shrinking Sears https://nyti.ms/2uOeTsH

I didn't know they sold homes. Kind of amazing. It's a surprising footnote in the tragedy of Sears.

The popular narrative of an out-of-touch company unable to compete with the likes of Amazon is false. The CEO is a hedge fund manager who pillaged the company, sold off it's best assets (sometimes to himself), loaded up the company with debt, and used it to pay himself millions.

http://prospect.org/article/it-was-vulture-capitalism-killed...

There is no good reason we are losing this company which has been the backbone of American commerce for over a century.

It's not all doom and gloom. Major American cities are also being invaded by a litany of battery powered vehicles, especially through ebike and electric scooter rental services. Some places, like here in Denver, seem to be embracing this with open arms and it could eventually help with both congestion and pollution.

Inexpensive power-dense batteries will unlock a real revolution, not just in car-like transportation, but transportation you can pick up and carry with you, or stow under your desk at work.

Electric skateboards, electric kick scooters, electric mopeds, electric giant wheels you straddle like a snowboard (OneWheel), electric unicycles, electric rollerskates... these are just a few of the device categories exploding in popularity.

I think the battery transport revolution is already upon us, it's just harder to see because it's much smaller than we expected.

I think most of us want our code to see the light of day. If given an actual problem to solve, we aren't going to toil away at tiny details forever. We want to see it run!

A good manager knows this and will give you room to find that balance yourself, unless you have demonstrated you need help with that.

I was lucky that my first technical role was where I found the best manager I've had. He was my 2nd supervisor in that first role.

After that I got to be pickier than most about where to go next, so my results might be rosier than others. In total I've had 7 "supervisors" in my technical career. 2 of them were amazing and I would take a (small) pay cut right now to work with either. 2 were good, mostly hands off, and easy to work with. The other 3 were nice people with good intentions, but significant managerial shortcomings. None of them were bad or insufferable.

In one case, an extraordinary mentor almost entirely made up for shortcomings of the manager. Working with great people alongside you often makes the incompetency of the people above a little less relevant, or at least more tolerable.

He tore down barriers and made sure interactions with other parts of the organization or external parties were as frictionless as possible. He would take any non-technical chores off our plate where possible. He would give clear and frequent feedback, good and bad, and really cared about where I wanted to go with my career and what kind of projects I wanted to work on. He trusted me when I said I would do something and would just make sure everything was out of my way until I asked for help or deadlines were being missed.

He was a shield for those of us who worked for him.

I bring my own laptop to work, which runs a linux distro I installed myself (Ubuntu). I also have to use my camera and mic quite a bit, so, they remain free of obstructions most of the time.

If I was using my work supplied laptop I would likely take efforts to blind the machine outside of work hours.

I am a lot more worried about my phone. The android update process is slow and opaque and I have no idea what the manufacturer might be slipping into updates. Again, I use it a lot, so it generally remains un-obstructed.

I value privacy, but, apparently I value convenience of being able to actually use my devices a little more.

This story is very thin on details, but with the abysmal quality level of most Samsung software it is 100% believable.

That's literally what the OP did. A 1950X is only $799 now, so less than half a top end i9.

I misread the headline. I was really worried I wouldn't be able to search C-SPAN archives anymore. I'm glad I can still find old clips of bonehead senators trying to grandstand at hearings.

Mickey has been on the verge of entering the public domain for decades now. Every time it gets close Disney and other companies are successful in re-writing copyright law to whatever they want it to be. No, Mickey probably won't be in the public domain in 5 years.

The GPD Pocket fits this bill. It was available with Ubuntu pre-installed during it's crowd sourcing campaign. The support under Ubuntu is pretty good, including good support for the touch screen. 7" 1080p, atom CPU, 8GB RAM, 128GB SSD. More expensive, but under $500.

https://github.com/stockmind/gpd-pocket-ubuntu-respin

10000mah and an ARM A53 mean it should last 10 hours or more with moderate brightness settings. It's hard to beat this for a light cheap terminal/browser with plenty of battery if that is something you need.

Pretty sure the are just banking on SpaceX dominating the global space launch services market for the next few years. Signs increasingly point to this being a safe bet.

The valuation is higher than the annual global launch market, but below what it's projected to reach in the next few years. If SpaceX can maintain their current share of the global market for a few years the valuation may be conservative.

Impressed a girl once who's friend had a Mac Classic with important files that needed to be removed. The only removable storage option was a broken floppy drive. It did have a network card, but couldn't find any way to move files to my modern mac, linux, or windows machines over the network.

It did have an ancient version of Netscape, so I tried to upload the files, but the browser was just too old to handle Dropbox, Google Drive, or any other service I could think of. An obvious solution, then, would be an upload service built for ancient browsers.

So, in about 5 minutes flat I made a sinatra app that used the simplest HTML upload form possible and dumped uploaded files to a folder on my desktop machine.

Maybe there was an easier solution I missed, but she found mine quite impressive.

While it is a good idea to spread to credit for SpaceX's acheivements around, Musk himself has done more engineering of products at SpaceX and Tesla than any of his peers. His title as CEO of both companies is somewhat misleading as he has very little involvement in business operations of either company and spends most of his time engineering.

Newer Intel chips seem to render it fine in Chrome on Linux. i7-8550U laptop here running Ubuntu 16.04.

The UX design is very well executed. This feels so polished. The floating graphs in the background, the individual paths under the chart, etc. It's all very well done with lots of little flourishes. Makes me want to up my game. Thanks for sharing.

Expected the new XPS to have a developer flavor soon, but also expected it to be limited to 16GB still. Was not surprised since the Windows version has the same limit.

Went ahead and purchased a 32GB System76 Galaga Pro last week with the same i7-8550U available on the XPS. It's a slightly larger 13", but feels a lot closer to my 5th gen XPS 13 than the MacBook Pro the Galaga replaces. Comes with a retina-like matte IPS 3200x1800 screen that is a joy to use. No touch, for better or worse. Keyboard layout is actually superior to the XPS for development with dedicated home/end/pgup/pgdn buttons. Pop!OS is nice and worth a spin, plus it has XPS levels of support under Ubuntu 16.04 which is available pre-loaded. Camera is in a much more useful place than on the XPS. It's also cheaper at most configurations.

Downsides are a smaller battery (probably to make room for both an M.2 SSD and a 7mm 2.5" drive bay) and a touchpad that while multitouch and decent isn't as good as the XPS touchpad. Also, while the screen hinge feels more solid than the XPS's, it doesn't go back as far as I would expect. XPS uses better materials in spots, like soft touch carbon fiber in palm.

So far I'm extremely happy with the Galaga Pro and would recommend to anyone who wants a small powerful laptop like the XPS 13, but is turned off by its 16GB limitation.

Came here to vote for this. I even published an app to their store during the ~2 weeks it looked like HP was going to throw their weight behind the TouchPad.

It was really ahead of its time and most of its major metaphors can be found in the surviving mobile OSes. Just wish the web-centric development model survived as well.

I have WebOS on my LG TV now. It sucks.

Flying cars. I remember seeing prototypes in late 80s and early 90s, constantly showing up on Discovery Channel programs I watched as a kid like Beyond 2000 or Next Step.

Over time it seemed increasingly far out, but, possible. Eventually I realized things like how catastrophic a break down or accident would be meant it will likely never happen. I and everyone else who thought flying cars were on the horizon were suckers.

Dr. Lisa Zu, CEO of AMD, is the real "man" behind the Zen microarchitecture. Not only is she an engineer who was deeply involved with the product, she lead the company through a tremendous turn-around that made Zen possible and put into place all the platform and support pieces the resulting Ryzen/Epyc products would need.

I find it interesting that when Apple brought out the iPad neither Keller nor Ive got credit, Steve Jobs did. I don't even know the project leads or primary engineers behind Windows 95, Bill Gates got most of the credit. Couldn't name for you the other geniuses behind SpaceX or Tesla, I just hear about Elon Musk. Does the dark lord get credit for Oracle's awful products? No, Larry Ellison is the name we hear. Good or bad, the CEO usually gets the credit... except in this case.

I wonder if it has something to do with Dr. Zu being a woman.

That said, obviously Jim Keller is a skilled chip designer. It would be nice to see more of the supporting cast and geniuses behind innovations get some spotlight instead of all credit flowing to the top (unless maybe it's a woman).

This is all fair and tempers my interpretation of your original post. Some people do get stuck, and members of echo chambers are a good example. I think this observation is likely a snapshot of people who usually do move forward, but take a bit of a pause as they indulge. Another example would be people who just don't care, who found a reasonable 9-5 "job" and aren't very interested in seeing it as more than that. They often have to be pushed hard to advance their skills. Thanks for the thoughtful reply.

This has not been my experience at all. I have watched many developers progress from being coders ("hammers") to being thoughtful architects who have no trouble seeing the forest through the trees and re-imagining problems from first principles.

Of course people will try to lean on the skills they already have when tasked with solving a problem. This is completely orthogonal to whether they have any trouble adding to their skills. The former is often the correct response to solving an immediate problem as quickly as possible, while the later is something that happens over a longer period of time and many projects.

Your assertion that people get stuck in this "hammer" mindset and have a harder time learning once there does not match my observations at all. From my experience the people who see a brick wall between these two skills fall into two categories. I don't know if you fall into either of these, but it would not surprise me.

1. People on the "architect" side of the wall who want to justify their feeling of superiority, their higher salaries, or their enterprise's highly regimented hierarchy that separates the two. 2. People on the "hammer" side of the wall who suffer from imposter syndrome and seeking to justify their sense of inadequacy.

Both are incorrect. There is no wall. In fact, between those two skills is a well worn and wide road that most developers move along throughout their career. Many don't complete the journey to your (or my) ideal of "software enlightenment", but most make progress, and being trained as a "hammer" doesn't stall the progress, it helps.

Also worth reflecting that software is still relatively new and we really don't know what we're doing. We're all making it up as we go along for the most part, so let's not be so quick to prejudge the capabilities of our peers. All of our enlightened architecture may seem pretty foolish a century from now, or even a year from now.

This a very dim, short-sighted view. Most large companies do have training programs and don't artificially limit the skills to ones that are not transferrable. Investing in the skills of your current employees can be far cheaper than trying to hire for those same skills.

Even in your worst case scenario you've presumably gotten some benefit from the employee before they depart and spent less than you would on a bad hire who has the desired skills (and therefore makes more).

If the result of your investments really is competitors with better trained employees then you have a higher skilled pool to recruit from when you need it. Plus, you've saved money in the meantime.