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factotvm

143 karma · joined June 9, 2010

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factotvm··on Canada to order military plane fleet from Sweden in shift from US suppliers
No, it’s a lost sale.
factotvm··on Hegseth gives Anthropic until Friday to back down on AI safeguards
It probably started with the Third Amendment to the Constitution, continued with the Posse Comitatus Act, and was alive and well last November under the leadership of Mark Kelly.
factotvm··on Hegseth gives Anthropic until Friday to back down on AI safeguards
The important words are, American citizens. In times past, the thought of "waging war" against your own citizens would be a bad look.
factotvm··on Cosmologically Unique IDs
> In order to fix this, we might start sending out satellites in every direction

Minor correction: Satellites don't go in every direction; they orbit. Probes or spaceships are more appropriate terms.

factotvm··on FBI tries to unmask owner of archive.is
The laughable thing here is the "argument" that one cannot judge the societal impact of the FBI unless one has worked in law enforcement.
factotvm··on Chain of Recursive Thoughts: Make AI think harder by making it argue with itself
Read The Fine Prompt, more or less, right?
factotvm··on Have Gemini stage and write commit messages for you
Don’t forget that most modern version control systems are distributed. The same can not be said for ticketing systems.
factotvm··on Have Gemini stage and write commit messages for you
Not to mention, the best commit messages are about the code that isn’t there.

As you say, we know what’s there. I need the author to tell me why it’s there, and perhaps what other alternatives were abandoned because they didn’t work.

You know, so I don’t waste a day finding out for myself why you didn’t just do ${obvious}.

factotvm··on Have Gemini stage and write commit messages for you
> 2. Margin of commit messages is often too small for documenting the rationale - this job is better left for tickets.

The commit message lives with the code. The number of times in my career that a company has migrated, changed, consolidated, or otherwise made all those links in commit messages obsolete, well I don't quite yet need two hands. But I see a lot of dead ends to context in code bases.

factotvm··on Supreme Court wants US input on whether ISPs should be liable for users' piracy
Only if gun manufacturers are liable for murders.
factotvm··on Humble Tech Book Bundle: Head First 2024 by O'Reilly
I read Head First Design Patterns years and years ago. I'm a fan of the series. It's less for dummies and more using ideas from psychology to help you learn the material. I'll forever recall the power and conciseness of the Decorator pattern for computing the price of coffee drinks when there are as many variations as there are people. Starbuzz...

From my memory banks after close to 20 years:

    SoyDecorator: CoffeeDecorator {
        price: Cents { price + 90¢ } // Soy adds 90 cents to the price
    }
Edit: My regret is lending it to someone and never getting it back. I believe I might get this bundle.
factotvm··on Verso – Web browser built on top of the Servo web engine
You can disambiguate two types with the same name from different libraries, e.g. `Factotvm.URL` and `Foundation.URL`. Do you mean something more full-featured? You are not prefixing types with three letters, if that's what you think has to be done.

I don't know if it's still the case, but there was an annoyance where you couldn't have a type with the same name as the package. But that is hardly a lack of namespaces.

factotvm··on Code reviews don't usually find bugs
I'd like to see the difference in bug detection between "pull requests" vs. "over-the-shoulder code reviews".

Edit: or, rather, in my experience the author of the code often finds the bugs when explaining it to the person standing next to them. This goes away in the GitHub-style pull request.

factotvm··on On knowing who he was
I would imagine consciousness shrinks in the presence of an all-powerful god.
factotvm··on Develop with Cocoa for Apple devices without using Objective-C
Slack is web-first at best. It has nearly zero platform conventions, at least on desktop. (It’s been some time since I’ve used the mobile app.)

A quick couple of examples: multi-selection and drag-n-drop, both all but broken on desktop.

factotvm··on Geography of Kansas (2022)
Kansas, birthplace of the Lynx browser.
factotvm··on We glued together content moderation to stop soccer pirates
It’s been great in many ways, but the user interface is horrible. Why they show the scores on the thumbnail for replays is beyond me. Time shifting is all about not knowing the outcome beforehand. It’s as if this was created by people who don’t understand sport ball at all. But I don’t know what excuse they can use for burying the replays in the first place such that I found others on the web thinking the same as me—that only recaps are available for past matches.
factotvm··on Cinema’s greatest scene: ‘Casablanca’ and ‘La Marseillaise’ (2015)
Your talk of audio reminds me of how the climax of The Last of the Mohicans (1992) is so powerful because of its restrained sound. The silence of Chingachgook's inaudible wail makes me want to weep. The slicing of knives and reports from rifles are second to the score:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8BxDpOu3cD0&t=320

(It won the Oscar for Best Sound that year.)

factotvm··on Book Review: The Programmer's Brain
I'm here for this, but not to declare empathically my position. Rather, I'd like to ask a question: Say I'm learning a new language that is opinionated about casing. Suppose it was easier to read one style, but the language in question adopted another style. Would you buck the trend of that ecosystem and adopt it, or follow convention?
factotvm··on Tell HN: Twitter is growing increasingly unusable without an account
For me, it’s because I’m on my work machine. I don’t move my personal credentials to my work machine. (In fact, I moved over to my phone to write this comment.)

We could discuss that aspect—sharing accounts on computers that don’t belong to me—but that’s why I’m often thwarted from reading content. I have the account, just not on me.

factotvm··on You click a link to a news site, to read an article that seems interesting
In essence, Goodhart's Law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
factotvm··on Canon sued for disabling scanner when printers run out of ink
Did you miss the part about kids?
factotvm··on What Did We Lose When We Lost the Stars?
Yes, I believe we do. I only need think of the math discovered solely to predict the stars to know that without the night sky, we are different. To say nothing of the poets.
factotvm··on What Did We Lose When We Lost the Stars?
You have chosen poorly.

If we lose that essence of humanity where we feel wonder and awe looking up into the night sky, then we lose one of the prime movers of discovery and science. Or do you think cat videos can do the same?

factotvm··on What Did We Lose When We Lost the Stars?
Please check out The International Dark-Sky Association and consider donating.

https://www.darksky.org/

Note: I am only a donor and not affiliated with them in any way.

factotvm··on Goodreads plans to retire API access, disables existing API keys
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
factotvm··on The YouTube ban is un-American, wrong, and will backfire
But one is about the past and one is about the future.

And those items in the past have been heavily investigated, brought to the courts, and due to no evidence, summarily rebuked.

Apples and oranges.

Don’t get me wrong, the world ending in 12 years is a silly thing to say.

factotvm··on Amazon owns more than $2B worth of IPv4 addresses
You’re off by about 20% on the take home.
factotvm··on The YouTube ban is un-American, wrong, and will backfire
According to the downvotes, my statement must be false and predictions are the same as lies.

If it’s been proven false, don’t say it. If it can’t be proven false, carry on, as that’s not against the terms and conditions.

Or, a false equivalency between saying the election was stolen, and saying the world will end in 12 years if we don’t do something.

factotvm··on The YouTube ban is un-American, wrong, and will backfire
Predictions are different than lies.
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