imajoredinecon

I learned to drive in Seattle, where it's 100% allowed, and then moved east and almost got ticketed my first day in my new city.

If only “every other” were true. LIRR, NYC: same problem. Metra, Chicago: same problem.

Some of the US citizen-facing services are very backlogged too. For example, it's around 18 months to get a response when you apply for the US-Canada travel fast lane ("NEXUS").

The Bay Area is pretty special that way

The methodology for "quiet" places seems particularly off. One of the ones in Chicago is right next to a highway that sees constant 50-70mph traffic.

Speaking personally an American, any smart person building useful stuff is welcome in my country. That alone _is_ extraordinary ability, in my opinion (can’t speak to the intent behind the law).

It’s funny that the post ends up recommending Jsonnet, which is a very close relative of the Google-internal “GCL,” which everyone at Google hates

Pick your poison, I guess.

Not to me, no. Snarky, yes; aggressive and vitriolic, no.

I just don’t feel sympathetic for someone buying something really expensive and then complaining that it cost a lot of money.

This article linked from the OP turned out to be a find too

> in western Kentucky, a tradition of barbecued mutton still holds, although no one is quite sure why. https://bittersoutherner.com/southern-perspective/2020/south...

No, they literally can't. The UK Competition and Markets Authority made Google promise they won't remove 3rd-party cookies from Chrome before adding alternatives.

IMO, effective "scripting" just means the ability to solve ad hoc problems easily by writing task-specific glue that delegates the hard parts of the program to (1) an effective set of libraries you've written yourself and (2) external code or tools when it makes sense.

From this perspective, the languages of the glue, the libraries, and the external code all matter less than the ease of writing the glue; interfacing with the external code; and maintaining the libraries. The best language for this probably comes down to a combination of what you're comfortable writing (and reading, and maintaining) and what kinds of tasks you're trying to solve.

For me personally, using Python glue and libraries strikes a pretty good balance here. Writing a script "in Python" doesn't mean you need to reinvent the wheel. If you think `parallel` provides a better interface for map-reduce parallelism than `subprocess` (or than a library function you've written on top of `subprocess`), no problem: you can just call `parallel` from Python (and you'll probably find yourself writing a library function on top of it to abstract away the fact that it's a shell script).

But if you're much more effective working in Bash than Python, then writing your glue and developing your libraries in Bash could be the way to go.

From my experience working there, killing a cute toy project like this takes some breaking change in a dependency plus nobody willing to spend a few hours every now and then to maintain it. Both of these are basically luck of the draw, so it’s not surprising to have stuff like this stick around for this long.

The difference is that Google has come under enough historical privacy flak that they now aggressively privacy red-team new functionality like this and do things like make it opt-in.

You estimate how many people use computers and how many people use computers you make. When you subtract the two, you get how many people use computers that your competitors make.

Not every “internal metric” is something you can measure directly.

The tl;dr is “our lawyers and CEO hated it,” which is sad for the author who was just trying to have some harmless fun, but is not surprising.

Yeah, the OP's counterargument is that you can filter down what goes into the test output. But at that point it seems not too different qualitatively from the traditional bottom-up approach where you just write assertions yourself, except that the framework does the job of populating the assertions' expected values.

Your link [1] says that the Three Mile Island cleanup was 14 years, not 40, and cost $1 billion.

I think you’ve counted to one strike against the ability of well-functioning societies to operate nuclear safely—-Fukushima—-because $1 billion is pretty negligible in comparison and Chernobyl was operated by a shambolic totalitarian state.

Googling "largest whistleblower reward" turns up a $114 million reward and a $200 million reward.

> create problems or make them worse

Personally, I'd hope that the sophistication of the regulators involved, and the liable parties' lawyers---if you're doing something bad enough to be liable for billions of dollars in fines, you can afford good lawyers---would be a good guard against whistleblowers' trying to game the system.

If you have an hour to kill, it could be worth taking a look at the dissents in order to see their reasoning. The justices (/their clerks) are very good writers and decisions and dissents are pretty easy for a layperson to follow.

Dunno what I’d think if I reread them now, but when I was 8 I (1) devoured the whole trilogy for the characters/worldbuilding and (2) didn’t notice the religious metaphor. Seems like this might be the way to evaluate a kids’ book?

> It is possible to pop some other grains like popcorn, but none of the ones listed here, at least not using the methodology described.

I didn't read the article as asserting that any of the grains popped like popcorn? There's a picture that makes this quite clear.

> iirc Chrome (the most used browser) doesn't use DoH by default.

Last I checked, Linux was behind other platforms because there’s a lot of complex custom dns configuration that chrome (understandably) didn’t want to be accused of overriding/ignoring, but which isn’t all easily visible to the browser

...unless you're in Korea, where people use electronics and backpacks to reserve their seats _on different floors_ while they go to order their coffee

(probably other examples too. This just floored me as an American)

On the other hand, both sides of the aisle can dislike it too:

> * On the left hand, you don't just get some level of control over maximum income, but also can just directly set an income-floor. What more do you want?

"UBI gives people dollars but takes away their free education and food assistance, so they have to choose how to spend the money. We should explicitly guarantee basic rights, not make people purchase them."

> * On the right hand, for one you're basically giving every entrepreneur a "free" ramen budget for their startup to build on top of. At the same time you can also abolish quite a number of subsidies, reducing the costs of bureaucratic administration.

"UBI is additional public spending. Giving people UBI doesn't mean they _don't_ get other benefits too. Also, assistance from the state should be limited to things people in unexpected situations desperately need (like food assistance): it's not a good use of taxpayer money to fund Kim_Bruning's next iPhone."

@dang: Would it be better to have the first part of the title be "Google Chrome" or maybe "Chromium"? The content doesn't deal with Google's internal codebase.

A Google engineer on their science/climate team moonlights as a registered lobbyist:

https://www.thirdway.org/memo/how-advanced-nuclear-got-on-th...

(The article provides a really interesting window into a real-world lobbying project IMO.)

The engineering reality is that, much of the time, information asymmetry is a big help when you’re an anti-abuse engineer trying to build systems that distinguish good traffic from bad. It’s not an “undisclosed vulnerability” to build a very effective heuristic that wouldn’t be effective if it were public knowledge.

Tone matters. The comment people don’t like comes across as really callous.

I think GP meant “ayran” or “doogh.”