jasonhansel

Ownership is great! Which is why you should use a language that actually supports it, instead of one where it is just a semi-enforced convention.

Ok. How does that compare to the number of lives saved by good drugs?

As I understand it, part of the issue is that Paxlovid interacts with a large number of other medications. This is a problem because people at high risk of dying from Covid tend to have preexisting medical conditions, and thus are more likely to take medications that interact with Paxlovid.

The obvious solution is to prescribe every medication when there's no evidence for or against it. Just take every medication that hasn't been proven not to work, and you'll be cured! Oh, wait...

The good thing about C is that, while its memory management is unsafe, it is at least explicit; there's generally no doubt as to whether a statement allocates memory or not, since "malloc" and "free" have to be written out explicitly in the code.

The same cannot be said for C++.

Surprisingly often, firefighters in fact are the ones burning down buildings: https://www.cbc.ca/amp/1.3563183

COBOL programming also pays good money. It's usually when a language becomes "legacy" that pay starts rising, because the supply of interested programmers starts drying up.

As a fellow software developer, I respectfully disagree.

While a piece of software may satisfy its requirements, it will never satisfy them perfectly or optimally. All software contains bugs, unexpected failure modes, and undiscovered security vulnerabilities. I am convinced that there are essentially zero exceptions to these claims.

Furthermore, the environment in which software runs must change over time. This causes "bit rot" as (say) dependencies stop receiving security updates or platforms become unsupported.

Finally, there's the human factor. When software runs on old technologies, it will become progressively harder for new developers to understand. There will consequently often be a steady decline in available talent.

For these reasons, even if the requirements of a piece of software never change, it will always require ongoing maintenance to keep it running, much like a piece of physical infrastructure.

(edit: typo)

A question I have: do people working on DoD software ever get to use it themselves? I assume many of them don't (if they're working on, say, a weapons system).

This situation often (IMHO) makes it much harder to deliver high-quality software. No amount of surface-level UI testing replaces the knowledge you get from actually using a system yourself.

It is worth noting that, while the minimum wage is lower for tipped employees, their total pay still has to be above the ordinary (non-tipped) minimum wage.

To quote https://www.dol.gov/general/topic/wages/wagestips

> An employer of a tipped employee is only required to pay $2.13 per hour in direct wages if that amount combined with the tips received at least equals the federal minimum wage. If the employee's tips combined with the employer's direct wages of at least $2.13 per hour do not equal the federal minimum hourly wage, the employer must make up the difference.

Is there a randomized controlled trial of rejecting the darkness?

> Everyone wants a pill as a quick effortless fix

Isn't a quick, effortless fix the ideal goal? Wouldn't that be better than a slow, difficult one?

Lifestyle changes are a lot harder and more time-consuming than taking a pill; if the latter were equally effective and low-risk for all people, it would obviously be the better choice.

I find the "medical disclaimer" odd: https://www.lungy.app/medical-disclaimer

> By using this App, you confirm that : (i) you are medically fit and in sound health. (ii) you have consulted your relevant health practitioner, medical advisor, or doctor before using Lungy (iii) Lungy and Pi-A Creative Systems have made the health and medical consequences of using Lungy clear (iv) you fully agree that you are using Lungy at your sole discretion and at your own risk.

> There have been rare reports that people with certain mental health conditions such as anxiety and depression have experienced worsening symptoms after engaging in intensive breathing exercises and/or mindfulness practices. As such, you are requested to consult your doctor or medical provider before using Lungy if you are unsure or have a mental health condition.

SBF also wrote a later post about FTX US's balance sheet: https://sambf.substack.com/p/ftx-us-balance-update-2023-01-1...

Is that post at all accurate or is it even more lies?

> I'm not talking about "more 12 step" here but more of a Frommian psychoanalytic approach.

Do you have any evidence that that works better than (say) buprenorphine or naloxone, which target the underlying neurological problem?

IMHO push notifications (which appear when you need them or when they are most relevant) are almost always better for UX than widgets (which take up space at all times).

Sounds like a good thing, insofar as it allows you to bypass the Windows requirement that Secure Boot be enabled. This should be good news for people running obscure Linux distros or other operating systems.

Might be better to disable it by default, though. Do other motherboards support this "feature"?

I don't think replacing the root FS with a database is a good idea. There are two options here:

1. Make it a database with schemas. In that case, you'll never be able to change or extend the language used to define schemas, since every application and OS will need to keep supporting older versions. It will also be hard to have multiple competing implementations of a complete database system, particularly because applications will come to rely on the performance characteristics of the reference implementation.

2. Make it schemaless, like a key-value store. That basically just is the file system, but non-heirarchical and with a faster implementation. In that case, your DB could just be a faster implementation of the existing filesystem interface or a natural extension thereof. The hierarchical nature of the filesystem is fairly essential if you want to allow multiple applications to avoid trampling on each other.

Over time, I've grown to appreciate "pip-tools." Since it's a dead-simple extension of pip, I wish it could be upstreamed into pip itself; that seems like the most straightforward way of fixing a number of Python's packaging issues.

I agree that we shouldn't read much into this. But I do suspect that, if an n=17 study came to the opposite conclusions, supporters of intermittent fasting would never stop citing it.

I think they're talking, less about intermittent fasting as an intentional diet, and more about people who just "don't have time" to eat breakfast and skip it habitually. They say the diets were "isocaloric."

I was confused by this, but I think they mean "neurological" as in "relating to the nervous system," specifically to the olfactory sensory neurons that detect smells.

It's not like they're going to use any of that additional revenue to suddenly start achieving their original mission. So they won't accomplish the stated mission either way.

Remember OpenAI's original mission statement?

> OpenAI is a non-profit artificial intelligence research company. Our goal is to advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return. Since our research is free from financial obligations, we can better focus on a positive human impact.

Let's just say that their goals have obviously changed.

edit: As with SBF, longtermism provides an excellent cover.

Source: https://openai.com/blog/introducing-openai/

> It claims that if you have one of the following conditions it is likely you and blood relatives have others:

"It is likely" is a pretty vague term, particularly for such a long list of different conditions. What are the actual numbers?

Given the high rates of delegation, we could just make delegation the default. Then we could have people vote, not on issues directly, but to choose delegates who will "represent" them. We could even call them "representatives," and call the resulting system "representative democracy."

There, I fixed it! You don't need to have fixed geographical districts, of course; party-list proportional representation is pretty close to just deciding how you want to delegate your share of power.

Because people make mistakes?

> An account value that previously had balance = 0 may now have balance = 1000. Is this acceptable risk?

Your entire web app process crashes due to a panic every time a request triggers an extremely rare edge case. A hacker discovers this and uses it to conduct a DoS attack. Is this acceptable risk?

If your programming language handles very common errors by crashing the entire application, and if preventing these crashes is actively discouraged, then that suggests a flaw in the language itself.

This would be fine for a low-level language like C where you need to allow SEGFAULTs, but designing it into a high-level language makes no sense.

You won't need it. But you'll probably want it, since at most start-ups complexity grows over time.