krinchan

Having been outside of the frontend development world for innumerable years, I'm talking out of my backend here. But a cursory look gives me the instinct that Tailwind is kinda like Very Fancy Bootstrap. This blog post certainly makes the discourse around Tailwind to sound eerily similar to the discourse around Bootstrap.

Bootstrap got trashed regularly for being the Times New Roman of web development and any mention of it online would summon a howling pack of CSS purists. However, back in it's heyday, you could join a team and immediately start to make an impact because you knew the CSS class names and what they did. You still had to have someone around who knew CSS extensively to work out some corner cases. However, it definitely let the juniors get up to speed and when they hit one of those corners, provided a great mentoring opportunity to help them grow their knowledge of CSS.

> * Notion is odd, everything is a block and sometimes formatting is just meh...

I really like Notion as a way to create little mini-databases of things. Businesses in my new city I just moved to that I want to visit later, what I thought about different teas, vendors for my hobbies, etc.

It makes me extremely nervous to keep all that info there. It feels like vendor lock in. My recent struggle to get everything out of Evernote in a semi-usable format, much less into another app was eye opening.

So I've been looking for some similar sort of Notebook + Freeform DB replacement.

> if they are non-fraudulent

Considering that FTX is a fraudulent exchange and the rate at which fraud has been perpetuated by crypto exchanges historically, I don't know that this is any more than theoretical pedantry.

For all practical purposes at this point in time, if you don't assume your exchange is lying about their reserves and at high risk of a run you're in for a massive loss.

I am heavily against crypto, but I will be the first to point out the decentralization purists were right: not your keys, not your coins. If you're going to play this game, putting complete trust in mostly unregulated entities who have conflicting self-interests from you...yikes.

You don't use .gitignore? All our projects use dotenv for local credentials with a .gitignore that covers build, log, and any *.env file.

Sounds like you need better tooling, tbh.

    git add .; and git commit --amend --no-edit; git push origin --force

Rarely, I have to do pipeline work on repositories. You'd normally see twenty "Fix Jankins Issue" commits on the main branch because of some nonsense that only happens when you deploy UAT or whatever. Once I learned this little gem, this is also how I manage my feature branches mostly. But also my employer's fleet of laptops has been aging and I've had to do 3 swap outs this year, so I like to keep my in progress work pushed up just in case.

Yeah I went with Mint in the South Florida metro once, and it was painful. Once a download started it finished pretty quickly, but the amount of lag between clicking a link and the page starting to load was on the order of 10-15 seconds.

Apps that pre-fetched a lot of data (like social media apps fetching a ways down your feed, music streaming apps that will fetch the next song, etc.) will operate somewhat okay but web browsing and map usage was pure hell.

The second I swapped my phone over to Verizon it was like night and day.

I might look into Mint again, now that I'm in a Verizion weakspot so to speak. Unfortunately, I took a BYOD rebate from them that they'd claw back if I left before April. :-/

I mean, they're literally out here training models on Disney's copyrighted works. People seem to miss the point that the copyright ambiguity can work both ways and the courts are almost always on the side of corporate copyright holders.

I posit with a few good NSFW scandals so the legislation can be dressed up as protecting the children, Disney will get the legislative intervention it wants re: copyright and stable diffusion.

I realize that seems pretty US-centric but it's surprising the ways Disney can reach internationally to protect it's IP. It'll be interesting to see if Stable Diffusion ends up relegated to the parts of the Internet outside of the big three "jurisdictions" so to speak: US, EU, and China.

Ye Wenjie is too emotional. Which is a bit of a flip side of the same coin: she is presented as lacking in logic and ruled by emotion, much like Cheng is throughout Death's End.

Spoilers for Dark Forest and Death's End follow:

Cheng in Death's End makes several decisions:

1) As Swordholder she balks at transmitting the coordinates of the Trisolarians into the universe. Humanity is corralled into Australia and Mars to be starved until their numbers are more manageable by the Trisolarians. I vividly remember the flowery prose of how she just couldn't consign so many Trisolarians and Humans to death and that surely the Trisolarians would be the better choice. The prose is rather condescending of her choice. One hopes it's merely the translation.

2) One of the clues given to Cheng by Yun involves faster than light propulsion. However, it leaves behind evidence that can attract a Dark Forest attack. Cheng has Wade continue researching the propulsion but maintains the final say-so on if they proceed. The human government discovers the project and the choice is either armed conflict with antimatter bullets that'll cause a lot of death and destruction or to stand down. Her choice is to stand down and avoid conflict, this directly results in all of humanity (with the exception of her) that exists in the solar system being destroyed in the inevitable Dark Forest attack.

3) Cheng finally gets to make a "moral" decision and leave the pocket universe to try to ensure the universe cycles into another big bang. It is interesting because technically the decision is almost certain to not work: it depends on all the other residents of pocket universes also leaving and reentering the dying universe. It's almost like at the very end Liu Cixin gives this tiny concession so no one can be like, "Bro, what's your problem with women?"

There's an entire thing at the start of the book where Liu Cixin spends an inordinate amount of time describing how effeminate "peacetime" men are. It gets creepy and quickly becomes obvious it's a very personal takedown of Korean and Japanese men. Later, during the bunker era, Liu Cixin spends an equally inordinate amount of time singing the praises of tough, masculine men during a time of hard decisions made in the name of survival.

He just continually uses Cheng's empathy and (rather unbelievable after her mistakes as Swordholder if I'm being honest) naiveté to kill huge swaths of humanity. It's fairly obvious what his opinions are.

The whole message of "we need people to make tough (borderline genocidal) decisions for the survival of our people/race" is weighted so immensely, you get brow beaten by the author. It moves well beyond the norm for even military sci-fi, much less hard sci-fi.

EDIT: Also Luo's arrest after he steps down from being Swordholder for crimes against a star system that wasn't even known to be inhabited at the beginning of Death's End is ... the most blatant and ham-fisted critique of Western Woke-whatever I've ever seen. It's good, don't get me wrong. But it's just so hilariously obvious what Liu Cixin's bone to grind was.

I find it difficult to give him a pass for writing "bad things" about the Cultural Revolution when he ends up at the same fascist conclusions.

I'm not saying not to read the book. I don't actually regret reading the entire trilogy. It's got a certain nostalgia for the clumsy hard sci-fi of the 70s. However, I don't feel the trilogy does much to really extrapolate the Dark Forest theory so much as co-opt it to validate a set of ethical and political beliefs.

Or...you can see Dark Forest theory for what it actually is: PRC propaganda.

It's fascist projection, applied on a universal scale.

EDIT: To expound upon this, I'm not really trashing Dark Forest theory. I mean, it's possible. But I find it to be deeply rooted in a particular brand of game theory that is convenient. I also find it's easier to justify genocide and other such things here on earth if you pretend the entire universe is out there doing the same thing.

As such, I hold the entire theory as suspect and someone trying to justify a particular mode of human existence. This extends deeper into the trilogy as women continually are painted as too soft and emotionally empathetic to make the cold hard decisions that will kill many humans but ensure the survival of the race.

This is a Very Big PRC Thing. "Someone must make tough, manly, destructive decisions and you will suffer because of those decisions. However, they are for the Greater Good of our Nation."

It's hard to take the theory seriously when it conveniently justifies the entire history of the PRC.

Thanks. Keeping this in a pinned tab till I have a chance to watch it all (I scrubbed through it just now). I love getting to see how things work visually like this.

Oh I went through the wringer with memorizing the Krebs cycle. It's just every time you got to ATP Synthase it was literally just a tube, a few arrows, some comicbook-esque POW shapes, and "ADP" and "ATP" on both ends of the POW. Lmao.

So "oh it's a water wheel that the proton pushes that then pushes the phosphate onto the ADP" is like, "Oh. There's...a whole physical machine and not just magic 'energy transfer'". I just thought it was really cool, though obvious in retrospect.

(I am not a clever man.)

The physicality of the proton pumps (I can never remember which ATPase it is) was new for me. My intro chemistry and biology classes in college really didn't get too far past "proton goes through tube and an ATP appears!"

I didn’t even realize that widgets were so under-developed? I legit thought I’d look into writing one today as I suddenly had a use case. Apparently at the moment the only way to write one is Win32 flavored C++ and a bunch of COM Black Magic. One would assume from their marketing that they’d have at least started at .NET. But instead it’s C++ and Someday(TM) PWAs (via Edge I assume) can provide widgets.

That just runs completely counter to all the Dev Experience marketing you get from them. It feels like Widgets were slapped together by the kernel team at the last minute.

I appreciate the mention and demonstration of Fourier Transforms. It makes a lot of previous sound codec discussions click a bit more now.

This article and these comment threads are such a US centric discussion.

I’ll never forget the little landmine Ghost in the Shell planted in me when it represented the Americans as having used their cybernetic tech to give themselves permanent, atrociously fake smiles. That landmine exploded years later when I learned the fake “half smile” is something Non-Americans pick up on and are very uncomfortable with.

In general, most cultures outside of the US find us to be very indirect, obtuse, and overly obsessed with very specific word choices. The verbal and non-verbal mazes of our prevailing corporate culture is something of a beast for them to overcome.

So it’s amusing to see a lot of virtue signaling about preferring direct language and having a thick skin in this thread alongside people earnestly showing off their “negotiating skills.” Be interesting if you could see who was inside or outside the US, because I suspect it’d fall along the lines I’ve laid out above.

My problems with git commit signing mostly overlap with the critiques leveled against GPG. That said, git’s implementation of signed commits combined with Github/Gitlab’s validation framework of only respecting the current key on a user’s profile really makes commit signing’s usefulness limited.

The signatures are stored within the commit object and the only way to resign a commit is to rewrite history. Also you can only attach one signature to a commit, though this is less of an issue.

GPG has plenty of critiques that I do agree with: horrible defaults, difficulty of use, a key model that is outdated and does not serve the plethora of uses it’s now used for, etc.

All of this adds up, tbh, that ephemeral keys are probably no worse than a GPG key. If your GPG key is compromised (or lost), you won’t be resigning your entire git history with your new key. You will simply note somewhere visible that X key was valid until Y date and Z key is the current valid key. Any commits pushed after Y date with X key are suspect.

The point being, signed git commits regardless of what type of key you use really only validate that a particular person at a particular instant in time signed that commit.

If anything, using a more ephemeral and disposable key will encourage Github/Gitlab/etc. to start thinking about key rotation on user profiles. As it stands, if you change your GPG key in Github all commits made with your previous key become invalid until you change you GPG key back. The fact you can change your key back is probably also bad.

The current state of git commit signing is useful, but that usefulness rapidly decays as the commit ages.

Someone has been the subject of a SOC audit.

I am a week late. Real Life Happened. :-)

I probably phrased this really badly and applied it too broadly. Take the early days of Machine Learning. Everyone was working to crack it open and make money off of it. They still are, but now we’re almost to the maturity portion of it’s lifecycle.

But in the early days, if you were smart enough and showed promise, you could get hired before you even finished your doctorate. Everyone trying to crack open the ML egg was doing this, so not doing it gave execs FOMO about letting someone else employ a very smart ML scientist that developed something that made a lot of money.

So it’s less that it’s risky but for very specific and developing areas of CS it’s considered a worthwhile expense rolling the dice to own the patents on the next big breakthrough outright for the cost of a single salary.

The academic system is completely broken for Computer Science, and I don't really see a way to fix it. The economic realities of the field just make it too risky to allow an exceptionally gifted individual to remain out in the open publishing research that could potentially destroy your business model.

Justifying these low acceptance rates as somehow prestigious is really just creating even more perverse incentives that open the academia side of Computer Science to further defunding and brain drain. If you're smart enough to rise, you'll get an offer from the private sector you simply cannot refuse. It doesn't matter if your passion is Academia, they can and will buy you out and own whatever you're working on.

This has all led to Computer Science's academia side being something one escapes rather than something you contribute too. The "cream" rising to the top is often less genius and more politically savvy with the right connections on the PC. I'm not necessarily against a selection bias towards "people skills," but to do so and continue to pretend PCs are pure meritocracy is nauseating.

It just comes back to the fact that the majority of Comp Sci PhDs have the same story: Halfway into their doctorate program they became severely disillusioned and started jockeying to just graduate and land a private sector job that essentially was just bribe money to keep them from working for the competition.

And I think it’s important to read the article before writing comments based purely on the title, but here we are.

The author makes several convincing arguments and specifically lays out what failure modes are avoided for each recommendation. Honestly the title is completely out of step with the tone of the argument, which is a critique I can support.

This is such a CERN thing to say, lol.

"Bluh bluh the ILC and muon colliders aren't real! Neutrinos are fake!! Low energy particle physics is a lie!"

Also this article is weird because phase 2 for the LHC is under way. Currently run 3 is happening and just started but this article talks like the beam upgrade isn't happening.

Also particle physics has gone far more than 10 years between major discoveries.

I'm gonna guess this author is yet another person who needs to stop whining about supersymmetry not happening. Like the only point the article makes (but makes it obliquely) is that supersymmetry is no longer a good motivator of higher energy beams. However, all our theories still break down at that level. So there's still a crap ton of things to explore.

I'm somewhat concerned that Science would go this click-bait with an article. The mood is hardly a nightmare.

I feel surprised that Miami or Fort Lauderdale or just South Florida in general didn't rate in any category. It's even more baffling to see Tampa, of all cities, used for the "Warmer Climes" category. I can't really overcome the gut feeling this data is cherry-picked.

Very late but just in case: If you're referring to my post, it was the particular layout I was trying to achieve. The board wanted me to imitate the existing minutes title page layout from their Word "template." The image was inside a table cell, the table had a lot of column/row spans, and things got messy really fast. As with HTML, using tables for layout is just a bad idea all around.

Also, as pointed out deeper in other responses, the basic tabular environment is not terrific when you're not just presenting standard table data.

Breaking apart the image and table and letting LaTeX handle the layout Just Worked (TM) and looked better in my opinion. That said, LaTeX images and tables are pretty easy and look great by default when you're not doing something weird with them.

Edit: A better way to phrase this might actually be that a major principle for LaTeX is that I should be able to just drop in a new chapter in the middle of a large document and LaTeX will automatically reflow and typeset the entire document without any of the very specific fiddling necessary in WYSIWYG word processors.

A major example is for instance, figures/images/tables will move to new pages but will remain correctly placed between paragraph X and Y. Because I've marked it up as such, if paragraph Y is on the page following paragraph X, it will bring the figure along with it to the new page. In WYSIWYG word processors, that figure would likely just sit at the end of the page until I manually moved it myself.

When you try to micromanage the layout of a very specific page, even if it's just the title page, you're going to have a pretty bad time unless you've written your own \documentclass. :-)

I remember when Nextel PTT was all the rage. I had a job coordinating a bunch of contractors and had to spend all day just being chirped at. I'd be mid-conversation on the landline and then "PA-DURRP Hey man can you text me that customer's address again?"

LaTeX is particularly suited to print (and by extension PDF). When you get into writing your own custom LaTeX macros/commands, yes it's difficult. However, the vast majority of users are simply consuming these sorts of custom commands in the article, not producing them. This leads into environments where people writing papers or articles just use what's handed to them.

LaTeX works out amazingly for two very specific use cases: 1) Large, collaborative documents and 2) producing the exact same, highly structured print document over and over. I have pretty extensive experience with the second use case.

When I was Secretary for a non-profit organization, I had an entire little personal library of macros that sat on top of the minutes[1] package. I could open an empty text file, type in \attendee{Name} as people arrived. Type in \maketitle and do a quick preview and the document would instantly build out a front page that included if we had quorum or not, etc. I typed the document exactly as the meeting happened while marking up things like tasks (and who they're assigned to), decisions made (with voting tallies and who motioned what), and so on.

All that data would get duplicated to the end of the document in nice lists for quick reference. It had consistent formatting. The build system (a make file and latexmk iirc) would wrap my new file in the basic boilerplate and spit out the PDF for me to email. I consistently had the meeting minutes published an hour after every meeting whereas my predecessors often took 24 hours or more to publish meeting minutes due to Word being Word. Those documents also lacked a table of contents or the various appendices with summary data.

That said, there were things that I tended to avoid doing, like complex tables or something. There's something to be said for staying inside the box of what comes built into LaTeX. I recall giving up with floating an image to the left of a table on our title page and just plopping the image inline in a horizontally centered paragraph and then putting the rest of the title content beneath it.

Also, many documentation frameworks (sphinx comes to mind) use LaTeX under the covers to produce their PDF output. So you might think you're just using markdown or RST, but somewhere someone is converting that to LaTex or TeX in order to leverage a very good typesetting engine.

[1]: https://www.ctan.org/pkg/minutes

I think the only time I've seen OKRs work correctly is when they were super specific, singular, and very short term. The team I've seen use them generally picks something that aligns closely with something leadership wants to see progress on, that isn't a multi-year project, and is easy to measure directly.

An example: Q1's goal was around tagging of AWS resources for billing. Our CBO came down with some new practices and automation around tagging and was having trouble getting traction in our BU with getting those tags in place for existing projects.

The work was tedious, but not difficult. Progress is directly measurable (X of Y resources in Z account are tagged correctly) and the measuring is easily automated into a dashboard. It has a massive benefit for automating Change Management and Billing/Budgeting bureaucracy.

I think OKRs have a place but I also think you just can't centralize them the way various big companies do. Even the "bottom-up" version just doesn't work because by the time the OKRs hit the C-Suite they're just mangled and incomprehensible. The OKR in my example never "escaped" past middle management. All the C-Suite knew was the CBO stopped whining about people not tagging their stuff.

Honest question, why aren't s-expressions in their purest form more prevalent?

This seems to happen constantly on HN:

    Post: "Behold, a data format!"
    Commenter: "This is just poorly implemented s-expressions!"

I know some heavily idolized LISP person out there made the over-quoted statement that all languages end up implementing s-expressions badly.

I did LISP in college. I had my moment of transcendence with it. So I get the fandom for it. But I don't get why people keep paraphrasing this one sentence over and over, yet absolutely no one uses s-expressions outside of LISP. The one person I know who uses LISP in the private sector (via Clojure which many people refuse to recognize as a LISP for some reason?) is being hired to do very academia type research and publish white papers about it. The rest of LISP users are quirky members of academia who complain endlessly about Python's prevalence.

It just kinda seems like if LISP or s-expressions were truly that great, there would be more convergence around it for expressing data structures.

YouTube has plastered the same 10 video essays across the homepage for almost six months now. I have watched these videos in their entirety. I don't want to watch them again. It feels weird that every time I login to YouTube I just...don't see anything I actually want to watch?

> This also leads to some pretty insidious siloing since (at least with Mastadon) you can have instances block themselves off from other instances or instances at large, which seems pretty unhealthy.

I really keep coming back to this sentence and still continue to not see the downside. Why is it a problem if an instance walls itself off from the Fediverse? What right do you have to force an instance to do literally anything? This idea that people think you should be forced to engage or interact with content they don't want to see is ... disturbing. Free speech gives you the right to say what you want but it doesn't give you the right to force people to listen to you.

I really want to give the benefit of the doubt but your protests seem entirely based around this idea that you have the right to force people to interact with you. That aspect of Twitter is entirely what enabled Twitter Mobs to mete out life destroying "justice" over the smallest of infractions.

I don’t pay for my account on my home instance. I don’t want to interact with the world and I think most people are tired of living under threat of being one misstep away from a Twitter Mob.

Your complaints are features. People are fleeing to group chats for a reason.

As for the problem of your data being deleted if you’re concerned with that export your data regularly or run your own instance. Anyways, while it’d be nice to take a stab at that problem, it’s no worse than Twitter banning you.