lexandstuff

One thing I'd add to this is to schedule it in the future. Sometimes, you can't bring yourself to block all websites right now, but you can happily make it a problem for your future self. I've written a similar script to do this and had success with it.

Something like:

checking 60m --start-in 30m

I really love Threads personally. I find it more chilled than Twitter but not as boring as Mastodon. The engagement I get is much, much higher than what I get on Twitter and the vibe seems friendlier.

My major complaint is none of the AI community are on it, aside from Meta researchers.

Fair enough. But they have done a fantastic job educating me about propositional logic, set theory, Turing Machines, algorithm design, etc. - actual computer science - and the theoretical side of software engineering.

My point is that this education alone would not have been sufficient to prepare me to be a productive junior developer building a website with a team of 10.

However, they are much more useful to me now, working towards very senior technical roles later in my career.

How so?

Re that quote: Software Engineering is a tiny part of any Computer Science curriculum, and the content at my particular university is quite out-of-date. 5-10 years is being generous. Git and version control are absolutely not covered.

What part of it do you consider trolling?

They've had some issues with billing and usage over the last couple of days, though it's supposed to be fixed: https://status.firebase.google.com/incidents/7PC34iWhnMCpZtr...

It's currently the 3rd most popular app in the UK iPhone app store [1], so clearly some people have heard about it.

[1] https://apps.apple.com/gb/charts/iphone

For those that only read the headline, this is an important caveat:

"On the flip side, employees who work outside of standard hours by choice, to better suit their schedule or to pursue personal ambitions, report no negative impacts and even a slight uptick in their wellness and productivity scores."

I finally got an invite code to Bluesky. During onboarding, it gave me a list of feeds to choose from. For some reason, they've decided to have no tech whatsoever in that list of feeds. I guess I'm a bit of a loser, but I don't have many interests outside of tech, so I picked nothing and now I have an empty feed.

Is that the goal of Bluesky, to be Twitter for non-tech people? Seems like a surprising approach, given that the first users of Twitter were exclusively tech peeps.

It was Musk endorsing antisemitic conspiracy content that caused advertisers to pause, not "speaking the truth".

Fair enough. I researched it earlier in the year and it wasn't available.

I stand by my point: we often hear that adding a new tool to your stack is introducing unnecessary complexity, when more often not using the right tool is the path of most complexity.

This article is about why you shouldn't enter the vector database field, and it's reasonable.

But I want to comment on another thing I often hear: "You don't need a vector database - just use Postgres or Numpy, etc". As someone who moved to Pinecone from a Numpy-based solution, I have to disagree.

Using a hosted vector database is straightforward. Get an API key from Pinecone, send them your vectors, and then query it with new vectors. It's fast, supports metadata filtering, and scales horizontally.

On the other hand, setting up pgvector is a hassle - especially since none of the Cloud vendors support it natively, and a Numpy-based solution, while great for a POC, quickly becomes a hassle when trying to append to it and scale it horizontally.

If you need a vector database, use a vector database. You won't regret it.

I find it pretty hard to get alarmed about the impacts of declining population when my family and I have spent the 2019 summer on the run from a raging bushfire, and a few years later, I watched my neighbouring suburbs get washed away in the 2nd once-in-a-century flood we've had in a decade.

Sorry, but I think the world needs fewer people right now, and I'm doing my bit to help.

Agreed.

To me, GPT-4 is an AGI: it knows how to cook, write code, make songs, navigate international tax law, write business plans, etc.

Could it be more intelligent? Sure. Is it a capable general intelligence? 100%.

Can we not with the word "woke" please? Culture wars are really not relevant here.

True. She's the only person in the executive team that didn't come into OpenAI with pre-existing clout. They appointed her CTO with only a few years of engineering experience and now CEO. She must be a phenomenon.

What an unbelievable turn of events! To the outside observer, OpenAI is one of the most successful, well-oiled machines, shipping nearly weekly and doing an unbelievably good job marketing itself. Clearly, there's a lot of turmoil going on behind the scenes.

Claude is a drop in replacement for most use cases. You'll be fine.

Same here in Australia. Firestore has been intermittently buggy for days - randomly timing out, throwing errors, etc.

But it wasn't until a few hours ago that some of our customers were completely locked out of the site due to permissions errors.

I don't have a Facebook account with my name attached to it, but I do keep an account with a fake name to follow community pages and updates to my gym etc.

You probably should. Many of my school friends started experimenting with tobacco and marijuana in elementary school, which were the prevalent vices of my time.

Kids are autonomous humans with free will, and despite what many adults think, they have opinions worth listening to.

There are certainly people in rural areas who stopped drinking their preferred beer because they disagree with the values of the beer company. That's the free market for you.

Huh? How is it not sane?

Voting with your dollars is a key tenet of capitalism. If a company is run by unethical people, I sure as hell won't be doing business with them. Especially when there's plenty of competition, like there is in the EV market.

What are they gonna do if they catch me - put me away for life?

Yep. That's us, too. We had been planning to get a Tesla for many years but wouldn't be caught dead in one now.

Just keep saying Twitter. The name change will inevitably be reverted when it's sold in a few years.

Trouble is, alcohol goes really well with a lot of those things.

The title is incorrect. It implies a causal effect, where the article suggests correlation. Also, it refers to a cannabis use disorder, not cannabis use (as mentioned by others).

I propose: "Cannabis use disorder correlated to increased risk of both psychotic and non-psychotic unipolar depression and bipolar disorder."

Or even: "People with major depression, bipolar disorder and psychosis are more likely to be addicted to cannabis."

You can impede manned vehicles with traffic cones in exactly the same way. Randomly put them on roads, and people will stop, causing traffic jams. Throw them under the wheels of moving cars, and people will crash and likely die.

Allowing people to drive 2-tonne death traps around dense urban areas seems like a bigger mistake.

If this is the "minimum", I'd love to see what they left off the list.

My minimum for a public-facing MVP:

- All services use HTTPS to talk to users and each other.

- High standard of password encryption (or prefer to use something like Cognito or Firebase).

- Plan for GDPR compliance (not exactly security related, but in the wheelhouse. The GDPR grifters come out of the woodwork quickly, so you need all the popups and account deletion stuff from day 1 if you are releasing to the EU).

- QA specifically for security: users can't access each other files, authentication controls work, etc.

- Don't store or handle credit cards - use a vendor like Stripe.

- Ensure all dev tools enforce 2FA where possible (GitHub, AWS, etc.).

- A basic backup system.

Then post-MVP, start working on the following:

- centralised logging.

- dependency patching plan.

- etc

In Australia, we had ozhiphop.com/forum.

It was a super active forum between 2001 - 2010. Really the only online meeting place for local hip-hop until social media took over. It was the launching place of many careers (including Action Bronson's albeit indirectly).

Sadly all seems to be lost to history too.