lukeck

It’s a fair point about the difficulty in deleting data in a decentralised system but that’s also true in more centralised systems like GitHub or any other website. Once some data is out there, you have no control over whether it can be removed. Other parties could have copied it and may re-share it. “All” removing data from a centralised system does is slow down this spread, sometimes to the point that it is effectively deleted but that can’t be guaranteed.

The best response I’m aware of is to invalidate any secrets that have been accidentally shared. Sometimes that is easier said than done though. And of course there are plenty of other reasons someone might want to delete data.

Generally, nothing inherently wrong with sending a username but directing people to a 3rd party social media platform rather than an official Anthropic email or support system does nothing to build trust that they actually work there.

This is a really interesting perspective. Thanks for sharing.

In your opinion, what would a product that successfully provides low cost computing in developing markets look like? Is one even needed?

I have to agree with this. The software was always serviceable before the new app. I have a Sonos speaker in my kids’ rooms that we often use for audiobooks and lullabies.

Even with the latest version of the new app, when I play something on both speakers, there is a delay from seconds up to a minute before sound comes through the second speaker, they play at wildly different random volumes each time, playing Audible books within the Sonos app no longer works, Airplay won’t connect about 30% of the time, and sometimes they just decide not to work at all for no apparent reason.

Every night I fight the urge to throw them in the bin. I’m contemplating replacing them but don’t know enough about alternatives yet.

And they provided an interesting tidbit of information about some of the units mentioned. I didn’t read it as anything negative towards your comment at all. Both your’s and their’s added to the conversation.

I took their question to be shorthand for “Can you please share the image?”

Or they’re looking for someone with a few of the listed skills.

I’d be totally on board with job ads saying “the team’s tech stack includes A-Z. No one is expected to be an expert in all of these but if you have experience with some of them or equivalent tech, we could be a good fit for each other.

Depending on circumstances, the ad could go on to say stuff like “we’d love to boost our capabilities in these particular skills” to call out anything that’s an area they want to focus on improving with the new hire, if there is one.

At my kids’ childcare, by far the most popular educator is non-binary. They do a great job of listening to the kids, and talking to them without talking down to them. Come to think of it, the way they interact with the kids actually reminds me a fair bit of the parents in Bluey.

Both my kids (3 and 5 but now at school) have said stuff like “Today we did x with Greg. He’s not exactly a boy and not exactly a girl.” Then they get on with their day. To them, it’s just another person that’s a bit different to them.

> the ones for the CV vaccine were listed on many pages of tiny text (both from Pfizer and from Moderna)

The size of the pages side effects were written on says absolutely nothing about what the side effects are or their severity.

> Then there are the long term consequences, many studies keep coming out with surprises (recent buzzword “Ribosomal frameshift”

Ribosomal frameshift is in itself not a “long term consequence.” It is simply that depending on where translational of a piece of mRNA starts, different proteins can be produced. This is an essential part of how our own (or any other organism’s mRNA) is translated into proteins. other proteins present in a cell can regulate which proteins can be produced - again an essential part of how our cells function. This has been known about for decades.

It is one of the main potential areas that could lead to side effects of an mRNA vaccine so understanding what other proteins might be translated and under what circumstances is important.

Please don’t fear monger without any actual evidence to back it.

Do you have any recommendations of your own that you can share?

There have been a few minor revisions of some of the optional add on boards and things like SNAC adaptors for using original controllers from different systems.

There have also been a few different takes on making a mister in more of a console form factor, and boards that integrate into arcade cabinets or fit in ITX PC cases.

The software has come a hell of a long way. In the army days, the most advanced cores were 8 bit systems like the NES. Now we’ve got PlayStation 1, Sega Saturn and N64 in the works. Similar progress has been made supporting old computer and arcade systems too.

There is an upcoming sort of successor called Marsfpga that’s recently started being teased. From the little that’s been shared so far, the community seems hopeful that this will mean the Dreamcast and support for arcade games through the early 2000s are possibilities.

Once you get much beyond that era, an FPGA-based approach makes less sense - the systems become much, much more complex and also largely standardise around with x86 or ARM where there are always to run them without emulation at all. A notable exception to that is the PS3 with its cell architecture. Then again, people said for a long time that PS1 and Saturn were not possible.

In my view Python’s strength is it prioritises making how things work clear while Ruby’s strength is it prioritises making intent clear.

I actually wish there was something that struck more of a balance between these two philosophies. Ruby’s expressiveness is very nice but unless used carefully, can obscure what’s happening. Python’s clarity in implementation can make a piece of code clear in isolation but can get clunky.

> There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it.

I just wish Python applied this approach to package management. It is needlessly complicated.

Thanks for sharing. I’ll check out Ballistic NG.

I would love love to see XL/2097 added. That was my favourite. Wipeout 3 was a close second. It was certainly quite different in tone though. In what ways did you find it a disaster?

Are Aruinos really aimed at the professional prototyping market? I’ve always had the impression they are aimed at students and hobbyists. These two groups are generally more price sensitive but do also value ease of use.

For these non-professional groups, what are the benefits of a $20 Arduino ESP32 vs. one of the many $4 ones?

1. Being able to take a problem, break it down into progressively smaller chunks and methodically work through it. This often looks like binary search (eg. When trying to understand how a codebase works or debug an incident). 2. Being able to decide what detail is unimportant and what’s worth focusing on to work on whatever the current goal is.

3. Being able to use version control. Having the confidence that my work cannot be lost was a big boost.

4. Having some understanding of what non-developer stakeholders care about.

Energy use per capita has dropped because people are using less electricity, and generation has dropped to match. Power systems need to be operated so that demand very closely matched supply from second to second. If people use more, more power can be generated. The grid is not at capacity.

I agree with you that cheap, sustainable power sources need to be found but I’m not quite understanding your argument for why.

What has happened that makes borosilicate glassware hard to get?

Or make an iPhone that can take spatial pictures.

I used a single large TV for my monitor for a couple of years. At first I used a 50” 4K LCD TV. Some aspects of this were very nice. As you describe, being able to split the screen up into multiple areas or use a portion of the screen as a monitor with different aspect ratios was very nice. The downside with the LCD was the backlight on the areas of the display that weren’t in active use was very distracting. It was also nice having the flexibility for games, watching TV and movies.

I briefly tried my 65” LG OLED TV as my monitor. It didn’t have the backlight problem at all but the auto dimming of white screen areas was too distracting to be usable.

I’ve now gone to 2x 32” 4K monitors. It’s okay but either too wide if both monitors are horizontal or one is too tall if I turn one vertical.

I’d like to revisit using a large OLED again when their use as monitors has matured a little. With a little software tweaking for window management, it was almost perfect.

In the late 2000s and early 2010s, I was working as a C# developer in a big, old, traditional enterprise environment. I had burned out and I was falling out of love with programming.

A friend introduced me to Ruby and I became excited again. Railscasts helped me immensely in being able to very quickly build things. This motivated me to continue and before long I was able to change jobs and start using Ruby and Rails full time.

Thanks.

I recently switched to Fastmail and have been happy with it so far.

The setup I’m using is:

- I have a mylastname.com domain. For serious accounts like my bank and insurance, I use companyname@accounts.mylastname.com. - I also have a myrandomdomain.com. For most other online accounts I register with companyname@accounts.myrandomdomain.com. - I have been playing with a sieve script to automatically create folders and categorise incoming mail for each address. It needs a couple of small tweaks still that I didn’t quite iron out before going away for a few days but should be pretty straightforward. - In limited cases where I want more anonymity (eg. Facebook, Reddit, now Twitter), I create a masked email and set up a filter to put it into a folder myself. - I use a different address to log in to my account instead of myfirstname@mylastname.com

For me this is a reasonable mix of security and convenience. Depending on your level of paranoia you could be slightly less paranoid (company@yourdomain.com or company@something.yourdomain.com), or more paranoid (use masked emails for everything - there is now integration for this in 1password so if you’re using that for a password manager it’s very easy to manage. I love the automatic categorisation using my own generated addresses gives though.

If you ask it, it says it can’t search the web and only works with the data it knows about.

You can already ask it to provide responses “in the style of.”

I interpreted the original comment as saying that C is detrimental to the long term health of a piece of software in a similar way to how asbestos is detrimental to the long term health of humans.

I don’t think there was any suggestion made that C is detrimental to human health.

Analogies might not help you understand a perspective on a topic but they do help many, many people.

I heard your recent interview on the Retro Hour podcast. Thanks for writing this. I’m looking forward to reading it.

Similarly to the person you’re replying to, I needed to confirm that a doubly linked list is what I thought it was because for me, high school and college were decades ago. I just haven’t had to use that knowledge in many years of professional development. Now I’ve refreshed my memory on the data structure, inserting an element is straightforward. In other words, the harder bit for me is the boring trivia of what is the data structure with this name, while the far more interesting questions how do you use it and what are its advantages and disadvantages are easy. I would expect that a good interview would focus on the more interesting parts.

This is why diversity of thought is important in teams. Some people will be the “ship, ship, ship type who make sure that the team is meeting its goals. Some will be detail oriented, may frustrate the first type but will ensure the team is producing quality results. Some people like to be on the bleeding edge and bring you techniques to the team. Others like to clean up tech debt or bring incremental improvements to old solutions. All of these are valuable even if they at times frustrate each other.

These are generalisations. There are likely far more “types” and different people will act as different types in different situations.

Having a mix isn’t sufficient though. The team also needs to find ways to prioritise and manage conflict to get the best approach in place for any given situation.

I may be misremembering but I think it was Jessica Kerr who suggested calling it “escalating or compounding risk.” I quite like that because it makes the consequences clearer.

I kind of agree with you. I don’t care if a new hire has deep experience in every part of the team’s tech stack. In interviews I look for four things:

1. Do they know the fundamentals of each domain they mention in their job application? How well do they understand and how well can they explain core concepts?

2. Do they have an attitude to learning and teaching that will make it possible for them to pick up the gaps between what they know now and that they need for the job? Will they be able to keep going past that? Will they be able to support co-workers on their journeys?

3. What are the specific gaps between what they know now and what they’d need to know to work in our tech stack? This isn’t to exclude them from the role, more to understand what support they’re going to need and what the ramp up might look like. I try to keep it away from trivia and more general. Eg. “tell me a time you had to debug a problem in go code. What was the initial bug report and how did you get from there to solving the problem? What did you do to make sure it didn’t happen again?” Those open questions can lead to some good conversations and give a good sense of how well a candidate understands an area.

4. By now I’ve made my mind up about whether I’m going to say yes or no. Now I see if I can convince myself the opposite (without being a jerk).