nlehuen

> Learning to coat steel pans in oil to make them non-stick-ish has been a great help.

Doesn't this involve cooking oil into harmful polymers?

This video puts things into perspective, mapping the whole of 4.5B years of Earth history to 1 hour: https://youtu.be/S7TUe5w6RHo?si=9rkHNaXA2PXXMJjN

+1 in France at least, food products must not suggest that mandatory properties like "preservative free" is unique. When they advertise this on the package, they must disclose it's per regulation. Source: https://www.economie.gouv.fr/particuliers/denrees-alimentair...

It's a bit scary to imagine the consequences if this file was somehow corrupted (wrong column headers for instance)!

You might enjoy this then: http://powerwash-simulator.square-enix-games.com/

This. Over the last few years of writing C++ on a daily basis, I can count the number of times I used `delete` on both hands (maybe one hand actually). `new` was harder to get rid of because of some flaw in the framework we used, but that has been fixed now. Unless you are in the business of writing smart pointers yourself, you should never have to use those keywords anymore.

This whole research domain is confusing to me. I do get that it's a hard and cool problem to solve and I do see why researcher could work on it on those grounds.

But I'm concerned about what solving this is useful for, especially with the focus on generating human faces. Obligatory Jurassic Park quote: "Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.".

I can imagine this technology to be used in the entertainment industry (movies, video games) as a way to save money on art. But it's quite obvious that this technology can be weaponized and used in the propaganda industry (if it isn't already).

So, this could save money in fun applications on one end, and provide means for mass opinion manipulation weapon on the other end. I am certainly biased but I'm not sure the recreative use case is worth the risk of the weaponized one (a bit like using tactical nukes for a firework show).

What am I missing then? Are there any other use cases that would make this technology actually desirable for the greater good or humanity, or is it just a weapon with some potential recreational use cases?

Obligatory XKCD reference: https://xkcd.com/538/

A while ago I wrote Babble, a toy language to teach myself ANTLR4: https://github.com/nlehuen/babble

It initially supported both English and French keywords: https://github.com/nlehuen/babble/commit/eb090fd3e80238166ac... - that was fun but for some reason I found it cringy and removed it (as if the rest was not cringy either).

Completely off topic, but I also implemented Hodor - "Its main objective is to teach programming to Hodor.": https://github.com/nlehuen/babble/tree/hodor

Philips in the Netherlands and Thomson in France went the same way (https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomson_(marque)) - after being major manufacturers of consumer products, they are now licensing their consumer brand to third party manufacturers.

Basically they are banking on their previous glories and advertising.

Sometimes you can spot the exact same product from a noname manufacturer, it's just missing the right sticker.

The stats_agg + extractor function pattern is exactly what I was thinking about in my last paragraph :-). Very cool!

You can see the same pattern of two-step aggregation with the HLL_COUNT family of functions in BigQuery: https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/docs/reference/standard-sq...

This is really useful for this kind of metric (distinct count) that can't be trivially aggregated. It allows generating pre-aggregated tables containing the intermediate aggregation state. Now you can compute your DAUs, WAUs and MAUs from the same daily pre-aggregates.

I wish this design was generalized in SQL. For instance, getting the same family of function for variance computation would be super useful for efficient & correct computation of confidence intervals at different levels of aggregation.

I'm a big fan of the nested set representation. It hits the sweet spot of compactness and expressivity - queries for parents, children, ancestors and descendants are simple integer comparison and pretty fast with the right indices.

The only downside is that this requires updates of a large number of rows whenever the tree changes (not all rows though). If you have a sharded table that could be problematic.