pbourke

You wrote:

> 14 people died at an Amazon facility

This is false. From the article that you linked:

> Even as floods that have killed at least 14 swept through the city, warehouses remained open.

Kelowna?

> Conservatives aren't against rules, they are against changing rules.

That doesn’t ring true to me. Both liberals and conservatives want to change and preserve rules according to their viewpoints.

> Do we see a greater percentage of entrepreneurs from Canada or Europe than from the US?

Yes, if one uses self-employment as a proxy for entrepreneurship. The US trails Canada and Western European countries in self employment as a percentage of the labour force.

https://data.oecd.org/chart/6xG6

Edit: the US has the lowest rate in this OECD dataset.

Reddit is kinda-sorta a forum site. You can treat a single sub as a forum by ordering posts chronologically. phpbb style forums still exist and are the best place to discuss some topics. In the RV/truck space there are still many forums that have been bought and consolidated under a few holding companies. They still operate as distinct boards, however.

> While I consider myself a really solid full stack developer and believe that Pony's infrastructure is secure, I do not have the requisite experience with cryptography to honestly represent to people that this is a private platform.

It would be great if this existed as an infrastructure-level service. Something like the Signal “API” that allows apps like yours to be built on top.

With a bit of telemetry, you’d know in advance what your load is going to look like, allowing you to scale up or down resources (if you design the system that way)

No, I meant the trans-Canada. That’s remote enough for me :)

> west of Timmins

Yep. Sudbury to Kenora is some lonely road with a few “no services next 150km” stretches

I’m sure you’re aware, but just in case: bring tire chains if you’re crossing Washington mountain passes as they can sometimes be required.

> Banking, for example, is such a clear-cut case of competition not being detrimental for Canadians

How much does the average Canadian pay per month for their chequing account?

> It doesn't even really seem like any of the high paying jobs are enough to keep up with this insane market.

Compared to two years ago, it’s much more likely that you can get paid a coastal tech salary yet live in an affordable city. These still exist in America. Here’s one that I just pulled out of a hat: Ames, Iowa. College town. Median house price $265k, which you can have for less than $1k/month with a 30 year mortgage at todays ridiculously low rates. There are hundreds of places like this across the country. You don’t need to live in the Bay Area, Seattle, NYC or Austin anymore.

At a certain size, big tech develops efficient systems to transmute forward-thinking younger talent into slightly jaded mid career pros excited for 1% improvements and 30s off the build. The world needs both types of people and companies need them both in different measures at different points in their trajectories.

> ‘Specifically, the judge saves texts from his friends by taking screenshots and emailing them to himself. He showed one such screenshot to the courtroom today, noting that “some of them are pretty long” and “show up in my email like this, like a little ribbon,” so he zooms on them and “it’s just a blur.”’

The argument, which I do not buy as sufficient but add here for completeness, is that it’s better for your large purchases (ie rent) to clear before your $10 lunch, etc.

> mechanics don't like the people who want to do the bare minimum amount of work all the time

Does anyone?

> oil change on a '15 4Runner owned by some yuppie

Yuppies don’t drive 7 year old cars

> If people are going to switch to EVs for lower TCO, the EVs will need to get a lot cheaper.

Or gas will need to get a lot more expensive, which is what governments are planning to do.

1. There are other countries

2. What if Tesla gets $1-2k ARR along with each sale for charging or other services?

> People aren't going to suddenly start paying more for cars than housing. People aren't going to suddenly own 30 cars a piece. Tesla is never going to grow enough to be worth it's current market cap.

There are around 290M cars on the road in the US, of which 1.3M are electric. Over the next 20 years, the majority of those 290M will get replaced by an electric vehicle. One of the major drivers of this will be cost: it will just be significantly cheaper from a TCO perspective to drive electric.

Electric is such a shift that traditional car purchasing forces like brand loyalty are disrupted, and there will be a land rush to claim new market share. Electric also presents heretofore prohibited avenues for vertical integration: Tesla wants to sell you the car, the home battery and the solar panels to go with it. Standard Oil was broken up for similar types of vertical integration.

Electric will also present opportunities for ongoing service revenue (value-added services such as in-car infotainment) that automakers have tried for years to break into (unsuccessfully)

If you’re the early leader with a promising track record, as Tesla is, a 1T valuation is not surprising.

Very cool to have a piece of your own computing history that you can reinterpret/carry forward.

Did you use Godot for this game?

Are you working on a next game?

Congratulations on getting it finished and out there!

> In a large corporation, their boss would swing by and tell them customers need that tool, and it can't be removed willy-nilly.

Vastly more arbitrary and intrusive changes routinely occur in large corporations, where community complaints are often ignored rather than addressed by quickly reverting the offending change.

> my more ordinary programming work as a Python backend developer

Did you use Python for your game as well? This looks really cool - congratulations on making the leap to full time.

Car rentals?

Tool rentals?

Camera equipment rentals?

Leeches, all of them?

> Anyone whose main income is from other peoples rent has an incredible amount of explaining to do if they want to claim that they are anything but a useless leech

What would you envision as the alternative to tenanted apartment complexes?

Let’s say you could wave a wand and outlaw rental housing as a business. Do you think the world would be a better or worse place?

> No one who was against the Iraq War from the onset is doing particularly well.

Would that include President Obama?

I wonder if it would help to decorate compute_mandelbrot with @numba.jit(parallel=True) and change your call to range to a numba.prange.

Ironically I’m going through this process at work this week to improve the performance of scipy.stats.ks_2samp

> The real fear was that there would be a run on masks by the public, making them unavailable for hospital use.

Ironically the run on masks had begun months earlier. I snagged a box of N95 construction masks in late Jan 2020, and they were totally gone everywhere by early Feb

Awesome! That brings it down to 0.57s on my machine - a 56x improvement from the original.

Thanks for bringing it further.

The Python-only version can be sped up using vectorized numpy operations:

  import time
  from PIL import Image
  import numpy as np
  
  def PyMandelbrot(size):
      t1 = time.time()
      xPts = np.arange(-1.5, 0.5, 2.0 / size).reshape((1, size))
      yPts = (np.arange(-1, 1, 2.0 / size) * 1j).reshape((size, 1))
      cs = xPts + yPts
      z = np.zeros_like(cs)
      red = np.zeros_like(cs, dtype=np.uint8)
      mask = np.full_like(cs, True, dtype=np.bool_)
  
      max_idx = 0
      while max_idx < 199:
          np.putmask(z, mask, np.multiply(z, z) + cs)
          np.putmask(red, mask, red + 1)
          mask &= np.abs(z) < 2
          max_idx += 1
  
      dt = time.time() - t1
      print(f"dt={dt:.2f}")
      zeros = np.zeros_like(red)
      pixels = np.dstack((red, zeros, zeros))
      Image.fromarray(pixels).show()
  
  if __name__ == '__main__':
      PyMandelbrot(1_280)

On my machine (Core i9, Win 10, CPython 3.7):

  > python .\mandelbrot_orig.py
  dt=32.01

  > python .\mandelbrot.py
  dt=5.86

I'm sure my version can be improved upon.