proamdev123

I haven’t seen any non-networked baby monitors anywhere, but perhaps I’m looking in the wrong places.

Can you suggest any monitor brands/models or places I could find them?

(Genuinely asking)

Thanks for the list of alternatives!

Have you experienced any unexpected pros and/or cons from using those vendors instead of Amazon?

This is an excellent point.

I’m extremely curious to see if the evidence shows that Amazon’s practices actually drive up prices in the market or whether there’s not much impact.

I suspect the answer may vary drastically depending on the product category.

Where do you shop online now for things that you used to buy on Amazon? Have you found any unexpected pros or cons from going to alternative online stores?

I’m not planning to leave Amazon, but I’d love to find good alternatives.

> It is none of Amazons business what prices they put when they list their wares on other services…

It is literally Amazon’s business to offer pricing at equal to or better than their competitors.

> …the only reason they care is that they want to crush the competition.

Every company wants to beat their competition, and many (most?) want to “crush” their competition. Don’t you think Target wants to crush Amazon? Don’t you think Google wants to crush Apple in smartphone sales? Don’t you think a local retailer would love to crush Amazon for products in their niche?

The only question here is whether Amazon is doing this in an abusive way and/or a way that negatively impacts consumers.

We’ll find out in the trial…

Fantastic insights here.

I’d add that another invisible cost(?) is that business users are going to develop their own tools no matter what. Why? Because they need them to do their jobs! So development is happening, whether it’s done by people with the title “developer” or not.

> Just bill for it, support and all. Make the customer say no. Or if they're willing to pay then great.

This is probably the best solution. The organization still has to be prepared that business users will make their own tools, though. And they will frequently get things wrong, because they’re not developers.

> As another commenter said, it was an incentives problem. Right or wrong, good or bad, helping people with small scripts was not something that would ever be rewarded.

I agree with you here. The long queues for internal dev support is indicative of high demand for that support. If the organization can’t or won’t staff properly to provide that support, both the users AND the devs are forced to make tough choices.

So the devs say “No” to requests (or it takes an inordinately long time to get done), and so the business users make their own tools.

And the cycle continues…

> The counter was "If we fix it, they'll keep coming back to us and in the long run more money would be lost."

And this is why people develop their own tools.

Then the same people that wouldn’t help say, “Why did you build this monstrosity it Excel/Access/$OtherNoCodeTool ?!”

That’s a fantastic point. The unstated underlying request isn’t to see the same chart, the same way, every week/month/quarter. It’s actually: “Find any abnormalities in the data that could be threats or opportunities, and show me THAT — in a chart, table, email, or whatever medium make makes sense.”

As a business user myself, often times we are simply responding to an edict from Leadership that amounts to: “You guys should have some dashboards!”

Other times it’s because a supervisor or internal customer likes to see certain things on a chart, and putting the chart in Power BI/Tableau/other tool will make them prettier than Excel charts.

Very few people, starting from the top on down, have a good understanding that dashboards mean very little in and of themselves.

Can you recommend a good online Excel modeling course?

I see tons of courses that teach “Excel skills”, but can’t find any that teach modeling using Excel.

Physics doesn’t obey mathematical laws. Mankind studied physics until we found mathematical formulas that describe nature reliably. There are countless math formulas that were discarded over the millennia after they were discovered to not adequately describe the physical phenomena they were intended to describe.

Math is a collection of abstractions. Some are useful in explaining natural phenomena. Some are not.

> One imagines two intelligent alien races would be able to communicate that pi is the ratio of the circumference to the diameter of a circle without coming to any real agreements over postulates or axioms.

Except circles don’t exist in the real world. They are an abstraction that mankind created that are similar enough to many natural objects as to be a useful abstraction of them.

In order for two alien races to communicate about pi, they’d have to first agree on the definition of a circle as a set of points equidistant from a central point.

That’s one of the axioms they’d have to agree on before they could even get to pi.

This link says OpenAI makes $80 million per month and is projected to make $1 billion this year. Google (Alphabet) made $5.4 billion per WEEK in revenue last year.

ignoramous was right 5 times over!

I’m not quite sure what you’re asking. We were talking about searching for signs of extraterrestrial life by looking for electromagnetic signals that they may have sent through space.

Are you asking why I’d assume that they don’t have the biological ability to send electromagnetic communication signals?

If that’s not what you’re asking, I don’t understand how else they’d send signals through space without sophisticated instruments capable of transmitting powerful signals.

Please clarify.

Following that thought even further, if dolphins or whales were as intelligent as humans would they even be capable of developing the ability to make instruments that can transmit electromagnetic signals?

Given the limitations of their physical bodies, would they even be capable of developing any sophisticated instruments at all?

Point being, intelligence may not be the limiting factor for extraterrestrial communication at all.

I’m interested in using privacy.com, but I’m concerned that providing THEM access access to my accounts creates even more vulnerability.

Fo they have any security protections that prevent them from draining my accounts (either accidentally or via hacker)?

Makes sense.

> was writing code where I couldn’t be bothered to put together ideas from several distinct tutorials. It’s fantastic for writing code that you can basically google for, even if you have to read several disperate pages to get a clear picture of what to do.

I think this description of yours nails it.

Soon, though, you’ll be able to feed it a corpus of documentation and/or library code and question it based on those. That might help your use case.

> OOP remains the most popular and requested programming paradigm even though it has gradually slid into functional obsolescence more than a decade ago…

I read your link. It was an interesting essay. But how is OOP functionally obsolete?

> I'm quite keen to use it more in my side projects, I just don't really see the time pay off to invest learning it…

I think using it for side projects is where it shines, especially if you’re talking about coding side projects.

In my N=1 experience with coding, it can save me a ton of time by iteratively providing code and saving me time looking up documentation to find correct functions and syntax. ChatGPT frequently shows me functions that I wasn’t aware existed. It also can give me cleaner and/or more idiomatic code.

So a function or class that may have previously taken me 45 - 60 minutes to build, now takes 5-10 minutes. This is a huge productivity increase. It’s not some magic pill that builds whole applications, but it’s like having an experienced (but not expert) programmer by your side with unlimited patience for your questions. (This also applies to non-programming tasks as well.)

And it hasn’t taken me any time investment in learning it. I just have an iterative conversation with it, including asking it clarifying questions and requesting it to modify the code it provides.

Are you experiencing something different than what I’ve described?

It did used to be free. I used the site years ago for awhile before he announced that he was putting it behind a paywall (except for a few free chapters).

Got it. Thanks!

Lol. Hilarious! Thanks for elaborating.

This sounds interesting, but I’m not following. Do you mind expanding?

Specifically, how does nesting details/summary tags relate to 5 MB of HTML, and how does that relate to breaking a lot of browsers?

Sounds like a great story, and I’d love to hear it!

Why do you hate Jupyter notebooks so much that it reaches “worst thing to ever have happened“ status?

Why do you love R Studio so much? (I’ve never used it, so no judgment)

> it gets people socially in trouble if they’re picky.

What does it look like when somebody gets “socially in trouble” for being picky? What actually happens to them (socially) in this instance?

I’ve never seen or heard of anything like this, so I’m really curious about it.

Out of curiosity, why would people have “horror” at the idea of going to a chain restaurant, as opposed to, say, “disinterest”?

I refactor my code into functions as I go.

Then I can easily put them into a Python file and import them from the notebook.

Easy peasy and very nice for iterative development.

> …the moon does not have an atmosphere

> …would remain suspended in mid-air

Aside from the no-gravity hallucination, this is also funny.