quicklime

> What's a more convenient scale for human living conditions? 0–100 °F or -20–40 °C? I am aware people live in even colder and hotter environments, but the majority of people in the world don't need to worry about values outside of this range. I also think "0 is very cold" and "100 is very hot" just makes more sense than "-20 is very cold" and "40 is very hot".

The idea that 0-100F is somehow the range of “human living conditions” is completely bizarre to me, but I can see why someone from a place like the American Midwest might think this is true.

To me 0C is so much more meaningful than 0F, especially when talking about weather. The difference between -1C and 1C is something you can literally see around you. The difference between -1F and 1F is not.

Anything “below zero” is literally frozen and completely inhospitable to normal human life!

In New York a lot of dogs wear shoes when they’re out in walks, which I assume are taken off when they go back home.

> Make it the top layer’s responsibility and don’t log in any services or lower level code.

> Make sure your logging framework is including stack traces so you can trace the error to its cause.

> For example in a web app you would log the error in the http handler when returning the Internal Server status code.

This is different from how I do it, am I doing anything wrong?

I prefer to make it the bottom layer’s responsibility - so, the first source of the error at the boundary of my application and the library that produces the error, rather than the top level of the http handler.

Go errors infamously don’t include stack traces, so how are you supposed to know where your error originated from if you log it from the top level of the http handler?

I love Rust but honestly the Go way works fine, even if it isn’t as strictly correct as Rust. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a case where a Go function returned neither a value nor an error, or both a value and an error.

What I like better about Rust, and what I think most people are actually complaining about with Go, is that syntactic sugar like the ? operator and functions like unwrap(). It’s a lot more concise and your application logic doesn’t get lost in verbose error checking code.

Most people buy everything, even their homes, using rented money!

There were tests by France and China in 1996, by India and Pakistan in 1998, and by North Korea in 2009, 2013, 2015, 2016 and 2017.

We’ve never had a decade without a nuclear test since the 1940s.

I strongly disagree with this. We shouldn't create new laws for new technology by making analogies to what's allowed under old laws designed for old technology. If we did, we would never have come up with copyright in the first place.

600 years ago, people were allowed to hand-copy entire books, so they should be able to do it with a printing press right? It's "just a tool"!

The correct way to think about this is to recognize that society needs people to create training data as well as people to train models. If we don't reward the people who create training data, we disincentivize them from doing so, and we'll end up in a world where we don't have enough of it.

In a typical evening, how many neighbors walk by?

I used to live in a suburb with literally 10x the density, and the only time I ever saw my immediate neighbors was if we both happened to be walking from our front doors to our cars at the same time.

It’s not on the same page as the signatories but they do have this: https://www.safe.ai/ai-risk

But he's not the only business leader using heavy-handed techniques to get workers back in the office. I think it's likely that he genuinely believes that working from the office is better - he's not playing 4d chess.

The morality argument is just him rationalizing what he already believes. This isn't the "first principles" thinking that he demands from others.

> “One tablespoon of olive oil” to brown absurd amounts of meat at high heat.

I love watching cooking videos where they say “a tablespoon of olive oil” and proceed to pour in half the bottle

312 entries, although only 37 were accessed in the last 12 months.

I used to carefully clean my mushrooms with a brush to keep them dry so they wouldn’t end up slimy. But someone told me that was a myth and I decided to try just quickly rinsing them instead. Never resulted in slimy mushrooms, and I was shocked at how much crap ended up in the rinse water.

A lot of enterprises need to comply with regulations and security standards (e.g. PCI-DSS or SOC2) which often require them to implement systems and processes over their "control environment". They need to demonstrate that they can do things like enforce password requirements, or disable your device/account remotely (via MDM) if needed. It's not enough that you use their VPN.

It's great that they've removed "non-permissive" (GPL) code from their training data, but it looks like they still train on code with "permissive" licenses (they use MIT, BSD, Apache as examples). But don't these permissive licenses still require the copyright notice to be reproduced?

From the MIT license:

> The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

From the BSD licenses:

> Redistribution and use in source and binary forms are permitted provided that the above copyright notice and this paragraph are duplicated in all such forms...

From the Apache 2.0 license:

> You must retain, in the Source form of any Derivative Works that You distribute, all copyright, patent, trademark, and attribution notices from the Source form of the Work, excluding those notices that do not pertain to any part of the Derivative Works

We used to have a header for this but the tracking companies refused to play ball.

  DNT: 0

I do agree with many of your points here, but just to nitpick...

> (fact) Americans are ambitious to a fault...9 to 5 in the suburbs is not an endgame for me.

So you state this as a fact about Americans in general, but then use yourself as the only proof. Isn’t 9 to 5 in the suburbs basically the end goal that most Americans dream of?

I definitely think that Americans are more entrepreneurial than most, but other cultures are equally ambitious in different ways.

> (opinion, maybe fact) The consequences of failure in America are lower

The idea of losing access to health care, going bankrupt and still being unable to rid oneself of crippling student loan debt sounds terrifying to me, and if I were living in the US I’d think twice about taking the sort of risks that I’d be ok with taking in a “welfare state”.

It's not impossible, and the examples listed are living proof that it is possible.

People often cite the failure of Edge/Trident - even with the resources of Microsoft, it's still impossible to compete with Google.

But there's a big difference between "competing with Google and taking significant market share away from Chrome" and just "writing a browser engine that supports the modern web and runs on personal computers". The latter is definitely not impossible.

Does it really help that much in practice?

> Easier to share configuration settings

I want to share my nvim config between both my home Linux machine and my Mac at work, but I don’t want to share my config for gnome and its apps. So now I’ve got to maintain a script to go one more subdirectory deep to pick which dotfiles to sync and which to ignore...

> Easier to temporarily ignore the config > It is easiest to set XDG_CONFIG_HOME=/tmp/dir

This is such an unreliable way to do it, even within the xdg world. What about stuff in ~/.local/share? It’s a lot easier and more reliable to just set HOME=$(mktemp -d)

Personally when I’m trying to start from a clean profile, I find it much easier to just go and blow away ~/.mozilla than to go and surgically remove .config/epiphany, .local/share/epiphany, .cache/epiphany, and whatever gconf (or gsettings or whatever windows registry clone we’ve got now) settings it’s got.

> Hiring well is one of the best uses of your time

When I was an engineer I used to think this, but now that I'm a manager, I'm not so sure...

If you want to maximize your impact, and make the biggest contribution possible to your company, then yeah, sure, it's absolutely the best use of your time.

But a lot of engineers are trying to contribute to the company in ways that are mutually beneficial to them, and the way that a lot of companies set up interviewing is not. It's a thankless job that takes time away from things that can actually be put a performance review, so only the more selfless engineers will do it.

The article reads a bit like manager-to-engineer advice, but the advice to managers would be: keep track of who is helping out with interviewing, and who is interviewing well, and reward them for it.

I also find hiragana-with-spaces hard to read, even as a gaijin. So I'm somewhat skeptical of the idea that Japanese and Chinese are harder to read because they don't use spaces. No offense to some people here, but I think it would be better to avoid coming at this from a position of "what is the secret that makes western culture so much better?"

After a quick search, there is at least some research out there that suggests that Chinese readers are able to read faster than English readers, e.g. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/1938807990955829.... This comes at a cost though, and that is the time spent learning how to write, but maybe technology like word processors will reduce that cost while retaining the benefits.

In my experience with Japanese, kanji is more work to learn how to write, but it makes it easier for others to read - not just compared to romaji but even hiragana and katakana. I'm not really sure it's time "wasted".

> rediculous

In a lot of ways, it's like spelling in English ;)

Lack of testing is part of it, most places do less testing than is ideal.

But there’s much more to it than that. From the article, the author’s resolution is 1366×768. This was designed and tested for! The problem wasn’t that it was broken at that res, the problem was that it was incorrectly classified as a tablet-only resolution.

The issue here is their designers and developers being out of touch with their users, and using constrained hardware helps with that.

> even though this category lacks the skills and the interest to repair their devices anyway outside of a rare few exceptions

Most poor people do have the skills to take their device into a repair shop to have it repaired?

It makes a big difference to the price of the repair if the device is designed to be repairable. Even better if it’s something a user can do themselves, such as replace the battery in a Nokia 3310.

To me, the value of an ML tool would be in the step after we run things through static analysis (e.g. linters for bad coding practices, SCA scans for known CVEs) and before we send this off to our security team for an internal audit and pen test. It would be a tool that we add to our existing tool set, so that we can catch issues earlier, rather than something to replace our pen testers.

Even if you do have some authoritative curation of resources, it's difficult for dev teams to consume it. And even for those who do understand security, it requires a lot of tedious work to check through. I wish it weren't the case, but the reality is that most teams don't have the specialist skills or the motivation to grind away at this for a significant chunk of their time.

For a long time, "vehicular cycling" was a big thing - the idea being that bicyclists should use the road as if they were driving a car. This put a lot of focus on teaching people how to ride a bike on the road, rather than designing safer infrastructure for them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicular_cycling

> VSCode and Visual Studio are two completely different products, one is a code editor, and the other is a full blown IDE

What does Visual Studio from around 2000 have that VSCode doesn't? I get that VSCode offloads a lot of work to the language server and extensions, but it offers IDE-like features including auto-completion, code navigation, and the UI is more than just code editing - it integrates version control, a test runner, debugging, etc. What is it missing that makes it not a full blown IDE?

I've found Teams acceptable for video calls, including large-scale ones. Some of the Office integration is quite nice, e.g. PowerPoint Live. But what I really hate about it is the chat functionality. Very basic person-to-person DMs work ok, but it doesn't scale up to larger groups. Some UI complaints:

- When someone messages a group that you're part of, you get a notification. This makes it hard to distinguish between someone trying to get ahold of you, and the background chatter in a group. Slack just has better defaults here: it'll notify you for DMs, and use a more subtle message count for channel messages (unless someone @'s you).

- When someone calls you on Teams, it's like they're using a telephone from the 1990s. You could be in the middle of another meeting, and your computer will play a ringtone, because SOMEONE IS CALLING, URGENTLY!!! So you have to quickly excuse yourself from the current meeting and pick up the phone (and probably find out that it was nothing urgent anyway). Slack's UI for huddles are a lot better here, and the smooth jazz is just a nice touch :)

- If you set up a "team" within MS Teams, it's supposed to set up a place where people from that team can collaborate. The UI for it is just awful though, and I've never seen teams stay engaged through this. Slack channels are just far more intuitive, and remove a lot of the friction from collaborating with your teammates.

There are more issues, e.g. Teams isn't friendly to my laptop's fan, and it keeps screwing up my bluetooth settings. Although I'm not sure if Apple is actually to blame for those ones.

I feel like a fairer way to do this would be through proportional representation. Most issues that voters care about are not local issues, so why do need a system to carve up representation along geographical boundaries?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proportional_representation

> there is nothing different than a machine reading it, other than scale

Copyright itself was introduced because of the scale of the printing press, which fundamentally changed the economics of publishing. Is it reasonable to assume that scale doesn’t change things?