randmeerkat

> Things start to go sideways when you have tens of thousands of users.

If that’s really the case, run another GitHub instance then. Not all tens of thousands of users need access to the same codebases. In the kind of environment described someone would want identity boundaries established around each project anyway…

> congrats on wrapping ffmpeg and charging for it!

AWS is just a wrapper around KVM.

wall became Twitter

> … widespread belief that it's easy for low-performers…

The truth is that most high performers do menial busy work that doesn’t impact real bottom lines either. Everyone sits around doing things knowing that their job doesn’t need to exist and rather than call out the madness of a society focused on busywork for the appearance of “productivity” everyone just rips on each other instead… Society could use a lot more empathy and a lot less fear.

> I think most people who work at Big Co's have their share of meetings where half a dozen people attend regularly, but have never said a word and you have no idea what they actually do. Those are the "NPCs" he's referring to.

Have you considered that those “NPCs” have no idea what you do..?

> Then every 3 years or so you spent $300 again to get the updated version. It was a much better system!

By your math it was. 10x12x3=360 > 300. Subscriptions cost more than buying the actual software. Why do you think most companies switched to a subscription model?

> Technically that's what we call "buying software".

What a novel idea. You mean once upon a time you didn’t have to pay a monthly racket for a piece of software you wanted..?

> Idk if I agree as split keyboards is likely not what folks have in mind…

The article literally mentions a mechanical split keyboard, without mentioning the ErgoDox.

It’s a disservice to have a guide to mechanical keyboards that doesn’t mention the ErgoDox EZ: https://ergodox-ez.com/

> I assume for something like this to happen it would need all source code and design docs from Boston Dynamics in the training set. It seems unlikely it could independently make the same discoveries on its own.

No, to do this it would need to be able to independently reason, if it could do that, then the training data stops mattering. Training data is a crutch that makes these algos appear more intelligent than they are. If they were truly intelligent they would be able to learn independently and find information on their own.

> We cannot find qualified applicants.

What’s the name of your employer?

Here’s a question for you, have they automated trains yet? They’re literally on tracks. Until trains are fully automated, then after that cars, then later airplanes, then maybe, just maybe “ai” will come for thought work. Meanwhile, Tesla’s “ai” still can’t stop running into stopped firetrucks[1]…

[1] https://www.wired.com/story/tesla-autopilot-why-crash-radar/

> It's optimized for profit.

It wasn’t optimized for profit 30 years ago..?

> Makes you question how productive we are in the computer age...

The difference is that modern society isn’t optimized for productivity, it’s optimized for consumption and attention. 30 years ago you could go days without seeing ads, now companies send notifications to the nuisance devices in your pocket and on your wrist. It’s no wonder we have a harder time focusing and accomplishing things. Even being aware of the problem isn’t enough to fully protect one’s attention and intention.

There’s so much waste with every household owning a car. A lot of this could be avoided with affordable mass transit options like high speed trains and subways instead.

> Then again, the rest of the industry has figured out a way to make slottable RAM almost as fast and compact as soldered RAM…

Just be patient, the EU will take a large stick and force Apple to allow users to replace their RAM soon too.

> It still leverages social and internet points which for some is attention-hijacking enough.

The difference is it’s not deliberate, it’s just how they get us to rank training data for ChatGPT 5.

> Don't worry. Once the True Leader is back in power, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau will be powerless again.

That’s the problem with Congress abdicating its duties and assigning rule making to administrative bodies and their respective courts instead of passing actual laws. Instead of being upset at whatever figurehead sits at the top you would do well to write your senators and representatives instead.

> Elmyr had great skill, greater than anyone alive perhaps, but he had nothing to say.

I would argue that he spoke volumes and had a vision so vast that he was able to take perspective from any other’s view. What a rich life Elmyr must have led.

> Um, no, I want illustrations for my stories. That’s the end, and the means can be whatever. I don’t care to search for self-discovery in that.

Maybe writing a story is your art… Part of self-discovery is in finding out how you desire to express yourself. There’s a reason many books have a an author and an illustrator.

> I agree. I think the distinction between arts and crafts is largely one of utility, rather than skill or technique.

Which is why I take offense to someone claiming that it selects for and requires skill. Especially because the ones making that argument are usually the ones arguing that they’re incapable of making art. I would tell them they just need to spend more time finding themselves.

> Artistic skill lies not merely in the hand, but also in the eye.

Precisely. There is no skill in artistry, it’s rather just a developed sense of style, that doesn’t come from a medium or method, it comes from growing to know oneself.

> It’s unfortunate that art selects so strongly for skill.

Jackson Pollock begs to differ.

Yet a formula that actually calculates the probability of impact is nowhere to be found in your response. You don’t consider mass, density, velocity, orbits, or anything else for that matter.

> If you have a 25 m^2 cross section in the direction of the explosion, at that distance you have a roughly 1 in 246 billion chance of any given bit of debris hitting you.

Source?

> I thought how unreal would that be to be able to see exactly how you do mechanical work on your car before going out and doing it.

You don’t need augmented reality for that, Haynes manuals still exist, or you can just google it, there’s also stuff like Alldata…

The Microsoft HoloLens also supposedly had “business” applications, but was ultimately discontinued. The Apple Vision Pro was DOA, Apple just refuses to come to terms with that.

That’s fair, one of the big things I always enjoyed about languages was the communities that form around them, I actually think that’s more important than the language itself. I will say that the Clojure community has to be one of the better ones that exists.

I just always meant to dabble more in a lisp style dialect and was curious what an emacs enthusiast enjoys. Clojure has been mentioned before and I’ve heard good things about Clojurescript. I never heard of Common Lisp for being close to the metal, more so that it was a bit memory heavy in those applications, but I’ll have to take another look. What’s NBB? Python is undeniably a workhorse for most applications and aside from Java probably the easiest to hire for.

How about what’s your go to programming language?