rdw

Acronym stands for Public Housing In My Backyard. (I had to look this up)

Settlement is one of the conditions that SF Bay realtors draw a very hard line around. I have on several occasions seen just the possibility of settlement kill deals and drive prices down by huge percentages. Similar to black mold.

The explanation that makes sense to me is that settlement is a problem that could be very costly and disruptive over a long period of time, and it's expensive and complicated to prove otherwise. So in the case of the Millennium Tower, they did in fact attempt to prove that the settlement was not going to cause major long-term problems, but that seemingly had no impact on the price behavior. I think with such an ingrained pattern, there isn't really a way to force buyers to think unconventionally; everyone "knows" that you don't buy in a building with settlement, and no one "knows" that there are circumstances where it's OK to buy anyway.

> New Yorkers may seem assertive/rude/cold at first but you will soon love the fact you always know where you stand.

Unfortunately, I have observed that New Yorkers are now performatively complaining and being rude. They believe they have to be a little negative, so they find something wrong with the current situation, no matter how tenuous. They're supposed to be grouchy so they act like your presence is a burden even if they're actually really happy you're there.

There's nothing wrong with it, it's just a different style. But it's no more or less phoney than anywhere else.

Source: lived for 20 years in New York, and 20 years in CA.

This is truly an optimistic take. Mark's "maybe no one else would bother building this if I don't" ethos is inspiring. But, man, that can justify absolutely anything. It seems like an expensive hobby, like Rod Stewart's model trains. Impressive, amazing, had to be built by that one person or it never would have been made....but, it's gratifying to only that one person, too.

Maybe my people were special in some way, but it seemed like the idea of lining things up vertically just immediately clicked with them. It seems like it's something that folks do in their regular lives when writing (hand-written) notes or on a whiteboard.

People have strange trouble with delimeters. They put commas inside the closing quote, (e.g. ["hello," "there"]) because I guess that's how they were taught in English class somehow. They forget a bracket and then can't figure out how to fix it because the tools are no help. They start putting in excess braces like they're some type of Simon Says: [{"hello"}]. I guess I can't be critical -- this is a lot like how I write CSS. But whitespace makes more sense to a lot of folks because it just "looks right".

TOML is a decent format because it does use whitespace for delimiting -- but only newlines. It gets verbose if you want to represent large amounts of deeply-nested data, though.

It used an off-the-shelf library, I don't remember which one anymore. I don't think it really matters though -- YAML is a format, not a parser.

Per the YAML docs [0], "Creating a fully compliant parser has proven almost impossible." Pretty much every YAML parser out there is going to have its own idiosyncratic subset that it handles. That doesn't make the _files_ not-YAML.

(This does make YAML a horrible data exchange format. No argument there!)

Also, JSON has a similar condition [1].

[0]: https://github.com/yaml/yaml-grammar [1]: http://seriot.ch/projects/parsing_json.html

YAML's not bad if you couple it with strong types. I used YAML _heavily_ and wasn't aware of any of the issues that the author mentioned because of the types. It doesn't let YAML automatically parse dates because the destination structure is either a date or a string or whatever, and that controls the parsing. It doesn't have the Norway problem because it knows whether a field is a boolean or not. I don't think it had the octal problem, not 100% sure though.

It's very good for non-technical people to edit because they are allergic to symbols and quotes and brackets and making sure things match. YAML's syntax let you write like you're a CEO sending agenda notes to a subordinate. You can easily switch between line-per-item and brackets-style and you do so whenever the readability is improved by doing so. It's highly intuitive somehow. You can pretty much turn someone into a config-editor just by showing them an example file, especially with syntax highlighting.

It would have been surprising and mildly impactful on the world at large, had Facebook lost. So the tech journalists were following it in the small chance that that happened.

It really seems like the folks who are upset at the lack of coverage are so emotionally invested in this trial for whatever reason that they can't see the truth that there's no reason to care about it outside of the personal feelings of the celebrities involved. At least with SCO v IBM, and Oracle v Google, the rulings could, and did, have significant impacts on how regular tech folks went about their careers.

Or maybe the reason is that it's not interesting. "Meritless lawsuit against huge company fails, status quo remains the same" stories play out every day. I'm sure it was a big deal for the participants, as most trials are, but, for anyone outside, its resolution is super boring.

People care about performance a lot, especially when writing evented I/O. The explicitness is pretty useful at preventing unexpected performance cliffs.

One of the main pieces of feedback I heard about green threads is that they are "just as confusing" as threads. Developers tend to view preemptive multitasking as a difficult-to-manage hazard. Non-explicit async is not technically preemptive, but, most developers won't know which functions are going to cause a context switch, and it can change from one version to the next. So they kinda end up assuming they're all gonna context switch, so they put mutexes on things and basically do all the tedious and annoying work that threading entails. It's simultaneously "too much magic" and "not enough magic".

That said, Ruby's new green threading stuff [1] is very exciting, has the potential to revitalize the concept, and we'll just have to see how things turn out in the next five years.

[1] http://www.wjwh.eu/posts/2020-12-28-ruby-fiber-scheduler-c-e...

Just because you're not getting that panel back doesn't mean it's destroyed and wasted. I figure that these policies simplify their front-line technician jobs, getting faster turnaround times and higher success rates. Then they have a different department that sorts through all the removed/broken parts, repairing and using parts from them. No idea if this is what they actually do, but it would be the smart way to handle it.

Your comment got me thinking, and I checked the math. It turns out that light takes ~0.2 ns to travel 2 inches. But the speed of signal propagation in copper is ~0.6 c, so that takes it up to 0.3 ns. So, still pretty small compared to the overall latencies (~13-18 ns for DDR5) but it's not negligible.

I do wonder if there are nonlinearities that come in to play when it comes to these bottlenecks. Yes, by moving the RAM closer it's only reducing the latency by 0.2 ns. But, it's also taking 1/3rd of the time that it used to, and maybe they can use that extra time to do 2 or 3 transactions instead. Latency and bandwidth are inversely related, after all!

Rent does not necessarily include a profit margin for the owner. There is a rental market rate and if the landlord's expenses exceed that rate, they can and do rent out the unit at that rate. It's still better than leaving it empty. Loss-making business ventures are common, and if we're talking about owners who have a separate source of income than property ownership, loss-making side hustles are exceedingly common. (there's a lot of complexity that sometimes does incentivize big commercial-property landlords to leave office spaces empty in some cities, but, I think that's a different market yet again)

Atlassian bought Bitbucket after it was already mature. That's why!

I currently believe that it is because software engineers are non-substitutable. The hiring manager is not looking for any qualified engineer, they are looking for a very specific engineer who is also qualified. Engineers also are not looking for "any programming job", they want a job at an early-stage startup or in an infrastructure team or to learn a new framework. This is true in many industries, of course, but significantly more so for software.

There's a startup using a similar principle to address a related challenge: getting and staying focused on a task. I tried it and it was surprisingly effective. https://www.focused.space/ (Disclaimer: I know one of the founders)

Is this some sort of six-degrees thing where Eric Schmidt wanted to co-author a book with Kissinger (or the other way around) for the prestige? And then they paid Huttenlocher to actually write it?

Looks like one of the NRO telescopes is being used in the Roman space telescope: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nancy_Grace_Roman_Space_Telesc...

As amazing as Hubble is, it's worth remembering that other agencies built several more devices of the same or better resolving capability, and the NRO donated two spares to NASA almost a decade ago [1][2]. Not sure what's happened with those devices since then.

"Why build one when you can have three, at thrice the price?"

[1] http://content.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,2116436,0... [2] https://www.spacesafetymagazine.com/space-exploration/deep-s...

The hypothesis in the article could be correct (that industry is not adopting new academic innovations because they fail in the real world). Based on my experience in this industry, though, it could just be that there isn't a super strong connection between academia and the people implementing these kinds of systems. I've had many conversations with my academically-minded friends where they're astonished that we haven't jumped on some latest innovation, and I have to let them down by saying that the problem that paper was addressing is super far down our list of fires to put out. Maybe there are places where teams of top-tier engineers are free to spend 6 months every year rewriting critical core systems use un-battle-scarred new algorithms that might have 20% performance improvements, but most places I've worked would achieve the same result for far less money by spending 20% more on hardware.

For many, the question is about the code quality as well. Having an AI write substantial chunks of code based on the work of "the average github committer" is being criticized as a problem for security, correctness, and understanding.

I think such arguments are a little overheated, but I do have my copy of tabnine configured to use only local code because depending on the full dataset (which is available over the could only IIRC) seemed like it was going to be more work than it saved.

The feature of TabNine that uses the "public" dataset is optional. It can also provide completions only based on local code. That optionality is important.

Also, tabnine has a smaller scope; you type "var " and it suggests a variable name and possibly the rest of the line, like autocomplete has been doing for decades. Perfectly normal.

My understanding of copilot is that you can type "// here's a high-level description of my problem" and it'll fill out entire functions, dozens of lines. The scope is much grander.

There are different methods of framing a house and roof and builders do tend to specialize in just one. Balloon framing is different than platform framing which is different than mortise and tenon framing. To learn a new system, a carpenter would have to learn a whole new system of rules, measurements, suppliers, attachment methods, and seasonal tolerances. Here's an overview of some of these techniques: https://www.hometips.com/diy-how-to/house-framing.html

It's actually pretty analogous to programming methods.

When Google Maps came out in 2004 and revolutionized mapping with the sheer quantity of data presented unbelievably smoothly, there was a similar (though smaller) excitment about "map-based" apps. It seemed like such a big blue ocean had opened and fortunes would be made on the back of new killer apps. I worked on a few prototypes myself and saw many pitches from various maps-based startups.

But pretty much only Yelp was able to succeed. There just aren't a lot of highly-monetizable applications that are primarily map-based. No one knew the limits at the time, though.

I think AR is in kind of the same place. The demos are mindblowing and there's enthusiasm, but there aren't a lot of killer apps with the state of the technology. For location-based apps, they really required a second piece in order to really open up the space: the smartphone. It may be that AR is waiting for some other supporting technologies before it becomes obviously laden with utility.

The early generations worked as you describe. Newer/better ones attempt to map out the layout of the home, which allows them to cover larger areas, return to base to recharge/dump dirt, and to only gently touch objects instead of slamming into them at full speed. They actually probably still don't need ML for all of that, motion planning was able to avoid the need for "learning" for decades. But I bet they do use ML anyway.

The justification for why they don't need an auto industry CEO makes sense. But do co-CEOs make any more sense? I never get a good vibe from that arrangement.

The 30% cut was considered very good at the time. It was way better than the 50-90% cut that traditional publishers would take.

A sibling comment notes that Steam charged 30% at the time (though some had better deals) but it's worth noting that Steam was not an open platform that anyone could publish on. Much like for consoles, to put a game on Steam you had to have a preexisting relationship with Valve, or try to develop one with no certainty of success. This was also considered a very generous cut because getting on Steam was almost a guarantee of financial success.

I asked a similar question of someone who worked on these systems at Instacart, and the answer was that story inventory is often innacurate or incomplete. The stores just haven't needed the degree of accuracy before.

There's also a fun integration problem: food manufacturers essentially lease shelf space and then the manufacturer handles all the inventory/restocking, and the store itself doesn't know or care what's there. So now you have to contact a bunch of third parties to learn what's in the store.

Dr. Hossenfelder has been on the beat of searching for mathematical ways of eliminating dark matter for some years. I hope she writes something about this paper.

https://backreaction.blogspot.com/2019/10/dark-matter-nightm...

https://backreaction.blogspot.com/2018/07/evidence-for-modif...

https://backreaction.blogspot.com/2018/04/no-that-galaxy-wit...

https://backreaction.blogspot.com/2018/03/modified-gravity-a...

https://backreaction.blogspot.com/2016/10/modified-gravity-v...

As a counter, there's this article which lists a daunting number of phenomena that dark matter explains which competing theories have to also explain, and why that's very difficult: https://medium.com/starts-with-a-bang/only-dark-matter-and-n...

Here's one site that attempts to catalog this: https://displaylag.com/video-game-input-lag-database/

Found an article from a few years ago: https://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3725/measuring_respon...

Not all games are that bad, especially these days. And your overall point is correct: adding even a little bit on top of that already horrendous latency is going to be noticeable by players.