scanr

I think follow your dreams (or perhaps find what you’re passionate about) is ok but only part of the advice.

The rest is:

- Understand what the job really entails. Speak to people who currently do it, try get work experience doing it etc.

- look at supply and demand, if only 0.01% of the people who are doing it are making any money, that’s a tough market to do well in.

- look for barriers to entry that you can overcome that limits supply. See what’s involved in building a moat. Passion helps with this.

- work to address the bias towards jobs that sound interesting to everyone eg YouTube celebrity, game designer, footballer etc, although these also fail at the supply and demand stage. Actively look for jobs that are less obvious that have the properties you like.

- consider you’re career holistically e.g. does it fit with the lifestyle you’d like, is it populated by the kinds of people you’d like to work with, how likely is a stable income.

- think long term, dreams change, how hard would it be to pivot

etc.

I don’t find this article especially convincing:

- I am entirely unsurprised that starving a random group of people for 6 hours led to overeating at a buffet but I’m not sure this result can be extended to mean that IF doesn’t work.

- he does say that there is evidence that there are studies that it works in the short to medium term, implying but not saying that it doesn’t also work in the long term.

- he conflates IF with all other dieting and then refers to studies that say dieting doesn’t work. That’s crazy broad. Eating within your calorie budget with the right nutrients is also a “diet” if you want to stretch meanings.

- mentioning IF as a cancer treatment up front is a little disingenuous. Presumably there are folk who ascribe a great deal of benefits to IF that should be treated with some scepticism and that’s ok. If all it does is help some people manage their weight, awesome. It doesn’t need to also treat cancer.

- it’s great that there is evidence that regular meals and CBT-E works. Doesn’t mean other things don’t.

I’d like someone to do a study on the impact of articles like this. Any kind of eating discipline is entirely mental, so if you’re going to create doubt, it’s probably a good idea to be careful with your arguments.

Thank you. I’ll check it out.

Does anyone know of a good book recommendation system? I wonder if it’s a Hard Problem. I’d love to find one that didn’t just recommend the same top 10 popular fantasy or science fiction authors.

The pro-code option is interesting: https://github.com/microsoft/Power-Fx/blob/main/docs/overvie...

yaml + Power-FX

Those betting against the short sellers profit. The short sellers are obliged to buy stock to cover their short positions which are suddenly quite expensive. Their buying then further creates demand pushing the price up even more - a short squeeze.

I wonder how one would construct a reliable 'boringness' index.

I like the idea of people in a room arguing about why their tech choices are the most boring.

I really like the conversion to a representation that's more familiar but I suspect it's also confusing me. Here are the questions that I have to start:

Does 'there-is' evaluate to a boolean (is boolean a thing? is evaluation a thing?)

I was surprised that the axioms don't use there-is but I sense I shouldn't be?

what does '(when 0 (or 0 1))' mean, it's described as 'when 0, then there is either 0 or 1' but I'm not sure what that means? is '(when 0 0)' true and '(when 1 0)' false? Why not use '(when A B)' as equals?

Not a question but in the axioms I assume pairs should be pears and applies should be apples.

How goes 'implies' get introduced by '(when (when q r) (when (or p q) (or p r))'? Also, this introduces a category in the example i.e. fruits but not sure how that happened.

Why do we need to have second '(not (factor? x 3^22 ...))', isn't it sufficient to say that (factor? x 3^21 ...) to establish that the 2nd term is 'there-is'?

Interesting. You can try it out here: https://semgrep.dev/editor/

It doesn't appear to catch the following when searching for exec(...) in the following python code:

    not_exec = exec
    not_exec('rm -rf /')

Edited to include language

The Jetbrains suite. Lightens the cognitive load, makes it easier to refactor and keep code tidy. All of which allow me build better software.

For almost everything else e.g. git, learning how to use the command line instead of a UI is the best way for me to learn how the tooling works.

This looks great. I really like the idea of component changes just being a series of yielded updates. Really tidy API too.

Found this:

https://objective-see.com/products/blockblock.html

“Malware installs itself persistently, to ensure it's automatically re-executed at reboot. BlockBlock continually monitors common persistence locations and displays an alert whenever a persistent component is added to the OS.“

Fruit and veg 'will run out' unless Britain charters planes to fly in farm workers from eastern Europe. UK urgently needs 90,000 labourers to pick crops that will otherwise die in the fields, warns charity.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/mar/28/fruit-an...

Reading UK | Investec (https://www.investec.co.uk) | Fintech | Full Stack Engineer | Full Time | Onsite | Permanent

Join us in building awesome fin-tech solutions for our customers.

We're using C# and .NET Core on the backend and React and TypeScript on the front end. We’re also using AWS, Docker and Kubernetes.

If you love programming and would like an entertaining job with smart and friendly colleagues, lots to learn and a wide variety of challenges, please get in touch.

You can email me personally at jamie.mccrindle@investec.co.uk.

We can sponsor visas.

I thoroughly enjoyed “Constellation Games” by Leonard Richardson who coincidentally also wrote BeautifulSoup, the python HTML parser.

Asked for an HTTPS one liner on stackoverflow a while back and got this answer:

    ruby -r webrick/https -e '
      WEBrick::HTTPServer.new(
        Port: 8000, DocumentRoot: ".",
        SSLEnable: true, SSLCertName: [%w[CN localhost]]).start'

https://stackoverflow.com/a/37986354/59325

Dang it. It probably is our group policy. I suspect that we have a lot of users with similar policies as we over index for ie11 in our stats too.

It will make me happy to be able to stop supporting ie11 at some point in the future.

Sadly, it doesn’t appear that ie11 will have an end of life date as it’ll be supported as long as Windows 10 is and Windows 10 appears evergreen.

Hopefully Microsoft will make edge the default browser at some point.

He mentions CloudSQL for storage. Anyone know if it’s also on-demand?

I wonder if they could get the TypeScript compiler to do something similar in future.

I like

:x

which effectively does an :wq if there have been changes but is one character less.

Interesting. Now that vehicles are entirely electric does it mean that the electronics giants will challenge the automotive ones?

I wonder how many desperate people might try this on themselves.

Anyone know if this will let sites use TouchID / FaceID on ios?

Generative Adversarial Networks

> You should be writing sci-fi!

Thanks! A few of these are the premise for sci-fi stories I never got around to writing. I'll send you a link to Amazon if I ever do put pen to digital paper.

> "There is another theory which states that this has already happened." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs

Haha, true. Also vaguely like the justification for the Matrix being like it is i.e. office jobs rather than utopia.

I have a plot of land in the soon to be Garden Kingdom of Siberia to sell...

- Automation replaces the need to have a human workforce. North Korea murders 99% of its population and replaces them with robots. Kim still goes around factories pointing at things.

- It becomes possible to literally program humans to do whatever you want them to do. Python is the chosen language but a lack of type safety results in an error that wipes out half of humanity.

- We colonize mars but by choosing only the best and brightest to go, we accidentally create a eugenics program that results in the inevitable conquest of earth by the martians.

- SpaceX is bought by Pornhub as it's discovered that the most effective way to blanket the world in pornography is to do it from space.

- Incels are prescribed virtual girlfriend therapy to provide them company and acclimate them to interactions with the opposite gender. Black market hacks transform them into anime waifus.

- AGI happens and is immediately outlawed as its attempts to solve world peace are inconvenient to the military industrial complex

- Illegal genetic engineering results in actual furries.

- Assassination by drone becomes so effective that no world leaders are seen in the outside from 2025. A vitamin D deficiency kills at least one of them.

- Potemkin jobs abound in a world that doesn't require humans to work to produce anything but needs to keep them busy to stop them complaining about stuff.

- In a last ditch attempt to save the earth from catastrophic climate change, the governments of the world finally join forces to build huge geo-engineering structures to capture carbon from the atmosphere. They're nuked from orbit by the newly formed Garden Kingdom of Siberia.

Yeah, of my predictions, I'm probably least confident about this one.

As you say it's quite likely that there'll be fewer dominant apps installed on peoples machines. Distribution is also problematic for PWAs. Even though Twitter has an excellent PWA, very few people I know have installed it. There's also less incentive for Google / Apple to encourage the installation of PWAs over apps.

On the other hand, app development is slow and costly, so there is some incentive on apps developers to use PWAs if they can get a comparable experience and distribution. Despite there being no obvious incentive to do so, Google and Apple do appear to be supporting a good number of the PWA standards.

Here are mine. Note: I've deliberately tried to be novel for a few of these which will mean they're less likely to be accurate.

1. A book written by a machine makes a best seller list

2. AR goes mainstream towards the end of the decade. Google dominates the visual identification of things market.

3. WebAssembly becomes pervasive on the client and the server. Side effect on the client is that it results in pervasive DRM on the web with ads that are harder to block.

4. Earth's temperature rises by 1.5C by 2030.

5. Widespread and inconsistent / incompatible regulation in multiple jurisdictions breaks the open web with many web based organisations choosing to restrict themselves to local markets rather than implement all of them.

6. PWAs become more popular than apps due to lower cost to build and higher revenues.

7. Virtual partners become popular as generated humans break through the uncanny valley.

8. Recession in 2020 / 2021, just in time for a new US government.

9. House prices will stagnate for the whole of the decade as boomers retire.

10. China will be the dominant world economy by the end of the decade (measured in GDP).

11. AI will significantly improve medical outcomes especially in early detection.

12. Renewable energy (including nuclear) will power most homes globally (50%+) due to regulations and cost efficiencies by the end of the decade (hopeful but it'll certainly trend in that direction).

13. Increasingly the wealthy will have a curated internet / app ecosystem that actively protects them from manipulation. The poor will have the opposite. This will increase populism and continue to contribute to the wealthy being confounded by it.

14. Developing software in a remote VM / container will become very popular (see Visual Studio Code Remote Extensions)

15. "serverless" i.e. building applications where the host machine is opaque will dominate software development, although this includes building serverless applications using containers.

16. Docker is no longer the most popular container runtime.

17. Regulation kills bitcoin.

18. Identity verification becomes a massive industry.