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Purely anecdotal as well but it really feels like a quantity over quality thing between the two. It takes significantly longer to find someone in orange, but they’re as helpful as I can reasonably expect. Whereas Lowe’s employees tend to be both useless and annoying.

It varies a lot by store. I’ve been to HDs where they’re all useless, and others where there’s a good number of knowledgeable DIYers working there.

I think a lot of people just expect too much from a big box store employee making $17/hr… You go to HD because you have an easy job and you’re as cheap as their MBAs. If you need help, go to a supply house or an Ace Hardware or something.

I like Haskell, but I never want to work with Haskellers, ever again. I’ll do personal / solo Haskell projects. But never professionally on a team. Haskellers are not team players.

Rustaceans should really take Haskell as a cautionary tale. It doesn’t matter how good your tech is, if your community is actively hostile to newcomers, if you try to haze every newcomer by making them recite your favorite monad definition before giving them the time of day.

Rustaceans are already working their way onto my shitlist for proliferating X years’ Rust experience all over the place. And no, that’s not HR’s fault. HR has no idea what Rust is. It’s rustaceans corrupting the hiring process to reward their fellow cultists.

It’s idiotic to be so insular and so tribalistic, if you want to increase adoption of your favorite language. Programming languages are like natural languages. The more people that use them, the more valuable it is to speak it. Imagine if someone tried to get you to learn mandarin by shitting on your native language. You catch a lot more flies with honey than vinegar.

I’d rather be stuck in JS hell forever, than have to deal with such toxic, dramatic, dogmatic people. And I really dislike writing JavaScript… but the community and ecosystem around the language are way more important than the syntax and semantics. You want the engineers and builders to vastly outnumber the radioactive PL theorists.

Like monopolies, monopsony power exists on a spectrum. For example, Walmart exercises extreme monopsony power over suppliers, despite not being the only retailer in town.

While I can certainly think of ways in which ordinary segmentation can be stretched beyond the limits of what’s reasonable, the example you give is categorically different.

In your example, you’re paying extra for additional capabilities. Doesn’t really matter if it’s a nonlinear increase in cost with the number of seats. Two companies buy 500 seats and pay the same price.

What I object to is some sales bro deciding I should pay 5x more for those same licenses because of who I am, what I look like, where I’m from, etc. It’s absolutely repulsive. Why can’t you simply provide a fair service at a fair price and stop playing these fuck-fuck games? You’re making a profit on this sale either way. Stop trying to steal my profit margin.

Instead of trying to scam me by abusing information asymmetry, why not use your sales talents to upsell me on additional or custom services, once you’ve demonstrated value? Honest and reliable vendors generally get continued (and increasing) business.

Conversely, these Broadcom/private-equity/mafia tactics generally have me running for the exits ASAP. Spite is one hell of a motivator.

0.27% + credit card interchange fees feels more than fair to me. Apple should be thanking their lucky stars that the court isn’t forcing them to spin off the App Store business and pay back every stolen cent from their criminal bundling scheme. This makes IE + Windows look so innocent in comparison. Hardware manufacturers shouldn’t be allowed to mandate a monopoly on software distribution. Full stop.

I believe it depends on which parties are responsible for the criminal antitrust violations. Is it the manufacturers abusing monopoly power, or is it OpenAI abusing monopsony power?

I’m not a lawyer or a forensic accountant, but given how remarkably stable the RAM market was until SCAMA disrupted it, I’m inclined to think the answer to your question is a resounding “no.”

You should look up the monopsony provisions of the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, as well as the Robinson-Patman Act of 1936 which prohibits predatory price discrimination schemes. Scam Alt-Man should be paying the same price for RAM as us plebes, if the DOJ wasn’t derelict in its duty to enforce antitrust law.

It’s wild how Bork’s fraudulent legal theories have been converted to into dogma within a generation.

The Sherman Antitrust Act has outlawed abuses of monopsony power since 1890.

What we should really be asking is, why did we ever stop jailing wanton criminals like Scam Alt-Man?

> I know part of it is that sales wants to be able to price discriminate and wants to be able to use their sales skills on a customer

You say that as if it isn’t the entire reason why these interactions should be avoided at all costs. Dynamic pricing should be a crime.

There’s no honor among thieves. You don’t get to cry about Chinese “bandits” when Anthropic just had to pay $1 billion to settle a massive copyright infringement lawsuit. All of these models were created through the mass-scale theft of humanity’s intellectual property, personal data, and dignity.

Open always beats closed. Drain the moats. Starve the ClosedAI beast.

Add the Export Clause to the list of flagrant violations of the Constitution by this despicable regime.

It is a purely subjective design decision, but I personally prefer the stricter rules that don’t do backwards type inferences like this… type hints shouldn’t follow duck typing semantics. Otherwise you’re not providing nearly as much value IMO. Typescript is really the model organism here. They took the most cursed mainstream programming language, and made it downright good.

Today, the “: list[str]” is 11 wasted characters and it’s not as aesthetically pleasing. Tomorrow, you do some refactor and your inferred list[str] becomes a list[int] without you realizing it… I’m sure that sounds silly in this toy example, but just imagine it’s a much more complex piece of code. The fact of the matter is, you declared foo as a list[any] and you’re passing it to a function that takes an iterable[str] — it ought to complain at you! Type hints are optional in Python, and you can tell linters to suppress warnings in a scope with a comment too.

That being said, perhaps these more permissive rules might be useful in a legacy codebase where no type annotations exist yet.

Really, it’d be extra nice if they made this behavior configurable, but I’m probably asking for too much there. What’s next, a transpiler? Dogs and cats living together?!

If you know your way around the Docker CLI, you can mount your workspace in a new container environment and run it however which way you want. You can attach VSCode to arbitrary containers. You can find the commands used to build the dev container image and run it, either in the logs or with docker inspect.

There’s no coupling being forced by devcontainers. It’s just a useful abstraction layer, versus doing it all manually. There is some magic happening under the hood where it takes your specified image or dockerfile and adds a few extra layers in there, but you can do that all yourself if you wanted to.

I will say, if you stray too far off the happy path with devcontainers, it will drive you insane, and you’ll be better off just doing it yourself, like most things that originated from MSFT. But those edge cases are pretty rare. 99% of workflows will be very happily supported with relatively minimal declarative json configuration.

> I have no idea why people buy pistols that aren’t Glocks.

A G45 was my top pick if price were no object, but this is the worst job market in 20 years for SWEs. I’ve been out of work more often than not for the last 2 years (never taking more than a month to find something new for the previous 10 years).

Until that MN shooting spree, I always felt the risks of gun ownership were greater than the risk of home invasions. I am fortunate to live in an area where random violence is quite rare. But paramilitary-style murders and forced disappearances are a categorically different kind of threat. The statistical rarity doesn’t matter. What matters is taking one of the bastards with you to hell when they come for you. If you can’t save yourself, save the next person on their hitlist, and in doing so, save the world. Die on your feet instead of your knees. There are fates worse than death. Forced disappearance is certainly one of them.

Anyway, my LGS had a lightly-used P365XL with a bunch of accessories for half the price of any Glock. It was a no-brainer to me. Guns aren’t a “buy once cry once” kinda purchase. Seems hardly anyone has just one for very long.

TLDR: people buy other handguns because it’s a tool to them, not a hobby. At least, not yet.

At least they could pivot Hotdog or Not into a dick-pic classifier, which was less trivial when that show was airing.

$14 billion for a glorified mechanical turk platform is bananas. Between this, the $6 billion Jonny Ive acquisition, and a ChatGPT wrapper for doctors called Abridge having a $5 billion valuation, this AI fraud bubble is making pets.com look like a reasonable investment.

That word, “healthier,” is doing a lot of lifting in the parent comment. I read it in the maximally-utilitarian viewpoint, in which all the individual harm is completely ignored, and all we’re talking about is the collective health of society.

Few people should want to live in a society which completely disregards the individual in favor of the collective. It is an inherently totalitarian worldview. It has inspired some of the worst atrocities in human history, including eugenics in the USA and Nazi Germany, and de-kulakization in Ukraine.

In discussing such things with authoritarians, I think bringing up your lived experience just triggers their impulse for cruelty. Instead, I’d point out that totalitarian societies that cover up macro and micro level human rights abuses have always underperformed more “liberal” (as in freedom, not politics) societies in the long run.

Ireland was a broken, impoverished backwater, backing in the days of the Magdalene laundries and Catholic theocracy. I’m talking mid-20th century, for those who are not familiar. Now it’s one of the richest countries in the world. It is not a coincidence that America’s least repressed, most godless city, San Francisco, is also its richest. There is a causal link between prosperity and not burying all the skeletons in your closet (individually and collectively).

It’s a nice lie the right tells themselves, that there isn’t one long gun for every military-age liberal already in friendly partisan hands. This country is so flooded with guns, that it spills over to Mexico, a country where guns are almost completely banned. Our sloppy seconds enable the cartels to fight on even footing with the Mexican Army.

Most of our GWOT veterans tend to despise the Republican Party for what should be obvious reasons. Chicago famously has no guns too, am I right? The cognitive dissonance is honestly astounding.

Honestly though, guns really only go so far. They’re useful for making yourself more trouble to fuck with than you’re worth to cowardly paramilitary thugs. They’d rather go abduct first graders and unarmed adults in the final stages of becoming US citizens, than risk suddenly finding out they’re in the middle of Ruby Ridge 2. Guns are more of a self defense tool. Ukraine and Iran have proven in recent years that drones are far more useful to an insurgency than guns. That constant hum, like a swarm of bees, constantly threatening a slow and painful death, destroys the enemy’s will to live, never mind fight. You see videos of Russian orcs just sitting there, almost catatonic, as the drone finally puts them out of their misery.

I wonder how many civilians will be disappeared before a Dem governor finds their balls and musters the state militia. There’s millions of patriots out there just waiting for the call to action. This nonviolent shit will get you killed. MLK was a gun owner.

If that kind of talk worries you, consider how much uglier it will be when the good people of LA form unregulated militias instead. Do you really want to see Ruby Ridge 2: Rooftop Korean boogaloo?

Gitlab begs to differ.

The number of times I’d google my problem and find a ticket from 6+ years ago with dozens of users participating in the comments, confirming it’s a consistent, common problem, and not a peep from their devs.

It’s like their public issue tracker only exists to insult their users.

My best guess is that legalizing corruption has made everyone a bit more deranged. Some more than others.

I don’t think it’s such a huge leap that a policy with such unanimous opposition was put in place by the select few special interests who benefit from it. It helps (or doesn’t help?) when they all got together for that photo op at the inauguration.

How many companies in Silicon Valley can trace their history back to eight postdocs who absolutely despised William Shockley (for good reason)? They didn’t climb the same ladder, so much as run away from the same bear, using the same emergency exit.

Spite and necessity are much more common motivators for greatness than team synergy. People will do the wildest things because they share a mutual enemy. Just look at the drone innovation that’s happened in Ukraine.

On the other hand, annoying sports analogies are a fantastic recipe for mediocrity.

Great scientists and engineers seldom work alone, but their paths to the top were usually rather unique, and all too often, full of tragedy.

On a finite planet, we probably ought to care about how many orders of magnitude more energy that the LLM must use to perform a task than our 20-watt chimp-brains.

I’ve been asking myself that question regarding dating app companies for 10 years. The status quo is so dystopian already. Sure, go ahead, put an LLM in it. How much worse could it get than a glorified ELO rating?

“I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time -- when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness...” - Carl Sagan

I’m used to embellishing things a bit, telling a more favorable story of the truth. That is categorically different from what hiring panels crave now. People used to be able to smell flagrant bullshit. Now, they don’t just fall for it. They reject everything but bullshit.

They want you to pretend like you were a cowboy coder in a regulated environment where redundancy is a requirement, not a dirty word.

I dunno if they’ve just spent too much time chatting to stochastic parrots, if we desperately need to bring back onsite interviews, or if HR is deliberately sabotaging anyone with integrity. God knows only a psychopath could work in HR and still sleep at night. But you’re right. Let them eat slop.

From a more left-wing perspective, it certainly doesn’t feel like a coincidence that Section 174 kneecaps anyone who’d try to compete with the FANG trusts. I’m sure an oligarch paid good money to insert this rubbish into the tax code. Well, relatively good money. American politicians are shockingly cheap to pay off. Probably only took $10k each, to convince them to destroy billions in economic value.

It’s a rare thing these days: a law everyone can hate, regardless of ideology. You don’t have to be a Laffer curve believer to recognize that you can design tax schemes that would destroy competition and/or cause excessive deadweight loss. After all, if all taxes were created equal, we could just replace them with a money printer.

Hopefully it doesn’t take three years to reach a consensus on these moronic tariffs, which are far more destructive to the overall economy.

Judging by the Big Law shakedown, enforcement will be based on how much of your corporate cash is held in Taco’s shitcoin.

A sufficiently idiotic tax scheme such as Section 174 can destroy far more income tax revenue than it collects, by destroying jobs and small businesses, and knocking high earners down a tax bracket or three. Section 174 isn’t doing much to tax FANG companies. Apple has all their profits in their Double Irish Dutch Sandwich racket. Amazon cooks the books to appear unprofitable on paper, in a manner that would make Hollywood accountants blush.

This really only hurts the competition, who is completely unprofitable in every sense of the word. And all for what? Left-shifting the collection of a 21% income tax by a couple years? I think many of us would’ve done terrible things in 2021 to only have an effective tax rate of 21%. The government mugged Peter the payroll tax man to pay Paul the corpo tax man, but they disemboweled Peter in the process, and most of the money had to be disposed of as a biohazard.

I don’t believe Section 174 was an honest attempt to manage the deficit. I think Zuck, the PayPal Mafia, and the blood-boy cabal bribed some Congresscritters to kill off what remained of their competition.

I feel like this is a rite of passage for all engineers: messing around with things like Lucene long enough to realize that search-for-humans is a relatively hard problem, even at small scale.

Improving your simple website's search function will take days or weeks, not hours. If you make your own search engine, it's almost guaranteed to be worse than ElasticSearch.