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How does a cable develop a kink while it's buried?

I worked for a company of ex-Googlers that used Bazel with Python/Django a few years ago.

- It copies your files into a temporary directory to run them and that directory is named an obnoxiously long hash digest, so it effectively takes a giant shit in all your stack traces. When you're looking at an error message, half of your field of vision is taken up by line noise of the same random hash over and over again and since it runs your Python the first few frames are just helpfully telling you "this code was run through bazel". I even wrote a script that scanned my clipboard for Python stack traces, parsed them and removed this noise to make it easier on my brain to search for the actual line with the error.

- Every import you write you have to write in two files or three if you have to export it. It's double the typing work and finding the target is a pain because there's no jump to definition of the Bazel target so it's even more typing to find it.

- I wanted to use pytest and it was much more work, I don't think I ever got it working. Normally there's no setup you just run "pytest" and it discovers all the tests and runs them.

- Your code doesn't start running as quickly.

- You have to type way more characters to start your code. I had aliases for every endpoint.

- There was something with tests where if the error log was too long it would just say "there was an error, please find it in this randomly-named file" and when you're debugging a test whose error log is too long it's going to be too long every time you re-run it too. So running and seeing the error is now a two step operation, double the work.

Maybe some things have changed or I misremembered something, but overall it was the part of our tech stack I really hated. I just wrote software, I didn't do any ops or any sort of deployment or touched live systems at all really, so I honestly have no clue what it actually did for us it was just pure downside for me. I would never use it.

People are already doing this

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38445578

Some are spending 5+ hours a day on Character.AI chatting. I don't know what they're chatting to but I assume some chats follow a relationship format

https://www.reddit.com/r/CharacterAI/comments/14tfwue/screen...

I've never understood what people see in this story. Meat is a complex organization of trillions of self-replicating machines, each of which (besides red blood cells maybe) is also incredibly complex... much more advanced than anything human minds have been able to build.

I can't imagine what a sentient entity would have to be made out of or how much less "efficient" or stable it would have to be than me for me to find it amusing. If it turns out that some slow geological process or a momentary dust cloud are actually self aware, the last thing I would do is laugh.

Is it just an abstract association that we're wet inside whereas computer chips are dry? That's just where our technology is right now, it largely reflects how our brains can't simulate fluid dynamics or conceive self replicating distributed systems efficiently enough so we resort to designing simple, solid state things.

If you want to use uBlock Origin on iOS, there's Orion browser. Enabling extensions and installing uBlock Origin on it requires a tedious step and the app is noticeably slower to respond and just overall worse and buggier than Safari, but the ad blocking works.

https://apps.apple.com/ca/app/orion-browser-by-kagi/id148449...

https://help.kagi.com/orion/browser-extensions/ios-ipados-ex...

Yea, that's annoying. You have to install the noTunes app and set it to run at log in:

https://github.com/tombonez/noTunes/releases

The internet is telling me that Taiwan uses both calendars. Is that not true? Surely even your grandparents know that it's 2023 in the rest of the world.

It's irrelevant to my point though. Just because the standard is used by 99% of people instead of 100% doesn't mean programmers should invent a new one, for the same reason they chose January 1st 1970 and not November 15th 1970 or any other day of the year. There's only one obvious choice.

That list includes things like the "British Regnal year" and its mostly historical calendars that aren't used at all... The real items on it are almost all ceremonial calendars and everyone (who isn't a priest) uses the Gregorian calendar, or at least most people know it. It's the obvious choice for the standard, I'm not sure why people are pretending it's not.

Notably, the newest entry on that list is "Unix time". Just because there's already more than one entry on the list doesn't mean a small group of people should add another. That's not even "there are now 14 standards" that's just deliberately adding to the pile.

We count years from year 1, but seconds from 1970? It's just illogical, arithmetic has nothing to do with it.

I would say it's a secular international standard of Christian origin, similar to how "information" is an English word even if it's actually a French word. The origin of concepts is important but usage is what ultimately defines them, not etymology. The exceptions prove the rule and most of those countries only use the other calendar ceremonially, and the ones that don't are still familiar with the Gregorian calendar.

Regardless, just because the standard is not used by 100% of humanity doesn't justify programmers coming up with their own calendar instead of using the obvious choice. It's unnecessary.

The one that everyone uses.

> as long as everyone uses the same one

Exactly my point. The rest of humanity uses year 1 as the epoch.

It should be 63835596800 (63.8 billion) because it was kind of self-centred to start counting from 1970 instead of year 1. It doesn't make sense to make memorizing a 4 digit number a prerequisite to becoming a programmer.

An application launcher adding like 20 billion CPU instructions of overhead to every application's launch is just incompetence. And on macOS it's 34 seconds.

It's really Microsoft/Apple's fault. Their app stores come pre-installed and start apps 10 or 100 times faster, yet Steam is able to exist because you can install across operating systems, it has an identity that works across games, the sales, faster and better game discovery, and the achievements (for the people that works on).

Checking the file size first is good, but reading every byte of every file that has at least one file of matching size and and doing a ton of XOR steps (or whatever BLAKE3 is) for all those bytes can't be optimal when different files probably differ within the first few bytes.

If you only have two files, read them X bytes at a time in parallel and XOR the bytes directly, stopping at the first different byte. For more than 2 files, to a first approximation, you have your list of file pointers, you read the first X-number of bytes for all of them and then sort your list in-place based on those first X bytes (sorting is a linear operation if all the X bytes are the same), then you iterate over that sorted list processing each run of identical X bytes in a depth-first fashion. If you have just one element that starts with a given set of X bytes, it's unique and you don't have to process it anymore, otherwise repeat the process reading the next X bytes but only for the files that started with the same bytes. X is probably 8, so that you can efficiently XOR 64 bits together for your comparisons.

It wouldn't be an open source license then.

You're saying people shouldn't be able to buy 8GB RAM Macs, which is crazy. I had to check how much memory my laptop has, and it's 8GB and I've never noticed.

I guess you're just complaining about what you get for the lowest price.

What we actually have though are thousands (potentially millions) of well-fed human brains which are volunteering their downtime in a particular moment of their life to receive factual information of any kind (of the kind they expect to see on Wikipedia) in the hopes of getting something good. A system that chose the best possible article to present to them in that moment to bend the course of their life in a good direction or satisfy some need (or attempt/pretend to satisfy, as much as we can by shooting photons at their retinas) would be a better engineered system than one that randomly selects from its entire catalog of options correctly and efficiently.

You wouldn't print out this picture, go up to a child you know and show it to them. I would hope. The internet lets you efficiently subject more children to indecent exposure because you don't see it actually happen.

Just because people often say "think of the children" insincerely doesn't mean you should never think of them.

The latter

Is it also Apple's fault that Steam takes 34 seconds to start up on my Mac with four 3.2 GHz cores?

From my looking around, Homebrew's Python 3.11 has specific binaries for each macOS and CPU architecture

https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-core/blob/c1321e2629203...

A comment in Homebrew's formula says that Homebrew adds the --enable-optimizations flag during compilation because Homebrew has separate binaries whereas the official Python release doesn't add this flag because "they want one build that will work across many macOS releases"

https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-core/blob/c1321e2629203...

and it looks to me that pyenv just installs the official binary

https://github.com/pyenv/pyenv/blob/28e7000b485bff61235d8a69...

So I would expect it to be the other way around, Homebrew's Python should be faster.

Actually the standard layer also says "Isle of Man" twice at a certain zoom

https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=9/54.1624/-4.5071

Islands which are also states say the name of the island twice at certain zoom levels.

https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=10/54.2375/-4.6695&layers...

https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=10/13.9394/-61.0785&layer...

https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=12/16.7342/-62.1730&layer...

Topography and map don't match up for Fairway Rock

https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=14/65.6235/-168.7505&laye...

Some islands are not named at any zoom level

https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=8/49.629/-126.381&layers=...

https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=8/63.273/-170.184&layers=...

https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=8/71.253/-179.604&layers=...

That's a lot more work than your library just working in more places.

How much money have you spent on NFTs?

I tried both this summer and Mapy.cz is definitely better for hiking. You don't have to zoom in as much to see the trails, hiking trails are marked more clearly with major trails marked in a nice thick red line and it has relief maps (though they can't be downloaded) and the peaks are more clearly labeled along with their height. Also when you zoom out you see a height map instead of just grey for land and blue for water.

Overall it has a nicer attention to detail, for example dashed lines stay in one place as you zoom in/out instead of swimming around and I like the selection of downloaded areas better on Mapy.cz (it has flags next to country names and downloading a new area takes one tap instead of two or three) though it still feels flimsy.

Apple also has a bunch of small hiking and biking trails that Google doesn't. They must've bought some GPS data from Strava or something because you can't see them from space and there's no way they could have paid someone to map them that thoroughly.

How? You have to deliberately search for and buy stuff in their app store.

I use none of those except for homebrew, but I didn't mention it because it's for installing complete programs that happen to be written in Python, not Python dependencies for when I'm working with Python.