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thechao

5,801 karma · joined September 23, 2013

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thechao··on What happens when US economic data becomes unreliable
Damn! I just nuked a long conversation with ChatGPT outlining my pet theory that with changes in scale of energy regimes (labor->wind/water->coal->oil->solar) we get an excess energetic capacity that means our entertainment systems can't handle! That excess spills out as elite political retrenchment, entertainment jealousy, and (finally) violence, expanded civil rights, and a new entertainment regime.

Mostly tongue in cheek... but the whole thing hangs together.

thechao··on Nobody ever got fired for using a struct
I know "serde" is a take on "codec" but *rewrite* was right there! Also, as long as I'm whinging about naming? 'print' and 'parse' are five letter p words in a bidirectional relationship. Oh! Oh! push, peek, poke, ... pull! It even makes more sense than pop! And it's four letters!
thechao··on Judge orders government to begin refunding more than $130B in tariffs
Restricted representative size, gerrymandering, FPTP voting, businesses with resident/citizen rights, the restriction of 42 U.S.C. 1983 to not cover Federal actors...
thechao··on The United States and Israel have launched a major attack on Iran
Hot take: Trump's denialism of 2020 and the use of '3rd term' is so that they can make a case that he can have a '4th term' -- that the will of the people to elect him overrides the constitutional limits of Presidency.
thechao··on Dan Simmons, author of Hyperion, has died
It's ok, at best. I can tell you really like it, so for other people that should be a great indicator!
thechao··on Factory-built housing hasn't taken off in California
I'm pretty sure we've had a collapse in trade hours available per capita at a rate that's far exceeded productivity gains. If a GC has a fixed labor pool that can build at either 200$/ft or 600$/ft, then labor constraints basically makes the housing market an open auction. Housing costs have gone up because you're bidding on the final cost overhead per foot. The result is the trades aren't paid more: just the house does. (Nicer finishes, etc.)
thechao··on I built Timeframe, our family e-paper dashboard
I had Windows^(TM) installed in my house when it was built. We're on the top of a 700' hill, so The Weather is pretty accurate.
thechao··on How to choose between Hindley-Milner and bidirectional typing
> If your types are not structurally too complicated

Load bearing hand waving.

thechao··on Hard-braking events as indicators of road segment crash risk
I object to the "late" argument made by etho's parent. The difference in time to destination will inevitably be dominated by lights, in city travel, not by modest speed differences (say 45 vs 55) on a highway. Being safe & out of the way is the trick! It would be nice if we got rid of left & u turns and build our roads for that!
thechao··on AI makes the easy part easier and the hard part harder
I don't know code examples, but this tracks, for me. Anytime I have an agent write something "obvious" and crazy hard -- say a new compiler for a new language? Golden. I ask it to write a fairly simple stack invariant version of an old algorithm using a novel representation (topology) using a novel construction (free module) ... zip. It's 200loc, and after 20+ attempts, I've given up.
thechao··on The Waymo World Model
GPT likes to argue, and most of its arguments are straw man arguments, usually conflating priors. It's ... exhausting; akin to arguing on the internet. (What am I even saying, here!?) Claude's a lot less of that. I don't know if tracks discussion/conversation better; but, for damn sure, it's got way less verbal diarrhea than GPT.
thechao··on TikTok's 'addictive design' found to be illegal in Europe
It's a constant stream of makeup & dogs. I just stick to Michael Penn on YT.
thechao··on 430k-year-old well-preserved wooden tools are the oldest ever found
Then ... you find out that smoking was introduced to the new world in the 16th c, and indigenous North Americans didn't start using the bow & arrow ubiquitously until after the year 1000. But! Native North Americans were using copper contemporaneously with the old world.
thechao··on What “The Best” Looks Like
So... every company only hires the best!? I jest, I jest!

In general, I've found that the younger engineers (20s, up to 30s) have a lot of vim & vigor; but, even the very best ones generally do a lot of spinning-in-place, when they think they're making progress. Almost anyone above a certain level -- call it the 30–40% mark (it's low!) -- can be raised up to be a competent engineer. Probably what'd be called an "an A- or B+" player? That's just part of a good training & onboarding regime; although, it can take 1-3 years, depending on the person. Very good "natural" talent can definitely boost top performance to an A+, but it won't substitute for literal time-under-stress of delivering high quality product-ready code to clients.

thechao··on UN declares that the world has entered an era of 'global water bankruptcy'
Our least tasty crop!
thechao··on Memory layout in Zig with formulas
Overlapping. I have my needs.
thechao··on Memory layout in Zig with formulas
I know this is a bit cursed; but, I always wanted a bitfield-on-steroids construct:

    struct Dang : bits 64    // 64 bits wide, int total
    {
        foo : bits 5 @ 0;    // 5 bits wide at bit offset 0
        bar : bits 5 @ 0;
        baz : bits 16 @ 4;   // 16 bits wide at bit offset 4
        tom : bits 11 @ 32;
    };
thechao··on Tesla kills Autopilot, locks lane-keeping behind $99/month fee
Waymo's been in Austin for a while! Seeing them on MOPAC, when I don't think they're supposed to be on the highway, is always charming.
thechao··on Why medieval city-builder video games are historically inaccurate (2020)
Ballpark figures based on the ram earth construction for TGE vs AOT would have the AOT wall be 5-10x the volume & mass of the TGW. The issue is labor — the Great Wall probably represents 20–100 million ma years of labor. The AoT wall probably has at most 100k man years of labor it could've pulled from. That'd mean it's labor-mass ratio is off by 1000–10000x.
thechao··on If you put Apple icons in reverse it looks like someone getting good at design
You can't say "no" to a restaurant without voting "yes" to an alternative. The first restaurant to a majority wins. Is it a perfect system? No. Do I get to eat in a reasonable amount of time: yes.
thechao··on The recurring dream of replacing developers
You sound bored. If we triple head count overnight, we'd only slow our backlog, temporarily. Every problem we solve only opens up a larger group of harder problems to solve.
thechao··on SETI Home Flags 100 Signals After Sorting 12B Others
Sun Diver by David Brin, or The Black Cloud by Fred Hoyle are both adjacent to this.
thechao··on Let's be honest, Generative AI isn't going all that well
You're absolutely right!

The irony of a five sentence article making giant claims isn't lost on me. Don't get me wrong: I'm amenable to the idea; but, y'know, my kids wrote longer essays in 4th grade.

thechao··on What a year of solar and batteries saved us in 2025
"Freedom for me, rules for thee". Texas has always been a cesspit of political kickback. I mean ... not Illinois or New Jersey, but annoying enough.
thechao··on What a year of solar and batteries saved us in 2025
> which would probably hae been another 3-5k if I could have found someone to do it.

Yo. If you can find an electrician to stop by my house and turn a light switch off for less than 1000$, please inform me. I got a quote for 25k$ to install a system that size, and that price. City code has me by the balls: I can't modify my main panel without inspection, the inspector won't show up without a licensed electrician, and electrician wants the labor. I pointed out that we're talking 8 hours of labor — call it 2500$, lawyer money — and he was like "what's your choice". I'm in Texas.

thechao··on Statement from Jerome Powell
It's about 3%, and the study had major flaws in its context; large westernized countries are out of scope. I don't remember paper, but I just lost this argument to a lawyer.
thechao··on Code is cheap now, but software isn't
Vibecoding is the feeling of coding. It's the same feeling people have when they say they can see the picture in their head, but can't quite draw it.
thechao··on Polymarket refuses to pay bets that US would 'invade' Venezuela
That's just a rescue op, bro.
thechao··on I changed my personality in six weeks
Right? It was a weird test. It started with OCEAN — which got a completely different result than the real OCEAN tests I've done — and then moved to a weird interest/aptitude test. It's clearly some BS marketing thing.
thechao··on I changed my personality in six weeks
I took the test, and the results were completely meaningless. It said that I have a moderate or below average interest in science or engineering. This is patently wrong. This is a deep, abiding, long-term love-affair. It's why I've got a PhD in programming language theory, and have done all the course work, but not the dissertation for PhD's in Economics, Computational Biology, Statistics, Epidemiology, and Mathematics. So... yeah. Complete & utter baloney.
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