vba616

I don't know much about either Houston or zoning, overall, but I have been there many years ago, to some degree because I was interested in the consequences of libertarian policies, and from what I saw, there was more intermingling of different types of property use than I'm used to seeing in the eastern US.

Of course, since I didn't stay there, I am hardly about to evangelize for any of their policies for other cities. I remember when someone asked why I came to their "shitty city", and at another time, putting a bag of fast food down on a table in a cheap motel and their being almost like a tidal wave of roaches in seconds.

(Although in fairness the exterminators might have been coincidentally clearing another part of the building at that instant and that could've been what drove them rather than smelling food)

It replied chirpily that it could do that, in so many words, and output a grammar (which I didn't test) that solely parsed MySQL identifiers rather than the double-quoted kind. It wasn't precisely an invalid response, but it was clearly inappropriate for a human-like reply and showed what I consider a qualitative absence of consciousness.

I don't know why, but this seems to be a pattern with SQL - I have never asked it about MySQL, and indeed MySQL results tend to pollute my Google searches, but there may just not be enough other training material.

It's starting to aggravate me every time someone concedes it only is useful sometimes, and you have to check it, because it is starting to seem like unwarranted "praising with faint damns".

Some random things that seem difficult to get an AI to deal with:

1) Things that people expect you to know by observation, but not be told and not to say.

2) Things that people expect you to know/adhere to, in spite of being told something different.

3) Strategically creating the impression that you do or do not have the ability to change your course of action.

It occurred to me to connect it to recent unusual weather, and I found that I wasn't the first, but I don't see anything about it in news about the "crisis".

To be clear, I hadn't the least idea of whether it should result in warming or cooling, but the experts seem to be saying that an unprecedented amount of water vapor - which is a greenhouse gas - should be stuck high in the atmosphere and result in substantial additional global warming on a decade scale.

It depends on your perspective; it's not unheard of to portray the whole swath from Boston to DC as one gigantic metro area of 50+ million people.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_megalopolis

On a different note, when I think of people being fascinated with the idea of no zoning, I think of Houston, Texas.

And yet, when I think of The Atlantic or its avid readers, I do not think of people who find Houston, Texas an appealing model.

That possibility ("a commonly held belief") indeed is the reason I thought it worth engaging.

I don't think I can see your upvotes, and discussing voting is against the guidelines.

>It's not as if I came up with this opinion out of thin air.

It would be unreasonable to assume you did. Yet that doesn't give me a hint where your opinions do come from, which is why I was - and am - asking.

>You don't know me.

That was the gist of my whole comment. It's unfortunate if the meaning of the whole thing was somehow inverted.

>You can't possibly know something like this from one comment on the internet

Something like what? You quoted a sentence that tried to communicate, in short, nobody can judge you.

My entire comment was a disclaimer or admission that I know nothing about you nor can I judge you, and a solicitation of information.

>It seems that others have said this to you in the past, and you are just parroting it to me

Every word I wrote was original to me and expressed my thoughts at least for one particular moment.

Do you think repeating beliefs that others hold is bad? I don't think it's good or bad in itself. By the repetition of an idea, you make it your own, and there is always a good reason for doing so...but that reason is unique to you and not made clear unless you choose.

Asking about your reasons may seem intrusive, like asking if you want to open yourself to bullying from all and sundry, but I strongly believe in this principle:

What convinces you of a thing is the best possible argument for convincing other people

Constructive dialogue on anything cannot take place without some willingness to treat discussion as more than a tactical game.

Not participating in constructive dialogue is everyone's right. The benefit to you, the carrot and not the stick, is that you might one day rightly convince someone, somewhere, in the world of something you believe in.

Who knows, you could be the first person to convince anyone of anything on the internet in the last half century.

Your feelings, whatever they are, that lead you to your opinions, political principles, or ethics, are inherently immune to being invalidated by others.

However, it makes me nervous to read comments such as yours, because my first reaction is that I can't tell what motivates you.

Oftentimes deep feelings come from personal connections.

If person A had a loved one who became homeless, and person B spent a week in a mental hospital, then those people might naturally have very different reactions to history or public policy debates.

Neither is right or wrong, but either might learn from the other.

I don't understand the train of thought that lead to the sentence above. "Marx's Labor Theory of Value" is a well-known phrase, but its meaning is probably more precise for you than me.

Do you not think, broadly speaking, there is some economy of scale with longer hours (compared to 15/week), that gaining experience more quickly has some value, that overhead like shift handoffs or putting work aside for the next day becomes more significant the shorter the day/week is?

I'd also suggest it's plausible that automation changes the nature of work to increase the efficiency of long hours. The more education and thought a job requires, the longer it takes to "get up to speed" and to hand off work to other people.

"A disk is a bunch of bits" doesn't seem to me like an accurate characterization of microcomputers at any time, really, in the last 50 years. I started to say that I think things got really complicated with SSDs, but spinning hard and floppy disks were never that simple either.

I don't mean to nitpick, and I'm no expert, but I think the non-bit-array nature of storage had a lot of implications for users doing low level stuff - for example, copy protection sometimes exploited the hardware to try to make an uncopyable disc. Or if you were setting up partitions on a hard drive, you'd need to know about more than just "disk = bits".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cylinder-head-sector https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_block_addressing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modified_frequency_modulation

"Commodore's Amiga used an unusual format which got closer to the disk's raw (unformatted) capacity by eliminating the gaps between sectors and simplifying the identification data. This meant that individual sectors could not be rewritten; the Amiga would simply rewrite the entire track."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floppy_disk_format

I also remember that audio CDs, even though you could read them on a computer, were very, very much not bit arrays. Despite their vaunted "digital" nature, you couldn't rely on getting the same bitstream every time if you were ripping them to disk. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cdparanoia

https://www.myfonts.com/collections/dossier-font-tabular-typ...

If your worldview is wrong enough, even a few data points will show with high probability it is incorrect.

"As easy to use as your telephone book, THE INTERNET DIRECTORY provides: user-friendly instructions on how to get on-line and get the information you want; a guide to the thousands of interconnected computer systems that comprise Internet; tips on how to send and receive messages, and much more"

https://www.amazon.com/Internet-Directory-Guide-Usenet-Bitne...

Someone gave it a one star review in 2008, saying "I tried to use a bit of information from the book and it didn't work so I'm not going to bother reading it anymore."

Another shortcoming is it wasn't printed on acid-free paper for the ages.

It seems there were still similar directories being printed at least as late as 1995.

   boss: you might try doing X as your next project
   me: ok
   boss: actually, we can't do X, we don't have access
   me: ok
   boss: you might want to watch this video on X, though, it's interesting
   me: no

You could declare custom integer types like this:

type My_Type is range -5 .. 10;

And then you could reference the range with My_Type'First or My_Type'Last

And there were named parameters.

   for A in Range_Type loop
      I_IO.Put (
         Item  => A,
         Width => 3,
         Base  => 10);
      ...
   end loop;

(2) I think a lot of people were prejudiced against it coming from "the government", wrongly assuming that it was the product of a committee like COBOL.

(3) The aerospace industry did not greatly influence everyone else to use Ada, and eventually they just said "screw it, we should use C++ to be able to hire people and cut costs with COTS tooling"

I would assume they owed whatever ethical duties they owed to Twitter in the sense of the shareholders selling to Musk, and I threw out $20 billion as a wild-ass guess of how much he was paying above fair value at that point in time. They got paid ASAP because they're savvy.

And I assume Musk is having a fit of pique and the legal arguments make no more sense than the stuff about the "bot problem". He didn't own the company before he owned it, and usually you acquire the debts of a company you buy, right?

But I'm an expert in none of it. I just expect more of the same from a person with an established routine.

(By the way, a $100 bill - the largest US currency these days - is said to weigh about 1 gram, meaning that $100 x 454 grams/lb x 2000 lbs/ton = $90,800,000. $90 million, in other words, is literally a ton of money...but $20 billion is more like 220 tons of money - ChatGPT claims that is the weight of a blue whale, a Boeing 747, or an M1 Abrams tank)

We must be talking past each other.

I was saying that being a farmer, or not being a farmer, but with no more formal education than a typical farmer, was brutal.

People that could've done a hundred things with a college education spent their lives doing back breaking physical labor until they couldn't stand any more.

Isn't it really the opposite?

Pre-industrial revolution, most people would be farmers, and they would learn outside of school nearly everything they needed to know.

Today, it's much more common for people to do something different from their parents, and even if college doesn't put you in an elite group, it gives you the freedom to choose from different lifestyles.

I think people may be oblivious to this if they are a few generations removed from their farming ancestors, such that they never knew a living relative who was the first to abandon their traditional life and get educated and go to the city to work.

When was that, exactly?

Maybe the problem is just that when 1% of the population is educated, they can all be in the top 1%, and when 100% is, they can't all even be above average?

https://ourplnt.com/earth-smooth-billiard-ball/

A comment on the article, though, says "I’d like to point out that Earth is about 3400 times flatter than a regulation pool table...I love saying it – The Earth is flatter than a pool table!"

Below is a story about how insisting that a fitness instructor look physically fit is unreasonable and sometimes illegal.

The icing on the cake is that her day job is said to have been in tech, in SF.

`` Jennifer Portnick, a 240-pound San Francisco aerobics instructor rejected by Jazzercise because of her size, has reached an agreement under which the firm will drop its requirement that instructors look fit.

After weeks of mediation with the San Francisco Human Rights Commission, Jazzercise Inc., the world's biggest dance-fitness organization, agreed to change company policy.

The case, which drew international attention, was the first to be settled under San Francisco's "fat and short" law, an ordinance barring discrimination on the basis of weight and height.

"I'm absolutely thrilled with this outcome," said Portnick, 38, a computer systems training manager who works out six days a week and has sufficient stamina to lead back-to-back aerobics classes.

"I'm lucky to live in San Francisco, where there's a law to protect people like me." ''

https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/EXERCISING-HER-RIGHT-TO-...

When I read "fired", I don't immediately think of "forgot a WHERE clause when deleting from a production database table". That happens, but I don't think I've actually seen anyone fired for it.

I think of it more like "you just gradually found you couldn't do the job, didn't meet performance standards, etc". In that case, the usually bland stuff about how the position wasn't a good fit but this one is seems to me like the way to go.

And "CV" suggests to me a non-American or an American academic - whereas some people in this thread may be in the SF bay area (although I'm not).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36588394

If you were hiring someone, think about what you would want, and what you want to know. Anything negative in someone's past, you do not really care about it, you just care they are past it and it won't have negative future consequences.

Avoiding the negative aspects of your past is not a matter of deception, but of proving that you are emotionally ready to move on.

On a written job application, which in my experience comes at the end after they think they want you, be honest, but read it like a lawyer and make sure you don't disclose anything that you don't have to.

2. If a web browser can display all the content much faster, why not use one?

(plagiarizing the linked Twitter thread)

...maybe the answer, now that I think of it, to item (1) is as simple as it doesn't respect robots.txt.