josephc

I’m less concerned with the jamming of a major highway and more concerned with three or four companies having a defacto monopoly on the Internet. AWS, GCP, and Azure host what? 90% of all traffic? 99%? Considering how many providers have them as a direct dependent, the “own nothing and like it” prospect looms ominously to me. The Internet should be a decentralized service owned by people and lots of small companies, not a handful of corporations.

A paper trail from before 2018 to prove I’m not a bot?

If confronted at a bar I’d consider it for basically all the reasons you mentioned. When I send updates to my friends in France or Ireland or China I find myself apologizing for wherever embarrassing things we’ve done most recently.

I think back to times I’ve eaten a thing and remember the sensation, then try replaying the feeling to see if it would be just as satisfying.

At the moment, I’m in the mood for a snack. I’m thinking about the dried fruit I had yesterday and the sensations it elicited when I ate it. Those same sensations of flavor and texture sound agreeable, so I’m thinking that would be nice.

Not everyone has this form of recall all the time. Some people have it intermittently. I asked my partner what she wanted to eat and she said she could not tell if she was hungry or if any food sounded good. I took this as a warning and we stopped at the nearest restaurant immediately. Fortunately, this was the right decision and we both felt better afterwards.

If you’re feeling hungry, imagine the smells of a food. Sense memory tends to run deep in people. If you find that you can’t recall or reject a sensation, that’s okay! Plenty of folks are in the same situation.

Yes. In fact, zero-knowledge proofs make it possible for me to do something like prove my age in a way that is verifiable by the site without the site knowing any other information about me AND without the government knowing what website I’m asking. It doesn’t even require an API. The government needs to digitally sign my identity papers and publish its signature. One time download and you can even do offline checks.

The EU digital ID program does this. Everyone has privacy.

No. I think the general consensus is that C# is faster.

From the devs: “According to some preliminary benchmarks, the performance of C# in Godot — while generally in the same order of magnitude — is roughly ~4× that of GDScript in some naive cases. C++ is still a little faster; the specifics are going to vary according to your use case. GDScript is likely fast enough for most general scripting workloads. C# is faster, but requires some expensive marshalling when talking to Godot.”

The cases where GDScript are faster consist of those where there’s a great deal of marshalling and unmarshalling, like with heavy engine calls and signaling. If you’re doing compute heavy work.

GDScript is still plenty fast, so use the one that’s most comfortable.

Imagine you’re writing a book. In this book you need to be perfectly consistent and coherent because the people reading it are so incredibly literal that if there’s ambiguity or inconsistency they will run into your home and defecate on your carpet.

Short stories are easy enough. There’s only a character or two and you can generally remember what they’re wearing and what they said, but as the stores get longer you start to work yourself into corners and lose track of what you said in the previous chapters.

Let’s say you reach a scene where the main character needs to hop on a train. You write a scene where they purchase a ticket. But wait, a few chapters ago you said they got mugged! So you decide to cut that scene. Now they can pay for a ticket, but the scene where they said they got mugged is wrong and the scene where they said they can’t pay their bill doesn’t work!

Computers read instructions and interpret them. They follow orders. Programming raw hardware is tricky, so we add abstractions to make it easier. Collectively we agree, “we’ll put a return pointer here, then push these instructions here and set the program counter here” as the way we call subroutines or send data or something else. If there’s ambiguity in the specification then two people might build two different programs which they both expect to work. One of them will fail. If there are ten people implementing things with an API, perhaps all ten will fail.

Hyrem’s Law says any observable behavior will eventually become part of a workflow.

I used to hate this. I still hate it, but I used to hate it, too.

More seriously, something that has helped from my managers is getting a “product requirements doc” or PRD. Management and customer reps put together a requirements document that says what they need built. Then you can break it down into work units for yourself and estimate the size with milestones and deliverables. It helps a bunch, even if it’s extra overhead at the start.

There are 86 billion neurons in the brain and 31* pairs of spinal column nerves with about 7 trillion interconnections. When I pulled that figure it wasn’t obvious if it included connections inside the brain, too.

*I found one article that said 43 pairs of nerves connected to the spinal cord and 12 to the brain, but Wikipedia says 31.

Honestly, it could be a data point added because the researcher was getting really pissed off at the plotting software truncating the axis strangely. Normally you’d remove that after the fact, but…

Or it’s a data oddity, like someone who specified units incorrectly (mg/mL) instead of (ug/L).

Also left out of the headlines: she exhaustively tested thousands of traditional herbal remedies, not just one. She kept the one that worked.

It started with basic indifference and became a feature.

In the beginning, people were manually receiving and reviewing resumes given to them in person.

This moved online and, for a time, normal humans continued to upload their resumes. Humans continued to review them.

Eventually someone decided they wanted to spam resumes, like someone swiping right on every potential Tinder match and turning people down later. This spam became problematic, so companies needed a way to automatically filter folks. Extracting info from PDFs wasn’t easy at the time.

Having a form to fill out prevented some spam and let them do keyword searches and filtering, but more importantly now it gives them two things: It prefilters people who don’t care enough to complete it and add a sight sunk cost bias to folks who are on the fence.

I used to ask if I could work extra and leave a little early or take a long lunch. My current employer is far more chill about it and will let me do so if there’s nothing pressing. Still had to burn a half day of sick time to bring doggo to the vet.

But like others are saying, “you don’t.” Life is a Sisyphean nightmare of falling behind on laundry, cleaning, legal obligations, etc. Live in quiet desperation and perpetual exhaustion. “Truly the best of all possible worlds.”

If I send you a 24TB hard drive in the mail and it takes three days to arrive, thats high bandwidth, high latency.

If I send you a 24 character morse code message over the radio it’s low latency and low bandwidth.

Unlike javascript, where at least it is an interpreted language people can audit, you would have to reverse engineer these binaries to figure out what they do.

If you cargo install something you get source code (unless the library packages a binary, but that’s the same as if it were JS or Python or C). Rust dependencies don’t become binary until the final product.

Auditing Rust binaries isn’t much worse than auditing minified and uglified JS. I’ve done both.

EDIT:

Rust

Rust is doing pretty poorly right now.

among the 999 most popular crates on crates.io, around 17% contained code that do not match their code repository.

https://kerkour.com/rust-supply-chain-nightmare

I just went through the article and I don’t think I agree with the assessment that “Rust is doing pretty poorly right now.” It feels disingenuous, given the content of the article you linked:

826 crates match their upstream repositories at the revision they were built at. 74 crates have revisions that cannot be found in their repositories, whether due to later squash merges, rebases or revisions simply not being pushed. 73 crates do not have VCS info, either because they were built with old Cargo versions, built with --allow-dirty, or not built from a repo clone at all. 77 crates do not declare a repository in their Cargo manifest. 7 crates would match their upstream repository but for one or more symlinks being incorrectly handled. 3 crates declare repositories that do not exist. 3 crates have submodules that do not exist. 3 crates cannot be found within their repositories. 3 crates cannot be built due to cargo package errors. … Only 8 crate versions straight up don’t match their upstream repositories. None of these were malicious: seven were updates from vendored upstreams (such as wrapped C libraries) that weren’t represented in their repository at the point the crate version was published, and the last was the inadvertent inclusion of .github files that hadn’t yet been pushed to the GitHub repository.

You don’t have to. 4.6 will continue to be supported for a while. You can jump up if you want. Even 4.5 is still getting bug fixes.

Multiclass warrior bard. Hmm. 🤔

Really loving the drawable texture objects. Such a nice, simple, wonderful idea.

Going from Photoshop to GIMP 3, it’s just not the same. I have a lot of respect for the project, but there are so many rough edges that it’s demoralizing at best.

Here’s an example: in Photoshop, I select an object with the smart select brush (not available in GIMP), copy and paste it and it ends up on a new layer. I can drag the new layer around and draw on it. In GIMP, I paste a rectangle and the layer bounds are exactly locked to the paste area, so if I do something like feather the edges or try to draw on it I get a block of pixels. Without looking it up, can you tell me how to make the active layer size match the canvas size? And if I drag that layer, will it move the pixels or will it offset that layer and force me to rerun the “layer to document size” process?

Not that Adobe hasn’t done a ton of Enshittification, but CS6 was pretty great for me.

Perhaps the parent commenter has apps they need to run for work? I know Microsoft Authenticator isn’t supported on Graphene, which is admittedly bullshit but it’s a requirement if you work in the government or high security industry like utilities. If that’s the case they should be given a work phone, but companies don’t do that most of the time in my experience.

Or perhaps they’ve had a bad experience with an older version. I know that Ubuntu Mobile couldn’t even make calls on a lot of devices for a while. I recently had an experience where DTMF signaling didn’t work, which meant I couldn’t navigate phone trees to do things like get prescriptions filled.

Point being, there are lots of real reasons folks are stuck in their predicament.

The temptation to be snarky is strong, but we risk hurting imperfect allies instead of fighting our real enemies.