TimTheTinker

Our family is used to not having it on flights. Just bring a book or download a movie ahead of time to the iPad

The O(n log n) algorithm is galactic (only becomes more efficient when multiplying massive numbers)

So for numbers we normally work with, no. Maybe with cryptographic operations though.

Brand-new Cessna planes were selling for roughly 2x the US median annual income in the 1960s. Today that number is at around 5.5x.

I've always wanted to fly my wife & kids in a plane, but I just can't afford a high-maintenance luxury asset that costs as much as a house, and fuel costs are prohibitive as well.

so yeah, if someone could mass-manufacture an FAA MOSAIC-certified light-sport aircraft with >2 seats, that could bring the cost of fractional ownership and once-every-two-months weekend use down to my level. And if small local air strips could stop closing too, that'd be great.

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All to say, aviation used to be semi-reachable as a middle class hobby for family people. Now, the only way to get a family in the air for people like me is to spend years building a kit plane from scratch or fixing up a cheap broken plane.

Right now the comments that upset me the most are LLM TMI-style comments that break encapsulation by talking about the behavior of specific current callers of a function right above the function definition.

I recently reacted angrily in a PR review comment after encountering one for the umpteenth time... that caught me off guard. I didn't know I was capable of that.

You LLM-generated this comment too. What about you (the human, if there is one behind this account) -- what do you think?

If you don't speak English, write it in Hindi and use google translate. That will be much preferable to something written by an LLM.

That's like saying a robot will be a better friend if I use a more skin-like material for its face.

The LLM-voice revulsion isn't just about particular idiosyncrasies. Another commenter put it well - the "uncanny valley of text".

Ugh, another LLM-voice article.

I'm getting to the point that I almost have a physical feeling of revulsion/nausea when I read something outside an open Claude Code session that is written in an AI voice.

I'm so sick of that voice -- word choice, phrasing, style... it's hard to define and frustrating because it's both pervasive, influential on human writers including myself (I found myself using the phrase "doing a lot of work" in a Slack message about a word someone chose to use :grimace:), and presumably compounding on future LLMs.

The TZDB could handle it though

Some kinds of brains must just not be good at this kind of game.

I used to win spelling bees in school, but I played the entire archive on this game and my highest score was 6/18.

Maybe it has to do with the balance between audio and visual learning. Spelling bees are spoken words in, letters out -- not letters in, words out. When trying to solve these, I kept trying to sound out different orderings of letters, maybe that's not how good players do it?

It appears macOS native containers runs a separate Linux VM per container.

OrbStack's claim to fame is that all containers run in a single Linux VM, with lots of optimizations on both sides of the VM boundary (including use of a sparse image file for disk storage, which saves a lot of space on the macOS side).

If you run more than 4-5 containers on macOS, the performance and resource usage savings of OrbStack really starts to add up quickly.

He is a PHP developer from the early '00s who got lucky with Facebook

Nice summary of a good hacker's viewpoint. All his money, power, and other non-technical signals don't really give him the technical authority to weigh on what really makes a technical difference.

That being said, depending on how good information-sharing is at the company, he might have a valuable perspective. But given that morale is low, it's doubtful that engineers feel free to tell the straight unvarnished truth without fear. And in typical large-company fashion, managers above them likely spin things positively as much as possible.

It's concerning to me how the author generated AI images and gave them captions as if they are real depictions.

If I'm going to read an article about something real in society, I'm only interested in images that are true depictions of reality. They may not so perfectly capture what the author is envisioning, but the gap between "perfect for this article" and "real" is what makes a real picture interesting.

Ugh, the enterprise authentication is dumb

Any example bugs that you've encountered in the last week?

1Password checks all these boxes and hasn't yet had a data breach.

Their biggest security hole is probably somewhere in the operational pipeline between 1P browser client developers and the static file servers hosting them.

Optionality. The power available to any one person to do anything in society is directly proportional to their genuine connections to others, even if brief.

Meetups in person with real connections happening (even if brief) create so many new possibilities for those in attendance.

The disappearance of in-person meetups (especially among developers) in the US after Covid is a tragedy - so much could be happening that is not.

The Manifesto for Agile Software Development only happened because a group of developers met up in person. They disagreed about nearly everything, but what they agreed about changed the industry.

WASM is literally a direct replacement for asm.js. In fact, for a long time emscripten supported both simultaneously - both as outputs from the same tool chain.

They have a lot in common. So it's not at all wrong to say WASM fulfills the prophecy. It's an iteration of the concept that resulted in JS as a compile target and later asm.js.

What would you use Haiku for?

What about food produced in Europe? We have an Italian restaurant in my Tennessee town that imports all of its ingredients from Italy.

I know several people who are otherwise gluten-intolerant but can eat anything there with no trouble.

All of the food issues we're suffering from in the US -- celiac's disease, food allergies, gluten intolerance, dairy intolerance -- are relatively rare in Europe.

There's an "ape loader" that speeds up loading the executable on various platforms -- that will guarantee it continues to work, as it can evolve with the platform to continue support for binary format.

I had no idea they have a free tier. I've been paying for a couple of years and it's been so worth it.

At some point, lack of security becomes a feature. A fully secure, locked-down, T2 attested macOS is able to be controlled not just by Apple, but by increasingly evil governments, with no recourse available to users.

OrbStack is great also

not exactly - I'm referring to scripture as the arbiter

that's not Christian though (in the sense that their beliefs are not scriptural and not subjected to scriptural review)... it's something else, and it's really ugly.

Those who would think of such a passage (or any biblical passage) and those who push for a total-control agenda are disjoint sets.

Communism and fascism were both fueled by atheism (either explicit or functional), not a Judeo-Christian worldview.

"Ohne Gott und Sonnenschein bringen wir die Ernte ein." (Without God and without sun, we will get the harvest done.) - the slogan of East Germany in 1975 when people were hungry and it kept raining during harvest.

Agreed. The ability to learn new things, and what characteristics their ability to learn has -- that's one dimension that strongly differentiates people in nearly any domain.

But there are other dimensions as well that differentiate people and determine their value to business, like the ability to be handed problems no one else can solve and stick with them through sheer stubbornness until solutions begin to emerge.

Why not:

(1) directly fund studies and reproductions of studies (promising ahead of time to publish the results, even if negative) targeting the exact issues they're concerned about

(2) writing and publishing extensively to show people the results and help them arrive at a correct interpretation of the data

(3) make a public commitment ahead of time to change opinion based on what the data says, and not to overstate underdetermined theses

... instead of spending money trying to control the political narrative?

That would simply be science doing science -- which has always threatened the establishment because it's accountable to reality, not authority.

Science rightly done never claims authority, just reports on what the data says. Truth is powerful enough on its own.

It was sarcasm. I couldn't care less about whatever latest hardware junk Meta is hawking

I dread the moment my daughters find out about TikTok...

Tell her yourself. Explain why you hate it. And have something better to offer.

If your family culture is different (and stronger) than the culture around you, you have a decent chance at being able to intentionally shape her character.

That's where books and stories come in -- culture is transmitted primarily through engaging stories. My wife and I inherited reading as a top family practice from our parents, and we're passing it along. Every day we read to the kids ... it's been about 14 years now of that. My daughter in particular was deeply shaped by the book Little Women by Louisa May Alcott - it gave her a aspirative vision for life, particularly as a future wife and mother -- and her vision transcends her family of origin, in a very good way.