akira2501

There are games designed to be addicting. Some even have gambling built in. Technology is just a tool.

Which is ironic considering the FBI and CISA just today announced that you _should_ use WhatsApp and not use SMS for two factor authentication. Although they point out the biggest problem is mobile users click on links in SMS. We live in a mostly captured and anti consumer environment. I'm not sure there's any great advice.

https://www.newsnationnow.com/business/tech/fbi-warns-agains...

Insurance premiums are different for different people and are decided by underwriters based on expected risk. What subsidy are they receiving on those premiums? They were previously paying a special property tax to cover the additional fire services required for the area. This is not a particularly high income area.

Meanwhile everyone in Sacramento can buy federally subsidized flood insurance. The federal government also built the levees surrounding the county. The entire downtown core had to be jacked up several feet due to persistent flooding. Should everyone in Sacramento move too? Should we end the insurance subsidy?

Those have been known to start smaller fires before. Management strategies for them and recognition of the conditions that give rise to them were implemented. This fire burned worse than before because of poor maintenance on and around the line and because they did not shut it off quickly enough to prevent additional damage. The line was in a remote location and access to it was severely degraded.

Fundamentally the problem can be solved with management and engineering. It's entirely PG&E's fault. This was adjudicated and settled.

simply nobody knew how bad

It was a 100 year old C hook that caused the fire. Which failed in high winds. Which drove the fire. It was PG&E's responsibility to know "how bad" this was. They literally lost track of their own transmission lines.

You've apparently never had power run out to a new property that's not had it before. You pay for that. The poles, the lines, the installation. The power company doesn't just run power to you because you ask. They subsidize themselves.

Then PG&E takes the money, leaves 100 year old equipment in place, which inevitably breaks, and burns down an entire forest along with their homes.

You genuinely think these people are being "subsidized" by all this? That it's their fault the PG&E top brass didn't earn a bonus that year?

where consumers are incentivized to vary their consumption to help grid stability.

If the grid is not stable then it needs upgrades. Automated austerity to cover a backlog of undone work is madness.

There are no median families. There are a lot of very high wage earners in CA. You should really be looking for the mode here.

They're on track to build 12 _new_ coal plants this year.

Why do people believe they're operating in good faith?

Give it a dark theme and I'd say the modern Westworld TV series.

The government protects intellectual property rights and they protect physical property rights.

Intellectual property laws are in the constitution and are structured to allow the government to preemptively act on potential violations. For example seizing shipments that would violate patents or trademarks before any actual sale occurs. They can also create registration offices to certify claims publicly for the holders.

At the same time you were, and often still are, expected to physically protect your own property and the government largely can not preemptively act on potential issues. You must be a victim to receive service. To a large extent most property dispute /resolutions/ are handled through the civil courts. A criminal prosecution for theft may or may not be perused by a district attourney or certified by a grand jury, and even if it is, it does not make your injury whole.

You would still need a civil judgement to reclaim your property or it's claimed and adjudicated value. Once you have this judgement you are again personally responsible for enforcing it. You can file paperwork with the sheriff to audit their property and sell it or garnish their wages but you take all responsibility for this. Including finding their property or identifying their employer. None of this will happen on it's own simply because you were a victim of an actual property crime.

and if you have a bunch of third parties running bad software, consumers would lose faith in the platform altogether.

Famously the reason no one ever used Microsoft Windows.

How are they ok with cat litter full of feces just lying around for hours inside their home

It's a furry animal that uses it's own mouth to clean itself afterwards. It's not just in the litter box, I promise you. Meanwhile people have flush toilets that function as a water powered waste dispersion gun so their own waste gets arbitrarily distributed equally well.

The music industry relies on government supported copyrights. Music is often unsaleable unless you have an existing exclusive contract with the label. Royalty rates are set by the government.

We're pretty far away from any actual "free market" here.

The default return type for posthog.getFeatureFlag is string | boolean | undefined.

You could just as well say "how bad APIs make simple problems complicated and how you might strain at a type system to pretend this bad design is worth keeping."

I mean, "string or boolean or undefined," is not at all a "type." This is a poorly specified contract for an overloaded interface with terrible semantics built on the abuse of language grammar.

It's why I think a language with the core semantics of JavaScript plus a goofy type system are never going to produce anything worth actually having. The two sides of the system are constantly at odds with each other. People are mostly using the type system to paper over bad design semantics.

Perhaps those three different groups should just coordinate together, rather than individually using this data, and arriving at three different and possibly interfering conclusions.

Aside from that grid operators buy power from producers. They don't plan future capacity more than 72 hours in advance. If you're a producer with expensive power you won't sell much. If you're a producer with cheap power you will sell a lot. It's already a functioning market. Solar is a very small part of it.

More complicated and expensive

More durable for individuals in the face of large scale failures. You're paying for something real there.

This brings back memories of the time I almost shortened "thousand kilometres" to "kkm".

SI is such a senseless system. Unit prefixes were not a good idea. Did you move the decimal point or just switch to "Mm?"

is doing a societal good by parking money in inventory they brought near you?

Yes. That generates sales taxes. That generates property taxes. That pays for insurance. That pays for upkeep which is hopefully provided by a local contractor. Where this cycle repeats.

and getting "too" rich? ie dislike of big corporations?

Yes. The money actually doesn't bother me, it's the access to unrestrained political influence it buys you, and big corporations monopolize labor pools and result in worse outcomes for working conditions and wages. Where this story starts.

I kinda feel like macros!() should count.

True but I don't remember it being nearly as convenient to distribute those modules as it still required the whole build environment on the target and you still had to deal with perls exceptionally efficient but ancient and cumbersome object and type system.

XS wasn't _that_ bad once you got the hang of it; anyways, but I do remember ruby 1.6 coming out and being blown away by how improved the experience of creating distributable C modules was. The class system was flat and easy to access, you could map ruby language concepts into C almost directly, and the garbage collection system was fully accessible.

perl 6 started being discussed right around this time and I think it was clear in the early years that it wasn't going to try to compete on these grounds at all instead focusing on more abstract and complex language features.

Anyways.. even seeing your name just brings me back to that wonderful time in my life, so don't get me wrong, I loved perl, but that was my memory of the time and why I think I finally just walked away from perl entirely.

who only know how to glue together APIs

I think there's a deeper truth here. Perl was notoriously difficult to make C language extensions for. Languages like Ruby and Python really took off because they had a much more approachable and useful C interpreter API which; honestly, made gluing various library APIs into the language far easier. This being the key to taking a very slow and memory hungry scripting language covering a fraction of POSIX into a useful domain extension and embedded language.

Ruby did better at the domain extension part and Python was better at the embedded language part. Perl 6 went entirely the other way. I think this was the real driver of popularity at the time. This also explains why gem and pip are so different and why pip never matured into the type of product that npm is.

The explosion of single character sigils and the taint of C++'s template syntax.

which can matter in a hot loop:

163ns - 31.9ns == 131.1ns

This will need to happen 7.6 million times to save me 1 CPU second. On AWS lambda with 1GB of memory this will cost you a whopping: $0.0000166667.

The point is, you're not even wrong, but there are vanishingly few cases where it would actually matter to the bottom line in practice. You're taking an absolutist point of view to a discipline which thoroughly rejects it.

This is what I love about the cloud. It forces you to confront what your efforts are actually worth by placing a specific value on all of these commodities. In my experience they're often worth very little given that none of us have the scale of problems where this would show actual returns.

"[CPU, Memory, Disk] is cheap, engineering time isn't." Fuck that.

It is. It's absurdly cheap. I ensure I check the amount of time it would take for me to make a performance improvement against the runtime costs of my functions. It's rarely worth the extra effort.

Seriously, until you get into the millions of records per second level, you're almost never benefited. You may make your function 2x faster, at a cost of additional complexity, but you never run it enough in a year for it to pay itself back.

Bad engineering time is _incredibly_ expensive.

Engineering time is expensive. Period. It speaks to the need to minimize it.

This is an excuse to not spend time learning the ins and outs of your language, and your hardware.

All of which will change in a few years, which is fine, if you're also committing to keeping _all that code_ up to date right along with it. Otherwise you end up with an obscure mess that you have to unwind 5 years of context to understand and fix again.

Complexity and available mental contexts are forgotten costs. If your language even has that many "ins and outs" to begin with you may want to reconsider that.

Bluetooth Low Energy with some Logitech sauce added into it. Apparently encrypted and marketed for use in contexts where FIPS level security would be required.

Your card limit gets checked on every transaction. There doesn't seem to be a technical reason why information flow back to me should be limited in any way. If the extra layer fails to work the transaction fails to pass.

Your brain does. It's not _one_ computer. It's dozens some interconnected and synchronized to others some with entirely independent control. It's why we have seizures, why optical illusions exist, and why you flinch when something moves at you in your peripheral vision.

What I love about this article is it's actual engineering work on an existing code base. It doesn't seek to just replace things or swap libraries in an effort to be marginally faster. It digs into the actual code and seeks to genuinely improve it not only for speed but for efficiency. This simply does not get done enough in modern projects.

I wonder if it was done more regularly would we even end up with libraries like simdjson or oj in the first place? The problem domain simply isn't _that_ hard.

It's the same question. What decides when a long process and comment period is required and when it isn't? Why does this agency have such variable performance when it comes to similar rulings?