antipotoad

Smart invert on iOS can do the job for you (can be enabled as an option for the accessibility shortcut from settings).

Going snowboarding with the team if it’s a pow day.

I poke around in node_modules with some regularity (often in combination with the debugger) and it’s always nice to find actual source files, not just source maps.

Any recommendations for a pre-amp and DAC?

Roll 12 6-sided dice in turn, record the sequence. What are the chances that specific sequence should be rolled? Less than 1 in 2 billion. Anything remarkable about that? Clearly not.

If your counterpart thinks otherwise, well…

Flights are within a geofence, overseen by flight crew who can take over remotely at any time. Still surprising no license is required.

The latter is roughly what we do on the project I work on:

English string directly in the source, plus a human-readable identifier that helps translators understand the context of the string they’re translating. One script to extract all strings, and another to load all translations.

Works fine really.

For anyone else wondering, Zildjian was founded in 1623 in Constantinople.

It doesn’t have to mean anything. Music is pure pleasure. Vibrations in the air that tickle our brains just so.

May I ask how you identified them as silicon bugs? And by silicon bugs do you mean random bit flips, or something else?

Looks really nice. One comment from a usability perspective: it would be nice if the center of rotation were a point on the trail, rather than a point somewhere underneath the landscape. Better still if that center point was dynamic as you pan around the map, such that it’s always the ‘middle’ point of the trail segment that’s in the viewport (at least, I think that’s what my brain is telling me it wants, I might be specifying that slightly wrong).

Great work anyhow!

Very nice idea, and nicely implemented. One of those things that seems like it should already have existed, especially with how many headless CMSs there are out there, having a personal CMS of sorts just makes sense.

One reason could be to enable novel fare systems, like London has with its Oyster network.

You can travel around (scanning your contactless debit / credit card) without thinking about how much you’re paying, safe in the knowledge that the system caps your daily / weekly spend to predefined limits, essentially making it never more expensive than a daily / weekly travel card would be. The caps are automatically calculated for the zones you travel in.

It’s a very nice experience as a rider. Especially beneficial to visitors who can just scan through the gates as any Londoner would, no ticket purchase required.

As for the rationale to implement such a system — well, it’s ultimately a public service. All revenue generated is reinvested into the network, in London at least. The economic value of a fast, efficient, painless transit system that everyone uses, regardless of class or wealth, most surely outweighs any lost breakage revenue.

If you start poking, you find those stories have more holes than a fishing net. Best to suspend disbelief.

That said, I like your suggestions. There’s altogether too little introspection on what the point of schooling should be. To my mind, better that schools impart the metacognitive skills to be a better learner, a better thinker, a more stable person, than to impart specific knowledge.

Can anyone else chip in with their post-acquisition Auth0 experiences? I’m genuinely concerned about its future.

Been quite badly burned by another (totally unrelated) third-party service that got acquired. Went from having a direct line to their CEO (who was himself a great engineer), to no contact for months on end.

At least it’s not ‘codes’. That one sets my teeth on edge.

Having to give a phone number to join the waitlist is not so nice. Can’t think of any good reason not to accept an email.

Using A Fine Start [1], with a collection of links to frequently used sites.

[1] https://afinestart.me/

Walter Lewin’s MIT lectures on Physics. Quite sad to see that they’ve been removed from MIT OpenCourseWare [1].

[1] https://news.mit.edu/2014/lewin-courses-removed-1208

It’s not going to be write-only for long: the Copilot Labs version of the VS Code extension introduces brushes, which (by analogy to Photoshop) can be used to retouch your code [1]. Make code more readable, fix bugs, add types, and so on. Exciting times. I’m already regularly blown away by what it generates; the idea that it could similarly ‘read my mind’ with the refactoring In want to do seems just round the corner.

[1] https://githubnext.com/projects/code-brushes

To add to this: don’t touch your eyes when you’ve been in public places and touched unsanitary surfaces. Your eyes are a really easy path into the body for pathogens.

To save you a click: they’re not named in the article.

I have a suspicion you’re right about what ChatGPT could write about this scenario, but I wager we’re still a long way from an AI that could actually operationalize whatever suggestions it might come up with.

It’s goalpost shifting to be sure, but I’d say LLMs call into question whether the Turing Test is actually a good test for artificial intelligence. I’m just not convinced that even a language model capable of chain-of-thought reasoning could straightforwardly be generalized to an agent that could act “intelligently” in the real world.

None of which is to say LLMs aren’t useful now (they clearly are, and I think more and more real world use cases will shake out in the next year or so), but that they appear like a bit of a trick, rather than any fundamental progress towards a true reasoning intelligence.

Who knows though, perhaps that appearance will persist right up until the day an AGI takes over the world.

Cream and eggs really is the bee’s knees. I’m keen to try out Kenji’s method, but my approach yields pretty good results too, with perhaps less fuss (one pan, one fork, one spatula):

Melt a good bit of butter in a saucepan until it’s just browning, crack the eggs directly into the pan, whisk with a fork, plop some cream in (half an eggshell-full per egg), grind some salt and pepper, then stir gently every now and again with a silicone spatula, until there’s still a bit of runny egg. They keep cooking after taking off the heat, so serve as soon as they reach this stage.

Prion diseases are rare. About 300 cases are reported each year in the U.S.

https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/conditions-and-diseas...

So, vanishingly rare. Enough to be an irrelevance.

I’m inclined to agree. The article brushes over the type-safety provided by Prisma as being merely a ‘useful feature’ — but this is huge, especially working on a large project with lots of other developers. The discipline imposed by strict types is indispensable to my mind, how ever much I agree with the author that writing SQL directly feels good.

The idea of super-capacitors in cars is positively horrifying, knowing how explosive just the small ones can be. At grid level though, is there anything that speaks against them?

Edit: to answer my own question, they look pretty good [1]. Significantly lower storage density than batteries (roughly 50Wh/L versus 420Wh/L for Li-ion), but still dense enough for this to be workable at grid level. The linked presentation proposes converting decommissioned power plants into grid-level capacitor storage facilities, since the transmission switchyards are often intact. Furthermore, all the technology is available today, and when built, capacitors require almost zero maintenance.

[1] https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/piprod/documents/Ses...

I think making you ‘solemnly swear I have a TV licence’ was a way to boil the frog, so to speak, from the days when no licence was required at all to use iPlayer. Jumping straight to a real verification step would have created an uproar. Guess they never went all the way (not yet at least). Still seems odd and pointless.

Also in a subsequent interview with the Google engineer [1], it comes out that the sentience claim was a bit of an attention grab, but with the reasonable purpose of airing the topic of AI ethics, and how machine learning is running way ahead of our thinking on its consequences.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kgCUn4fQTsc

The yaybahar. It really sounds like there are electronics involved, but no:

Yaybahar is an electric-free, totally acoustic instrument designed by Gorkem Sen. The vibrations from the strings are transmitted via the coiled springs to the frame drums. These vibrations are turned into sound by the membranes which echo back and forth on the coiled springs. This results in an unique listening experience with an hypnotic surround sound.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_aY6TxC1ojA