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ar9av

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I don't really have a strong opinion on the letter because I agree with a few of the comments that the cat is kind of out of the bag. Even if we don't reach AGI, however you want to define it, I think we are headed for something existential, so I'm both skeptical of letters like this ability to work and sympathetic to the need to focus on the issue it's attempting to address.

So with that said, I find the "what about existing AI problems" and especially the "I don't like Musk comments" annoying. The current issues aren't as severe as what we could be facing in the not too distant future, and Musk is pretty tangential to that concern.

If the price difference is justified, I can't argue with a refurb. Most of my purchases from Dell (mainly laptops, a couple monitors) in the past 10+ years have been refurbs from the outlet. On a sale, about 20-30% discount over new, and they are essentially like-new with full warranties, etc. Never really had a problem except one laptop that was a little wonky at hte start, but got fixed and went on to last 7 years.

If someone is offering me $50 off a $800 device that has been "seller refurbished" , yeah, I'm just gonna buy new.

Scratch gets a lot of hate with semi-experienced programmers (the kind to browse this sub) because of its simplicity, but it's actually really good. It teaches you basic programming concepts without all of the complexity of other programming languages.

I remember back in school, some of the students in my computer science classes didn't understand the basic concepts of programming: variables, loops, functions, etc. and programming is 90% logic and problem-solving.

You can't teach programming by teaching the syntax of a language, you have to teach logic. If you know one language, figuring out another is going to be easy because most of the things are the same, the only difference is the syntax.

Some software is not worth paying for to use. But other services might.

Look at nextcloud: they wouldn’t have been anywhere near as big if they weren’t open source. Very few people would pay for the product but instead users now provide pull requests and improve the product. Meanwhile they make money now through enterprise support and specific plugins they provide for business.

Probably an unpopular opinion, and I realize I'm kind of ranting on a relatively unrelated subject, but I have become really dissuaded with the Node ecosystems dependence on seemingly boundless dependency trees. The fact that Window's file system can't handle moving project directories (without deleting the node_modules), and relatively simple projects using megabytes of raw text to work... anyways.

While I understand that you don't want to re-invent the wheel, it seems like the this is an important enough part of your project that your own implementation would be the only one without compromises.

The whole metaverse thing has felt like a buzzword-without-meaning that was never going to live up to the hype (at least in any meaningful good way), but still sucks for the people losing the jobs.

I don’t think I could comfortably switch to only EV cars. I think I still need a gasoline car with my Tesla. However, both of cars are similar size and mileage. One uses electricity, the other uses premium gas, as a result… round trip from work, one will cost ~$6 dollars in electricity, whereas the other is ~$15 dollars. Plus there are still some trips we do frequently where there are zero charging station for miles so having a gas car does help

I am personally doubtful. The problem with BABA is that it is a variable interest entity (VIE) listed in the Cayman Island that means shareholders are technically owners of shell company rather than the Chinese enterprises that they they think they are buying.

I also think the divisions are worth less apart then together as retail has no margins, cloud and entertainment are overcrowded, and logistics is highly competitive.

The charging issue and grid use is a massively overblown problem. You only need to charge your car for a few hours every 300 miles. Nowhere near everyone is always charging all the time.

Renewables and stored heat batteries will cover night/low wind loads. Geothermal in the north.

Public transit options will continue to improve, electrified bikes make them an even more viable alternative.

We’re a clever group of people. The oil drilling to gas available on every fourth corner in the country system is vastly more complex than installing chargers on light poles.

Wow, I've bookmarked the article for future reference, this is all very cool! I have been working in OpenGL recently on procedural meshes, particularly with L-Systems. My method for drawing branching structures was basically the same as the "Extruding" action the article talks about. The rotating of the splines around an axis is very clever! I am definitely going to use that.

I love how patient classical music fans are when people ask THE SAME QUESTION over and over and over again on forums as to why there’s a need for a separate classical music app. You classical music fans rock…

I saw this last night, I found an article from some smart PhD dude who is a Yale prof and a former federal reserve governor, it explained what would happen if the fed lost money. Nothing much, unless they lose a lot of money for a long period of time.

The main limitation of Apple's passwords implementation for me is lack of sharing. For accounts that my wife and I both need access to, we can have them in a shared location in bitwarden, but there's no comparable feature with Apple's. I'll probably even start paying for bitwarden so that I can share with more than one other person when my kids are old enough to need access to them

[dead] 3 years ago

If there's 'digital blackface', then I'm guessing there's also 'digital whiteface' and other 'digital [input race]face', or am I missing something? Either way, are those who are both white and black wrong when they use 'digital blackface'? /s

There are two main ways to implement a programming language:

A compiler transforms the source code into another language. This is usually executable machine code, but it can be another language for which an implementation already exists.

An interpreter is a program that reads source code and evaluates it. Interpreters are typically simpler to implement than compilers, but there is some overhead involved with re-reading the source every time the program is executed.

Many languages adopt a hybrid of these two - for example, Python code is compiled to Python bytecode which is then interpreted. Some languages have both interpreters and compilers available for them.

there is less space now. if you walked around NYC in the 1980's there were still a bunch of empty lots. these have been built over and so each new project is more expensive as the current building must be purchased, demolished and then rebuilt

Little Snitch Mini 3 years ago

I use Little Snitch on my MacBook Pro and love it. I’m a privacy nut and don’t relish the idea of behemoth corporations making money off me by exploiting my computer. It can be a pain to check every connection your browser tries to make but it’s worth it. Yesterday I shopped on three sites. None of them were Amazon. In that 24 hour period Amazon attempted to connect 259 times.- not their web services. To a lesser degree Google and then the social media sites. Facebook was the worst.

I use an IP identification site to look up each IP that attempts to connect on Firefox and see what company it belongs to. After awhile you learn which sites the first 2-5 numbers belong to. It is one of the finest security programs on the market and well worth the money.

Last week I did some holiday shopping for my granddaughter on the GAP site on my iPad and within 48 hours ads for GAP and all of their affiliated sites started showing up in my Twitter feed. I only use Firefox in private browsing mode now. Hope this helps!