hcayless

On the one hand, I empathize with the desire to keep as many books as we can, but on the other, librarians have to practice collection management, and they have to do it in the context of dropping budgets and greater demands for student meeting and study space. What do you expect to happen? Faculty often don’t have any idea how the systems that support them actually function, but things have to actually be made to work.

Many mid size to large companies are hilariously inefficient and the executives have no idea how work actually gets done. This means you can (in theory) fire a decent percentage of your workforce without affecting your output. You can then claim they’ve been replaced by AI without anyone ever challenging that assertion. I’m not making a pro or anti AI claim here, just saying that you won’t know whether you were wrong about it until/unless things start to go really badly.

If it can’t be copyrighted, then no. Licenses rely on the copyright holder’s right to grant the license. But that would also mean it’d be essentially public domain. I’m not sure there’s really settled legal opinion on this yet. Iirc it can’t be patented.

You might enjoy Sophocles' Oedipus: Evidence and Self-Conviction by Fred Ahl (https://a.co/d/ditCwg5). It explores this idea, concluding that Oedipus’ investigation is flawed, but the audience is primed to believe it because they know the myth.

This sounds fantastic! Thank you for your work. Now I gotta go learn Rust :-).

I was at a large public university in the 90s / early 2000s that used Oracle. The database product itself was absolutely rock solid if well-administered. They also kept trying to sell us enterprise services built on top of the database that were pure trash. "Oracle Forms" was one of those things iirc. We never bought that stuff, but it did get us a nice free lunch or two.

I remember a sysadmin at the company I worked at in 2006(?) remarking that this would be the third time he had migrated to and then away from Lotus Notes.

Of course not. What does that have to do with anything? People with different lives and experiences will have different perspectives that are likely to be helpful. We all care deeply about the things that directly affect us and our loved ones and less about the things that do not. You can cover more bases with a diverse workforce and avoid making dumb mistakes. I don’t get why this is controversial.

Binaries are cool and all, but maybe it's better for your organizational health to have (for example) your company look something like the population they're selling to? Maybe not everyone gets the same level of boost in their education? Maybe they've overcome some adversity and that will make them a better, more resilient colleague, but it also meant their grades weren't as high? Like I said, this isn't easy stuff, and binary thinking doesn't really help.

It’s astonishing to me how obviously intelligent people can just be put into the mental equivalent of an unrecoverable flat spin by ideology. The essay is interesting, but then just flips into silly mode. DEI is not the Spanish Inquisition. The idea that we should try to hire, retain, and promote people besides white men seems straightforwardly good to me. Obviously it’s hard to execute on, particularly without making some people uncomfortable. Such groups will make mistakes or be ineffective at times, but they’re not some sort of thought police. It’s quite hard to understand the opposition to them without hypothesizing that it’s simply racism.

But QI still exists, and Uvalde happened. It wasn’t fear of reprisal, but fear of being shot. So your argument doesn’t work.

More to the point 2/4 countries in the UK voted remain and got dragged out of the EU anyway.

My favorite thing about Hibernate is that it’s sophisticated enough that it has its own query language, which is very, very similar but not identical to SQL. Makes me want to take a drink just thinking about it.

That’s good. It really did feel like they were fighting each other sometimes.

This is the thing I find really puzzling. Being able to read between the lines of virtually any kind of communication (but especially business communications) is kind of a superpower. I can only come up with cynical reasons why it’s deprecated.

It’s interesting to me how comparatively impoverished Anglish seems. Here’s to promiscuity!

I had an interesting experience as a child. I grew up in Barbados, where circumcision is not a common practice. In Biology class on day, the teacher talked about the practice, and basically everyone in the class went “Eww”. I moved to the US the next year, and when the same topic came up in Biology, the teacher mentioned that in other countries, most men are uncircumcised. And the class went “Eww”.

I was you until a couple of years ago. Could have rolled naked in the stuff. Then it got me. And Lord, it was horrible. Weeks of agony. I’m super careful with it now.

Yes, but: a programmer who has made it to age 25 without learning how to ssh into a server where their code will end up running is to me demonstrating that they are remarkably incurious about the larger ecosystem within which they’re working. One sign of a better developer is that their horizons are broader.

I thought the expansion of YAML was YAML Ain’t Markup Language?

Title needs correction: that’s a Greek letter mu, μ, not a u.

Addendum: though it is clearly a u in the URL. Someone may be confused...

No need to be salty about it.

They really had no choice about that part. The spike (beyond their control) in energy prices was set to bankrupt hundreds or even thousands of small businesses and put many people in a situation of deciding between heat and food.

The tax breaks though, were totally an own goal.

Christ Jesus, yes.

I mean, there can be reasons why not, but why use an RDBMS at all if you’re not going to take advantage of its features?

Came here to mention CiTO. See also https://sparontologies.github.io/cito/current/cito.html. It’s been around a long time, from when the Semantic Web was the next big thing.

I think there’s something a bit deeper going on, and it’s implied in the post. Small companies (on the whole) are more fun than big ones for a certain kind of person. At a small co. you get to wear a lot of hats and have a much more holistic feel for the business. As the business grows, you get more specialized, and restricted. Some people, and I am one, get bored and frustrated in that sort of environment. Things getting more “corporate” is a signal that transition is happening, so the people who don’t like that kind of environment leave. Some companies handle the transition better than others.

Heh, it’s probably been over a decade since I regularly had to do this sort of thing, but literally my first thought on seeing that query was “Hmmm, I’d try rewriting that to force a different execution plan” and lo and behold, that was the answer. It’s kind of comforting that not all my experience is obsolete!

Serious question: I keep seeing opinions about the inflation and supply chain problems being purely the result of the stimulus, and they feel, well, ideological. To what extent is this simply the effect of the pandemic? In my own family, we’ve spent way less on travel and more on things over the last couple of years.

Put another way, isn’t this the product of a combination of factors and not just because of the stimulus? I’m not convinced supporting people out of work through no fault of their own is a bad idea.

In this kind of context (residential university) where you’ll have a concentrated group of people living and working together and where the consequences of an outbreak would be extremely disruptive, I think it makes perfect sense.

At a quick glance, it looks like it’s giving plural forms as alternatives. So the document can refer to a person or a group.