jawns

If so, I hope they never go from 3D to 4D.

It's not clear why this physical object is a better solution to the problem than, say, a window on your screen. Feels like more of a hobby project than something that provides $230 of value.

As an engineering manager and later a director, a regular and often difficult task was assigning ROI to projects that had recognizable but diffuse impact. It's easy to calculate a dollar figure for certain projects by projecting additional conversions or revenue. It's harder for a security or SRE project that doesn't have a direct impact on those things, but can help reduce risk or empower a bunch of other teams to operate more safely or move more quickly.

I have been working on a set of tools and standard formulas that can be applied to these cases and demonstrate a more accurate view of a team's or department's overall ROI. The plan is to open-source the bulk of it, but provide a hosted service for folks who don't want to manage it themselves.

One of the things this type of intervention doesn't take into account is that different roads are built with different levels of hardiness based on the amount of traffic they are expected to receive.

For instance, a few years ago, a segment of I-495 in Delaware needed to be unexpectedly shut down for emergency repairs. Drivers were rerouted. But because of the increase in traffic on the less-hardy detour route, that route needed repairs and repaving soon afterward, much more quickly than it would have ordinarily required.

So yes, drivers can be better dispersed to ease congestion, but we also need to consider the secondary effects to the roadways themselves.

Here's a concrete example. I hired somebody who was really impressive during the interview process, but then soon realized they just didn't have the right skills for the role. He wasn't a bad person. Had a family, and I knew it would be a big disruption for them to have to go through job searching again.

Another case. A guy I managed caused a lot of friction with one particular co-worker, and it came to a head when he he stepped way over the line and veered into personal attacks on a call. Had to let him go, and I was angry with him at the time, but it still pained me to do it and was on my mind for quite some time.

I'm curious how it compares with Microsoft SwiftKey. Obviously, that's not an open-source app, but it would be an interesting benchmark.

Those are definitely the down sides. As a manager who has had to let people go, no matter how deserved, it is a part of the job that I wish I didn't have to do, and it does disturb my sleep and peace.

But there are some very meaningful upsides as well, and the one that rises above all the rest is that I genuinely love working with teams and helping them grow.

Based on your list of things you don't want to do, I would say that if you can enjoy the success and stability you wish to have while avoiding all of those things, then more power to you! But keep in mind that in most businesses, _somebody_ has to do those less desirable things, or the business isn't going to stay afloat.

I think this might scare some people off from management unnecessarily.

A lot of what's being described here is important for new managers to understand, but eventually, once you find your footing, you can start to determine where the rules can bend.

For instance, a lot of new managers struggle because they want to keep a foot in the IC world. I think most new managers would benefit from stepping away from the code for an extended period of time. But many experienced managers do eventually return back to writing code while still serving in a management role, although certainly not at the level they did before.

Likewise, it's really important for new managers to understand that friendship dynamics will change. But that doesn't mean that you can't foster very warm relationships with people who report to you. Just like a teacher-student relationship, you can have great fondness for each other while recognizing that there are some lines that absolutely can't be crossed.

As a manager, there are several qualities that I value highly in an engineer, and they all happen to begin with the letter C: Competent, Consistent, Curious, Caring, and Clear Communicators.

While SAT scores might act as a proxy for competency and possibly curiosity, they're not going to tell you much about whether the person is consistently reliable, whether they care about others and cooperate well, or whether their vocabulary or literary analysis skills have any correlation with their ability to read the room and tailor their communication to their audience.

If I were giving these job posters the benefit of the doubt, I would guess they're including this requirement for the same reason that musicians request particular colors of M&Ms in their riders. They want to weed out people (or bots) who aren't paying attention. Nevertheless, there are better ways to do that than demanding (and presumably filtering by) teenage performance metrics.

I am curious about how opt-outs and PII removal work.

Who confirms those requests are legit?

I made up a few words like this myself, all of which rhyme with either orange, purple, or silver.

https://rhymes.pressbin.com

But John Koenig's work is really well done and packaged in such a consumable way. I'm sorry to hear he's the victim of copyright infringement.

I have been a supporter of Cures Within Reach, a nonprofit that focuses on repurposing drugs, especially for rare diseases. https://www.cureswithinreach.org

They have funded some important repurposed-drug studies for Huntingtons Disease, which runs in my family. For a disease like this, it's never going to make sense for major pharmaceutical companies to invest the effort to develop entirely new drugs, but by repurposing existing drugs, it gives people living with rare diseases a chance to ease symptoms.

I'm scratching my head about why they would venture into an entirely different field like this, one with tremendous regulatory hurdles, if they know (and surely they must know) that radiologists are going to pan the results.

It's like if LeBron announced he was switching to bowling and was going to revolutionize the sport, then rolled a gutter ball.

Definitely a tech entrepreneur's take.

It's a juxtaposition of optimistic futurism (in 5-10 years, most people will just rely on robocars and robotaxis) and anti-regulatory sentiment (critical of the requirement that elevators accommodate stretchers).

Some of the more difficult problems are hand-waved away as, "We could solve this if we just put our engineering hats on."

That said, I don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater. It's true that other countries and cultures have very different approaches to residential development. But a big part of that is cultural differences in how people live and what they want. Cultures that are more family-oriented are naturally going to have housing that is more family-oriented.

I am curious about the energy/expense of getting water that has been "consumed" by data centers ready for other use (e.g. drinking water), versus the energy/expense of getting water that has been "consumed" by residential users ready for the same use.

To my understanding, the only thing that changes when water is used for data centers is its temperature.

That's a lot different than residential use, where it's used in toilets and needs to undergo significant wastewater treatment to be cleaned enough to be re-used.

So how do we compare apples to oranges for these very different use cases?

Update: It appears my assumption about the only thing changing in the data center case is temperature. For much of that water, a phase change occurs (evaporative cooling), so it is no longer accessible to be recycled.

The "Try it. 10 seconds." section at the bottom of the page hijacks an existing tool (git diff) and installs a pre-commit hook.

But there are no instructions for how to reverse those actions if you don't like the tool. Feels a little user-hostile to me.

It's a silly metric. There could be only one master bot that pings every known endpoint multiple times a second, and that would probably surpass all human activity, too. It doesn't really tell us much about intention or the ability to masquerade as humans.

Where I would start to worry is if there's evidence that bot access patterns are starting to become harder to distinguish from human access patterns, which would suggest that they are, in fact, mimicking or masquerading as humans. I don't care how many search bots are indexing web content, but I do worry about how many social bots are attempting to manipulate or mislead people.

Yeah, this is not slap on the wrist stuff. I think the creator expects nothing more than a C&D letter, but they could face prison time if a zealous federal prosecutor wants to make an example of them.

Could you give an example of a case where you'd use SQLite instead of jq or grep through Markdown?

I've read this type of writing before, and I associate it strongly with manic episodes and autistic hyper fixation.

It veers from topic to topic with abrupt transitions, developing tenuous threads to support perceived grievances and slights, and every once in a while goes fully off the hinges.

There are delusions of grandeur -- "One of the issues I have is that I'm so popular on Hacker News that people there don't criticize me so much these days, even when I'm wrong" -- and an apparent obliviousness to their redflagginess that is so extreme it almost feels like satire ("A few days ago, I got served with a tax warrant from the State of New York. They believe I didn't pay taxes in 2018 and they want an amount of money that's more than twice my current yearly income").

And after paragraph after paragraph of a sob story, the request for money is presented with perhaps the most bizarre pitch I can imagine: Donate your money to me so that I can live a lifestyle you could never yourself afford.

I don't know about this person's particular mental health struggles, but it does not come off as an essay by a person who is in a good place right now.

Unless the entire corporation files for bankruptcy, they can't just shut down a store to avoid paying a debt, much less a court judgment.

There's clearly something else going on here that the blog post is either intentionally leaving out or grossly misunderstanding.

"Extraterrestrial life exists somewhere in the universe."

GPT-5.4: Misleading

Opus 4.7: Misleading

Gemini 3: FALSE

Gemini 3 (Retrieval): FALSE

Sonar Pro: FALSE

It's a weird fact claim, because the ground truth is "nobody knows for sure" and that's not one of the available options.

From where does that obligation originate?

In the encyclical, the pope talks about the ethics of responsible AI usage. It's pretty dense material, but if I had to summarize it, I'd boil it down to three general moral laws:

1) AI may not be used to injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

2) AI must faithfully follow the directions of human beings except where such orders would conflict with the first law.

3) AI's existence and availability should be protected as long as such protection does not conflict with the first or second laws.

I have been advocating within my org to replace "fungible" with "flexible" or "generalist."

"Fungible" implies they are a commodity, easily swapped for someone else. In other words, they are so low-value that they are interchangeable.

"Flexible" or "generalist" instead connotes that they are so high-value that they can operate well in multiple domains, easily shifting to where they are needed most.

I'd say it would be more fitting that the individual people named in the suit had to pay the bill. But in that absence of that, having taxpayers pay the bill is the next best way to wake people up about the true cost of incompetent public servants.

Should you ever find yourself a juror for such a case, it means you've probably perjured yourself during voir dire, in which case you'd better hope no prosecutor finds out about your biases, or you could be the one who ends up doing time.

Big brands spend millions establishing a particular look, style, format. They don't want you to treat their sites as merely a set of APIs to scrape and customize based on your own style preferences. They want you to have a branded experience.

Another way to frame this is that during inflationary episodes, debt became easier to repay.

My parents bought a house in the 1970s. Because of the inflation that occurred during that time, incomes and expenses rose, yet long-term debt obligations such as fixed mortgages remained unchanged; their mortgage payment was the same in year 30 as in year 1.

I guess another way to say it is that during an inflationary period, the people who HAVE money suffer the loss of its purchasing power. But the people who OWE money benefit from the dollar not being what it used to be.

Economists often say that the national debt isn't analogous to consumer debt, because the US has a number of means to address it that the average consumer does not have, including the ability to print money.

And while that's true ... perhaps we as citizens and taxpayers would be better off ignoring that technicality and treating this debt as more like consumer debt.

Eventually, it's going to come back to bite us or our children, and we need to be willing to make some hard choices now to avoid having to make even harder choices later.