nxobject

This is a sleeper option, but 'xonsh' as a Python superset is a very pleasant experience, especially when you just don't feel like learning another bespoke language for the complex stuff.

I once had to scrape the output out of something hacked together by a grad student 10 years before me, scrape yet another hacked together application, do some fancy numerics, and then plonk it into a database. I did it without tears!

We’re at the gamification stage of motivating people to use your product, eh?

It sounds like, in this case, Apple has hard proof that documents were stolen.

Honestly, the proof is the least surprising part -- Apple's been paranoid about leaks for decades, even when the stakes have been lower.

AI model providers have zero "moat", clients change them as they see fit.

That might be true in tech-savvy industries -- but in non-tech industries where the biggest software purchase might be the office suite or the ERP, inertia means the GSuite shops stick with Gemini, and the Exchange/Office 365 shops stick with Copilot.

The "curb cut effect", right? I'm sure there's a human-friendly interface to MCPs myself. I think we're reinventing application scripting that way.

i.e., welcome to Constitutional law, where divining the effect of a amendment written in 19th century prose lives and dies on jurisprudential philosophy, rather than decided case law. (Is that what you mean by the “(and common law?)” parenthetical?)

Fascinating to think about the logistics with avoiding ROM – model compatiblity must've been a PITA! I'm even thinking about how to identify models – I know there's a pre-Gestalt Toolbox routine that doesn't need any Toolboxes, I guess?

Yes, OP started the sentence with that. But, you do make me wonder if floating-point imprecision would eventually lead to material issues...

I would give my left leg to learn how the permissions system worked – do end users (and PHBs) get to edit the rules directly? I fully expect some HR ass to go:

  can_view(Person) :- didPITAOnlineTraining(Person), ...

Also...these things tend to have fuckin terrible documentation. Good luck figuring any of this out. And you can't google it and your AI is just as lost as you

I convinced my boss to hire an intern for the summer to do this. They said: "wouldn't internship projects that involved actual coding be more attractive?"

I replied: "Well, they'll be having to do a lot of experimenting to figure things out..."

I can't wait for the development postmortem ;)

Any hunches on why the iBook might not be working? I've been having hell with PRAM watch batteries recently.

I do not like the R language at all myself, but to be fair there are reasons it is widely used in higher ed.

In the same boat... from a PL perspective, yikes (especially the macro mechanism that somehow never seemed to be planned, but somehow exists). As a working statistician? It really does get work done quickly.

To pass inputs with complex unevaluated syntax, I've seen...

– ad-hoc string parsing (lavaan etc.)

– formulas (which somehow the tidyverse doesn't use),

– base R syntax manipulation by round-tripping between as.list and as.call;

– and whatever wheel reinvention with bizarre semantics that the tidyverse uses.

Even though I've dealt with this, I'm genuinely appreciative of requirements: out of many stipulations, packages that monkeypatch are prohibited (I have a few ones that add diagnostics to advance analyses), online API access needs robust error handling... and there is a conformance/diagnostic suite.

https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/policies.html

The other half is: "What combination of packages and task views do I actually need to not reinvent the wheel for this particular type of analysis?"

Gloriously boring WordPress, too.

I get it – in my (limited) opinion, there's a lot that's quirkily (but avoidably) named about ggplot and the surrounding R ecosystem in general.

I suspect for consistency with ggplot - the same reason why ‘aes’ is shorthand and everyone forgets that it stands for “aesthetic”.

https://ggplot2.tidyverse.org/reference/labs.html

That's the real problem! That healthcare costs are a goldmine for Big Pharma instead of being a cheap and widely available service.

I thought we were railing against Big Hospital/Big Insurance here? They'd love a cheap diagnostic.

FWIW, Tesco just divested from all of the Lotuses… now it’s the awkwardly named Lotus’s.

Curing cancer is one of the only things I’d take a pay cut to do.

Send an email to this head-and-neck oncologist's lab. I saw a talk he gave at a Chicago-area national lab on open-source models for identifying malignancies in scanned pathology slides, and was smitten.

https://voices.uchicago.edu/pearsonlab/

Which is why I pause when they say they're not looking for investor money – in medicine you'd at least have to phrase things in terms of "what already exists, and what's our contribution"? From that lens, I'm not sure what they're trying to contribute: instead of increasing the predictive value of full-body imaging, they're just making it cheaper?

At this point the Accessbility preference panes are just crammed full with tweaks and tools – good if you need them, bad for discovery!

Does that make you the first in a long tradition of GPU developers going to blockbuster app devs to say "hey, you should be doing this instead?"

PS – I am looking through the NuBus cards that I have... did you work for SuperMac or RasterOps?

And Anthropic seems to be leaving OpenAI behind so there might be only 1 in the near future.

Well, in domains like SWE where Anthropic's putting in the effort. I don't they'll make the claims that OpenAI makes about how their models are pushing the life sciences forward, for example.

Well, you know, you go into your Smalltalk-80 workstation for a hack sesh, and an all-nighter later you end up with an implementatkon of Swing...

To put the mad profit that Xerox got from laser printers into context: Alan Kay estimated it alone paid off everything that Xerox had invested in PARC, and then a lot, lot more. (I think PARC in the 70s cost less than $10 mil annually.)

What a choice: heatstroke, or chronic respiratory disease?

The comments that this rather expensive endeavour should just be about getting a head count are also amusing to me. The data collected was such an important baseline of common understanding, and this will not be a good thing for its future quality.

Even without considering the Census data products alone, Census demographic data underlies virtually all extrapolation from other survey research. Everything from national opinion surveys based on tens of thousands of respondents, to small community surveys. A Census product with the most diverse participation pays off almost infinitely for America. It benefits everyone from national newspapers to rural counties.

If the smallest communities lose what little trust remains in the privacy of the Census, they have the most to lose in all of these ways.

They're decentralized enough as well that some of their local offices have hilarious online presences. For example, Portland...

https://www.instagram.com/corpsofengineers_portland/

For some reason, Java has the same feeling. Professionally I do both embedded and statistical computing, and Java's been nearly anathema to this. But every 5 years I patch a hobby project I did once in college, and it comes right back (and with JVM hot reloading too.) It gives me the engineering warm and fuzzies.