obelos

This was my approach to a large rewrite I'm working on. First create the multiple layers of test suite to map out existing behavior at the unit, API, and integration level (something that should have been done incrementally over the 20 years this software has existed), then predicate the new code on the tests. It's been remarkably effective.

They're pro-“fertility talking points” at least, but rarely in favor of economic and social policies that encourage child rearing.

I'm not sure it's really from the lack of change, though. I've used Claude, Kimi, and other LLMs to write a ton of Perl that's jacked up with weird sugaring packages like Moose and Function::Parameters with reified types, and they seem to pick up the new idioms pretty effortlessly. It's a really unexpected fluency, frankly.

For us nerds in the Portland/PNW area, the Rice Museum out in Hillsboro—despite a name suggesting it has an exhaustive display of rice varieties—has a terrific collection of large and unique mineral specimens. https://www.ricenorthwestmuseum.org

I've most frequently heard this referred to as “Gell-Mann Amnesia,” and yes, LLMs are fertile ground to find it.

“Sure, it will probably happen again, but what if we made some money along the way?!”

I think there's also a dominating bias that people who walk/bike/bus are poor and thus make bad customers. “If they had money, they'd be in a car!”

Also nationalized control of healthcare costs.

I'm pretty sure this is a joke reference to Ted Lasso.

It makes more sense when you interpret it as an attempt at humiliation, not diplomacy.

I think you're forgetting to put “all the times ignorance didn't produce a breakthrough” in the denominator.

To a large degree their wealth is transnational and will move on to the next trough after emptying this one.

“Can you believe it? That colored boy wants me to call him ‘mister!’”

I wonder if there would be as much pushback here on this article if the conclusion to these 10k words of cited historical analysis had been to discourage the phrase's continued use because “we're besmirching our reputation as engineers using this idiom inaccurately” vs. “we're inadvertently maligning and hurting people by using this idiom inaccurately.”

In addition to the great lighting, the new design also has much improved acoustics. The sound dampening is impressive. I can have conversations without straining to pick up words through the din of echoes, and the ambience has a nice warm sense of quiet.

You might find Rag to Riches' (R2R) built-in use of Unstructured for doc parsing, hybrid search, knowledge graphs, and HyDE queries improves the quality of your retrievals. https://github.com/SciPhi-AI/R2R

Do you really need to comment to yourself or anyone else that you did a thing the less efficient way because it was simpler? I guess I"m not seeing the use. When later you've perturbed the criteria that caused that function's inefficiency to be immaterial to overall performance needs and it suddenly becomes material, profiling is going to reveal the low-hanging fruit faster than digging through the code for a “this could be faster a different way” comments.

If you have ever not gone somewhere because “there's too much traffic” or chosen to go to a store because it has easier parking than an equivalent alternative store, you've experienced the rudiments of induced demand.

Counterpoint: most innovation sucks. Sure, innovation is necessary for improvement and adaptation to changing circumstances. Sure, sometimes innovative change is stifled to the point that organizations crumble under the stasis. But the larger and more stable the organization, the higher the bar should be between “I have a great idea that will make things better!” and its implementation. Most ideas of change do not take into account the complex, multiplicitous, overlapping, crossed-purpose systems that conspire to bring an organization to life. They account for only locally perceived changes, not weird, unpredictable knock-on effects that can arise from introducing an optimization. Adopting every ostensible innovation that comes along is inviting only chaos. Change should be hard. Not impossible, but hard.

It's so bad I often wonder if I've done something to inadvertently screw up whatever vector database is used to weight the guesses on my particular phone. It's just hard to imagine having this bad of a user experience of a fundamental function be widespread.

Many of these look like solid feature updates, but I'm waiting to hear about a native keyboard that doesn't pick the dumbest, most context-free possible word from the smear of letters I've fat-fingered into it.

Not every time. Sometimes it's DNS.

This opinion piece is less a incisive criticism of NPR than it is a resume line item for Berliner applying to The Atlantic. His three leading “big” examples are largely wrong. The Mueller report didn't say “no collusion”. Barr did. The report said that it was not possible to conclude with prosecutorial confidence what level of cooperation had taken place because there had been so much obstruction of justice, so charging for that would be the appropriate law enforcement action after Trump resumed his role as a regular citizen.

Conversely, the Hunter laptop thing has never been a compelling above-the-fold story. Hunter Biden is a politician's kid, not some elected official or, ahem, a politician's kid who has been appointed to a cabinet or advisory role within an administration. There has been no evidence that implicated Joe Biden was a meaningful participant or benefactor in whatever name-dropping grift he's gotten on at. Why would a news outlet spend airtime on this?

The lab leak story is somewhat more compelling. Although I think at this point because of analysis that concluded there were two different, yet closely related strains of the virus simultaneously present at different sections of the wet market, it's hard to conclude a lab origin is more likely than it coming from wild origins. But at the time he's referring to, it was simply a matter of dogma to conclude a lab origin was off the table.

And commenting that the DC staff is 87 Democrat is... amazing. That's the natural demographic of DC, one of the most Democratic regions in the country.

Much like the frequently vilified HF trader, the value that landlording adds to the economy is liquidity. What do these managed housing schemes provide when, for example, a household breaks up? Or two households want to merge? Or even when a household wants to move across town to be closer to work? If you have ~100% utilized housing, the only way this gets addressed is with elaborate queuing. The liquidity that an open rental market offers comes at a cost, and it's very worthwhile to interrogate that cost and seek to mitigate it because it mostly translates into homelessness. But the managed housing market / absolute rent control approach doesn't seem to have an answer to the liquidity problem, which also demands interrogation.

What's your threat model? The number one killer of children under 16 is cars.

But why? If the person with the overwhelmingly disproportionate amount of power is unwilling to uphold and support the social contract, why is it incumbent upon the disenfranchised to regard the contract as valid or even existent?

gerund.ing is only $45/yr!

My city's transit system has this. It's convenient for if you're traveling alone, but traveling with kids now requires more logistics and planning than it used to. Their former electronic pass system was just an app that allowed you to activate any number of adult and child fares all on the same device. Now I have to carry separate physical cards for the kids.

A lot of car-centric people conflate “I don't know exactly what's about to happen next” with “danger!” What's actually dangerous is the hubristic trance people fall into when they believe they do know exactly what's about to happen next. When that happens at car speeds in a world that is inherently unpredictable, it's often deadly.

Make those anti-eargasm prudes take a back seat for a while!