speedplane

This is a nice idea, but it's empty. There were widely reported ICE operations in Minnesota over the past few days, yet it's blank on the map. Seems like a fun vibe-code project, but not useful w/o data.

Legal-tech: Using AI to help attorneys bill flat-rate instead of hourly. It's data intensive, but possible if you go through their old time entries and tell them the flat-rate price of all of their hourly work. 93% of attorneys bill hourly, primarily b/c they don't have any sense of the cost of the upcoming work. DM me if you want to work on these problems.

Saw both the movie and the real thing multiple times. Subject of numerous a heist fantasy… even today though, the MTA guys collecting money from the machines are escorted by NYPD conspicuously showing their firearms while giving you the eye. The attitude remains.

The question is whether consciousness is emergent from large enough models, or whether it’ll be something we’ll need to design/build.

“Power is not a material possession that can be given, it is the ability to act. Power must be taken, it is never given.”

“‘This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing Government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it, or their revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow it.’ Abraham Lincoln”

Instead, we should be using game-style "data oriented programming" a.k.a. "column databases" for a much higher performance.

This makes logical sense, but I don’t buy it in practice. Most of the heavy data reads are handled by databases, which do optimize for this stuff. I just doubt that, in most software, a significant amount of software performance issues are a result of poor memory alignment of data structures.

I don't think that being able to replace a library at runtime is a useful enough feature to justify the high maintenance cost of shared libraries.

We’re moving to a world where every program is containerized or sandboxed. There is no more real “sharing” of libraries, everything gets “statically linked” in a Docker image anyway.

Can someone explain the value of such a list, am I missing something?

You can glean information about your competitors’ usage and advertising, which can help you optimize your own app’s advertising spend.

Scale it

You can do Unicode in Python 2. You can do Unicode faster and easier in Python 3. But by gaining that ability, they set the existing community back by 10 years.

There are literally savings accounts with interest rate over my mortgage interest, meaning there is a zero risk arbitrage opportunity.

Many utilities give an 8-9% interest rate on bonds, with very little risk (Comcast isn't going bankrupt soon). That said, there's no such thing as zero-risk arbitrage.

Wealth inequality is not a problem in itself. Poverty or theft is.

Inequality leads to power centers. Power centers lead to systemic corruption. Systemic corruption is a problem.

So yes, extreme inequality is itself a problem.

It is often best to avoid non-ASCII characters in source code. ... > Depends of the language. In Python 3, files are expected to be utf8 by default, and you can change that by adding a "# coding: <charset>" header.

It's interesting that many languages avoid unicode and non-ASCII text, yet they make assumptions about file and directory structures about the underlying system. It's as if interpreting directory and file system structures is "okay", but interpreting file formats is not.

In fact, it's one of the reasons it was a breaking release in the first place, and being able to put non-ASCII characters in strings and comments in my source code are a huge plus.

Sorry, but as a Python dev that went from 2 to 3, yes native unicode features are nice, but no, it was not worth breaking two decades of existing code.

they've been heralding the death of Moore's law since he started and that the "one trick ponies" just keep coming. He says he doesn't doubt that they will continue.

The situation is clearly far worse than what you suggest. Back in the 1990s and early 2000s, apparent computer performance was doubling roughly every two years. Your shiny new desktop was obsolete in 24 months.

Today, we're lucky to get a 15% gain in two years. The "one-trick ponies" help narrow the "apparent performance" gap, but by definition, are implemented out of desperation. They aren't enough to keep Moore's law alive (it's already dead), and their very existence is evidence of the death of Moore's law.

We should all be happy for the millions of people that didn't starve to death, and for the millions who didn't have to walk their children off of cliffs or have the family hug a grenade.

Before we thank ourselves for all the lives we "saved", we should remember all of those that died in the name of an unnecessary exercise in human greed and cruelty.

Time is an illusion. Science tells us it's linear, measured in precise nano-seconds. But humans measure time differently, it's based more on the depth of connection we have to others. You can have a life-changing event in a day, or waste away doing nothing for a decade. The more connected one is to the surrounding people and environment, the denser and more fulfilling time becomes.

The M1 processor is a direct result of the death of Moore's law. It's an amazing processor, but a sad sign of things to come.

The performance gains from Moore's law have typically come from shrinking die size. That has ended, you can't juice more performance from general purpose CPUs. If general purpose processors no longer advance quickly enough, the only way to get performance gains is to build custom chips for common specific tasks. That's what we're seeing now with the M1. The M1 buys us a few more years of exponential-appearing performance gains, but it's a one-trick pony. You can turn code into an ASIC once, but after that, your performance is at the mercy of the foundry and physics.

The death of Moore's law has many consequences, the rise of ASICs and custom co-processor chips is just one of them.

Guns germs steel! Read the book.

There is a mathematically based definition of a perfect market. It’s only an approximation of real life, but it’s heavily used: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/perfectcompetition.asp

Can’t we just have biased media (like we do now), that makes their biased clear?

Billionaires are criminal by definition

Sadly, billionaires aren’t criminal by definition (no such laws), but the existence of billionaires sure does cut against the idea of a perfect market (in a “perfect” market there cannot be profits).

It’s easy to make a profit when everyone is strapped for cash and you have an infinite supply

I’d expand this... It’s easy to make a profit when everyone is strapped for cash.

If you can work 50 hours a week, and can manage a team of people, it’s time to look beyond McDonalds.

What kind of program requires that much ram?

Elasticsearch is written in Java, and routinely uses 30GB+ of RAM. I suspect if it was written in Python, it would use an order of magnitude more.

the term "a real python programmer" clearly meanys a developer who actually has used Python in the past in a remotely significant way

As a "real python programmer" that is trying to manage a conversion from Python 2 to 3, I can confirm that there is no superiority complex. We feel whipped and beaten, forced to convert a code-base that has been deemed "legacy" in exchange for a few nice string manipulation features that we don't really need.

A "real python programmer" in 2020 is an abandoned class.

if ... accurate, that Trump intentionally did not want more testing, to keep the reported number of infected low, to ... increase his re-election chances. ... it's not politics. It's unethical and immoral...

I'm no fan of Trump, but that's loading on too much. It's just bad instincts and leadership, no one could know how this would unfold.

Fact 1: There are always bugs or unforeseen events in software.

Fact 2: When there is an unforeseen event, the developer did not consider what to do.

Fact 3: Developers often deal with other people's buggy code.

It's clear that exceptions aren't the perfect solution to anything, but given these 3 facts, exceptions are around to stay.

So Ubuntu is open-source, but if I fork it, it comes with « Ubuntu » in package names, therefore I’m infringing on their trademark?

Yup. However, I suspect that Ubuntu gives a pretty permissive trademark license in their distribution.

This isn't a theoretical argument, the Android OS is open source, but the "Android" brand is a protected trademark. If you're a cell phone manufacturer, you can use the Android code freely, but if you want to put an Android sticker on your phone, you have to follow Google's rules.

Given the choice between honest work and preying on our fellow human being its always easier to exploit. This is why despite being proposed as a means to inspire creation copyright theoretically expires 7O years after you die and realistically never.

Your argument is not really about intellectual property rights, and is more about property rights and capitalism generally. If you don't believe in property rights or investment, then sure, IP rights don't make sense either.

That is an argument for the idea of copyright itself. It's not an argument in favor of the current system and it also proves no justification to expand the current system.

You're wrong. The constitution grounds copyright (and other IP rights), in utilitarianism. Meaning, if granting stronger protection promotes overall welfare, then that is justification.

The problem with utilitarianism is that it's very difficult to determine what is greater "overall welfare". By its nature, it's an empirical decision. Once you start invoking data (rather than basic rights), lots of people and companies will come out of the woodwork to promote their own data points.