stupidcar

How would you ensure things like industrial farms use a more expensive multi-antibiotic approach instead of a cheaper single-antibiotic one without effective regulation?

People who experienced a stable childhood seem to have a natural tendency to view the period they grew up in as, if not a golden age, then a safer, simpler time. Which makes sense: You’re too young to be aware of much of the complexity of the world, and your parents provide most of your essential needs and shield you from a lot of bad stuff.

That’s not to say all eras are the same. Clearly there’s better and worse times to be alive, but it’s hard to be objective about our childhoods.

For most people and companies, yes. But for Apple? They could have used their money and influence to campaign for patent reform.

This is often quoted advice, but like many things it’s only true in moderation. People who take it too literally come across like therapists or interviewers. Some people are not comfortable talking about themselves, and most well adjusted people don’t want to talk endlessly about themselves. A good conversation should usually be an exchange.

There are also getter (and setter) properties that can be backed by private fields:

get name() { return this.#name; }

Half of this article seems to be based on the author’s unawareness of JS class syntax.

For biology, Synthace supports designing experimental protocols using DOE, executing them on robotically automated lab equipment, then performing analysis on the results: https://www.synthace.com/

The principle reason I've stopped using Stack Overflow much, which I haven't seen mentioned elsewhere, is that its content has become too dated.

Most of my questions relate to web development — how to do something in HTML/CSS/JS. When I Google, I can almost always find a related questions on Stack Overflow, but both the question and the answers are usually from a decade ago. The techniques they recommend are totally anachronistic by modern standards.

For example, search "how to vertically center a div". The top Stack Overflow result is a question from _14 years ago_, wanting to know how to do it in all browsers "including Internet Explorer 6". And the the accepted answer is a horribly convoluted hack that could be replaced with a couple of line of CSS nowadays.

As I said, as a developer working on a software project for your employer, you often inherit dependencies you had no say in. Nor can you force your employer to negotiate a contract with the maintainer.

Don't get me wrong: I'm not arguing the maintainer has any responsibility to fix your issue. I'm only saying that the situation for the developer facing the bug is not always as simple as the article implies. Their choices are constrained by factors outside their control, and they are under pressure to deliver. It's this pressure that explains some of the frustration and anger that can bubble up in open source discussions.

I don't think there's an easy solution, but more empathy on all sides might be a start.

I agree with the article in general, but the wrinkle comes when you encounter a bug in a large, popular open source project (naming no names, but any of the major web frameworks for example) that you're using for a work project.

Fix it? Sure, except despite their ostensibly open nature, many of these projects are run as internal projects of large tech corps, and the bandwidth and interest of the team in reviewing and merging external PRs is limited to nonexistent. I've submitted small, obvious bug fixes, complete with test coverage, to projects and had them sit unreviewed for years.

Fork it? Well there is a big, big difference between spending an hour fixing a bug and submitting a PR, and forking a large and complex dependency. You're committing yourself and your team and employer to the ongoing maintenance of the fork and merging of upstream changes, just so you can merge a bug fix. Usually, that's just not practical.

Fuck off? Many third-party dependencies in mature projects are non-negotiable. Removing them would require a complete rewrite. You may not even have been the person who chose them, but you're stuck with them, and then your boss asks you to implement a feature or fix something that relies on a change or fix in a dependency. Being blocked due to upstream intransigence is very frustrating, and there is often a professional cost to saying "no" to a request, especially a bug fix, no matter how convincing you argue that it's not your fault or under your control.

This is an exasperating article. Where is the data on who these 2.6m people are, demographically speaking, what their reasons are for not seeking work, and how they supporting themselves if they don't work? 2.6m young people not working is very different from 2.6m people who've basically chosen early retirement, for example. It talks about a skills problem, but without giving real any numbers or context.

Which is not an answer to the question “Was The Washington Post the tipping point where Amazon started to collapse?”, which you were responding to.

I don’t eat at McDonalds, but that doesn’t make me think they’re going to collapse. In fact they’re likely successful for precisely for the reasons I don’t eat there.

I hate to tell you, but that momentous setback has not yet caused Amazon to collapse.

While it's true that a LAB gradient will produce a more perceptually uniform gradient, it doesn't alter the article's point that sRGB isn't a colorspace. It has an associated nonlinear gamma function that is used to help compress values to 8-bit, and the result is that interpolating between two sRGB values is not the same as interpolating between them in a proper RGB colorspace, with the result that you'll get brightness problems.

So yes, LAB will produce more perceptually uniform gradients than RGB, but browsers are exacerbating the problems of RGB gradients by not implementing them properly.

The keywords async and await should give us the same intuition that the then does in the third. But I’ll wager for many engineers it doesn’t.

It does.

Supposedly because at the time of the acquisition, "Canyon Bridge was licensed and regulated by US law." but "Since then it has moved its headquarters to the Cayman Islands and as such is no longer a US-controlled entity." [1]. Although that sounds pretty flimsy. I suspect, given it happened in 2017, it was judged politically unwise to block a Chinese state investor when the UK was looking to increase global trade post-Brexit.

Eventually it seems the UK gov woke up and blocked a Chinese attempt to take over the board and move the company to China[2]. Now it seems there's a plan to IPO again in London or Nasdaq[3] so the Chinese owners can exit.

[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-52275201 [2] https://www.ft.com/content/654a6d68-ef26-47b2-9da5-9029c570f... [3] https://www.ft.com/content/e0c48d30-866d-4efd-9d78-21e49d366...

I am very excited for this. For those unaware, Ron Gilbert was the creative force behind The Secret of Monkey Island 1 and 2, but then left Lucasarts and the subsequent Monkey Island games were made by others. He's said for a long time that those games, while perfectly fine, didn't represent his vision for how the series would have continued (and Monkey Island 2 finished on an intriguing cliffhanger), so it's cool that we'll finally get his version of things, as the new game will continue from where MI2 left off (although apparently the other games will remain as canon somehow).

Also, a few years ago Gilbert and many of the others working on this new game made a retro-styled point-and-click adventure game called Thimbleweed Park[1]. It wasn't a smash hit in terms of sales, but I thought it was a lot of fun, and had some very sharp dialogue and design, and reassures me that the creative team haven't lost their touch and this won't be another Underworld Ascendant debacle.

[1] https://thimbleweedpark.com/

Yeah, I can't think of a single real app or website I've seen that uses this style. It seems instead like a single designer doing some self-promotion by inventing these new "trends". And this one seems to be inspired by cheap DVD menu screens from the 2000s.

What are you talking about? The setInterval example is completely idiomatic React hooks. It is literally given in the React docs:

https://reactjs.org/docs/hooks-faq.html#what-can-i-do-if-my-...

Having used Copilot for a while, I am quite certain it will replace me as a programmer.

It appears to me that when it comes to language models, intelligence = experience * context. Where experience is the amount what's encoded in the model, and context is the prompt. And the biggest limitation on Copilot currently is context. It behaves as an "advanced autocomplete" because it all is has to go on is what regular autocomplete sees, e.g. the last few characters and lines of code.

So, you can write a function name called createUserInDB() and it will attempt to complete it for you. But how does it know what DB technology you're using? Or what your user record looks like? It doesn't, and so you typically end up with a "generic" looking function using the most common DB tech and naming conventions for your language of choice.

But now imagine a future version of Copilot that is automatically provided with a lot more context. It also gets fed a list of your dependencies, from which it can derive which DB library you're using. It gets any locatable SQL schema file, so it can determine the columns in the user table. It gets the text of the Jira ticket, so it can determine the requirements.

As a programmer a great deal of time is spent checking these different sources and synthesising them in your head into an approach, which you then code. But they are all just text, of one form or another, and language models can work with them just as easily, and much faster, than you can.

And one the ML train coding gets running, it'll only get faster. Sooner or later Github will have a "Copilot bot" that can automatically make a stab at fixing issues, which you then approve, reject, or fix. And as thousands of these issues pile up, the training set will get bigger, and the model will get better. Sooner or later it'll be possible to create a repo, start filing issues, and rely on the bot to implement everything.

Elon Musk trying to save humanity from going extinct as a "one planet species" and in the process causing us to miss a near-Earth asteroid whose impact wipes us out would be rather ironic.

The best I saw was one that completes docking in 16 seconds: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WwWccjAD2i8

Given that this simulator supposedly maps closely to the actual interface on the spacecraft, it's funny to imagine SpaceX hooking it up to the real thing and seeing how it fares. Succeed or fail, it would be a pretty wild ride.

While I do think many media sources have an obvious self-interested bias against Facebook, I think Luckey is biased himself in how he portrays this affair in his tweets. He talks about how the press covered the filing of the lawsuit, but neglects to mention that it was originally filed in 2015, and has been through numerous twists and turns since, being dismissed, reinstated upon appeal, etc. before finally reaching a jury trial.[1]

Coverage in general has declined as the years have gone by, and this latest trial garnered little attention when it started. It wasn't as if there was minute-by-minute reporting that went dark as soon as the verdict came in. Yes, a loss for Oculus would have been an interesting story, and would have been reported on, but the reality is that Oculus and VR are simply not the zeigeisty topics they were in 2015, or even 2017, and so a "Goliath beats David after six year legal slog" story was never likely to be make headlines.

As someone who spent years fighting against a meritless suit, Luckey is entitled to feel aggrieved, and to wish that its end would be as big news as its beginning. But objectively its easy to see why it wasn't, without necessarily ascribing it to an industry-wide conspiracy of silence.

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2017/03/10/oculus-catches-a-break-as-...

If you asked people what was special about Einstein, most would say that he had important new ideas. Even the ones who tried to give you a more sophisticated-sounding answer would probably think this first. Till a few years ago I would have given the same answer myself. But that wasn't what was special about Einstein. What was special about him was that he was really smart. Having important new ideas was a necessary precondition for properly utilizing that intelligence, but the two are not identical.

It may seem a hair-splitting distinction to point out that inspiration and its consequences are not identical, but it isn't. There's a big gap between them. Anyone who's spent time around crackpot scientific theorists knows how big. There are a lot of genuinely original people who don't achieve very much.

And so on...

If you don't want all the ports at once, then it sounds like modular ports is perfect? You can just attach whichever combination you need on any given day / moment. Or am I missing something?

It's funny how every society has its own way of mistreating children, yet never considers it a problem at the time. We look at the ways children were harmed and exploited throughout history and shake our heads at how our morally underdeveloped forebears could be so cruel and misguided. Then we turn around and declare that our children have no right whatsoever to privacy, and that everything they read and write should be surveilled 24/7 by teams of strangers, for their "own good".

I firmly believe that a hundred years, people will look back on practices like this and shake their heads at the appalling attitudes their primitive ancestors had towards children. But I imagine that's little comfort to the kids subject to this kind of abuse.

I remember reading a cryptozoological theory that there could still be some mammoths left, hidden in the vastness of Siberia. Absurd, obviously, but I always thought you could make a great film about a ragtag crew searching for the last remaining mammoth tribe in the wilderness.

For AI researchers to move past the behaviorist conflation of thought and action, the field needs to drink again from the philosophical waters that fed much AI research in the late 20th century, when the field was theoretically rich, albeit technically floundering.

Well, gosh. Fancy a professor of philosophy deciding that AI needs more philosophy. Clearly, if the price of making progress in the field is to engage in all this ugly mathematics and -eww- engineering, then it's no price worth paying.

Dude, this spec was ten years between ideation and a FPWD, for a feature with proven demand and prior art. Sympathy for committee members would be easier if they gave any sign of recognising that this constituted a failure to make timely progress and fulfil the working group's chartered purpose: advancing CSS to simplify web authoring.

But standards committees display the same depressing insularity and hostility to outside criticism as most institutions, preferring to censure its tone instead of reflecting on its truth. In reality, it wouldn't matter how diplomatically it was conveyed, it wouldn't trigger any kind of self-reflection, just the exact same special-pleading about their task's unique difficulty.

In 2012, the www-style mailing list (where the CSS WG organised and discussed before moving to GitHub) was receiving up to 1400 messages a month: https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/ . There was active participation from professional, full-time standards experts employed by Google, Apple, Mozilla, Opera, Microsoft and more organisations. The author of this nesting spec first proposed it in 2011: https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/2011Jun/0022....

And this was hardly the first such discussion. You can find requests going back for years before even that point, with people requesting nesting/hierarchical rules and being shot down.

So no, there was no lack of expertise or passion. So why has it taken this long? A failure of leadership? A failure of process? Perhaps the few, pigheaded opponents of an obviously desired and useful feature were able to sabotage progress by making it impossible to achieve consensus. I don't know. But I refuse to let them off the hook because they finally got around to delivering something in 2021 that the web should have had in 2001.

Good. But nesting could and should have been added to CSS a decade ago or more, and it is an abject failure of the working group that it wasn’t, despite the obvious, overwhelming demand from authors.