tres

What's your test coverage like?

Not sure why good coverage wouldn't mitigate risk in a refactor...

My mantra whenever I'm working with AI is that I want it to know what "point b" looks like and be able to tell by itself whether it's gotten there...

If you have a working implementation, it sounds like you have a basis for automated tests to be written... once you have that (assuming that the tests are written to test the interface rather than the implementation), then it should be fairly direct to have an agent extract and decompose...

I believe the Jesus Jones song, "Right Here, Right Now" has become an ironic commentary on Gen X; in that brief moment in the 90's when we thought the nuclear sword of Damocles dangling over all of us had finally been cut down...

Not a great song, but one that expresses the zeitgeist in a pretty succinct way.

We thought that we were at the cusp of a new era... one where we could overcome the injustices of the past and author a future based on the best version of ourselves.

In the end, Gen X never even got a chance to start; we watched from the sidelines as geriatric Boomers clung (and still cling) to power -- leaving less and less of that (ever more naive) dream behind.

"Right here, right now,

there's no other place I'd rather be.

Right here, right now,

watching the world wake up from history."

The song hasn't aged well & has become a cloy reminder of that time and what we didn't become.

And you may find your site in beautiful cloud, with a beautiful bounce rate.

Personally, I find this aspect of the work somewhat profound.

My graveyard of projects and dreams stretches out behind me and I feel saddened to know that these articles representing portions of my life never achieved what I had hoped for them.

However, I've come to view my work like a mandala or some representation of our mortality itself; our works and our lives are temporary.

We can make the most of the brief moment that we have – whether that be through work or through parenting or through base jumping – whatever that may be for each of us, or we can choose to do nothing with that moment, knowing that it's ephemeral and will be gone soon anyway.

I choose to try making each day's the best code I have ever written; I want it to be "beautiful" and maintainable in spite of knowing that it will be refactored, deleted or decommissioned at some point.

Not sure what you're looking for in IDE support...

If you're a Jetbrains addict, there's this IDE extension which has worked well for me: https://github.com/KronicDeth/intellij-elixir

Relevant quote: "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway." -- Andrew S. Tanenbaum

It wasn't an attitude of naive hope that there wouldn't be nefarious actors leveraging the protocol; there was a different kind of people using the Internet.

There's no need to design security in the system when you literally know everyone who is using it. And everyone who was using it had the same goals in mind.

So, I don't disagree with the sentiment -- people today would probably do it a little bit differently; however, I do disagree with the expression -- people designing these protocols weren't naive. They were trustful because they had to be.

In the early days of building something new, nothing works without trust; not the Internet... not Bitcoin... not a nascent venture... nothing.

s/recon/reckon/g

Well, it seems revealing that we're discussing togas and not sponges on sticks. I'd wager that's because earlier statements made in this thread regarding the universal, unequivocal truth that no one used shared sponges on sticks may not necessarily be so easy to defend.

Judgements of competence and honesty are subjective; we can all fail to distribute them fairly (especially when it comes to ourselves).

Rarely, when it comes to a history of an entire culture that spans hundreds of years and thousands of miles, can we find one perspective that describes a universal "truth."

All we have are shades of approximation.

That doesn't mean that there's no value in that approximation, it just means that we have to be a little patient with each other while each of our generalizations don't necessarily conform to the ineffable complexity of such a large group of people over such a large area over such a large timespan.

"Perfect is the enemy of good."

I guess that implies that esoteric aspects of toga wearing in ancient Rome is a "basic thing" that one should know before writing anything about Roman toilets.

I'm sorry that it seems to be so problematic.

This piece seems interesting and illuminating regarding a specific aspect of a culture that we are thousands of years removed from. It's a pop-piece, meant to be approachable and to stir the curiosity of the reader.

I can't imagine how many different ways it probably gets things wrong... and I guess that in itself is interesting to think about... but because it's impure does it mean that it has no value?

Is anything with a hint of inaccuracy (according to our own perspective and understanding) deigned unworthy of inclusion and distribution?

Does one need to be perfect in order to be published?

I recon that the cutout in front of the toilet has a purpose... the existence of that cutout seems to align well with the idea that one might put a sponge on a stick through it in order to clean their back orifice.

The toga thing has been addressed by others as our cultural mores being projected on people with different values...

Otherwise, I found the article interesting and entertaining.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

TIL. Thanks for taking the time to explain!

uh... wut

I believe it's the amps you need to worry about; "amps kill."

I believe it takes about 1 amp to kill a person.

This thing is outputting somewhere around 55 amps (if I remember right).

I believe the Washington state gas tax charged to standard internal combustion vehicles is much a lot about volume + mass; moving more stuff around less efficiently is going to inherently take more calories & therefore more tax will be paid.

That said, I've been really disappointed with the way the Washington state EV tax you reference was implemented. I mean, I'm just fine paying my fair share, but I should be taxed in the same manner as any other user of the same resources.

To that end, we have vehicle inspection stations & using those to check odometer readings on an annual basis would make for fair taxation.

As it is, I stopped paying registration, insurance and left our Leaf sitting in the driveway since the pandemic started because of the way this tax is levied.

Totally agree on point 2.

PHP's documentation was always excellent, available and was always a quick Google search away from finding the relevant materials. It was tangibly superior at the time.

Coding with other languages at the time always involved some kind of physical reference book (or some closed off "compiled" walled "context sensitive" help system whose search capability and discoverability was little-to-none).

Although I had sooo many O'Reilly reference books, I don't think I ever had an O'Reilly PHP reference book... (Not sure there ever even was one because it would be totally unnecessary)

What's the business model again? How are they making money?

"If you are not paying for it, you're not the customer; you're the product being sold"

Runtime configuration is my favorite new feature of this release.

Dancing around runtime vs compile time configuration seemed like it was one of the "harder" parts of dropping into Elixir.

edit: grammar

[Citation Needed]

Not that it's either relevant or germane to a discussion regarding an organization using stolen identity to wire funds electronically.

Multiple states have been using mail-in ballots for literally decades. No widespread voter fraud has ever been reported.

Here's an anecdote for you: a few elections back, my signature didn't look quite right on the envelope of my ballot. Got a call from elections officials to verify that I had in fact filled out the ballot.

There's a lot more control involved in mail-in voting than there are in fraudulently filling-out an online form and receiving an electronic funds transfer.

The article states that they're using homemade masks -- even t-shirts wrapped around their face.

It's not about filtering... there's something else happening here... I'd guess that the mask is a constant reminder to keep your hands off your face.

The U.S. federal government had a significant amount of control and formerly had the sole resources to deal with issues like this. Ironic that the sole raison d'être one of those resources was in mitigating and coordinating responses to events just like the one we find ourselves in.

Destroying that resource is squarely on turmp.

We've been watching the tearing down of the federal government since the Reagan years. We've witnessed the slow evisceration of everything outside of the department of defense.

The federal government could have and should have led a coordinated response to this. But now that the conservative dream of having a federal government big enough that it could be drowned in a bathtub is in reach, it's nearly impossible to.

This is the consequence of forty years of coordinated effort to hollow out the federal government from within.

States have very limited resources at their disposal. There's simply no way that they can coordinate the kind of response needed for an epidemic that knows no borders.

kr & wba are two that have what I consider a good P/E and a good dividend.

I think what really changed was the departure of Scott Forstall after the death of Jobs & the decision to put Tim Cook in charge.

Remove that someone who didn't just look at software as an accoutrement to hardware -- but as a necessary, functional part of that hardware (skeuomorphism was the natural outcome of this worldview), then replace them with someone who reveres form over function and we end up where we are.

Still missing Scott Forstall.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Forstall

What's more, many of the Leafs are still under factory warranty when they're sold for a fraction of their new MSRP.

I bought my 2011 Leaf when it was just about three years old and had somewhere in the neighborhood of 22k miles on it and paid somewhere around $6k.

I figured it was a pretty safe buy because the car still had plenty of miles left on the warranty.

I never had to make use of that warranty though; truly the best fit & finish of any car I've owned. Reliable & by far the best value of any car I've ever purchased.

After eight years, capacity is running down... somewhere around 40 miles per charge in the summer now... but that's perfect for my use-case. I'm looking forward to many more years with minimal maintenance costs. Once the battery capacity gets low enough, I'll spring for a new battery.

Tell bob he needs to check in the file so I can work on it.

I get that this is an ironic take on the semantic reference and the object it represented but I think there is merit in talking about why the obviously-not-floppy 3.5 disk was called "floppy."

At the time, "hard disk" referred to the spinning disk inside the computer & so though "floppy" wasn't technically accurate when referring to the 3.5 inch floppy, it was a nomenclature referring its utility or type rather than a physical description actual object itself.

"Floppies" were the things that you stuck in and removed... didn't matter their covering material, nor what size they were.

It's interesting to think about how many of our words have the same kind of history; once having a widespread descriptive meaning associated with physical traits of the object itself which ultimately were divorced from the original meaning over time...

I'm going to hazard a guess that most of our nouns have that kind of history... but the interesting thing here is that this morphing happened so quickly and it's because the object itself changed, not some generational loss of original meaning...

Today, toilet paper is ubiquitous in Western cultures; it’s a US$9.5 billion-a-year industry in the United States. Americans, in their typical excess, use more than 50 pounds per person per year! About 1.75 tons of raw fiber are required to manufacture each ton of toilet paper. That doesn’t seem sustainable, and frankly, I’m surprised that people haven’t protested more as a result.

Given these numbers and the marketing efforts behind them, it’s hard to argue that the use of toilet paper is somehow natural. On the contrary, toilet paper is nothing more than a technology. So the next time you’re enjoying a morning constitutional, think about the fact that defecation and urination are more than biological functions; they are cultural activities that involve artifacts and technologies that change through time.

My takeaways:

* Lots of opportunity in taking on the "dirty jobs" that don't get the glamor.

* Something so ubiquitous and integral to our daily lives is a relatively recent introduction... It's not "perfect," nor "finished;" thinking about this mainstay as a piece of technology that can be made better holds opportunity.

Hacking the system, following a vision going against the grain and persistence in the face of overwhelming obstacles.

Maybe this guy should apply for YC.

The real big issue here is not the agents -- although there's built-in systemic conflicts of interest that the industry engenders -- it's the people above the agents that really benefit from this system...

The companies who normally take about 50% of that commission from the agent do not provide anywhere close to the kind of value that they charge for.

These are the real winners and gate-keepers in the current system. These are the people that pay millions for lobbyists to keep the status-quo.

and the inspector is financially responsible for exactly the cost of the inspection.

No more.

I think you've really hit the nail on the head here. There's a built-in conflict of interest for the agent in every transaction.

They are rewarded by moving inventory, not serving their client.

"...following revelations of how its platform was used to manipulate black voters in the 2016 presidential election."

This seems somewhat misguided... I know Facebook is the whipping-boy de jour, but it seems evident that Facebook is the biggest victim in all of this.

All of the bad press FB is getting lately... literally years after events occurred and after they've been working to rectify the issues is curious.

After all the bad press that was hammering Tesla for an extended period of time quickly dried up (after Elon Musk showed just how far he was willing to go to shake the short-sellers), Facebook suddenly took its place.

I'm not one for conspiracy theories, but it really feels like someone with a lot of power has organized and weaponized information for the sake of manipulating stock prices.

That doesn't have much to do with the NAACP itself, but these information campaigns have a side-effect of modifying public opinion and sentiment.

I really kind of feel ashamed of posting this -- it seems like such a low-value conspiracy theory, but it just seems strange to me how all this is playing out.