unbearded

I use sparkey / hammerspace for caching static data (tried rocksdb but hammerspace was faster) for many years.

It helps me have a 20ms on a 100r/s on a ruby on rails app (ruunning on a ryzen 5950X). I keep seeing people brag about 100ms on applications and maybe I’m old school or haven’t seen enough, but 100ms breaks personal SLO. will trigger a 5-alarm alert. Also use redis a lot. But when possible, I use hammerspace/sparkey instead of it.

I guess the people who are not aware of this effect might make a lot of decisions in life and a confident AI agent will be like a high-tech con-artist.

As a child, I would read the horoscope of the day with the wrong sign for mother and her female friends and they always thought it was talking about them and I never had the courage to tell them I switched as a joke. I keep imagining a fine tuned GPT for insights from the "mystic realm".

I don’t think it’s the ADHD. I have it but I’m very conservative on the stack. And I know many developers who don’t have ADHD, some newbie and some who code longer than 20 years and are going after the latest shiny thing.

I think it’s more of what people assume it’s a status symbol among their peers. I noticed for example, in church, that some people think the more boring is more saint and don’t like more a church with a more contemporary dynamic approach and I think the same effect applies in the software development world.

Maybe should be called Prompt Science or Prompt Discovery or even Prompt Craft.

I have a 40 million BERT-embedding spotify-annoy index that I keep experimenting with to make a better query vector.

One way that I’m doing is getting only the token vectors with the highest sum of the whole vector and averaging the top vectors to use as the query vector.

Another way is zeroing many dimensions randomly on the query vector to introduce diversity.

But after experimenting with “prompt engineering” I found out that prefixing the sentences for the query vectors with “prompts” yield very interesting results.

But I don’t see much engineering. It’s more trial, feedback and trying again. Maybe even Prompt Art. Just like on chatGPT.

In my experience, there's the "software developer" and the "formware developer," and as more companies go through a real "Digital Transformation," they begin to require their programmers to do more advanced tasks that go beyond form-based CRUD applications.

As as person who got diagnosed with ADHD as an adult and looked back to a life of potential wasted, and while I don’t agree with calling the benefits of any drug “superpowers”, I can understand why some people would. I exercise almost every day, meditate, eat and sleep well and yet, it was a pill that made the biggest difference in treating my difficult on keeping focus.

The doctor recommended that I tried Strattera first and see if worked before trying stimulants. Atomoxetine is one pill per day and works 24 hours. But doesn’t work for everybody and some people have some undesired side-effects. I had some of the “undesired side-effects” in the beginning but they went away after a few days. Also, in my case, it took 20 days until I felt that it was working. I noticed it started working one day after a looked back at one situation where I would normally get stuck and dread and it had gone as without any issue.

Have been taking Strattera for a few months and wonder how many years of my life I would have not wasted if I had been diagnosed with ADHD earlier in my life.

I just turned 40 and I never thought I had ADHD until recently. Before I just thought my lack of attention on things was just the price of being a 10X on productivity (and I was a little arrogant because of it).

The reality was that I chose to put my time on tasks that I found interesting and engaging and when that choice was not available, I would feel anxious, stuck and totally unfocused. Still, I thought that was just normal procrastination that everybody goes through.

Some changes in my life and goals limited my time to act and required me to be more focused, but instead of getting into action I got more stuck than ever and very anxious as the deadlines got closer and got missed.

Treating my ADHD helped me change my relationships for better and widened the possibilites in my work and I would recommend to anybody in the same situation.

Thank you! She will see another doctor and do some more exams today.

In the case of COVID, I don't think we need two years. My wife had COVID a few months ago and got beat up pretty badly.

She would be the last person you would think would get seriously ill - she eats only healthy food, is(was) a Crossfit rat, vitamins, meditation. She checks all the boxes for a healthy lifestyle and some).

We would go on 30 miles bike rides often and now she can't go up a hill mounted on the bike anymore. She was still going to a Crossfit gym that was (illegally) open during the pandemic but just for sanity. She couldn't do much of the workouts.

That was up to three weeks ago. One day she woke up with a swollen leg and has gone to three doctors already and is going to another to try to find why her leg is that way.

My suspicion is that COVID affected her circulatory system and is caused the problem that she is having on her leg. I hope that it's not the case, but this worry is enough to lose some sleep.

I believe that Brazil gives a good case study on the subject. The whole sector used to be state-owned and electricity used to be more expensive and outages a very regular thing. Currently, some parts of the country have private generation and transmission with targets sets for the number of planned shutdowns, outages and inspection set by the regulatory agency. The private companies are light-years ahead on any metric that you can think of. The parts of the sector that are still public-owned are legendary on their wastefulness and lack of accountability.

I would say the quality is relative to your input and to what type of application you need results for.

If you are gonna use the pointcloud as a cheaper and faster alternative to LIDAR and need to take measures with centimeter precision, you will need a lot of overlap (we use 75%) and the drone to take the photos automatically to be sure it covers most of the desired area. I would also recommend a commercial tool for the task. We have jobs that take one week to process with state of the art hardware.

But if you just want to do it for fun, you won't need to get this complicated and can do even with your phone.

DJI drones stores that on the image itself. No need to use the logs.

I'm familiar only with the DJI drones and they do capture Pitch, Yaw and Gimbal and a few other variables as well. It stores them on the "extended" part of the EXIF.

At work, we tried DroneDeploy and Agisoft, but we settled with Pix4D, expensive, but we got better accuracy and the people who operate the drones found it easier to use.

I'm not sure how many outages I could avoid using Heroku, but I guess at least a few.

One time I was using Docker for a 2 TB MongoDB and it messed the iptables rules. I notice everything slow for a few days until the database disappeared and when I logged in to check, there was a ransom note.

I flew from Boca Raton to NJ to recover the backup and audit if that was the only breach. That was the longest outage.

Like Rome, this infrastructure was not created in one day. Adding Optane storage is something more recent, for example. Or adding a remote KVM to make easier to manage than dealing with multiple DRACS, which I did after a moved to Florida.

But I'm not against using the cloud. I'm actually very in favor. What I'm against is waste.

In my case, being very conservative with my costs and still have a lot of resources available allowed me to try and keep trying many different ideas in the search for product/market fit.

Exactly. I'm pretty sure if I developed the whole thing in C, it would be really fast. But I would be the slowest part of the development process.

The 6k/req with 40ms is just at the front door.

I'm talking about a real application here. With 100s of database and API calls on each web page load. I could make the whole thing in Golang or Scala and that would be at least one order of magnitude faster. But then I would have to throw away all the business knowledge that was added to the Rails app.

For instance, the slowest API call on the 40 ms is one that hits an ElasticSearch cluster with over 1 billion documents and is made on a Scala backend using Apache Thrift. There's a lot of caching but still, long tail and customization will kill caching at the top level.

Unfortunately, the fight goes even further than that when you go against the cloud.

Last week I was in an event with the CTOs of many of the hottest startups in America. It was shocking how much money is wasted on the cloud because inefficiencies and they simply don't care how much it costs.

I guess since they are not wasting their own money, they can always come up with the same excuse: developers are more expensive than infrastructure. Well... that argument starts to fall apart very quickly when a company spends six figures every month on AWS.

I'm on the other extreme. I run my company stuff on ten $300 servers I bought on eBay in 2012 and put inside a soundproof rack in my office in NJ, with a 300 Mb FIOS connection using Cloudflare as a proxy / CDN. The servers run Proxmox for private cloud and CEPH for storage. They all have SSDs and some have Optane storage. In 6 years, there were only 3 outages that weren't my fault. All at the cost of office rent ($1000) + FIOS ($359) + Cloudflare costs and S3 for images and backups.

With my infrastructure, I can run 6k requests per minute on the main Rails app (+ Scala backend) with a 40ms response time with plenty of resources to spare.

I'm very familiar not only with the voting laws but the campaigns laws.

In my opinion, the voting laws in Brazil are not bad.

The US is very different than Brazil. One big difference is that in Brazil the TSE and the TREs and also the electronic ballot are standard. Here, each state has its system of voting and counting vote.

I believe that Brazil's problem is not at the vote, but after the politicians get elected.

Here, there's gerrymandering, vote suppression, Citizens United, super PACs. Very different problems.

But fear not. At the rate the current administration is implementing ignorant, racist and stupid policies, soon we will be just like Brazil.

The irony? The corruption at the highest echelons of the government and people cheering up bad leaders is not what I had in mind when I wished some stuff here was more like in Brazil (I thought more about food and extroverted people).

It's a very different story in Brazil. Trust me. I'm not only from there, I have been involved and know a thing or two about Brazil's politics.

To start, in America the vote is not mandatory like in Brazil. Here, the "ID requirement" is not being implemented as a way to make better elections or prevent fraud, but as a way to suppress and limit the power of minorities, which by many complicated reasons, usually votes do the left.

Also, illegal immigration is/was a product of the prosperity of the country. It only became an economic issue after 9/11, when the government tightened policies and made impossible for people without proper documents to contribute.

Undocumented immigrants can't buy and drive a car (in most states) or be able to pay for health-insurance (it used to be much cheaper when they could). Instead, they drive without a license to feed their families and when they get into an accident or have a health "scare," we food the bill.

Unfortunately, the system seems beyond repair at this point. Some political groups take advantage of the fear and lack of information of parts of the population to gather support for their agendas. Not even children are out of limits, and the top of the pyramid is taking advantage of the situation, throwing even more gasoline on the fire.

One thing that I noticed is that if the website is behind Distil Networks, they will block on the first request and make cumbersome, if not impossible, to automate some task.

I get that is important to protect the information of their clients (which seems to be content aggregators), but there are legitimate use cases for allowing at least some scrapping to happen - one being when the information is about the person/company who wants to read it in an automated form so it can be used for further processing.

I'm not aware of any study, but having listened to over a hundred audiobooks on the last few years, I would like to share my experience while listing to non-fiction.

My experience is that retention depends mainly on two factors: the amount of attention and quality of the reader. I prefer when the author is the one reading because many of them add comments and a special "energy" to the book.

I find the "car mode" on Audible very convenient to add bookmarks without disruption while I'm driving and I use at the gym as well.

Some books that I want to reference later I buy a paper-copy and mark with a highlighter on the same places I bookmarked on the Audible App.

While listening, the faster I play, the more attention I pay. I start at 2X and if I'm listening to the audiobook a second time, I can go up to 3X. 1X and 1.5X are for engaging parts or when I can't understand what is being said.

One thing I don't do is: listen while not able to pay attention. While dring it can be while going through a toll or navigating through unfamiliar streets.

With all said, the feature that I think is the most useful for retention is the Pause button. This way I can reflect on what I just heard and save the information on my brain's long-term storage.

In Brazil, federal, state and some local governments publish what is called "Diário Oficial". It's a daily ledger of official hirings, firings, payments, votes on legislative chambers and even criminal indictments. The Brazilian Congress also post all the laws and amendments proposed and approved on its website http://www2.camara.leg.br/.

While AI is no solution for corruption, it could create a more transparent system with a lot more accountability highlighting the potential misuse of money.

Actually, even without sophisticated technology, whoever decides to read the free and available content, will quickly find many things that jump the eyes. For instance, I remember seeing that my city, under the new mayor, was paying for school buses while the school was off, in the month of January and three times the amount the previous administration used to pay (while kids were in school). My city also had even a helicopter for the local security force, which was not actually police and was not able to even carry guns. The helicopter was paid, faithfull, for many years. But seen in public only once, in a parade.

At the time (many years ago), I tipped newspapers and nobody cared.

A few years ago I created a simple script that to download all the public available law proposals from the Congress (https://github.com/pablomelo/baixa_camara) and downloaded 300GB of data.

I wanted to create an app where voters could see where and what was the allegiance of their representatives (In Brazil there's no district division and a candidate for Congress can get votes from anywhere in the state. While it prevent's gerrymandering, it also allows politicians to have little commitment to their constituents).

1. It is possible to have both dynamic-like syntax and static safety IHMO: This convenience causes more harm than good in the long term. Note: My experience is that this is a minefield of bugs and defeats the point of type safety. Also, because Go lacks generics, there's a lot of boiler plate and interface being used as function argument (just check large open source repos on github and you will notice).

2. It’s better to compose than inherit IHMO: It's better to have both tools available. Note: Inheritance, like static types, offer a more rigid structure and helps on large project that will exist in the long term. In a language that does not offer something like traits, "composition of behavior" ends up being a hack. Of course, we also have the tendency of blaming the language for the fault of the programmers. I would think the example of the Vehicle is not the best to explain the paradigm of behavior composition.

3. Channels and goroutines are powerful way to solve problems involving concurrency IHMO: Powerful, yes. But I would use actors instead. Note: Same problem: as your business problem gets complex, goroutines start to become a pain and the code will become unreadable and littered with hacks.

4. Don’t communicate by sharing memory, share memory by communicating. I read other comments here that express what I think better than I can articulate Note: You still have to "synchronize" if you are working with shared resources. There's no magic solution.

5. There is nothing exceptional in exceptions Oh, Boy! This causes more wars than "space vs tab". IMHO: Good in theory. Too rigid in practice. Note: While works for small stuff, the the lack of exceptions becomes a problem in large projects, causing people to just ignore "for now" (and usually, forever).

In conclusion: The "cool features" of Go might teach some people about programming, but take a toll on more complex projects. I would use Go for small system utilities and tools but would never touch business logic with it.