walljm

most of the available services (anthropic, google, openai, xai, deepseek) have a free tier. you can't use it extensively, and have to wait... but its there.

programming has always gates... today is no different. arguably, there are quite a lot more free options than there were when i was coming up.

and there are free models available. and free ways to run them...

was it developed for free? he has a computer, which i'm assuming he paid for. and you can run LLMs locally. and those will catch up eventually.

there has always been a moat, with varying levels of depth. do you have electricity? do you have a computer? can you afford internet?

https://walljm.com

yes. precisely.

Ah, ok. Thank you. If you add in the 2.7% for military personel (which doesn't seem to be included here) then you get to about 6-7% of total spending.

Ah, thank you. That's helpful.

this was pulled from the 2024 monthly budget report from the treasury.

1% ??? that can't be true. the DoD's personel budget, by itself is 2.7% of the total budget for the whole federal government.

6% seems suspect. I would expect it to be higher... at least in the 20% to 30% range. Do you have a source?

I had the exact same pleasant experience. I had a Gen 2 ring with battery issues, and support was fast and painless with a new ring on its way in a couple of days.

I wouldn't want to assume the details or the difficulty someone else has or is going through related to this.

What I have found helpful, when I went through something like this, is to distinguish between the "feeling" of certainty and the "choice" to put my faith in something. A lot of the time, we talk about "faith" and we conflate those two. I can choose to trust something and not feel confidence in it until after the fact. How much confidence I feel in a choice varies for a lot of reasons, but I may still choose to accept the risk and act on the little information I do have because I don't have better alternatives.

In that sense, you can choose what you believe. Or at least, you can choose what you put your faith in.

Hm... but in my example, in order for the Church to do that, they would have to formally excommunicate that individual. That isn't something done often, and doesn't really support what you seem to be saying it does (unless I misunderstand you).

The Church doesn't get to just point at a person who commits a sin and say that person isn't a Christian. There is a formal process for evaluating if that individual meets certain criteria (laid out in scripture). Its not done without serious consideration.

And there is a significant difference between saying that a person "isn't a Christian" and saying that some practice by a christian "doesn't represent Christianity".

For a practice to be considered "Christian" it should resemble the established and agreed upon tenets of the Christian faith, as laid out in the Bible and generally agreed upon by the Church at large.

Its like, I can claim to be a lawyer, but to actually be one, I need to pass the Bar. And a lawyer can be disbarred, if their actions show them to unable to execute the duties of a lawyer in accordance with the standards set by the state they practice in.

Similarly, a licensed Lawyer can claim something is lawful, but that be false when compared to the actual written code of that state. Someone can then come along and say that the advice and practice of that Lawyer does represent the actual law of that state.

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Look, I get it. Its frustrating to see christians do bad things, and for the church to not take responsibility when it should. And I'm not defending that. It is also frustrating for the Church when people do not represent it fairly. This is a common issue with any organized group of people, because People aren't always reliable. A fact the Bible has much to say about.

I don't know enough to comment on the specifics of your thread with the other poster, but I thought I would offer a suggestion for "Core Tenents".

Though there are many instructions in scripture that many christians ignore or fail to live up to, there are a set of core beliefs that comprise the essential nature of the Christian faith. The Apostles Creed summarizes most of them for Christianity.

As an example, if you deny the deity of Jesus, then you can not reasonably claim to be a christian. This is the case with Mormon's, who are sometimes called Christians, but whose theology differs in significant ways from Christianity.

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There is also another way to approach the idea of "that person isn't really a christian". Though it is in fact, impossible for a human to judge definitively, Jesus does say that "you shall know them by their love one for another" (John 13:35). And the bible does teach that under certain circumstances, the Church is to treat someone claiming to be christian as though they are not, because they refuse to acknowledge and/or address behaviors that are instructed in scripture.

The Church isn't generally good at that, which may be the point of the OP. But, it does allow the Church to say that someone who unrepentantly practices sinful behavior doesn't represent Christianity.

.net will let you do that now. You can ship precompiled binaries with Native AOT. (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/deploying/nati...)

A number of people have recommended good books. So i'll maybe drop a few pieces of advice that I've learned while managing a diverse group of ~35 people.

* Listen to the people who report to you. They aren't always right, but they often are, and if they are pushing back then there is a good chance that they might be seeing something you don't.

* Much of leadership is about communication. And much of communication is about planning. And much of planning is about knowing and understanding all the components of the problem you're trying to solve. So cultivate a deep understanding of your people, their talents, your business, your boss, and spend time thinking about how to best optimize all those things.

* Its hard to lead in an area where you don't some expertise. You don't have to be the best, but you shouldn't be a slouch in the subject matter either. In order to earn respect you'll need to be able to understand what you're being told by your team, and you'll need to be able to articulate why you are making certain decisions, and that is seriously difficult if you don't have a good understanding of the domain.

* Good task management and organization is remarkably similar to good distributed systems architecture. Teams should be organized so that communication and integration dependencies are minimized, because communication overhead grows logarithmically as the number of people who need to be informed increases.

not nearly a complete list... but a start maybe. good luck! good leaders/managers are a scarce resource.

I hear this kind of response some times, but I don't agree with it. If you're being tongue in cheek, then I'm missing it, but if you're serious, then this is precisely why many managers are bad.

It also runs counter to my experience. I don't think people deliberately promote people who are incompetent in order to "get them out of the way". People are smarter than that, as it only pushes bad people into management.

If we want better managers, then we should move heaven and earth to get the best people who understand the needs of both technical and organizational constraints and who can communicate and coordinate effectively.

Thanks dang! It can be a difficult job, and you do it well. Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays!

I think you're right, in that open displays of emotion are rarer in men. I'm not sure you're correct in the assertion that men can't appeal to people for help based on being sad. At least, that hasn't been my experience. I think men don't display/communicate their emotions in the same way, but I think its somewhat normal (at least it is today) for men to seek out help for something because they are experiencing conflict and it bothers them.

I looked closer, and it seems my memory is either bad or the levels have changed since I last dug into those numbers. In either case, thanks for checking those numbers!

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FDHBFRBN - for the exact number.

The vast majority of our defense spending is Salaries for US Service Men and Women. And they are under paid in many cases. Just bumping the salary of the bottom ranks would likely shift the spending ratio.

(you can verify this by digging into the monthly treasury statements: https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/datasets/monthly-treasury-st...)

Turnover is a business issue, and if you want to show it is a problem, then you need to demonstrate the negative affect it is having on business objectives. If you could show that it was costing the business more to rehire/train new people than it would cost to give higher wages or make org changes so that there was higher retention, then those arguments tend to be effective in my experience.

Try to build a virtual hallway/watercooler. We use slack for this, and worked very intentionally to encourage people to post what they were working on in their respective channels, and to reflect conversations in slack threads.

This led to the team being able to observe what other people were working on, to occasionally "overhear" something that was relevant to them and hop in.

We also encouraged people who jumped into video conferences to drop the meet in the slack thread so that other people, if it mattered, could hop in. Though not always appropriate (we have plenty of private ish meetings) that makes it easier for remote people to engage in the random happy accidents you get from a physical office.

Director of Software Development.

I run a team of ~30 (down from ~45). I'm one level down from the CEO.

"The fetus is utterly reliant on the mother to provide a hospitable environment, it seems self-evident that a body that is not autonomous doesn't have the same right to self-autonomy."

So you're saying that if a life is reliant on something external for its life, then it isn't autonomous and doesn't have the right to self autonomy?

Wouldn't that mean that we don't have to respect the living will of someone on life support? They are entirely reliant on other people to provide a hospitable environment.

The same would hold true for new born babies, who can't feed or shelter themselves. And, for that matter, that would hold for small children. At what point does a child become self reliant enough that they don't have the right to decide if they want to be alive?

"Just think through the consequences of the argument you are making. You've now established the government as the absolute arbiter of that fetuses best interests and given the government absolute control of the environment it relies upon, aka the mother."

You're being somewhat hyperbolic here. But this isn't much different that what the government does now. Government limits our rights in order to provide everyone with a set of equitable rights. "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness" is what the goal is. And to do that, you have to limit what some people can and can't do in order for everyone else to have those rights.

We have already granted the government authority to act on behalf of those who are too young to make decisions on their own. Children who find themselves abandoned, or in homes that are dangerous, can be removed by the state and placed in a safer (hopefully) environment. This system doesn't always work, but its acknowledged that its better than doing nothing at all.

"Should the mother be required to eat a government mandated meal to make sure that the fetus is getting the nutrition required? What if the mother wants to vigorously exercise? Are you going to strap that woman down to a bed and force feed her veggies to make sure the baby comes to term safely?"

You've pushed the idea to the extreme to prove a point. But what you've shown here is only that an extreme interpretation of this is a bad idea. The other end of this extreme is equally bad. When a mother has total autonomy to decide the fate of her children until they are old enough to live on their own without the support of their parent, then a mother could kill their child right up until they were what, 5 or 6? maybe 10? Or force the child to live under extreme physical or sexual abuse?

A better answer here is somewhere in the middle. At some point after conception a child becomes a person. When that happens, the child should have all the same rights as any other person. They should have the right to "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness" the same as any other. And those who chose to bring that life into the world must accept the responsibility to care for that life until it no longer needs that care. To do otherwise is to invite cruelty and societal degradation.

it varies depending on how old it is, when it was last worked on, how quickly it was produced, and how important it is. Some is very good. Some is quite bad. But most is fair to middling...

I use microsoft defender on my windows boxes. nothing on any *nix servers i use.

Most of what the cell phone camera is doing in software is also available in the post processing software for DSLRs.

Its not as convenient, but the quality is better.

But, HDR isn't necessary in most cases, specially given that RAW files give you an extra stop in both directions when post processing. OTH, the properties of different lenses (FOV, DOF, magnification, macro) can't be reproduced in a cell phone camera (only approximated in software, and not usually well).

A big DSLR isn't necessary for snapshots, but for serious applications (landscape, portraiture, nature, sports, events, etc...) they don't hold up.

I also find that pair programming can be a great way to train programmers in areas of knowledge they may not be up to speed on, to mentor junior programmers, or to just learn from your peers as they approach problems from different perspectives.

i also find paring to be useful when troubleshooting or working on a hard to find bug.

pairing shouldn't be the norm, but it can certainly be useful.