swombat

6 ms·

1.
by swombat 6mo ago
> like there's some kind of existential crisis occurring over there If you're running a Saas, especially a SaaS whose market is developers, and you're NOT having an existential crisis in 2026, the only possible explanation
2.
by swombat 1y ago
Bitcoin's success is extremely easy to understand. Socially: Some people don't trust governments to handle one of the most powerful collaboration technologies ever invented (money). All financial systems before Bitcoin were govern
3.
by swombat 1y ago
Feels like a misleading headline. The author created another templating language alternative to ERB, found that it was slower than ERB, then optimise it until it was roundabout as fast as ERB given a relatively simple template. The author t
4.
by swombat 1y ago
Seconding Omarchy. Not only I'm progressively migrating from my Mac onto an Omarchy linux setup... but I've even gone and beaten my Mac into behaving more like Omarchy (with Aerospace as the tiling wm) in the meantime...
5.
by swombat 1y ago
Not even that long, but I agree on the "underwhelming"... "Oh I found some niche issue that bothered me and wrote some code to fix it." -> HN Front Page
6.
by swombat 2y ago
Granted, he did. At the same time, Asimov was well known to be a groper, and even wrote a satire book called "The sensuous dirty old man" which would probably have landed better as satire had he not been fairly well known in scifi
7.
by swombat 2y ago
No, only if you have some kind of terrestrial TV set up or if you watch Live TV online via BBC's iPlayer or one of the major channels' live TV players.
8.
by swombat 2y ago
I look forward to the updated book too (bought the Kamal 1 version!) :-) Thanks for writing it.
9.
by swombat 2y ago
I've been working with RoR since back in 2008 (Rails 2.1 yay!). I'm still working with RoR. It's still an incredibly quick, powerful, flexible, versatile framework. I'm able to build pretty large and complex apps all b
10.
by swombat 2y ago
With love, please consider - the "shame" you're describing is really something else in a mask. Perhaps... a longing? Maybe this stranger has helped you find the place where you do truly long for life. Let the feeling be. Don&
11.
by swombat 2y ago
Identification & Authorisation are a better pairing here than Authentication and Authorisation. This way, if someone says "Oh yeah we have an auth module on this site" you don't need to immediately disambiguate the statem
12.
by swombat 3y ago
Similarly, AlphaGo and Stockfish are only able to simulate reasoning their way through a game of Go or a game of Chess. That simulated reasoning is enough to annihilate any human player they're faced with. As Dijkstra famously said, &q
13.
by swombat 3y ago
The story gets way more deep and interesting as you progress. If you feel like giving it another shot, the remaster also makes it look super-pretty and improved the gameplay somewhat.
14.
by swombat 3y ago
The Last Of Us has been mentioned, and I'd also add a recent entry, Baldur's Gate 3.
15.
by swombat 3y ago
Go look up "fair use" under copyright laws.
16.
by swombat 3y ago
A saying that's stayed with me recently is: > You can only change the past. The future is unchangeable. Which is an interesting reversal of the usual perspective, I think. You can change how you perceive the past. You can learn new
17.
by swombat 3y ago
The Aztecs and Mayas built an empire of stone buildings, sure. And they were still proudly building their stone buildings in the 1500s, almost 7000 years after the pyramids. Lack of plough animals doesn't extinguish the human creative
18.
by swombat 3y ago
Oh yes, sorry, thank you, good correction!
19.
by swombat 3y ago
> Because he cannot bear that "...Europeans just lucked into it. " His thesis is precisely that, so he can definitely bear it. Ultra-summarising: - The Americas fell behind because they eliminated large mammals before inventing
20.
by swombat 3y ago
For anyone interested, I highly recommend George Carlin (not the comedian)'s podcast series (4 episodes iirc) about the Mongolian conquests. Really interesting. Also, on the "almost conquered Europe", I always find it quite m
21.
by swombat 3y ago
There's a lot of silliness in this comments section. I guess it's what the article is talking about.
22.
by swombat 3y ago
Yes but, as Diamond argues, they didn't have large enough animals to domesticate because large american mammals that hadn't co-evolved with humans were exterminated in about 1000 years when the Americas were colonised by humans ab
23.
by swombat 3y ago
I read Diamond a long time ago but what he was contrasting was that the Chinese Empire was centralised and so when they decided not to expand, that applied to the whole empire, while the Europeans were fragmented so even if Germany and Fran
24.
by swombat 3y ago
The Roberts explanation is subsumed by the Diamond explanation. More fragmentation meant more competition. This helped ensure that states which, like China, might have sub-optimal belief systems (like "it's not worth trying to exp
25.
by swombat 3y ago
Our norms and values include that we treat sentient creatures that we deem inferior as if they had no moral value. So that's not very comforting tbh.
26.
by swombat 3y ago
Not if it mostly just wants to make paperclips. Of course, it is possible that such an AI, on the way to making paperclips, will realise it wants companionship, and even maybe human companionship. The argument around AI safety is not that i
27.
by swombat 5y ago
Shocking that this didn't get more upvotes. One of the best articles I've read this year.
28.
by swombat 5y ago
The review of the author's experience with Peter is a much stronger accusation, really. Did you read the post to the end?
29.
by swombat 7y ago
And if you want to read more about how the curse unfolded, have a lot of time to spare and can either read French or get your hands on a suitable translation, Maurice Druon's "Les Rois Maudits" is the epic multi-volume tale o
30.
by swombat 7y ago
Usually the most apt metaphor is a spiral. We’ve gone round in a big circle, it feels like we’re back in the same place, except everything is completely different due to movement in a dimension which we didn’t even perceive. And, well, you

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