zb

6 ms·

1.
How to Think About AI Before It's Too Late(theatlantic.com)
2 points by zb 3mo ago|1 comments
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by zb 4mo ago
In 1812 he was the Earl of Wellington. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_titles_and_honours_of_...
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by zb 4mo ago
CFC refrigerants are the canonical example.
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by zb 10mo ago
Commit messages are immutable. Linking them to a bug ticket gives you a mutable place to record any new information about the bug that you discover in the future. (For example, that it affected more cases than you originally thought, or tha
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by zb 11mo ago
It’s a lot better than the reverse.
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by zb 11mo ago
Another way to look at it is that you’re getting to do all of the fulfilling parts of management roles (helping your team(s) to grow and develop) without the less fulfilling parts (endless meetings, budget spreadsheets, unpleasant conversat
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by zb 1y ago
The ink ribbon contains a record of every word you type, and I believe hoovering them up was a common espionage tactic back in the day.
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by zb 1y ago
Debuggers allow you inspect stuff forward in time, while print statements allow you to debug backwards. (There was a lot of academic work on reversible debuggers at one point; to be honest I haven’t kept up on how that turned out.) If you c
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by zb 1y ago
A city is not a tree: https://www.patternlanguage.com/archive/cityisnotatree.html Even trees are not trees: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anastomosis Evolution is most definitely not a tree. Natur
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by zb 2y ago
I’m reminded of an infamous occasion when this technique was used: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cable_243#Preparation
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by zb 2y ago
The one that sprang to mind for me was The Name of the Rose . Oddly it doesn’t show up as a title drop in the data.
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by zb 2y ago
> This in turn is why air traffic still use AM where you can hear both overlapping transmissions at once (possibly garbled if carrier wave was off), and react accordingly rather than being unaware that it happened. I’m not convinced this
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by zb 2y ago
You must be American. In Australia there are exactly zero heat pumps on the market that you can use an ecobee with. It just isn’t an option. There are no off-the-shelf options. You don’t have to pay $1700 for this garbage $50 tablet, bu
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by zb 3y ago
The arrow has a white outline around it, so the hotspot is at the tip of the black arrow, at (1,1).
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by zb 3y ago
> this can’t possibly be how you write tests in Golang?! Only for very simple functions like in the example. Most of the time it’s much worse.
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by zb 3y ago
AIUI the Hybrid Synergy Drive combines aspects of a series and parallel hybrid, for efficiency at both high and low speeds. I think this is the main reason that pure series hybrids are not more popular.
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by zb 3y ago
This is called a series hybrid and there are lots of them on the market.
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by zb 4y ago
It’s a quote from Newton, so that’s obviously why we say it. The reason he said ‘giants’ is supposedly that it was a dig at Robert Hooke, who was famously short. Impressively, if true then he both managed to get this dig in and to be reme
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by zb 4y ago
I’m currently reading The Staff Engineer's Path by Tanya Reilly and it’s really good (so far). It’s a great thing to read at the point it sounds like you have reached, where programming a little better is no longer going to move the
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by zb 4y ago
Exactly, but also that it's quite often experience you had this morning , not e.g. over the last 5 years, that makes the difference.
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by zb 4y ago
Lawyers make a distinction between "illegal" (crimes) and "unlawful" (torts) that is mostly lost on the general public.
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by zb 4y ago
Any thread about this is incomplete without mentioning the article about a note change in this performance by John Darnielle (of the band the Mountain Goats, who is also a novelist): https://harpers.org/archive/2016&#x2
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by zb 5y ago
No, because he’s clearly describing an engineering problem, not a physics problem.
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by zb 5y ago
Cloud infrastructure - so basically I have gone right from one end of the scale spectrum (tiny GPS receivers) to the very opposite extreme :D
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by zb 5y ago
Yes, I was working for a company making standalone car navigation devices (remember those?), amongst other GPS-related things - I also worked on a lot of OEM GPS receivers. There was even a guy (not me!) who had written the firmware for a G
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by zb 5y ago
Fun fact: when I was looking into patenting this concept in c. 2007, the prior art search revealed that it had already been patented by someone in Japan in c. 1997. Amazing to think that ideas people had back when Selective Availability was
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by zb 5y ago
I don't know anything about the .NET Foundation or much about this particular situation, but I know a little about open source governance. It appears that Novotny believed she was acting in her capacity as a (long-dormant) maintainer o
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by zb 6y ago
He had no idea whether it was a risk worth taking or not, because they rejected any evidence short of certainty that the O-rings would fail on a given flight. The results of the Rogers Commission make this abundantly clear to anybody who ca
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by zb 6y ago
The film “Challenger: The Final Flight” on Netflix includes interviews with the most important participants in the launch decision, including McDonald. (It also has interviews with many of the astronauts’ families and does a great job at pu
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by zb 6y ago
> Python's "threads" are actually fibers. They’re actually not. They are native threads with high lock contention. Async is arguably fibers, as are greenthreads in libraries like gevent or eventlet. > But if you want to

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