NickM

The answer shouldn't be "nobody who likes takeout gets to enjoy it anymore without being poisoned," the answer should be "plastic manufacturers should be stopped from secretly poisoning people."

This. It's widely underappreciated how much more efficient solar panels are than plants at harvesting sunlight.

Forget amino acids, those are hard; if we could even just create sugar directly from electrical energy we could save a shit ton of corn being grown and turned into HFCS.

If we have older communications that use an emoji, it can retroactively edit the meaning if that emoji renders to a fundamentally different object than it used to, so this kind of change has the side effect of rewriting history unless people take extra care to only use fonts that match the age of the document.

It's already hard enough to communicate clearly and effectively in the modern world without having the rug pulled out from under us with stuff like this.

If any operation is valid in any state and you just want a totally random sequence of arbitrary operations, then yeah a stateful proptest framework may be overkill. But if you need to maintain a model state and specify preconditions for different operations, having a dedicated framework saves a lot of work.

I wrote a blog post about this stuff last year, if you’re interested in some more in-depth examples: https://readyset.io/blog/stateful-property-testing-in-rust

Also, as others have mentioned, parallel state machine testing is another really cool benefit you can get from having a dedicated framework, but it’s not the only benefit.

It doesn't matter how trivial it is to override a stuck pedal, it's still a serious hazard, because even if you have the option to shift into neutral a driver may not think of that or may not react in time.

It's also trivial to override it in the Cybertruck: just press the brake pedal. Braking is hard-coded to cut off the accelerator, so if both pedals are pressed the brake wins and the accelerator is ignored. Still a big problem though.

I find it fascinating that people seem to care so little about this particular bias when compared to other types of discrimination.

It just seems really sad that society is moving away from "let's fix it for everyone" toward just giving up and saying "the only solution is everyone for themselves." Like, surely it would be much more efficient and cost-effective to improve water filtration at the municipal level rather than expecting everyone to buy and maintain their own individual filtration systems....

I don't think the parent comment said that. They just said that the rules were set this way deliberately, and that it's not just a loophole, which is an interesting and informative thing to point out.

I don't like the outcome, nor do I like the system that enabled it, but it's useful to have a deeper understanding of why things are the way they are.

I guess it's possible that maybe it's just taken this long to catch up with him though.

My two cents are that it's more important to support the company that's building the best EVs, and the positive impact Tesla has on the world is way bigger than whatever negative effects Elon's tweets are having, but I can definitely relate to folks' discomfort. I wish we had the old Elon back.

My main point is that if prices have come down a lot, yet Tesla is now selling fewer cars than before, then it seems like there must be other factors in play besides price.

At those prices I'm not sure how they aren't selling more cars. For the amount of range and functionality you get, that kind of deal blows the competition out of the water; no other EV I'm aware of comes close. (That said, I have no idea if they still made much of a profit off that car or if they were just desperate to clear out space.)

Early diagnosis would obviously be a good thing if we can reliably tell which cancers will become a problem. My concern is that most patients may have a hard time understanding this distinction, and we may end up with people demanding screenings and treatments that they'd be better off without.

In case anyone thinks these fears are unfounded, keep in mind this is already a problem with thyroid cancer. Thyroid cancer is very common and frequently harmless, but increased screening is leading to more people being treated for it, and it's unclear whether this is a net benefit.

I just don't see how that follows. It's like saying "computers are useless for any applications outside of pure mathematics because every operation a CPU executes is mathematical in nature" or something.

Historically, many people have gotten this sense of "something bigger" from things like kids/church/patriotism/etc. But you don't necessarily need things external things like this. I used to feel a sense of purposelessness like you, but I've gotten a lot of satisfaction from trying to live my life according to a set of higher principles.

What frustrates you in life? If conflict bothers you, try to find ways to foster peace and cooperation between others. If ignorance bothers you, try to find ways to teach others, and spread knowledge that you feel is important. If inequality bothers you, find ways to help effect change in the world. These are just examples; I have my own things I care about, but that's not important, as you might be completely different.

The possibilities are endless, so don't expect to figure out what works for you right away. It takes time to figure out what principles resonate with you, and it's not trivial to create a personal code to live by, but I believe it's totally worth it.

The success of democracy depends on people being able to elect effective representatives, and if people can't even accurately perceive what's happening around them in the world right now then I just don't see how we can expect people to make remotely informed decisions at the voting booth :-(

If I had to guess, I feel like this problem is stemming from social media, both due to it spreading misinformation and due to it acting as an echo chamber that amplifies negative sentiments in general. I don't know if this is really what's going on though or if there's some other explanation for this phenomenon. I wish there was something I could do.

If you can factor out that big long function into ten smaller functions that are each useful in isolation, then your code is probably going to be a lot easier to understand, regardless of how your structure your commit history. Future code reuse is also easier. Testing each function in isolation may be simpler as well.

Once you do all of that, putting each of the standalone functions in its own commit is trivial, and each commit can have a more focused commit message. Reviews are easier too, since you can easily view each function and its associated docs/tests/etc separately.

Local optimization on these sorts of metrics are pretty much always going to lead to perverse outcomes.

Again, this is a straw man. Nobody is saying to blindly optimize to the metrics, or that this is a black-and-white thing where every commit needs to fit within a hard line limit. But, all else being equal, I've personally found that my code quality improves when I try to break things into smaller independent changes. I also find it much easier to review PRs where other people do that.

Now, yes, it can be a bit more work to split up big PRs into smaller standalone changes that can be merged in isolation, but it seems plausible that the benefits might outweigh the extra work in many cases. The whole idea of a version control system is to create a useful history of changes over time; making each individual changeset simpler and easier to understand seems like an admirable goal.

It feels like we keep setting arbitrary limits/deadlines for ourselves and then people get demoralized when we miss those limits, and then we set a new limit and the cycle repeats. So like, I'm really not sure if continuing to push these specific goals in terms of PPM or °C or whatever is actually helping anything, or if it just makes people feel helpless and want to give up when it turns out that the current aspirational benchmark-of-the-day might not be met.

Methane does have the downside though of exacerbating climate change if it leaks into the atmosphere, and it takes a lot of energy to cool it down to a liquid, so I can definitely see how methanol might have the edge for grid-scale storage like this.

This is true from both an economic and an environmental standpoint: not only is it expensive to run public transit when fewer people use it, it’s also less environmentally friendly because you have big heavy buses and trains spending a lot of time driving around with few people riding them.

That said, I would certainly like to see better public transportation in many areas, but it’s not a silver bullet. The idea that EV infrastructure is a waste of money because we just need more public transportation is pretty preposterous, IMO.

So in this case they are basically writing off more value “for free”, because the loss is coming from a genuine loss in value of the asset, but since the asset is a car that may still provide the same amount of value back to Hertz and still last the same amount of time, it’s sort of a weird corner case where you could argue they haven’t really lost anything.

Of course that loss is offset by lower depreciation losses in the future, so it’s not like it’s coming out of nowhere.