Tloewald

My previous had a monorepo for the website and backend (but not the mobile apps) which was insane to work with (as a coder I had a dedicated 128 core box to work on, some engineers had more than one, less intense engineers shared one) and a substantial amount of my time was spent just finding code. I guess most engineers just end up working in some nook and so that searching code constantly becomes less of an issue (it never did for me) but the code / debug cycle was dreadful.

I should add that a huge amount was invested in tooling. We had an in-house IDE with debug tools that could step through serverside code. We had a highly optimized code search tool. We had modified a major version control system so it could handle our codebase. (Indeed we picked our version control system because we needed to fork it and the other major version control system was less amenable to our PRs.)

My current job we have a micro service architecture and lots of small, focused repos. Each repo is self-documented. Anyone can checkout and build anything. We don’t need obscene dev servers. We have not hugely invested in tools or workflow.

Client apps are unavoidably larger repos than the services apps.

Based on my personal experience, I think monorepos are nuts.

Can’t you create a branch and merge the two branches you are interested in into that?

Are you talking about sensors or film? Kodak and Fuji dominated film, and today Sony and Canon dominate sensors (Samsung had a pretty solid go of it and simply gave up). Lots of other companies make sensors but they aren’t competitive with Sony.

There are plenty of camera companies, mostly using Sony sensors or Sony fabs.

The lack of manufacturing diversity isn’t a shortage. It’s a different problem. Is there a shortage of cpus?

There’s no shortage of large sensors, they just don’t make sense in a phone unless you want it to be huge. In fact there’s a migration upwards in camera sensor sizes owing to the decreasing size of the support electronics, e.g. you can now get a Hasselblad medium format camera that’s smaller than a DSLR. Of course the lenses are huge.

I for one would love for Apple or Samsung or whoever to release a photographer’s smartphone with a micro 4/3 mount (it’s the only multi firm properly documented lens mount system and also seems to be the sweet spot for trading off image quality, sensor readout speed, and size) BUT the phone would be at minimum 20mm thick.

It’s running the Mac and iPhone.

Here's a review from a dev who works at NASA:

http://hrtapps.com/blogs/20180712/

Maybe the key point is he isn't running Adobe Premiere.

The thermal issues in modern laptops certainly concern me, but they've been running hot for a long time now, and being thin doesn't actually change the surface area significantly.

For years I used windows and Mac side by side and my impressions was always that windows was less refined but perfectly solid and slightly faster at first with a tendency to slow down over time and much better for games and 3d. For the last four years I’ve been Mac only but recently got two new windows laptops for testing. I don’t know what’s going on with windows. It’s far worse than it used to be. The UI is horribly inconsistent. Performance is randomly sluggish. The built in browser is unbearable. And even games don’t seem to run well.

The single worst thing is the way windows trackpads work. It feels like time traveling to 1997.

Yes it’s nuts and it seems like a popular thing to fix electorally. I think that it’s a case of lack of political imagination.

Certainly trying to use Truth in Advertising was always my first thought, but Truth in advertising laws are pretty toothless and I imagine any attempt to do something like this using that mechanism would get tied up in the courts for a long time.

I would love someone to at least make the case -- it seems like a non-partisan thing, surely the free market types should be in favor of price transparency, while liberals should be against misleading consumers.

The US system of local sales taxes doesn't look awesome ever. If there were one economic reform I would push in the US it would be advertised price is final price (i.e. if you say "I'm selling this for $9.99" then that's all you pay, and the taxes are all inclusive) this would pretty much force underlying tax reform as businesses lost their shit having to deal with the insanity.

Note that the disaster area that is US regulatory overlap means passing a law like this is probably impossible without constitutional amendment.

Right now in the US it's often difficult, and sometimes impossible, to know how much you'll actually be paying in any transaction. It's ridiculous, and from a pure Econ 101 perspective it's a first order problem in the market.

Right but worse when batteries contain the “oxidizer”. If the battery uses atmospheric oxygen (e.g. as with hydrogen fuel cell vehicles) then it’s exactly like gasoline.

They have everything to do with increasing power density. By definition power density is potential energy and when you release that energy you get waste heat.

As someone living in the US with far better medical coverage than average I am awestruck by how wrong this statement is. Have you ever had to deal with a serious illness in the US?

Right, they might well be basis vectors.

The question is whether the real numbers (as a set) are real, not whether each specific real number is a thing.

Transcendental — the numbers that make the real numbers distinct from the algebraic numbers — are not necessary for anything we do, and all the weirdest corner cases in math seem to come from treating them as a thing. sqrt(2) and 0.5 aren’t transcendental. 0.5 is a rational. Sqrt(2) is an algebraic. You can express them in physical terms (as roots of finite polynomials)

Most reals don’t need to exist for any purpose. All we need is some kind of vector space of constants (e.g. planck’s constant, electro-permeability, the speed of light, the mass of an electron) over the unbounded algebraics. It’s entirely possible that some of these constants would in fact be transcendental, but such a space is much much smaller than the reals. These are the numbers we can construct.

> I don’t believe for a second that someone who would torture or abuse or kill someone on the orders of someone else was ever a ‘good person’.

Fair enough. How about "not a monster"?

One interesting thing about Milgram's experiment was that it was actually intended to detect a difference between the German and American psyche. This is a case of science working to falsify an incorrect belief.

The argument being that there was something wrong in the German character that made it easier for someone like Hitler to get "good people" to do bad things. Experiments were run in the US as a test and control, and the results were well-established long before Zimbardo's ridiculous non-experiment.

We only need to look at the behavior of ICE agents to see real world confirmation of Milgram's experiments.

The cost of crappy things that don't solve the problem described which leads to the mess we're complaining about is low, yes.

Let's take this article at its word, which is that right now we can bury carbon for $600/tonne (forget the speculative $100/tonne) which equates to $1.32/liter of gas (based on the speculative $0.22/liter). In California right now gas costs ~$4/gallon (which is high compared to most of the US but low compared to most of the developed world), so it's not an insane amount to pay for carbon-neutral gas.

The interesting thing to me is that this is presumably something ideal to do with excess solar power (e.g. it's a much better deal than paying other states to use it, which is what California is currently doing).

Another question is how does this compare, price-wise, to using solar power to create fuel (e.g. hydrogen) and truck it around the way we do with gas.

I believe that they axed the mac product, then ported the iOS implementation to the Mac -- which makes perfect sense even if it was effectively a regression for those folks who had been happily using the desktop version.

The new version looks amazing, even if it may still be technically a regression in some nooks and crannies.

It would be pretty cool if someone devised a core set of meta-services (e.g. the feature branch / pull-request / review / commit that lived entirely on top of git and some simple command lines so that you could basically not care where your cloud repo was.

(I'm expecting that this has been done and I'll be deluged with links...)

To whom or what are you referring? If my suggestion that the commenter’s requirements seem quixotic — guilty as charged.

More like: why are you making harsh language a crime since murder is legal?

1. If cable tv providers can get away with disintermediating TV viewers from TV stations I don’t see how Apple is any worse, especially since I can still buy third party apps, but I can’t either set up or tune into an indie TV station. Amazon is a far worse problem with respect to books (and without any demonstrable user benefit) so good luck waiting for regulation here.

2. Again, you can use Chrome on a Mac. The App Store is not stopping anyone from using anything, it’s just facilitating certain cases. Microsoft installs its apps on your machine without asking you (and has an App Store). Don’t even get me started on Nintendo. Seriously, you’re complaining about the least worst (commercial) player in this space.

3. Clutching at straws here. No one cares.

4. You mean like OpenGL, and two other OpenGL things. Again, Microsoft DirectX is what?

5. Apple intentionally slows devices down to prevent random shutdowns from peak power draw when the battery has aged. This is a good thing, well implemented, but poorly explained. Apple has paid a PR penalty for its lack of transparency, and having them suffer regulatory punishment for this seems harsh.

Ok, I get it, you hate Apple. But unless you avoid all commercial vendors I don’t think you’re going to find someone that satisfies your peculiarly quixotic requirements.

Presumably this is quite large relative to the expected number. I couldn’t find a statement as to what the expected number was.

Given the incompleteness of our fossil records, this makes the old joke about the astrophysicist and the black sheep seem apropos.

Many years ago I was working on "electronic performance support" tools for call center operators at a large retail financial services organization, and someone proposed we install software on every worker's computer that measured idle time, keystrokes, etc.

I was vehemently opposed to this on simple grounds -- we already measured everything about the workers' performance that mattered to the organization's bottom line (customer satisfaction, productivity, etc.) -- what did we care _how_ they achieved their results? Measuring the wrong things is a total waste of time and effort. It's a distraction.

Oh yeah, and it's hideous and creepy.

It was quite obvious to us at the time that Apple was planning to provide a native SDK but hoped to mollify third-party developers with "web apps" while Apple got their house in order (having barely managed to get the phone done on schedule).

As it happened, the reaction to web apps was so negative they ended up releasing their SDK hastily (which anyone who went through the pain of using it for the first couple of years can attest to).

One of the common mistakes people have when discussing Steve Jobs is mistaking what he said for what he believed. (We see this confusion constantly in the news, where "The Whitehouse believes" is used to describe something in a press release.) He knew how to stay on message, and he knew that saying "our SDK will probably be released in alpha form in a year and be somewhat stable in two years" was off message.

It's also fairly clear that if he had had a bunch of arguments about something and reached some provisional conclusion, he wasn't going to have much patience with an argument he had previously encountered and beaten to death from someone random.

In my opinion, folks who say they're being "honest" about something are kind of begging the question. That said, I doubt he did it to save money, although I'm surprised he allowed a dealer plate frame on the car. I think he thought they looked ugly. It may even have been a bandwidth issue — he simply didn't want to decide _which_ license plate to get and it was easier to avoid the issue altogether.

He famously didn't own much furniture (at least when he was single) because he couldn't find any he liked, not because he was cheap.

Problem is planes don't fly high for fun, they fly high because the air is thinner up high which improves fuel economy.