agent281

Assuming that this doesn't devolve into a company town, Google deserves credit for taking on such a large housing project. The housing problems in California (and especially the Bay) require efforts from public and private actors. It's especially heartening to see them take aim at car centric development. I can only hope that others will follow their example.

In some languages it's two or more of the fundamental types. Obviously you haven't been using the big brained languages like Rust, Haskell, or Elixir.

(Also a bad joke.)

I know that's the financial/cynical case (and probably the more common one). However, I know people who genuinely prefer it because you all get to be in the same room and talk all day. They tend to be really extroverted folks.

I feel like open offices are sometimes implemented by oblivious extroverts at the expense of introverts (and real productivity).

I remember working with some extroverts who loved war room calls because it made them feel like they were doing something productive. When there was a problem they insisted on sitting in a conference call for hours. So I was trying to get the work done while they were talking about weather. They were feeling productive because they were on an important call and I felt unproductive because I couldn't tune out the noise and get the actual work done. Made the whole process really painful.

Couple points:

- Canada is an English and French speaking country. - Most of Canada's population lives next to the Great Lakes region so it is somewhat dense there, but most of the country is empty

https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/8pmzd7/pop...

Definitely varies by community. Elixir had the fastest responses in my experience. Often I would get a response within a day or two. F# and Haskell were quite a bit slower, on the order of multiple weeks.

We're using AWS glue (basically pyspark) right now. I used standard python before.

I've implemented a function for schema based processing JSON documents for both vanilla python and pyspark that makes the process really easy. It'll take a schema and a document and product a list of flat dictionaries for python or a data frame for pyspark. Vanilla python is really streamable and keeps memory overhead low so it was actually faster than the pandas based workflows that it replaced.

Yeah, I stopped using pandas entirely for ETL for this exact reason. If you are trying to maintain the fidelity of the data while cleaning, automatic casting is awful. If the new backend prevents automatic casting, it might be worth reconsidering for me.

No, I think it's off by one errors.

When I say inert I mean that the image is just a bunch of bits. It's read only. It doesn't cause actions in the world like code or self driving cars do. People can have reactions to them. That's why we make them.

The big difference between the two is how much damage occurs if the AI screws up. We don't have self driving fleets right now because a multi-ton truck hurtling down the freeway at 65+ mph can do a lot of damage. AI generated artwork is inert so it can be safely used as a substitute for the human generated stuff. I would expect speed of adoption to operate at inverse proportion to potential harm.

image -> text -> code -> self-driving vehicles

It's really reductive to just put all code in a single bucket, but most code probably isn't super critical for safety and it can be tested before it gets released/reviewed. I think that's the biggest differentiator from real time applications like self driving cars.

I think it's an open question how much better the LLMs will get. However, we should expect adoption and integration to radically transform their usage. Who knows what the Google Maps of LLMs will be.

> Is there some other arrangement?

I heard Sam Altman gets to be in the room when the AGI hatches so that it imprints on him. He took that in lieu of equity.

I'm mostly curious how far the hockey stick will go up. Eventually most things level off.

Yeah, it made me sad because he sort of apologized to the person. Ultimately, Ken doesn't owe anyone anything.

Agreed!

I have to say I was disappointed by the question at 59:23. They seemed to expect a retrospective on Ken’s career or some grand philosophical statement on software or open source. To be honest, I was pretty surprised by the direction of the talk myself, but I ultimately enjoyed it.

You see, Ken decided to talk about his 75 year project: his music collection. He talked about audio formats, collecting music from different groups, sourcing metadata, building hardware to play music and more. He was deeply interested in the topic and honestly probably a bit obsessive for multiple decades. This was very humanizing. And to be completely honest he reminded me a lot of my girlfriend’s father who we think is undiagnosed autistic.

Ultimately, I think the reason why Ken was so prolific over such a long time is his ability to be deeply interested in problems. He was not too fussy about tools. He didn’t push Go or Linux or UNIX. He wasn’t self aggrandizing. He just wanted to tell people about his project that he’s been working on. Honestly, I thought it was a great lesson that might have gone over a lot of people’s heads.

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This comment was copied from lobste.rs. https://lobste.rs/s/htwiag/ken_thompson_reveals_his_surprisi...

I'm impressed with how well it catches the divide by zero error. I obfuscated it a bit by using subtraction, bitwise and, and using randint from python, but it still catches the error:

subtraction: https://whatdoesthiscodedo.com/g/b12eef2 bitwise and: https://whatdoesthiscodedo.com/g/95a1492 randint: https://whatdoesthiscodedo.com/g/8cf88de

Yeah, that's it! Makes cobbling together shell scripts way easier. They have some other projects based around terminal UIs too. Take a look at their site it's gorgeous:

https://charm.sh/

This seems really nice! Makes me want to build my own with Gum filters, TBH.

Uh, can I get one of those layoffs?

Looking at the DBT semantic layer documentation I think I get it. The goal seems to be describing a metric that could be aggregated at multiple levels once instead of defining all of the aggregations separately.

For example, if you want to be able to aggregate revenue by subscription plan and by country over year, month or day, then you would have 6+ different aggregations. The more dimensions and time periods you add, the more the various combinations blow out. (I think the formula is dimension permutations multiplied by the number of time periods.) Having a single definition of the metrics prevents errors from occurring in rote implementations of the metrics. A bit like generics, but for queries.

At this point, I'm curious how they manage to make the integrations with different platforms work. (Ultimately, I think that's why they acquired Transform.)

Sometimes places have high turn over because they ask people to move fast while cutting corners because have high turn over and don't know how long people will be there and so they ask people to move fast while cutting corners because they have high turn over...

Literally today I said something similar.

"Who knows about this data?"

"X and Y do, but they're gone. These people know a little bit about it."

C'est la vie.

Kind of proves my point: what percentage of practitioners are content creators in most fields? How many more people might be doing this out of sight?

That said, thanks for pointing the video out. I watched the update video and it's pretty incredible.

At this point I feel like people must also be trying to modify their DNA in secret. I wonder if we'll hear some horror stories in the next few years.

I’ve been toying with the idea of using Nix for dev environments at work. What does devenv add on top of Nix?

Edit: And if you know, how does it differ from devbox?

It's not quite obese people. It's women who weigh 220+ lbs and men who weigh 260+ lbs. Interesting that it's absolute weights. You could be 5'0" man who weighs 230 lbs and qualify.

It also seems to exclude anyone who has ever used tobacco products daily for longer than 3 months. So if you have quit, you're out.

https://www.joincrowdhealth.com/faq

Cheers! When I was thinking about this originally I thought you could build it as a social network. Rather than curate the internet for yourself, you could work with others to aggregate different curated views. By following only some people and having the ability to unfollow them, you would be able to keep away from spammers. Furthermore, you might be able to fork other people's curations so that people who "sell out" and include spammers can be cut out of the loop. Wasn't sure if this was too crazy though.

TBH, I'm wondering if we need to start using yahoo style curated content directories again. Content aggregators like reddit, hacker news and lobsters already help filter out a lot of noise, but they focus on recent articles. It would be nice to have a searchable/browsable source for interesting content. It wouldn't contain the full internet, but at least it would have better relevancy.

That's awesome! Are you comfortable stating your employer? It's always neat to find out who is working differently and what industries they are in. If not that's totally cool. The internet is a weird place and I'm a total stranger. (Not to mention the whole this is publicly available forum.)

Actually, to even the playing field, a bald guy in a blue shirt just looked at your LinkedIn profile. ;)