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amonroe805-2

27 karma · joined February 25, 2025

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amonroe805-2··on Waymo halts service during S.F. blackout after causing traffic jams
Is this not how four way stops work everywhere? I live in Kansas and have previously lived in Chicago, and I feel like both places follow this custom. Only thing that’s different is the laws are followed slightly more rigorously in low traffic areas, but the customary rules are definitely still in play.
amonroe805-2··on Zig's new plan for asynchronous programs
I’ve never really understood the issue with this. I find it quite useful to know what functions may do something async vs which ones are guaranteed to run without stopping.

In my current job, I mostly write (non-async) python, and I find it to be a performance footgun that you cannot trivially tell when a method call will trigger I/O, which makes it incredibly easy for our devs to end up with N+1-style queries without realizing it.

With async/await, devs are always forced into awareness of where these operations do and don’t occur, and are much more likely to manage them effectively.

FWIW: The zig approach also seems great here, as the explicit Io function argument seems likely to force a similar acknowledgement from the developer. And without introducing new syntax at that! Am excited to see how well it works in practice.

amonroe805-2··on Ask HN: Who uses open LLMs and coding assistants locally? Share setup and laptop
Quick correction: The mac mini does have a fan. Studio is definitely more capable due to bigger, better chips, but my understanding is the mini is generally not at risk of thermal throttling with the chips you can buy it with. The decision for desktop macs really just comes down to how much chip you want to pay for.
amonroe805-2··on Pyrex catalog from from 1938 with hand-drawn lab glassware [pdf]
My heuristic is that quality is largely a function of human attention during creation. The transition to digital layouting etc meant less human attention could be spent on it while still achieving “acceptable” results, and so market dynamics ensured that less attention was spent on those tasks, lowering quality.

Whether or not you personally would make this cost/quality tradeoff comes down to the individual, but to me it is also quite clear that something was lost in the transition.

amonroe805-2··on Cloudflare Email Service: private beta
This is great. I’ve had many side projects with Cloudflare where I’ve wanted a way to send emails as a part of it, and it’s slightly annoying having to go find another service to use to get that done. Having this baked-in will he sweet!
amonroe805-2··on Rereading books
This is sort of a strange reply. You don’t have to spend any time on art at all really. For many people, the more they can spend time enjoying the art they like, the better. If you don’t like the art, that’s one thing, but if you do like it, why must it be shorter?

The video game community is often pretty explicit about this. They want their favorite games to be longer, not shorter, because they want to spend more time enjoying it. I don’t think it’s so strange that people may apply the same mentality, to books, movies, etc as well.

amonroe805-2··on The economics behind "Basic Economy" – A masterclass in price discrimination
Broadly agree, with the one caveat that private-equity-owned businesses seem to be even worse than public companies in this regard.
amonroe805-2··on A possible future of Python in the browser
I mean, these things aren’t static. Python may be the second most popular language (behind JS/TS) today, but what if elixir takes over 10 years from now? There is no need for browsers to implement every language-of-the-day.

Additionally, browser JS adheres to a quite strict backwards compatibility requirements. Python can and does deprecate and remove APIs, and I would imagine the community would not like to lose that flexibility.

WASM is probably the best bet here, in that it provides a well-specified low-level target, such that the door is open for other languages for anyone who is allergic to learning/using javascript.