anyonecancode

Doesn’t Portland have a housing affordability problem? Why was the answer to “people are using drugs in public because they can’t afford a place to do it in private” to legalize public use? I swear we’ll do anything to address the consequences of lack of housing except actually build enough houses.

>> The pitch to customers for buying a hybrid is simple: Such cars are often cheaper than all-electric rivals and get some benefits of electrification with improved MPG compared with a traditional car without the headaches of having to charge like an EV.

Another aspect that I don't see often mentioned is that there are a few small market segments that simply don't have an EV option. My next car will be a hybrid, because I want a mini-van and the Toyota Sienna is a very good vehicle in that category. The Sienna is hybrid. There's no all electric minivan available in the US market.

Potentially controversial take -- we've been making, and continue to make, decisions that in aggregate prioritize private car ownership as the default transportation mode, and this has resulted in limiting our freedom of movement, and will continue to limit it.

I have a car, and I enjoy a good road trip. I think cars are fantastic for inter-city transportation, especially with a family. But objectively, I have less practical freedom of movement today when I live in the suburbs than when I was younger and lived in NYC. Having a car is not optional for my current situation -- I cannot run any errands without a car, and can get to very few places of interest without one, and it is outright dangerous to be on foot in many parts. If my car is unavailable to me for whatever reason, I'm very inhibited in my movements.

When I lived in the city, by contrast, I had a many options for errands and fun within a 15 minute walk, and most of the rest of city available to me via bus or subway.

As cars become increasingly complex - especially as they start to become "connected" -- being car-dependent means our freedom of movement becomes even more vulnerable. My general feeling with this story on kill switches is skepticism that it's a good idea, but I feel that if people are really concerned about freedom of movement, they need to be thinking more broadly about how we've made it so difficult for a person to freely move around with just their own two feet.

It doesn't -- hence my noting the GH cli as a minor point. It's a tool I've personally found helped increase my productivity, so just wanted to share as others may find it useful too.

From the second article, a minor point but possibly helpful to other here, he contrasts doing everything in the terminal with stacked commits vs going to the Github UI. If people aren't aware, Github offers a cli tool[1]. I've been using it for a few months now and am finding it does make me more productive -- it's nice to be able to open up a PR directly from my terminal. I do still use the GH UI for a lot of things, but I'll often at least start in the terminal, and it also makes the transition from terminal to browser easy as many commands support the `--web` flag open up the right page for you (eg `gh repo view --web`).

[1] https://cli.github.com/

A good example of this I see a lot in a code base I'm currently working in is React components that conditionally render or not. I really can't stand this pattern, and whenever I can I refactor that into having the component ALWAYS render, but have the caller decide whether or not to call the component.

PHP was one of my first languages. A common mistake I saw a lot of devs make was using string interpolation for SQL statements, opening the code up to SQL injection attacks. This was fixable by using prepared statements.

I feel like with LLMs, the problem is that it's _all_ string interpolation. I don't know if an analog to prepared statements is even something that's possible -- seems that you would need a level of determinism that's completely at odds with how LLMs work.

I think for the pre-vaccine period, there's at least a couple issues that are still very unclear:

- how well did official policies map to actual behavior? I expect a lot of people still masked and distanced, regardless of what their particular state's policies were

- what specific behaviors actually made a difference? (Well, maybe it's really just a question of how much difference masking made -- I'd expect it's pretty clear that avoiding other people was pretty effective)

So for me, a more interesting and, I'd argue, practical question, is really about how effective _policy_ is. There were definitely a lot of costs, as it helped politicize things (who would have guess masks would become a partisan issue?).

I think of the case of Sweden, for example, where IIUC behavior was pretty cautious although policy was pretty loose.

I'm not sure what you're talking about. You're not audio recorded when you vote. And voting doesn't provide a more publicly verifiable, accessible record than a court record does -- today, you can sue an employer and make statements in court.

I'll have to bow out of this convo at this point I think as we seem to be talking past each other, or at any rate you seem to be talking about something different than what I thought we were discussing.

Sure, play it out. Lots of things are currently illegal reasons for being fired or discriminated against at work -- eg "protected classes" such as sex, religion, race, national origin. Are you trying to argue that discrimination on that basis does not exist? If not, then we can agree that, whatever laws exist to prohibit it, discrimination based on voting would exist.

Given that, you're left with needing to argue that the societal benefits of non-secret voting would outweigh the harms of voting-based discrimination. To me, that doesn't seem like a close call, but I'm open to the counter-argument.

Boss man: I noticed you voted for X. As you might recall from the last All Hands, we're not big fans of X. Unrelatedly, I was wondering how you see your future at this company?

> It’s hard for me to separate the COBOL from all of the other dysfunctional things going on at the company. I knew that the language was a dead-end and did not want to get stuck with it. Not because I didn’t like the language, but because I was 21 and “Web 2.0” was in full swing and I knew I wanted to do something “cool”.

I think this is an often under-appreciated point -- languages don't live in isolation, but within a wider context of libraries, people using the language, and institutions and jobs with jobs that use the language.

As another example on this point -- at my current job, for some reason much of the backend has been written in Haskell. Haskell's a fine language, I actually really like many aspects of it. Our main product, however, is web based, a domain Haskell is completely able to handle on a technical level. In practice, though, it's a poor fit, and I find myself constantly puzzling at all the odd, non-idiomatic ways web architecture has been set up, often in ways that make it very difficult to make things work well for the web. In many cases, this has been carried over into some questionable typescript as the backend programmers then had to also try and become frontend programmers.

None of these problems are because of Haskell the language or because the original programmers were bad programmers, but because their background, and the majority of the Haskell ecosystem, just isn't really web-focused, and so conventions and assumptions most people who work mainly on the web take for granted they were unaware of or got wrong.

A language is more than just syntax and standard library, it's part of a broader culture.

Steal a worker's wages, get a fine. Steal a loaf of bread, get jail.

> what "rule" ? - capitalism doesn't set out to "rule" by anyone, it's been a system of owning capital (to put it very simply / abbreviated) for as long as I've known it.

It seems clear to me that those with a great deal of capital have far more influence over what laws get passed and enforced than those with less capital. And that many laws benefit those with more capital, often at the expense of those with less. I'd call that "rule."

I think the implicit argument here is that "capitalism" means "rule by those who own capital." Hence a lack of unemployed people, which would hurt the captains of industry, _would_ be a failure under that definition of "capitalism."

If by "capitalism" we merely mean things like a market economy with property rights, then the question would be what to call a system that has this but where workers, rather than captains of industry, have more power? Whatever we want to call _that_ system, it doesn't currently exist, and we've seen that any moves in that direction are very strongly resisted (c.f. return to office policies driven by captains of industry freaking out).

Industrial-scale copy-pasta is definitely a concern I have around LLMs, though in practice I'm not sure it'll actually be _so_ much worse than it is now. Consider, for instance, one team that aims to have good test coverage and productive code reviews, and one that doesn't, and assume that on both teams there are some developers who carelessly copy-paste whatever the LLM spits out. I suspect that the first team will still end up doing pretty well, whereas the latter will get more terrible. So one outcome might be a greater delta between teams these two types of teams, with the takeaway being that in the new AI world, practices around code testing and reviewing are more important than ever.

If your relationship to the subject you're asking about is equivalent to an oracle asking an inscrutable deity, then I don't know that you're going to get much value out of it. OTOH, if you know enough about the subject where the response is something you can evaluate for whether it actually makes sense, and can take and edit or integrate in a useful matter, you'll likely find that the LLM's provide a very helpful speedup that boosts productivity. At least that's been my experience.

That's silly. Obviously all cultures have their own issues, and I'd say it's actually rather patronizing to pretend that non-Western cultures don't have their own dynamics of bias and discrimination.

Having said that, as a cultural Westerner, I'd be very loathe to speak much on the topic of the Indian caste system, as while it's clearly a real thing, and I believe those Indians in America who say it is, I'm certain I lack enough context and background to talk about it without it ending up being an exercise in projecting my own culture's dynamics onto theirs. It's the kind of conversation I think I probably need to do far more listening that talking in.

Many of the migrants arriving in New York would like to be working -- they didn't come to hang around in city shelters for months at a time. But they can't, legally. Part of the solution seems like it should involve making it easier to let people who want to work, work.

(see eg https://news.cornell.edu/media-relations/tip-sheets/expedite... -- 6 months before they can even apply for a work permit!)

>> Tailwind's biggest pro is that it allows people that _don't_ know css that much to style stuff more consistently and easily. But that's where it ends.

I'm considering advocating for a move to TW at work. Most of the devs _don't_ know CSS well enough to style stuff consistently and easily. We have very complicated cascades, and sibling style imports, and "semantic" class names.

Sure, maybe the answer is "level up your teams' CSS expertise." But I'm looking for something more pragmatic than that. I don't know if TW is ultimately the right tool I'm looking for, but the underlying ideas it uses are very appealing for this use case.

That feels a bit like criticizing all the c-style programming languages for splitting the C community... Which is an analogy I rather like, as it suggest Vim has become so foundational that its legacy goes beyond the direct users of it. I've certainly found that to be so, as in addition to using vim itself, I also use its key bindings wherever I can.

I mainly remember 1) IE being quite idiosyncratic in how it followed html/css standards and 2) being able to use things like firebug to debug FF, but having an alert window pop up with a cryptic, unhelpful message when trying to debug IE. It seemed "make it work in IE6" was like 30% of time spent in my work back then. Also, it stuck around for a _long_ time, so that was especially annoying as long after other browsers, including IE, had moved on, a lot of effort still went into supporting IE6.

Back to the US, but an example people might not know/think of -- the NYC subway system. It's all run by the Metropolitan Transit Agency (MTA) now, but originally there were separate, competing subway companies[1, 2, 3]. That's why some lines are letters, and some numbers, and why switching between these often feels surprisingly long and/or complex.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooklyn%E2%80%93Manhattan_Tra... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independent_Subway_System [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interborough_Rapid_Transit_Com...

Ah -- should have continued reading comments, I see marc__1 already posted about this.

This seems similar to, maybe even a restatement of, the "how do you detect AI-written content" problem.

If someone could provide a way to programmatically detect accurate, high quality content, it would solve the SEO spam problem. It would also as a side-effect solve the AI-content problem. Or maybe it's the other way around and it would solve the AI-content problem and as a side effect the SEO spam problem. Well, they'll soon be the exact same thing, and either way I'm not sure it's solvable.

Vim, the program, I find useful in limited cases. Vim, the keybindings, I find I try to use everywhere -- from the browser to every IDE I ever work in.

Rate of change matters.

A car will naturally come to a stop if you don't push the accelerator pedal. A car will naturally come to a stop if you hit a brick wall.

Isn't implosion like the one obvious danger of being deep underwater?

Prohibition in the US really did dramatically cut down on alcohol consumption. It also was a terrible policy with all kinds of negative effects.

So I think the takeaway is that 1. Yes, reducing alcohol consumption does make sense as a public health goal and 2. strict prohibition is a terrible way to go at this.

Title also hints it'll be the first in a sequence:

"Octopuses observed engaging in light manufacturing"

"Octopuses experimenting with novel propulsion methods"

"Octopuses clearing out a large, flat space and assembling assorted metallic objects"

"Octopuses targeting Sydney, Brisbane"

The tricky part of an SPA is that as a developer, you're taking on a lot of the burden of managing location state that in an MPA is handled by the browser. And location state often is a significant component of application state.

Certainly it's possible to take on that burden and execute it well, but I think a lot of teams and businesses don't fully account for the fact that they are doing so and properly deciding if that extra burden is really necessary. The baseline for nailing performance and correctness is higher with an SPA.