area51org

Adding a bunch of noise to that situation is less than helpful.

Does he need to develop an AI system at all in order to have a valid opinion, though?

I appreciate the Ruby love in this post, but it's worth pointing out that the author is clearly new to the language. I say that because he writes Ruby as if he's writing some other language, and not idiomatic Ruby.

This:

  dirp = Dir.open(".")
  for f in dirp
    case f
    when /\.rb\z/
      print f, "\n"
    else
      # do not print
    end
  end
  dirp.close

Could be made much more Ruby-native (and simpler!) as:

  Dir.open('.').each do |f|
    puts f if f.match?(/\.rb\z/)
  end

My point isn't to play the "I know the language better than you, so nyah nyah" game, just to suggest that if the author likes Ruby as much as he says, he should learn it better.

> all of which presuppose that the recipient's perception of a communication is all that matters

... and assuming that the listener is able to parse and then object to phrasing on the fly. Phrasing can matter, but fine-grained hypercriticism is mostly a useless exercise.

“Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.” –pithy quote from a summer action movie

I'll just say it now: this is a mistake, quite possibly a huge mistake. The average human is not intelligent enough to deal with computer-generated video that they can mistake for reality, and so this can and will become a tool for despots.

It's fueled by the exhaustion caused by monkeying with what time it is. It's not about circadian rhythms. It's about having to wake up an hour early and pretend that you got enough sleep, and for no good reason.

The past is prologue and not necessarily predictive. That was then; this is now.

Jails are not a replacement for containers.

Exactly. Personal preference is all fine and good, and he's got a right to his own opinions, absolutely.

But to imply that these are empirical differences between FreeBSD and Linux, well, that's nonsense.

All the "advantages" of FreeBSD are really just personal preferences, and little more. E.g., FreeBSD jails are not a replacement for containerization in any way. The FreeBSD network stack is better? I'll bet you can talk to a Linux kernel expert who will explain why exactly the opposite is true. And things being "simpler" in *BSD? Simpler is not always better. SystemD may be somewhat over-engineered, but it's also powerful as hell and can do things the old rc.X system couldn't dream of doing.

There's nothing wrong with switching to another OS, but implying it's because the other OS is somehow empirically "better" is misguided.

You do have a point, there—he seems to contradict himself—but his larger point is about hosting, specifically.

I can't wait until they announce that DHMO (dihydrogen monoxide) is unsafe because it can so easily lead to death in children and adults. Perhaps no amount of DHMO is safe.

http://www.dhmo.org/facts.html

There is such a thing as being unnecessarily and overly cautious, however. This sure seems like a good example of that.

Looks like this might be making its point just a tad too subtlety.

You're not roped in (good, albeit not free, alternatives exist), but yeah, this is just a fuckover.

I've been paying google for GDrive for some time now, and that's about to end. It's back to Dropbox. I know, I don't have to do this, but the hell with google. I'm done. This is nothing short of a needless f---over, and I want as little to do with them as possible.

Boy, you could not dream of a better way to drive people away from custom Gmail domain accounts, and into the arms of

* Fastmail

* Protonmail

* Zoho

Thx for this. It's reassuring to hear.

That's not an excuse to actually be complete assholes.

Yup. The multi-billion-dollar company is low on cash and just has to do this.

I hope they succeed in completely ruining any goodwill they have left. I'd toss out some four-letter words, to boot, but I just can't be bothered.

Rarely if ever, AFAIK.

I'm just like so many others here: I've had these services for years and now they pull the plug.

Here's an exercise in how to piss off the world.

I will never recommend or use google products in the future if I have a choice. Never. Reason: you just don't know what Google is going to do next.

Here's a highly successful, multi-billion-dollar company. They don't need the money. But they want it, because apparently, there just aren't enough billions.

THANK YOU. I thought it was just me. And Chrome works fine! Bizarre.

I think it beats even Chef (a DSL, not a standalone language, but still). When you google for that you get a mix of automation documentation and links to Gordon Ramsey. But io?? The planet? The Italian pronoun? Good lord.

EDIT: thankfully, on a Mac with Homebrew, you can just 'brew install io'.

Let's be thankful for being alive.

EDIT: "We are a way for the cosmos to know itself." –Carl Sagan

Let's just be thankful for what we have.

It's funny how fast that attitude changes when someone you know dies of something you could have helped prevent. Suddenly you feel like you've got blood on your hands, and that maybe sometimes other people need a nudge or a kick in the right direction.

Link to an MP3 of that call with the dude flying into Area 51: https://www.area51.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/Man-tries-...

Here's a link to an MP3 of that 'dude flying into Area 51' call: https://www.area51.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/Man-tries-...

Exactly this. A capable engineer can learn whatever's needed. The idea that you should hire only niche specialists sounds good but is completely wrong-headed. The best engineers I've ever worked with were good because they would and could pick up whatever was needed. Specialists OTOH are usually narrow-minded and lacking in motivation—and of little use outside of their one small niche.

Really? I find him self-important and full of dubious ideas. I know that's not the conventional wisdom about him here, but take a long look at what he actually says about things. He's often wrong, and is rarely open to the possibility that this is the case.