belval

> Kaplan fires off an email stating that he's just realized that refugees don't have any money

Maybe they just realized that Palestinians don't have any money.

Besides the fact that this would give Amazon access to more data to train multimodal models, an area where they are lacking compared to Google/Meta, I don't see a good synergy here. It seems reminiscent of the Twitch acquisition where it became obvious through the years that they had no real plan for it besides "hey we can synergize because AWS".

A ton of sand, but that's the main issue with those systems and why it's genuinely impractical as anything but a hobbyist project. They need constant monitoring as all of those cells are from laptop and risk thermal runaway at some point. Even with the best matching possible some cell in his configuration will have higher internal resistance and create heat. "Real" large off-grid systems all use LiFePO4 and are unlikely to just catch fire. That being said from the forum post he seems well aware and he probably has individual fuse for each cell.

You could also just bury it so that the worst of the explosion is mostly mitigated. I've also seen small container setup which would probably work better than his (seemingly) wooden shed.

> We have not abandoned this project. The team has just been busy trying to address other pain points around the Python + SQL experience. If you want a sneak peek, check out the new Python SQL driver (in alpha): microsoft/mssql-python

> That team will be looping back to this Django connector as soon as they can to add support for Django 5.2 (LTS). But to be transparent, I don't think that will happen until Q3, at the earliest.

"It's not abandoned, we just don't have anyone working on it", is such nice PR double speak.

I am Canadian so I am "biased" (whatever that means in this context) but tariffs on resources are just non-sensical to me.

Take Aluminium, it's produced in Canada because our energy cost is low, we don't even have bauxite deposits and it is shipped by boat to the factories. Adding tariffs on that doesn't lead to better Aluminium production in the US since energy in the US is still expensive.

I thought the point was to on-shore manufacturing, so things like planes and cars, all of which would need cheap steel and aluminium to compensate for the higher US manufacturing cost.

Still confused about the tariffs on Canada at all though seeing as I thought the mindset was more us-vs-China, but I guess that deserves its own discussion.

> to watch most videos ad-free

Seems like when your pitch is 8$/month for no ads they could have spared a paragraph to explain what "most videos" encompasses.

I think the duration makes it different, the ECMO (blood + oxygen being pumped out of the body) record according to Google is something like 554 days. That's much much longer than the typical transplant.

> If my contributions were that valuable, I'd wonder if it made sense to keep me on life support just to extract my blood every two weeks.

It's a really interesting somewhat thought provoking idea. To some extent these people are valuable enough that turning them into blood factories after cerebral death is the more moral option?

> I think VR's issue is that most people don't want to strap things to their face.

It's the whole package, not just one factor. Motion sickness, strapping something to your face, requirement for "free space" to move around and exercise of being up for an extended period of time.

Playing a shooter in VR is genuinely one of my favorite experience, it feels tactical, you have to crouch, reload, you hear the bullets wishling close to your ears, etc... but it's also an experience that is kept to the odd weekend, every once in a while, because it genuinely feels like work to setup everything.

Every once in a while you encounter an opinion on the Internet that you so deeply disagree that it's not even clear how you would even start to counter it.

"Use RTF instead of Markdown" is one of those.

> Could I run my terminals in there? Yes. Did I? Yes, for a while. Was I effective? Not really. I missed my desk, my normal chair, my big Thunderbolt monitor, my full-size (and yet entirely boring) keyboard, and a relatively odor-free environment.

Not Meta but at Amazon I always felt like war rooms are a place for some leader to scream at you and not much else. The reality is that debugging some retry storm, resource exhaustion or whatever won't happen in a room with 18 people talking over one another.

Give me a meeting link, I'll join and provide info as I find it, but this type of sweaty hackathon-style all-hands-on-deck was never productive for me.

By default pip will give you a warning that package X requires package Y ==1.0 but you have 1.1 which is incompatible instead of just failing. That's the feature that I'd like to have, basically a "--just-warn" flag or a way to set a package as "version does not matter".

> What’s a typical or better way of handling in-house packages?

Fixing your dependencies properly, but on some older codebases that pull also old dependencies this be a headache.

For example "Pillow" a Python image library is a dependency in just about everything that manipulates images. This means that one package might have >=9.6<9.7, some package will have ==9.8 and another will have >=10<11. In practice it never matters and any of those version would work but you have a "version deadlock" and now you need to bump the version in packages that you may not actually own. Having some override of "this project uses Pillow==10, if some package ask for something else, ignore it" is something that pip does that uv doesn't.

> I had a friend who decided to not use uv, because the first time he used it, it was on a 15 years old codebase that had just been migrated to Python 3. It was standing on a pile of never cleaned up pip freeze exports, and uv could not make it work.

This is my only gripe with uv, despite how the author decided to depict it, this really turns into a headache fast as soon as you have ~4-5 in-house packages.

I don't think it's that bad that uv is so unforgiving in those case because it leads to better overall project quality/cohesion, but I wish there was a way to more progressively onboard and downgrade minor version mismatch to warnings.

Might be true, but as someone who worked on a few legacy projects, the opposite, i.e. "You're not a senior engineer until you've worked on a greenfield project" is also true. There are skills that you won't pickup by working on old piles of code. Knowing what technology to pick, how to design your system for high-availability and how to avoid needless complexity are just as important to a well-rounded senior.

Perhaps in the end you are not a senior engineer until you've done a bit of everything.

> I suppose PhDs can get a shortcut into Prinicple or Senior roles, so there's some tangible benefit.

I don't think that's a thing. Some government job will use a pay scale that varies based on your education level, but fast-tracking someone in software engineering because they got a PhD seems questionable seeing as the skillset does not really overlap.

It's a different thing for corporate research labs, where usually you need a masters for entry-level and PhD for the level above.

For some reason people downvote you, but batteries seem to have this constant flux of N=1 articles explaining why X new chemistry is about to dethrone lithium. When it's not aluminium, it's solid state. This article itself has several red flags:

> In contrast, a typical Li-ion battery retains only 80 percent of its charge capacity after 300 to 500 cycles, depending on conditions.

LiFePO4 lasts for about 3000 cycles before 80% degradation, not 300-500.

> The batteries were also tested at temperatures as high as 200 degrees Celsius

Thermal runaway on LFP is 120C, not 200 but still not a temperature you will easily hit.

And finally (as always):

> before the Al-ion battery is ready for commercial applications, its energy density will need to be improved

Which means it's not commercially viable.

LiFePO4 is cheap to manufacture, uses lithium, iron, phosphate, all of which are fairly plentiful and lasts for over 3000 cycles (before reaching 80% capacity).

Google isn't even the worst in my opinion. From the top of my head

Anthropic:

Claude 1 Claude Instant 1 Claude 2 Claude Haiku 3 Claude Sonnet 3 Claude Opus 3 Claude Haiku 3.5 Claude Sonnet 3.5 Claude Sonnet 3.5v2

OpenAI:

GPT-3.5 GPT-4 GPT-4o-2024-08-06 GPT-4o GPT-4o-mini o1 o3-mini o1-mini

Fun times when you try to setup throughput provisioning.

The name change is stupid, but not sure how it could qualify as evil.

Sure, but reading the article, what processes should be changed and do we have confidence that they will address the issue? The reporting on this ends with:

> although it’s unclear whether the reservoir would have made a meaningful difference in firefighters’ ability to combat the flames. Water systems experts said that with extreme Santa Ana winds that prevented the use of planes and helicopters, the Palisades fire was impossible to control, and that municipal water systems aren’t equipped for such blazes.

Also they added their god-awful Microsoft SSO to Minecraft which, coupled with the Xbox app means that you have to be careful with the sequence of action when requesting a password change otherwise the whole thing will just go blank and not let you reset.

My partner and I are each on our second copy because at some point it was just not worth the hassle of recovering our old accounts.

Read this with a smug "eh I still don't have TPM 2.0 so good luck with that", but little did I know TPM 2.0 is no longer a requirement since December 2024[1], guess I am getting upgraded whether I like it or not.

[1] https://www.techopse.com/microsoft-reverses-non-negotiable-t...

I get where you are coming from with this, but in my opinion being able to give feedback in a clear and concise fashion is a skill that people should have. LLMs will help you elaborate but they will also add their own flair by choosing the actual work. You can think "wow that's actually what a better person of me would have written" but you are biasing yourself based on what the LLM understood of your prompt focusing on form over substance.

But as the other comments mention it might just all be bullshit anyway.

Right now at Amazon we are going through the annual feedback cycle where you have to write strengths and growth areas for your colleagues. You will usually have to do ~12 of those.

I don't use ChatGPT for those, but it is the epitome of what you are describing, people will take a single sentence, ask some LLM to blow it up the correct length and in the process make it a complete waste of time for everyone.

My guess is that with long-form text losing value due to LLMs, we will see a return of very succint 1-2 lines employee feedback.

Over the holidays we played a game called Hitster which has a very simple premise of listening to music and guessing the release year. My in-laws have a Sonos system and it was so laughably bad connectivity-wise with the wrong song playing, no song playing, songs not stopping, etc...

I jokingly said that a 100$ bluetooth speaker would have been better, which was not super well received.

Bottomline is: It does not matter how good your sound system is if it's not reliable.

Maybe if one enjoys endless conversations with unhappy customers. Easier to simply isolate the PDF rendering/parsing and move on.

Propaganda? I am the only one of my friend group with a house at 30 years old. Most have completely given up on home ownership, we just registered a 62B$ deficit and homelessness is the worse it's been in my living memory. Universities are balancing their budget by pumping their foreign student numbers and hospitals are so deep in the red access to a specialist for anything non life threathening like a dermatologist or allergologist puts you on a 22 months waiting list even with a physician recommandation...

Not sure what you definition of broken is, but considering our tax rate we are well within our rights to call it broken.

Sensationalistic headline aside, this is a very thorny issue. On one hand you want to provide livable wages to your athletes, but Canada just registered a deficit of 62 billions. Cuts are coming and more money to Olympians will be put up against funding for healthcare, education, etc... At some point you have to make hard decisions.

> Monitoring the Future Study, which annually surveys eighth, 10th and 12th grade students across the United States.

I wonder if there is correlation to the opioid crisis, where the "downsides" (if you want to call it that) of drug abuse are so visible to teenagers that they are staying away from it. Doing drugs when it's associated with being "cool"/interesting like rappers is one thing, but when you associate it to fentanyl zombies living in the streets it loses a lot of its glamour.

I was not able to find the regional breakdown so it's just a conjecture though.

Do you mean on vultr or in general? Because $2.5/month VPS are still widely available on lowendbox: https://lowendbox.com/.

I had missed the idle consumption. That being said I guess if they are that energy conscious the next question would be why aren't they shutting down their computer when not in use.