e63f67dd-065b

> Made me wonder how many previous years' returns were wrong

Feed previous year returns into Astra and find out! It's not too late for amended returns, you have 3? years from original date of filing

The original impetus was more about banning robotaxis in Boston/MA than it is about the actual bargaining, from what I've heard. Just as the teamsters tried to ban cars to protect horse carriage drivers (that's what teamsters were, that's why they're called teamsters), they're back to ban the next mode of transportation.

If you were at any of the city council meetings where this topic was brought up it was a circus show with people repeating 'boston is a union town' and grilling waymo execs.

Don't we just call these out-of-tree patches? Lots of those for Linux lying about, it's not a new idea. I guess the difference is that they have multiple upstreams, so really they're more of a new project that consists of:

- A set of sqlite patches,

- Other upstreams and patches?

- A custom toolchain to build all the above together into one artefact

This kind of talent is ... not rare at all? And pretty easy to find too, just wander around the hallways at a major academic systems conference or hang around the kernel mailing lists, you'll meet most of the people working at the cutting edge of these things and get connected to those working on critical systems components. And yes, most of them work for FAANG or are funded by them.

Seriously, book a plane ticket to ATC/OSDI, EuroSys, etc and talk to all the people there. The good ones are already hired by one of the big established players (FAANG, Red Hat, Intel, etc), which is why you need to offer competitive compensation to lure them away.

Engineering is about tradeoffs -- are the resources invested in improving a system worth the return of said improvement? We know full well how to build bridges that will last a thousand years, we just choose not to because it's not an effective use of public funds compared to a fifty year bridge.

The same applies to software engineering -- each additional edge case you handle increases cost but has diminishing returns. At some point you have to say good enough and ship. The cost of perfection is infinite -- you have finite resources, and a great part of engineering is deciding how to allocate them.

> Besides the option to pay in naira, these companies allow Nigerians to store their data within the country — an advantage most of their Western rivals lack. Local servers give businesses the benefits of low latency and data localization at a time when the debate about who has access to a country’s data is heating up

Uhhh... all major cloud providers let you locate data manually? AWS surely has Nigerian datacenters too, that's not an advantage, that's the minimum.

I will grant the argument that random nigerian startups are not subject to foreign government interference, but saying that low latency is a benefit seems incorrect.

Character meshes were taking up 1GB? I wonder what surprising (to me, a non-gamedev) things are hiding in modern 100GB+ games...

"I would never buy a $200 ticket, therefore there does not exist a taylor swift ticket worth $200"

As you point out, different people have different price elasticities. Is it so hard to believe that some people really are willing to pay $5000 to attend?

You rightly point out that resale market prices are likely higher than the market clearing price compared to if there were a single-price auction for all the tickets, but saying that they're worth $100 is just flat out wrong.

> MacBook Air with M2 and M3 comes standard with 16GB of unified memory, and is available in midnight, starlight, silver, and space gray, starting at $999 (U.S.) and $899 (U.S.) for education.

At long last, I can safely recommend the base model macbook air to my friends and family again. At $1000 ($900 with edu pricing on the m2 model) it really is an amazing package overall.

I don't work in networking, but seeing as most traffic is encrypted these days, does passing through unfriendly hardware matter as much as back in the days of plaintext everything? Sure they can drop packets, but they can't tamper/read it, or is there something I'm missing?

With educational pricing this thing starts as $500, and at 16GB of RAM (finally) I think this easily beats any sort of desktop PC you can buy at that price (let's exclude custom builds, they're not the same market).

I think this just became the go-to recommendation I'll give to anybody wanting an entry-level desktop computer of any kind. In fact I might buy one for my parents right now to replace the old mac mini they have. I really can't think of any reasonable competition for it at that price.

Smartwatches are poor estimators of energy expenditure of exercise: https://www.strongerbyscience.com/research-spotlight-wearabl...

The same authors publish regular research reviews on nutrition and health at https://massresearchreview.com/; the general conclusion remains that exercise is a poor intervention for the purpose of weight loss is true. But estimating the effects of exercise is incredibly difficult, it varies wildly and is subject to many confounders.

There's 200k weekly downloads of node on npm. A million flutter devs means that there's a comparable amount of node devs to flutter. I'm not sure how else to estimate it, but there's 170k github stars of flutter compared to 100k node, and a roughly equal amount of forks.

The 2024 SO dev survey https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2024/technology/ has flutter at 10% and nodejs at 40%. Github language stats has JS about 10-15x the popularity of dart, but seeing as JS is more than just node it might pan out. https://madnight.github.io/githut/#/pull_requests/2024/1

So I guess looking at the stats 1M flutter devs is not an implausible number on its face.

> For the group of seven metal detectorists who discovered the 2,584 silver pennies in the Chew Valley area, about 11 miles south of the city of Bristol, it marks a lucrative windfall since they will pocket half that sum. The landowner on whose property the coins were found will receive the other half.

I'm curious how this arrangement came about; is it mandated by law? Negotiated on a case-by-case basis? Is 50/50 the "standard" split?

I think a helpful analogy here for the non-chinese is recalling the names of pieces of music from hearing a short part and vice versa. I'm classically trained, and in my circles I can probably hum out a short piece of music that'll have other musicians go "I know the piece but am drawing a blank on the name" and vice versa. I know I'm not the only one to have had that happen to pieces I'm actively practicing :)

Anecdotally, I can usually remember a few parts of the character but draw a blank on the rest. You can see the picture of the grocery list that for some characters he got basically half the character right but gave up on the other half (shrimp is the combination of 虫 and 下, you can see he remembered the first half).

I guess this is analogous to only remembering the main themes of a piece and forgetting how the rest of it goes. I'll recognise it when I hear it, but can't recall it off the top of my head.

> I assume you can draw a few strokes to "get someone started" on a character and they'll pick it up

In my experience this is not actually the case; I can usually remember a few parts of the character but draw a blank on the rest. You can see the picture of the grocery list that for some characters he got basically half the character right but gave up on the other half (shrimp is the combination of 虫 and 下, you can see he remembered the first half).

I guess there's several levels of character amnesia here, from "I remember half the character" to "I have no clue but I'll recognise it".

The interesting thing here is that nobody writes chinese one character at a time with pinyin; you almost always type out an entire phrase in pinyin, and usually there's only one meaningfully correct combination of those sounds in terms of characters and meaning (that's how the listener can tell what you're saying, after all, when listening) which will be the first choice in your input software (input software traditionally gives you a first choice with what it thinks the entire phrase is, and gets shorter with the 2nd choice onwards to partially match a phrase.)

The problem is not that people can't recognise the words; it's that we can't write them if given pen a paper. If the phone gets it wrong you just choose the nth choice instead of the first.

I'm not familiar with UI development at all, but I'm kind of amazed that the old solution of a giant async bridge where the renderer enqueued native function calls worked at all. What was the initial reasoning behind this architecture? (that is to say, why did it seem like a good idea at the time?)

Former employee here; the interesting (horrifying?) fact is that you can set some of these internal headers (I remember a notable bug with cf-cache-status) in workers (the serverless offering) and cause all kinds of bad things to happen :)

The state of the art these days is https://github.com/MCHPR/MCHPRS

It's an implementation of the minecraft server that compiles redstone into a graph representation, and then does optimisations like constant folding, tree shaking, etc. Very cool project. If you ever see timelapses of minecraft computers running game of life, mandelbrot, etc it's most likely with this project.

The thing that got me into CS was building a CPU in Minecraft redstone, which is surprisingly good at being a logic simulator.

You only got (back in my day) NOT (the torch) and OR gates (wiring next to each other), and everything was built out of them. Signal repeaters had delay, the gates had delay, so you naturally had to build a clock to synchronise it all.

The main benefit that I enjoyed was that you could see the signals physically propagating from one end of your cpu to the other in real time (clock cycles were in the range of 1-4 seconds), flowing from the instructing fetching, decoding, dispatch, logic, writing to back memory, etc. Seeing signals slowly crawl from one end to the other naturally introduced you to pipelining (it even happens naturally if you increase the clock without thinking about what will actually happen: the next instruction starts decoding before the previous one is done, more parts of your cpu start lighting up at once, and oops now you have a pipelined cpu).

Even the scales match; many learners are surprised that the actual ALU is the tiny thing in the corner that you can barely see, and all the giant stacks of rows you actually saw is memory and cache. Even in minecraft, most of your CPU is not logic :)

Also really taught me how asics are much faster: you could build a tiny compact multiplier that multiplied hundreds of times faster than your giant cpu running a multiplication algorithm.

Looks like they community I learnt from is still around actually https://openredstone.org/, even if all the old forum posts seems to be gone now. There were some geniuses on that place building computers with multi-tier caches, full pipelining, out-of-order (albeit primitive) execution, SIMD-capable CPUs, all in redstone.

Many government websites use Entrust, and that didn’t stop this from happening. So I don’t think that this is a good theory.

Sharpe ratios are not equal across different opportunities for the simple reason that actors are irrational. Many people write books even when the expected return is negative, which drives down returns for everyone.

My understanding is that eink only uses power on refresh; if you don’t change the image, the pigments remain where they are and draw no power.

> Only one out of every ten prospective customers ends up taking out a mortgage, so higher prices fronted by mortgage bankers add up

I read this as for every ten customers who get to a point where they get their credit pulled, only one of them end up closing on the mortgage (ie buying a house). Could be due to shopping around, negotiations falling through, or the other millions of reasons you could end up wanting to buy a house but not close the transaction.

The article mentions that one in ten pulls actually convert into a mortgage, so actually each borrower is paying $1500.

SARs are reported to FinCEN, which is part of the Treasury, not Fed.

Claims of electromagnetic sensitivity have been debunked. They show symptoms to fake EM devices, and don’t show symptoms to real but hidden EM devices, so it’s all in their head. It’s the nocebo effect.

I'm primarily a C++ developer these days, and if the C++ interop is actually good then I'm very excited for the future. For app-dev type stuff it really does seem like it's better than Rust, and I can definitely see a world where we start migrating some code into Swift.

Edit: back from watching the video, and a few observations:

- Swift does not suffer from Rust's refusal to add things into the standard library. gasp regex support in stdlib? Async/await runtimes?

- Default testing framework is a godsend, especially when integrated into the build system

- Rust but better for everything that's not low-level systems development is the impression I get

Yeah, I'm really glad for the trend of statically linked binaries that came with Rust/Go. No more version incompatibilities, fights with downstream packagers, weird build configs, etc, just distribute the binary and that's it.