foundart

That’s stropping

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Razor_strop

The author of the article also wrote a CLI parser library for Typescript, called Optique. I really appreciate them including a "When Optique makes sense" section in the docs. It would be great if more projects did that.

https://optique.dev/why#when-optique-makes-sense

Wow, so much older than the oldest known complaint

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complaint_tablet_to_Ea-n%C4%...

In comments on an article about spellchecking no less

Expresses a longing for the semantic web.

> Remember Semantic Web? The web was supposed to evolve into semantically structured, linked, machine-readable data that would enable amazing opportunities. That never happened.

I think the lesson to be learned is in answering the question "Why didn't the semantic web happen?"

I've navigated burnout and some slightly toxic environments.

I bailed on a job in 2022 when I was tired of it and the hiring market was still good. The hiring market turned and it took me a long time to get something new once I was ready. Fortunately, I had a significant cushion.

Prerequisite to taking up any of my suggestions that follow: How long do you think it would take you to get a new job? Triple that estimate. Can you go that long without pay?

If the answer is no, stop reading here.

Regarding prepping / searching while working - have you considered dialing back your hours to give yourself more energy for the search? If they don't like it... well, if you are still comfortable with your financial cushion given my first question, then at least you will have made some progress toward your next thing while still getting paid.

Another way to assess how you feel about staying: Take at least a week and a half off. Several of my job changes have occurred after some time off. It made the suckitude of the current job so obvious that I quit waffling about it and started looking.

> it’s not all that much effort after the first two or three. There’s no reason to think the language you start with should be one that you could get paid to use.

Definitely!

This inspired me to list out languages I've learned to at least some minimal level and written programs in. Here they are, with the contexts in which I used them:

BASIC - middle school ;

Fortran - high school ;

C++ - self-taught & later some work;

Pascal - university;

Motorola 68k assembly - university;

Miranda - university (Programming Languages class only);

Ada - university (Programming Languages class only);

Lisp - university & work (CLOS);

sh - work;

ColdFusion - work;

bash - work and personal;

Java - work;

Atmel microcontroller assembly - hobby;

C - hobby (to replace Atmel assembly);

Ruby - work and hobby;

Scala - work;

Elixir - work;

Solidity - work;

Typescript - work and hobby;

Elm - work;

Clojure - work;

Javascript - work;

Python - hobby (with a tiny smattering of work usage over the years)

I think the author's ideas are likely too complex for a wide audience, but they could be a game changer for those who can handle that kind of complexity.

TLDR: "According to a preprint posted to the bioRxiv server this month, nearly all the dead colonies tested positive for bee viruses spread by parasitic mites. Alarmingly, every single one of the mites the researchers screened was resistant to amitraz, the only viable mite-specific pesticide—or miticide—of its kind left in humans’ arsenal."

With SaaS you mostly give away the chance to benefit from the near zero marginal cost of software. The vendor probably shares the benefit of the marginal cost via lower prices, but at some scale of users and some price per user, the SaaS customer will end up getting a bad deal.

The problem is, you'd be foolish to run your own thing in the early days of a company. It's only when you've succeeded and scaled that it becomes a problem. You survived long enough to need to scale in part by keeping costs low and one way you did that was by using SaaS services instead of building and/or running versions of those tools yourself. That was smart.

As the business grew at least one or two of those SaaS services got so entwined into the daily operations of your company that there is now no way to replace them without a lengthy, risky, and expensive migration project.

The SaaS problem is a negative side effect of your success.

edited - a typo and a word change

It makes me wonder: Would an airline that drastically simplified its fares be more likely to appear in flight search results?

Simplifying the fares would make it less computationally expensive and, in theory, could take fewer steps to answer a flight planning query.

Imagine a flight search planner that, say, fanned out N airline-specific workers when handling a planning query and then displayed to the user whatever results it got back within some time limit. If FooAir had simple fares, the FooAir searcher would likely run faster than searchers for other airlines. Thus it would be more likely to return results for more queries, assuming the deadline is fairly tight because of usability metrics. (People don't tend to stick around waiting for slow results.)

A very interesting dive into, as the title says, the computational complexity of air travel planning. Graph algorithms with lots of complexity added due to the wide variety of fare conditions that airlines have dreamt up over the years.

The article may be from 2003 but I would call it an evergreen. While I imagine some of the details have changed since then, I suspect that the complexity has only grown since then.

One user's report: I've been working on a small personal research project with various LLMs. I tried Crystal and it dug up a helpful data source I hadn't seen before.

I signed up for the beta and look forward to seeing further developments.

According to the article: “ the White House had authorized the use of Signal, largely because there is no alternative platform to text in real time across different agencies, two people familiar with the matter said.”

It will be offered to people with $5M or more.

“As more companies opt to stay private for longer and a greater share of economic growth occurs in private markets, investors will need to look beyond the public markets”

That is an unfortunate situation, IMHO, as it strengthens the reality behind the old expression "it takes money to make money".

Transpiration by plants, especially in large forested areas like the Amazon, plays an important role in creating future rainfall

What a great development. Commenters have noted various challenges that will need to be addressed but they seem largely solvable to me. I’ll definitely be keeping an eye on this as it moves from the lab to real applications.

I read it as “by replacing use of some hard plastics”.

Without trying to avoid bumping is not accurate but certainly there is more of it in South Korea than in places like the US.

See for example https://m.koreaherald.com/article/10447649

Interesting. I’d be curious to see how this logic varies in different places around the world.

Windows are terrible insulators. Adding more panes of glass improves their insulation ability, but it hasn't been practical to add many panes because it makes the window assembly very heavy and thick.

The tough, thin glass developed for phones makes it practical to add more internal panes without much impact on the weight or thickness of the window assembly.

404

By whom?

This? https://briarproject.org/how-it-works/

Hadn’t heard of it. Thanks for bringing it up.

Summary of Romeo & Juliet: “A few teenagers get way too dramatic about a crush and end up dead.”

My point being that for a story like this the journey is more important than the destination.

It’s common enough that there are women-only cars on the subway in Tokyo.