hyperpape

> I never got why compilers don't have pluggable syntaxes.

An interesting question, but the answer is "because it's a bad idea" that doesn't actually solve the problem.

That said, the right way to implement this is as a "transpiler" that compiles one syntax into another. And only the people who want to use it pay the costs.

Statistical control is a very specific term: https://entropicthoughts.com/statistical-process-control-a-p..., and one which you'd expect anyone with a significant interest in Deming to understand.

My expectation is that Lorin would read the parent comment and say some variant of "oh, whoops, I didn't check." As the parent noted, it's not really that important to the overall point.

If the rate limit is reasonable (allows full download of the entire set of data within a feasible time-frame), that could be acceptable. Otherwise, no.

I don't really want to be a manager of humans, although my role as an engineer is a leadership role that has some overlap.

But I'm acutely conscious that in the 5+ years that I've been a senior developer, my ability to come up with useful ideas has significantly outstripped the time I have to realize those ideas (and from experience, the same is often true of academics).

At work, I have the choice between remaining hands-on and limiting what I can get done, or acting more like a manager, and having the opportunity to get more done, but only by letting other people do it, in ways that might not reflect my vision. It's pretty frustrating, to be honest.

For side projects, it's worse. Most of them just can't be done, because I don't even have the choice.

> At scale humans accept new things slowly.

I think this is true, but there are big differences. Motivated humans with a reasonable background learn lots of things quickly, even though we also swim in an ocean of half-truths or outdated facts.

We also are resistant to certain controversial ideas.

But neither of those things are really that analogous to the limitations on what models can currently learn without a new training run.

Organized fraud preys on disorganized fools, but this fraud didn't require or benefit from organization. You could just go do it on your own, and pocket the money until you got a visit from the cops.

With Google I can find out that he was prosecuted after his video came out. I'll count it. https://abc7.com/post/nuke-bizzle-rapper-edd-fraud/12024561/

Good example, though my impression was that was a quasi-viral TikTok trend that caught up random fools, not organized fraud?

> They will sometimes organize recruitment very openly, using the same channels you use for recruiting at any other time: open Facebook groups, Reddit threads, and similar. They will film TikTok videos flashing their ill-gotten gains, and explaining steps in order for how you, too, can get paid.

> As a fraud investigator, you are allowed and encouraged to read Facebook at work.

I tend to believe this, but it would be a lot more compelling with links to a case where Facebook/TikTok posts were useful evidence.

European regulators and courts have placed a lot of scrutiny on big US tech companies, with frequent fines for privacy violations and potential anti-competitive behavior. Also as noted upthread, they're investigating Meta and Twitter on this specific issue.

Source, seems pretty relevant. https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/occupy...

How seriously do you mean the analogy?

I think forklifts probably carry more weight over longer distances than people do (though I could be wrong, 8 billion humans carrying small weights might add up).

Certainly forklifts have more weight * distance when you restrict to objects that are over 100 pounds, and that seems like a good decision.

My background is in philosophy, though I am a programmer, for what it is worth. I think what I'm saying is subtly different from "black and white thinking".

The final answer can be "each of these positions has merit, and I don't know which is right." It can be "I don't understand what's going on here." It can be "I've raised some questions."

The final answer is not "the final answer that ends the discussion." Rather, it is the final statement about your current position. It can be revised in the future. It does not have to be definitive.

The problem comes when the same article says two contradictory things and does not even try to reconcile them, or try to give a careful reader an accurate picture.

And I think that the sustained argument over how to read that article shows that Yegge did a bad job of writing to make a clear point, albeit a good job of creatring hype.

> If you read Steve's writeup, it's clear that this is a big fun experiment:

So, Steve has the big scary "YOU WILL DIE" statements in there, but he also has this:

> I went ahead and built what’s next. First I predicted it, back in March, in Revenge of the Junior Developer. I predicted someone would lash the Claude Code camels together into chariots, and that is exactly what I’ve done with Gas Town. I’ve tamed them to where you can use 20–30 at once, productively, on a sustained basis.

"What's next"? Not an experiment. A prediction about how we'll work. The word "productively"? "Productively" is not just "a big fun experiment." "Productively" is what you say when you've got something people should use.

Even when he's giving the warnings, he says things like "If you have any doubt whatsoever, then you can’t use it" implying that it's ready for the right sort of person to use, or "Working effectively in Gas Town involves committing to vibe coding.", implying that working effectively with it is possible.

Every day, I go on Hacker News, and see the responses to a post where someone has an inconsistent message in their blog post like this.

If you say two different and contradictory things, and do not very explicitly resolve them, and say which one is the final answer, you will get blamed for both things you said, and you will not be entitled to complain about it, because you did it to yourself.

The fact that overall drinking is decreasing is 100% compatible with the drinking rate increasing for some specific age cohort.

Destroying a product is a well understood process, and we've witnessed many big companies do it. That's evidence!

Designing a food to be more appealing is also a relatively well understood process that is already carried out, but Ozempic seems to blunt the effectiveness of it.

Food companies will surely try to make food that is appealing for Ozempic users, and will do so if they can. But it is a massive assumption that they will be able to, given that they're already doing as much as possible to make food appealing to people.

So there is significant uncertainty that the food companies can do what the parent suggested they would do.

I predict you’ll retract this comment.

I don’t have any evidence that you will, but since you seem to think that’s ok, here goes!

What worries me is that the item I most know about seems like the problem statement is not that useful. The title is "early delay detection for shipments" and the text seems to mostly be about inventory (so the description is odd).

The frame is that enterprise solutions for these problems do not scale to smaller retail chains, and I find that at least believable.

The thing about this problem is that it's not hidden. It's extremely obvious. I work in SaaS targeting logistics (transportation for me, transportation, order management and warehouse management for our company), so I know a bit about this space, though I'm not in it directly. Plenty of people are solving this problem for bigger companies.

I put roughly 0% credence in the idea that many many people haven't noticed this is a problem for smaller companies. I put low credence on the idea that no one has tried to solve it for them via software. What I suspect is that this is a case where the basic idea is super-simple and obvious, but the reality of producing something that works in the market is hard.

None of that is to say that there couldn't be a real improvement here. It's just that I suspect it takes a real insight into why this problem hasn't been solved yet, and a new angle to make your solution work.

CI systems operate according to rules that humans feel they understand and can apply mechanically. Moreover, they (primarily) fail closed.

Salesmen making bad deals that boost their numbers and then don't make money in the long-term is one of the first things you learn when you work in an org that sells in the enterprise market.

Those are two unrelated points and the connection between them was unclear in the original post.

Your comment is sufficiently generic that it’s impossible to tell what specific part of the article you’re agreeing with, disagreeing with, or expanding upon.

The thing is, none of us are mice, but many of us use Postgres.

It would be the equivalent of "if you're a middle-aged man" or "you're an American".

P.S. I think some of the considerations may be true for any system that uses B-Tree indexes, but several will be Postgres specific.

Note that the author does not mention a single specific SaaS subscription he’s cancelled or seen a team cancel.

The only named product was Retool.

The reality is that the HTML+CSS+JS is the canonical form, because it is the form that humans consume, and at least for the time being, we're the most important consumer.

The API may be equivalent, but it is still conceptually secondary. If it went stale, readers would still see the site, and it makes sense for a scraper to follow what readers can see (or alternately to consume both, and mine both).

The author might be right to be annoyed with the scrapers for many other reasons, but I don't think this is one of them.

Being a little bit clever can lead you to make some pretty bad mistakes.

Yes, the distance according to roads can be different from the distance as the crow flies. No, it cannot realistically be 10x the distance when the crow's distance is 2500 miles.

Since it clearly runs afoul of anticompetitive laws, it will be easy for you to find case law that demonstrates that, alongside credible sources stating that OpenAIs actions are prosecutable that make that case.

This is big news, it's not like the folks who write about antitrust would just ignore it.

I know.

My point is that almost everyone refers to it as Postgres, because they do not actually value the descriptiveness of "PostgreSQL".

That's a really nice mnemonic. I wish I lived in an alternate universe where Postgres was called PostgreSQL so that it was easier to remember. Perhaps if we start using that, it will take over, like how everyone calls the Go project Golang.