ipsento606

I've been doing this professionally for over a decade and have basically never used a debugger

I've often felt that I should, but never enough to actually learn how

> It just doesn't seem to work with everyone

Without a very precise definition of "work", these discussions quickly degrade to near uselessness.

There is a very large difference between "telling patients to exercise more and eat less doesn't result in long term weight loss" and "exercising more and eating less doesn't result in long term weight loss"

The former is true, and the latter is not.

I agree that from a clinical perspective the former definition is more relevant than the latter.

as a heads up https://www.oilshell.org/blog/2021/01/why-a-new-shell.html links to https://www.oilshell.org/release/latest/doc/idioms.html ("Oil Language Idioms") which is a 404

> the notion of Germans being intrinsically superior

By "German drivers" I mean drivers who are trained, licensed and insured in Germany. There is nothing "intrinsic" about it, and it has nothing to do with genetics or national origin.

> Even though most of us don't speed

I'm curious where you live. In the major US city I live in, well above 50% of drivers are going above the speed limit at any particular moment on any particular highway.

> Explain how the German autobahn has fewer collisions than US high ways with lower than 85th percentile speed limits if the lower speed limits are such an advantage.

There is no reason in the world to assume that US drivers have the same level of driving skill as German drivers.

    > This stack gives me full control: no subscriptions, no vendor lock-in,
    > and no risk of platforms disappearing or changing policies.

I'm not trying to dunk on the author, but this sentiment encapsulates a tremendous paradigm shift in the meaning of "full control", compared to say:

* Writing in obsidian

* Syncing files via git

* Publishing via nginx hosted on the cheapest possible vps (with https via let's encrypt)

Running a static blog is one of the easiest scenarios to self-host, because even if you get slashdotted, nginx should be able to handle all the requests even if you're host it on a potato

It's not free, but you can get a VPS for $20-$30 a year.

This isn't the best fit for everyone, but it seems weird to talk about "full control" and "no risk of platforms disappearing" when you're relying on the free tier of two external companies

It happens to me maybe once every 5-10 years, whereas I open and close various credit card accounts several times a year. So for me it would be far more irritating to have to add and remove cards from my phone's virtual wallet several times a year than to potentially have to order a replacement card once every few years. Most phone wallets also don't give an option to provide a nickname for cards, which is extremely irritating if you have multiple cards from the same issuers, whereas with physical cards it takes a couple of seconds to add/remove cards from my wallet, or to make a note on a card with a sharpie.

I would have to use a credit card that earns slightly worse points for the rest of the trip?

If I left a card at a restaurant, I would block that card and have the issuer send a new one to my home address. It would really not be a chore at all

> Phones have displaced paper money and credit cards as the preferred way to pay for a bill at the end of a meal

this is 100% unrelatable to me

I have never once used my phone to pay in a sit-down restaurant. I have only seen someone else use their phone when forced to, such as due to a forgotten wallet, and with much fussing and apologizing

some are likely correct, however

> For every 100 people who use the pull out method perfectly, 4 will get pregnant.

Are those 4-in-100 distributed randomly?

Did the pregnancies result despite 100% adherence to the method, or was there occasional failure to adhere?

There's a big difference between a method being ineffective from the perspective of a health care provider, and a method being ineffective in absolute terms.

A provider has to care about what broad cross sections of people will actually do, rather than what they say they will do.

If you're an individual person who knows they can adhere to the method perfectly, the fact people on average cannot or will not adhere perfectly has no particular relevance to you.

I have no horse in this race, but the same difference in the meaning of "efficacy" arises in all sorts of aspects of health care, like advice on diet and exercise, or the prescription of specific exercises for physical therapy.

> This is lazy and wasteful.

Modern dishwashers are incredibly efficient. They consume insignificant amounts of power and water compared to heating or cooling your home, or taking an extra shower.

Your opinions are your own, but I don't have the slightest hesitation in running an extra dishwasher cycle if it makes my life the slightest bit easier.

> If someone logs into their bank and notices that changing the account number in the URL lets them withdraw from other people’s accounts, no court is going to shrug it off and say that it’s the bank’s fault for not being more secure

When you open a bank account, there is an actual contract and regulatory framework that governs how you use the account. A URL parameter is an implementation detail that no more alters the contract than a broken lock on a vault would alter the contract.

But when you interact with a smart contract, the smart contract is the contract. What you are allowed to do is defined by what the smart contract lets you do. You don't need to open an account, agree to T&Cs or sign any other sort of contract to interact with the smart contract.

If the smart contract is not the contract, how would you propose we can determine what the real contract is?

> This kind of expenditure at any business or organization would be recognized as one of poor judgement

The purpose of a business is to generate a return on investment.

Are you suggesting that the purpose of a government is to generate a return on investment?

> We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

Georgists want building apartment buildings to be profitable based on the value of the building, not the land.

The idea would be that holding land becomes less profitable, but buying land for development becomes cheaper.

I find it impossible to discuss bias without a shared understanding of what it actually means to be unbiased - or at least, a shared understanding of what the process of reaching an unbiased position looks like.

40% of Americans believe that God created the earth in the last 10,000 years.

If I ask an LLM how old the Earth is, and it replies ~4.5 billion years old, is it biased?

> How do restaurants work, then?

Primarily because recipe creation is not one of the biggest cost centers for restaurants?

> a single component outweighing an entire app feels fundamentally broken

It just doesn't to me, understanding that in react-land, a single component and an entire app will have roughly equivalent size, if you're not pulling in any other dependencies.

No one (I hope) would ever use react for a single button, so it feels like an unhelpful comparison.

The article also says

> JPMorgan became interested partly because of the potential it saw in Frank’s supposedly huge list of satisfied clients. The bank believed those future college graduates could become lifelong bank customers

Generating a fake user accounts database would only conceivably work if you expected the purchaser to never attempt to contact any of the business's users, which seems a ludicrous expectation.

I don't understand how one could sell a company with millions of fake users and not expect the purchaser of that company to realize those users are fake?

I understand how one could think you'd get away with it if one were lying to investors who might lack the ability to verify the claims

But actually selling the company? How would that possibly work?

> now that's shown to not improve the living standards of the many

Inflation-adjusted median real income is up 20% since 1990 in the US. Unemployment is lower. Life expectancy is higher. Air pollution is lower. Crime is lower. Gay marriage is now legal.

The living standards of the many in the US have demonstrably improved dramatically over the last 30-40 years.

Housing affordability is worse, but that is largely due to local rather than national politics, and the policies that have lead to unaffordable housing are largely non-partisan (in that homeowners across the political spectrum are for restrictive zoning and against development).

It's true that many people feel that living standards have not improved. I don't have an answer for that beyond speculation.

I find the way people talk about "homelabs" endlessly confusing. Is it "a playground for devops"? OK - that sounds about as appealing to me as a playground for washing the dishes, or a playground for changing the oil on my car, but people like different things and there's nothing wrong with that.

But wait, you also run your plex instance on there? And a git server? And wait, it stores your tax documents too?

Is it a playground, or a functional home server?

I run plex and a NAS and a VPN server on a machine in my home, too. But it's a home server. It's definitely not a "homelab" or a "playground" of any kind, any more than my freezer is a playground for storing food.

I've been a professional engineer for over a decade, and in that time I've only had one position where I was expected to write any tests. All my other positions, we have no automated testing of any kind.

land is in fixed supply, but the amount of land needed per housing unit can be reduced by easing regulatory limits on density

Can you give any examples of "AI slop products"?

Lots of comments here talking about how great S3 is.

Anyone willing to give a cliff notes about what's good about it?

I've been running various sites and apps for a decade, but have never touched S3 because the bandwidth costs are 1, sometimes 2 orders of magnitude more expensive than other static hosting solutions.

trying to refund a transaction that occurred 8 years ago is actually pretty onerous and time consuming