I tend to go by Binary Large OBject (BLOB) storage to discern between this kind of object storage and “object” as in OOP. BLOB is also what databases call files stored in columns.
429 karma · joined March 28, 2013
I absolutely disagree with how Copilot has been trained on the intellectual property of others, and I think Microsoft/GitHub should be taken to court over it (and I say that as an IP cynic, but if you play that game, you should stick by the rules), but this technological cat is out of the bag.
Students (and everyone else) should be thinking much harder about how they test and verify the behaviour of any given piece of code and how they design systems to stick together. This class of technology is going to automate away many of the jobs where you just pump out code. This is fine. It’s no different to someone inventing a burger-flipping machine, and I’m sure many here would agree it’s better if humans didn’t have to flip burgers for a living (modulo solving employment being necessary for a decent/tolerable existence). It may turn out that the next step in software productivity is not a new generation of cool and highly-abstract declarative programming languages (4GL) but simply automating away the drudgery of writing code in the extant kinda advanced languages (3GL) which are ‘good enough’.
Arguably Copilot doesn’t change much about the software development process. You can already get software developed pretty cheap if you farm it out to low-quality contractors or a lot of juniors straight out of school. There’s a whole branch of the industry that will hire anyone straight out of university to manage and front development teams in South Asia. But as we say, quantity has a quality all of its own. And the only way to manage software (not code) quality with this method is to verify and test that the deliverables actually meet your criteria and expectations.
It’s currently a great time to focus on TDD/BDD and code specification because our time spent on the D is about to get a lot shorter. There is still a place for artisanal hand-crafted code. But the mechanical loom has arrived.
Unfortunately a friend spilled coffee on mine, and it's hard to justify buying another one at >£100. And it's often out of stock whenever I do manage to justify it to myself!
[Vortex Race 3]: https://spotonpccases.co.uk/product/vortex-race-3-mechanical...
As a millennial I suppose I fall in between the two camps. When I was younger, social anxiety about taking up people’s valuable time with my silly questions made a phone call seem like a terrible burden to subject someone to, but with age and (remote work) experience, I’ve realised that conversations are indeed much higher bandwidth and often appreciated more than a letter or thread of back-and-forth clarifications. If I _had_ to stereotype by generation (sorry GP) I could say voice and video seem easier than reading and writing for boomers and Gen-Zs, but even that doesn’t sound right. It’s probably just a communication style thing. There’s a reason many of us struggle to read a book when we can watch some TV instead. As humans we communicate with our voice, face, and body. The main benefit of text is asynchronicity. The challenge is how to thread the needle of asynchronicity in an increasingly post-literate world.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bastard_Operator_From_Hell
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_keyboards#Aluminum_w/o_N...)
> A Leanpub Reader membership ($19/year) or a monthly Standard or Pro plan is now required for (almost) all free purchases of books, bundles, courses and tracks.
> 50% of the revenue from every Leanpub Reader membership goes to authors of the books, bundles, courses and tracks which were purchased for free using the Reader membership. This way, authors can earn money from free purchases.
> Paid purchases of books, bundles, courses and tracks do not require a Leanpub Reader membership and still pay 80% royalties.
Leanpub has essentially added a paywall for works that were previously free to download, and will split reader membership revenues with the authors. While this seems equitable, it's also a big change in the product direction.
I'd be interested to hear from authors who have self-published using Leanpub intending to maximise readership rather than revenue, and what this might mean for them.
e.g. Try adding a free ebook to your cart, for example this one[1] (no relation, just the one I tried to download). Your cart will now contain 2 items: the ebook and a "One Year Reader Membership - $19.00" with no way to remove it.
And really, who’s going to know (how) to do that, especially in an emergency? It also relies on either your phone or watch surviving an accident intact. It’s your life, but it’s just going to frustrate identification attempts when it’s important.
A wallet doesn’t have to be bulky a to hold a couple of cards or a few slips of paper. I have a cardholder which is much more minimal and compact than a standard wallet, and even Apple makes cardholders that attach to the back of MagSafe phones now.
I’ll see a “Hi!“ in a notification or followed by _x is typing_ then safely know that I can start slow context-switching out of whatever mode I’m in, start reviewing that block of work for check-in or noting the key takeaways to come back to, and start pre-loading whatever I was talking about with that person last, without the fear of “here’s a big block of text, please respond to it in kind (all right away)”. And more than that, I can also interrupt any incorrect lines of thought or rambling if it’s more rubber-ducking than a request, or turn it into more of a conversation than a message which can read “please do this” and a reply which says “um... let me get back to you”.
I don’t know about you, but a large technical question or “hey can you... X Y Z” generates much more uncertainty than a chat between colleagues, even if the format is only different. Hell, modes of communication are a thing, we’d be as well use each one for its strengths.
I have one, and it's great for learning how to play music, because the silicone pads light up according to the configured musical scale. Really well thought out as an instrument, and I believe it's also open source if you want to hack around with the Arduino microcontroller inside.
[0]: http://www.rogerlinndesign.com/linnstrument.html [1]: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJyEknT0SnyUr4wdvmObWHQ
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It’s not a modal, but supposedly ignoring it opts you into the tracking, with the only choices being “Allow” or “Learn More” and the [x] button also being labelled “Allow”.
IANAL, but it’s not informed individualised consent if there’s literally no opt-out, and there’s not a lawful basis unless advertising-cookies are suddenly the enabling technology behind downloadable containers.
I’d report them to the Information Commissioner‘s Office myself if I didn’t think they were about to fold anyway, after their piss-poor sunsetting of Docker Cloud and painting a target on their own back for a few adbucks.
Particularly interesting is the final tenth or so, drawing attention to the explosion noun-compound constructions in the body of scientific writing, even when compared to the peak of contemporary publications (i.e. Nature-published articles).
I also enjoyed the deliberately stupidified translations which invite refactoring into better English, and draw attention to the actual mechanisms of the underlying language.
How did they suggest dealing with changes over time, as members join and leave or shift roles as the organisation changes?
There are much more egregious terms in most copy-paste contracts that you can helpfully point out to HR people if you're feeling helpful (or mean), including attempted rewrites of UK labour law (meaningless, it always takes precedence) or ceding rights, to more subtle things such as full-time jobs disguised as freelance contracts, putting you at risk if the taxman comes a-calling[3].
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Course_of_employment [2]: It's mostly used to judge whether the employer is vicariously responsible for an employee's offences, e.g. was the delivery driver on his own time or was he in the course of employment when he hit the pedestrian? [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IR35
For events in the last hour, the following expression should evaluate to True:
(datetime.now() - timedelta(hours=1)) <= event_datetime
date.today().replace(month=5, day=1) <= event_datetime.date() <= date.today().replace(month=5, day=31)
[1]: https://docs.python.org/3/library/datetime.html#timedelta-ob... [2]: http://arrow.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
[1]: https://docs.python.org/3/library/datetime.html#date-objects [2]: https://docs.python.org/3/library/datetime.html#time-objects
London can also claim a useful 24/7 service, with the night tube starting a couple months ago and the third and fourth lines (Jubilee and Northern) just opening up this week[1].
[1]: https://tfl.gov.uk/campaign/tube-improvements/what-we-are-do...
On a lighter note, seems like a fun place to work! And the kind of attitudes on display here seem to be the kind you'd expect from a group of people who have the VC-funded mindset, but the cost-pressures of the US's government budget.
MailChimp charge crazy money for large numbers of subscribers. If your business actually makes money on direct-marketing, that's fine, but their pricing stings if you want your marketing team to manage large lists with only occasional informational emails. And since MailChimp will give you their deliverability for 25,000 emails for $20 on Mandrill, it seems like a win-win for that use-case.
I, for one, can't wait to try this out over the weekend.
It's less slick than commercial solutions like LastPass, but it's cheaper, and outside of proper authorisation models in web applications, which Facebook does well, it's all just copy-pasting passwords with more obfuscation.
You'd think that with so many engineers and so much love for brands Twitter could at least develop a proper concept of shared accounts, so I wouldn't have to venture into some deep dark settings menu to tweet from a company account instead of my personal one.
[1]: http://rattic.org/