luckycharms810

I wonder how we'll look back at the last 30 years at this point:

- We have a total lack of oversight, transparency on private companies and their finances

- We have VCs that very much have the capability to pump up value in a way that is detached from reality.

- The language of startups discourages saying "We are trying to..", you just say "We are". This is a launch pad for a more general culture that lacks integrity.

- The founder has become more and more of an idolized archetype. Character flaws are accepted as part of "what it takes". We accept dishonest behavior as hacks and part of the hustle.

I think this is a risk that applies to the whole VC backed tech startup economy.

A little bit of a tangent, but I found this prose to be oddly much better than the quality of most of Claudes prose.

It reminded me of an article I read many years ago by Guido Van Rossum and Jesse Jiryu Davis about coroutines - just a delightful piece of prose:

"The generator can be resumed at any time, from any function, because its stack frame is not actually on the stack: it is on the heap. Its position in the call hierarchy is not fixed, and it need not obey the first-in, last-out order of execution that regular functions do. It is liberated, floating free like a cloud."

https://aosabook.org/en/500L/a-web-crawler-with-asyncio-coro...

One really interesting effect of the AirPods - is that its changed the paradigm - where the default choice of headphones is Bluetooth.

I personally own a pair of Beats fit pros - which are great for running, Zoom calls. But I recently acquired a schiit vestri and I pair these with some old wired seinheisers (HD1). I cannot overstate the drastic difference in quality.

It is quite absurd (but categorically true) that the quality of audio that folks were generally listening to in 2005 was better than what we are doing today.

As a non ORM person - I do love the Pydantic functionality that comes out of the box w pyscopg3.

https://www.psycopg.org/psycopg3/docs/advanced/typing.html#e...

I think the rub is actually here:

"The participants received either ultra-processed or minimally processed foods for two weeks before swapping diet for the next fortnight. Participants in both diets had access to the same amount of calories and nutrients like sugars, fibre and fat. People were free to eat as much or as little as they wanted. The results were striking. People on the ultra-processed diet ate about 500 more calories per day than those on the unprocessed one"

My understanding is that caloric intake is king.

- No touch screen, but a screen w analog controls

- analog controls, buttons, knobs for all internal functionality like temperature control, sunroof, seat control

- plugin hybrid

- reasonable mileage on only gas

- electric only mode for city driving

Mazda CX-90

Whenever this conversation is had - it seems to completely dismiss the idea of domain. Duplication doesn't happen in a vacuum - it happens within a certain context. Some acceptable conditions for duplication include:

* If two things are semantically different within the context of a domain but require similar functionality.

* Code paths with different risk profiles.

* When new functionality is evolving with domain learnings.

This is the basis of most older async frameworks (see: Tornado, Twisted). A while ago I put together a short talk on how to go from this feature -> a very basic version of Twisted's @inline_callback decorator.

https://github.com/ltavag/async_presentation/tree/master

I recently discovered Menraku, a little more expensive - but truly worth it.

Articles like this make me think about how the software community has chronically under-invested in developing managers. It is not crazy to think that a manager could actually -

* Have the time to know what you are working on

* Set aside time to talk to you about your career development goals

* Help you work and progress towards them - with a plan that is personalized for you.

I think there is some magic lost in how music discovery used to work online over the last 20 years or so. I spent a lot of time on IRC, and then later Waffles.fm working to build my musical library, and discover music. A few things that are sorely missed..

* A community built by common interest in music. Community written articles, recommendations, and friendships built from across the world through music.

* Consumption was not the only form of participation. Ratio maintenance was required - this IMO helped everyone be a "good citizen"

* There was still a formal boundary between "the communities music" and "your music" since you had to download it to listen to it. This helped encourage a more pro-active form of discovery.

* Less emphasis on playlists - more emphasis on artist and album discovery.

* While there was some concept of tiers ( power users, etc ) - there wasn't a tier low enough to subject to pushing advertising through your home speakers.

I tried Qobuz for many years in search of a community that cared about music - and just a couple of months ago finally switched to Apple Music. It was hard to stick with the poor streaming infrastructure (streams cut out all the time) & terrible recommendation engine. A lot of the Apple collection is lossless at this point - and there's no reason not to pick them unless you want to wax philosophical about AAC vs FLAC.

While I agree Systemd timers aren't as ergonomic to set up - there are some benefits that I would basically never give up at this point.

* Running the service on command ( this is the best way to troubleshoot issues with your slightly different environments / cron's version of shell. I've spent many minutes over my career - setting the crontab one minute and the future and waiting for it to run / fail )

* Easily inspecting when the next run of the service is. ( list-timers )

* Straightforward access to the logs ( Always journalctl )

* Specifying environment variables easily

* OnFailure

Avoiding processed foods is more about avoiding the unknown than avoiding something specific. I would say more analogous to rolling your own tobacco vs buying a pre-packaged cigarette. At least you know what's in there for the most part.

This may be inaccurate now - but a few years ago I stopped at Idahos potato museum. If I remember correctly - the McDonald’s fries are actually a product of a lot of food scientists hard work. There are multiple types of potatoes involved that are turned in to potato product. Those are then mixed together in a specific ratio before they are reconstituted into fry shape. I think even the combination of oils and temperatures are very specific to McDonald’s.

This is a great idea in theory. Although per usual the rubber hits the road when people need to find the physical item. If the stores aren’t organized or the employees don’t know where things are - you end up with a situation where now everyone is at the mercy of what the computers tell them.

I’ve had a few experiences where the site tells me something is stocked but an hour later I leave without what I came for.

"We find it difficult to accept the threats to our "happiness" with a serenity which transcends happiness and sorrow. We are also offended by the contumely of allies as well as foes, who refuse to regard our prosperity as fruit and proof of our virtue but suggest that it may be the consequence of our vulgar Philistinism. We are therefore confronted for the first time in our life with the questions: - whether there is a simple coordination between virtue and prosperity; and whether the attainment of happiness, either through material prosperity or social peace is a simple possibility for man, whatever may be his scientific and social achievements" - Reinhold Niebuhr

This is a comically yet incredibly common engineering bad take. When you run a company there is only one question to answer, one north star - does it make money ?

Your TV (at least in the past ) could not collect the following information:

- What ads did you stay for ?

- What ads did you listen to, or turn the volume up for ?

- What ads did you hear and see 50% of with 50% of the pixels being on screen at the time you heard them?

- How many times did you see an ad ?

- Whats the average times that an ad is seen before you might convert in an offhand channel ( including offline credit card purchases )?

- What ads changed your scroll velocity - if only for a few 100 milliseconds ?

- What content changed your scroll velocity ?

- Where were you when spent less time on your phone ?

- Where were you when you were more susceptible to a type of ad ?

These aren't signals that you might yourself notice, but these are being collected. They are being collected on almost every website you visit, and an incredibly large data set is being collected. This training set is for you and you alone, but similar training sets can be found.

This training set is now used to determine what content to show you next so that you can stick around for another ad.

This is 'optimizing for engagement'. We are well past the stage of "It's the superbowl so lets play an Axe commercial'.

Some of this sounds fairly hyperbolic to folks who haven't spent time in the industry - but I promise you this is very commonplace non-controversial data collection in the adtech space.

I draw a distinction between introducing ideas to people and manipulating the way people think.

Reading a book, digesting ideas and having a conversation in your mind with the author is incredibly healthy and IMO should be promoted.

Optimizing for "engagement" requires that you offer the mind an endless set of distractions in lieu of good engaging content. Over time the mind starts to degrade to a point where its difficult to digest long-form content and enjoy it as a much healthier habit.

I think I expected to see more of this by now given the number of incredibly liberal folks who work in Adtech.

Sorry to break it to you, you don't get to wash your hands clean of it's incredibly detrimental effects on people mental health, the state of mis-information, and the creation of tooling that manipulates the way people think.

Ads made money before hyper-targeting, and will continue to make money long after. Most folks in Adtech are making an incredibly comfortable living - while ignoring the collective harm that is being done by the industry.

No matter where you work, it's worth asking yourself a few questions.

* What is the mission of my company ?

* What is the revenue generating unit of my company ?

* Are the two aligned ?

* Am I comfortable with the answers to the above questions ?

Listing out a few of my go tos!

- Every grain of rice ( Fuschia Dunlop ) is close to what I’d consider a perfect cookbook.

- Franklin BBQ ( Aaron Franklin ) is a definitive guide to how to use an offset smoker. I’ve read through portions over and over again - it’s only got about 10 recipes.

- My two south’s ( Asha Gomez ) - A wonderful collection of recipes inspired by South India, the south.

A good cook book will usually have a section that introduces new ingredients, tells you how to source them, introduces new techniques or methods, and also introduce some shorter recipes that can be used as dependencies for others. At the end of the day - you want good building blocks.

In the last few years I’ve learnt that there really is nothing better than a good cook book. Vibrant colors, techniques, stories - these can all really add to your experience if their presence is not solely for the purpose of including additional ads. I’ve also found that the recipe alone is truly not enough - the techniques and background are incredibly important !

I would highly recommend Qobuz. Great company, ownership that cares about artists and music.

Axuall (https://axuall.com) | Frontend Engineer | Cleveland, OH | Onsite | Fulltime

Axuall is working with many large healthcare institutions to empower physicians and streamline the credentialing process. We're expanding our engineering team and looking to bring on another frontend engineer.

We're invested in providing an amazing user experience and have partnered with the world class designers at Metalab! We use Vue, Python, Hyperledger Indy running on AWS. We offer:

* Unlimited PTO (minimum of 2 weeks/year)

* Fitness Stipend

* Continued Education Stipend

* Flexible Work Hours

* Medical, Dental, and Vision Benefits

Full Job Description: https://www.axuall.com/front-end-engineer-opening

If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out to me at lucky at axuall.com

This is a great point! If you use an established framework like tornado / twisted - they have idiomatic ways to deal with these.

For e.g. If you have a loop - that can potentially starve the rest of your service when the iterable is too long - go ahead and throw a `yield gen.moment` in there. `yield gen.sleep` can also be incredibly handy. Once you realize that you are just living in a world of partially executed functions - you can always have your coroutine phone home to the event loop and ask if anyone else needs some CPU.

Of-course for this to work you need lumpiness in your workload, if the CPU is just always starved this is more likely a problem of under-allocation of compute.

I guess the question is really - Is the site bringing politics into a non-political venue - or are you requesting that they suppress any views that make you uncomfortable on their site ? Would be analogous to going to someones house, eating their food for free and then regulating the dinner conversation.

A few years ago I heard “HBO is trying to become Netflix before Netflix becomes HBO”

Today the news is trying to become Facebook before Facebook becomes the news.

Apps are the new drivers.

You are possibly doing better than most engineering teams if you can achieve this within your team. This takes a lot of empathy And trust from the writers of the software and the users. The teams that move the fastest are those that can use each other’s work. The teams that move the slowest are like government - each one re-writing the progress made by another as years go by with things mostly unchanged on the whole.