megameter

My read on Go versus other options, having used it for a year or so and then switching back to other old favorites(Python, Haxe, Lua), is that it really doesn't want you to redefine the language. Go code is Go everywhere and asks you to work with a largely homogenous set of concerns everywhere.

That is great if you are building the environment for your application, but it's not great if you are building the application, because a differentiated app will always possess a unique application "vocabulary" - it's a thing that gets thought about in terms of a medium that is not the host language. Go resists extension, so most teams opt for primitivism rather than developing proprietary compilation mechanisms to express their spec. Everyone gets worried about the risks of generating code and how to maintain that: it's a "known" to have a larger fungible uniform codebase. The result is that "slow and steady" feeling when working with Go to do relatively high-level things - it lets you do it, but you have to work hard.

Certain developments in console and arcade games correllated directly with DRAM pricing at that time. Before 1985, music was usually limited to short jingles and the game content usually just had one "world" to it; afterwards, in the face of rapidly falling prices, nearly every new release had a soundtrack of a few minutes length and multiple themed settings. The 1988 shortage led to some games with cut content, but more often just delays on release as with Zelda II.

The article demonstrates a grand rhetoric and a total lack of capacity to actually dig into any nuts and bolts issue with the city, such as: land use, parking, public safety and justice policies, schools, bureaucratic corruption.

The fact of the matter is, the city politics have been vicious for decades. Credentials for national leadership get manufactured here because the politicians left standing are good at the job(which is quite different from being good for the populace). Tech doesn't make the city exceptional - tech is just a piece of the puzzle, another horse to jockey.

Take the school board, for example. The stories have made headlines: ineptly renaming schools and eliminating selectivity for "woke points" while pandemic-related issues remained unaddressed. Those headlines get made because the board was banking on those actions giving them progressive credentials, not because it was being asked for. They took a huge risk and miscalculated. But what happens if you manuever such things successfully? That makes you a Kamala Harris or Gavin Newsom - in other words, polarizing yet successful on the big stage.

In this light, SF has an up-or-out purpose to its dysfunction: encourage risky moves here and you get savvy statesmen later. It's in the interest of the Democratic Party to keep a machine active here to develop those candidates. However, the party itself is beholden to its biggest donors, so the things it prioritizes and encourages are warped according to financial incentives; the city government now has an ongoing federal investigation precisely because the incentives for politicians to behave and play fair are missing.

And so I would have to conclude that if you want to "save" San Francisco you have think big picture too and work on incentives for the city to generate better policymakers that can clean house. The money incentives automatically create a lean towards dysfunction, and this is a thing occurring on multiple levels of government, not just locally: "If you want to advance you have to do X and not do Y" is going to make X happen and Y not happen.

I have been dealing with a similar problem: Very old holdings that I first traded for back in 2013. It's unfeasible to record what I traded then since it goes through a trail of dead exchanges. I've been filing them as capital gains as I trade them now, dating their purchase time back to the year I originally traded for them(thus making them long-term), and their acquisition price as $0.

Marking acquisition price on trades to $0 is consistent with how I've seen the IRS behave in the past when I failed to report stock trades accurately($1mm volume = $1mm taxable when this occurs), and since the prices have increased 1000% in most instances(I buy and hold for years, and while I traded in 2017-2019, I did not trade at all in 2020) the initial cost is easy for me to write off.

I plan to use Cointracker's reports going forward.

It goes back all the way to 90's Usenet, as a memetic format for commonplace rebuttals. Possibly one of the most longstanding pieces of Net culture!

All that comes to mind is how people who displayed deep technical knowledge online, back in the 90's, were often misanthropic, tactless stereotypes who loved hacking because they wanted power.

To the extent that people who are now in their 30's and 40's "learned computers", it was mostly to get the printer working, load a game or bypass school security. Young people today do the same things, just using slightly different mediums. If you started earlier you might have learned more about your 8-bit micro's hardware, if you started later, more about servers and 3D graphics. It's just stuff.

Perceptions of prices are up more than prices are.

I did some grocery shopping for my parents the other day. Three tomatoes, three green peppers, a half gallon of milk, one bunch of bananas, and a soup bread. "Give me a twenty(USD)," I said. "No way, prices are higher than that," said my dad. "Take two."

The bill came out to $13.60.

Also the most likely tonic to platform churn, reinvented wheels, codebase growth. The culture will flip towards lambasting anything that hasn't been put through the wringer as "untrustworthy".

Related is also to choose to work in the appropriate medium. There are many things called books, but not all of them are defined by numbered chapters, carefully outlined paragraphs and artful prose - and it's the obligation of such that tends to act as a barrier.

A 8-page zine can usually get the essence of an idea out of your head, and the format lends itself to thinking about the overall aesthetic as part of the message.

Exactly - a good use of a decentralized ledger doesn't leave so much room for speculative profit motives.

However, my own investment thesis is that the "crypto" market is ultimately destined to march towards that useful and unprofitable outcome, kicking and screaming the whole way, by dint of the long-term market survivors being the civically oriented perennials. But this is a long journey, maybe another decade or two in the making(a epochal shift in tech). It will continue to have ups and downs.

It was easier eight years ago, I would just look at Bitcointalk threads and be able to make an evaluation pretty quickly. Small scale, relatively more clued in folks. Now the scale is a problem. There are so many projects I know nothing about.

Nowadays I usually go to /r/cryptocurrency/new for the firehose. I do not aim to read everything, just check in and take some notes. What tends to happen on that subreddit is that some really great posts get made but never hit frontpage because they're crowded out by useless memetic content. But you can take individual great posts and turn those into leads by doing some additional legwork. I don't usually talk to those users(I do not want to read comment thread replies and will completely ignore my Reddit inbox, instead I will monitor the thread if it interests me) but I will sometimes browse their post history.

I agree with this. Flow is a useful adaptation for something like learning muscle memory - practicing athletics or performing music. But when we're talking about intellectual pursuits like programming, if what you've done by entering flow is convert thinking into muscle memory - a cycle of mashing edit and debug keys - you may have just "laborized" your work. And this has some implications for what kinds of software can be sold to people, as well as how software is created.

The norm of programming is really to flip between "trivial 5 minute task" and "requires a day off to contemplate". And in the industrial context, it's evident that most of software is built to restate a preexisting belief - this is good, if we make an app that does it, it's better. This means disengaging from the philosophical problem of whether it's actually "good" and contemplating it until the resulting belief structure has grown so unwieldy and contradictory that it is a technical challenge to maintain it. But selling a preexisting belief is one of the best markets to be in: if you're selling to artists, you sell software that looks like a paint canvas. If you sell to musicians, you sell software that looks like studio gear from 50 years ago. If you sell to investors, you sell a thing that looks like money. What you can't sell(easily) is: new ways of making visuals, new ways of describing and performing music, new ways of explaining credit and value transfer in an economy.

Hence there is an awful conundrum; if you are experiencing a lot of flow, a lot of "wind in your sails", the whole thing is almost certainly on the wrong track and you'll only wake up to it later, because it means your ability to contemplate went out the window. The problem is not just that you can write something bad this way, you can even be praised and given access to more resources if your wrong belief is shared!

That is probably why software has this underlying tendency towards mysticism and cargo cults, in fact; "It's a good practice." "Why?" "It makes me feel good and the customer likes it." "What's the benchmark?" "I get paid, and it hasn't failed yet."

Ran the same program and input on my phone.

Time elapsed: 0d 0h 5m 38.2s

That doesn't really encapsulate anything, then. You end up with global data wrapped in classes.

"Food safety standards" would not result in downtime rising from <1% to over 10%.

I can confidently predict that both Go and Rust will be seen as the "old brown stuff" in not so many years and some hot new thing will have come along that everyone wants to build in.

Rust's main claim to fame - safe manual memory - is already being re-examined. There is definitely interest in and pursuit of a lower-boilerplate means of getting the same, and there are some candidates out there already.

Further, a language being successfully used by experts and popularized tends to precede an accumulation of low quality contributions that negate base improvements to maintenance. In due course, a popular Rust will become "enterprised" with an accretion of tooling and frameworks - although it might not look the same as "enterprise Java", it will have the same kinds of effects in creating barriers to entry and sucking the sense of "fun" out of the day-to-day workflow.

Lastly, the application categories will change. There will be demand for "glue" again, applications that are just frontends to library code(perhaps code written in Go or Rust). The new language will be something not systems-focused, and perhaps aim to be mostly focused on content and presentation (as HTML was in inception).

When the players are respectful that's when you know it's a combat sport.

They're addressed, not solved. The problems still exist.

So long as flagrant copyright violation also continues to exist online, bans pose minimal threat to cryptocurrency diffusion. This time is not different.

I've swung towards the cheap end and am currently wearing some basic Sony over-ears.

I have more expensive gear. The value here is not really in the audio quality - which, apart from the most strenuous audio engineering flat-response-and-detailed-image-needed cases, is fine, really - but in being light and cheap and embracing that quality. It rattles a little when you hold it, but it's made to withstand a few drops, and it won't pressure your skull or force your neck out of posture with hours of use. The cable is soldered in but sturdy.

The $75 ones I've used always tend to end up with issues because they don't have these qualities. The cables are still soldered but of a lower thickness, and the rigidity of the frame makes them disconnect more readily. They pinch your ears and crush your skull. The quality is better but not enough to matter in everyday use - a good DAC and a low-noise environment makes more difference.

Right. There's an element cleaving both ways of the developer being obligated to do complex and disempowering things for users for various reasons, and then users rejecting their disempowerment and trying to work around it.

And I think if there's a future here it belongs to targeted protocols that decouple the use case from the UI, and filters like Reader view that reformat content to the medium the user wants to work in.

Phrases like "the content is what is important" come to mind.

The whole project of graphic design has the same kind of abyssal qualities as other arts with a technical element - you can always go deeper, more specific. And in a competitive market it's really tempting to sell yourself on one-upping the techniques of others. With a computer in the mix, you can just add specification without end and it will soak everything up like a sponge.

But each layer of that you add gets a little farther away from "creative medium" and a little more towards "bells and whistles production". The essence of it comes from the content, and this is true of everything on the Web too, despite all the interference on and around the platform. So it's more like a case of modern development being "you have to describe the medium you want to work within" because the base layers are this morass of vocabulary that isn't conceptually coherent.

Well, that's what makes cryptocurrency a worthwhile market for speculation. Many folks look to the "market cap ranking" to see what's hot in the space, and going down the list and positioning yourself in a rank 400 coin - a good one that shows promise as a tech platform, a more efficient coin, a useful financial instrument or whatever - is one of the most straightforward ways to see 1000% returns, because even if it doesn't make it all the way up to the top 10, its valuation can grow faster than the market as a whole. (It can also get hit with huge drawdowns when the bear market hits. It's not all roses...)

While it is the case that most things get priced relative to BTC, and this does have a network effect since you end up exiting to BTC and thus reenforce its price, it's increasingly common to see trading pairs for ETH, LTC, USDC/USDT. There is interest in getting more liquidity into the market and that's a large part of "DeFi". It's not that BTC is self-perpetuating lock-in, it's that they're all growing but everything else is running several years behind, so on a day to day basis BTC still holds relatively more of the market.

I believe you are a fundamentally honest person who is trying to mimick the things grifters brag about doing and jump ahead of the line. I know this path because I tried it years ago. And most likely, it won't work - you don't have it in you to go that way.

But neither can you be a washed up 20-something begging for pity. You are probably a bit too competent and proud for that.

What you should do instead is be a "forever student". Now you are never there to snag the gig or steal the credit. You are there to study an "x". The x can be broad and impressive or narrow and miniscule. Jobs, businesses, investments, products, are all vehicles for pursuing this study. You will signal this at all times, and develop contacts and portfolio work pertinent to this study. Earnest emails asking "what should I do to go further with this" - questions that are of interest to the figure you are asking as well as yourself - are often golden tickets. Choose anything to start, and see where it pulls you. When you are in the vicinity of a good conversation and money is flowing around it, the money often ends up in your hands.

However, you also have to work on yourself enough to be a great student. That means valuing your body, household, social conduct and other things, and to see "access to resources" in a broader sense than salary. Taking a shit job or sacrificing some living conditions can be the right move if it buys you time, but if it makes your health deteriorate it might be the wrong move too. People get a lot of comfort out of doing the simple stuff well, and you have decades to get the big picture things right. It's OK to be unambitious.

Do some self-talk, journal a bit, exercise, eat well. Aim to get the concerns "out of you" so that you can act in the world with focus and purpose.

Modulars and multifunctional devices like the OP-1 or Octatrack seem to be what "the kids" are interested in, if they buy new hardware - there is just more "bang for the buck" when you go with those options. Vintage synths are fun curiosities, but with prices skyrocketing, most everyone turns to the very accurate software reproductions to actually use the sounds.

It's a very rapid divergence between collectors and users.

One could say that memory safety is exactly the kind of "sanding off" we need on the concept of the traditional coding paradigms that have governed the software industry since there was a software industry(which, conveniently, is something that got started in the 70's and came of age in the 80's). One long period of structural debt and organizational consolidation, most of it piled on the conceptual framework of Unix, C, and core Internet technologies. There's a shift in the cosmology of computing taking place now, where the base layers are getting reexamined.

And now, a period of reinvestment in the bottom layers and signs of a diasporic divergence emerging. Movements that are ideologically different from yesteryear's FOSS, and a tightening of SV's grip on events that increasingly causes sand to pour through, new purposings of old tech and roads previously untaken. It's like Alan Kay put it: The future is the past AND the present.

It's just never worked out to justify itself by the stakeholders who would approve such a thing. The standard gaming hardware configuration has always tended towards a little bit of general purpose computing capability plus a very focused specialization in graphics. And the standard incentive structure of game production tends towards a rapid deployment of assets authored in general-purpose content creation software, not a game driven by new algorithms. These things drive away from the experimental places where FPGAs could shine - unique ways of creating audio and video signals, customized inner loop optimizations, etc. The first thing everyone will be asking is "OK, but how do I make it portable?"

If we define hard drives and optical media as "memory based on periodic rotation" then the technology has been around for generations, in fact, with specific materials and mechanisms serving to update the paradigm. Tape, drum memory, magnetic discs, and optical. Periodic rotation trades blows with periodic refresh - tubes, DRAM - and phase-change - relays, core, flash - as the prevailing memory paradigm, with hybridization of features often occuring.

Von Neumann wouldn't be too surprised at the memory paradigms in use now, because they haven't changed, even though the implementation has become considerably more sophisticated.

But, of course, that can't dismiss the idea that a better implementation is a substantial technical advance either.

Branching narratives are like Choose Your Own Adventure books. You can get 80% of the way to what Ink does with a carefully programmed static website. But this is an environment designed to author that, and to publish to game engines as well.

The main competition is Twine, which is more focused on a self-contained deployment. Twine also got a huge update recently with its "Harlowe" theme supporting storylets - scenes that trigger from a pool or "deck" based on logic you program.

My own key variable, as it turns out, is "time between deciding to lift and grasping weight". Which means that keeping an adjustable dumbbell by my bed and using it a few times a week is close to optimal. While having the gym is nice for the additional equipment, this plan means that I don't have to think about making time for the gym since I can just do some more around bedtime or wakeup. Load, reps and sets are far less important than the factor of being able to add more volume whenever I want.

And that does reflect lifestyle goals - I am not going for a competition physique, and the gym isn't my social club. I am just aiming for a little bit of progress year over year, and scientifically optimal muscle growth would actually get in the way of other plans. I was in the habit of tracking it all pre-pandemic, but now I just do Ali counts - "I only start counting when it starts hurting."