miav

Yes, absolutely. Having a single person do what they want with a component involves risks but I think they can be managed.

Say the dev in charge of an important component of a service is struck by a bus and dies. The optimistic scenario is that the code was well enough written that people developing adjacent components (ie. components that interface with that of the deceased dev) can effectively take over development in the short term until a new owner is found.

A more interesting scenario is that in which the dev abused autonomy and the component is utter spaghetti. In all but the most extreme of cases, the component could be kept in maintenance mode as is for some time. This would block progress that relies on changes in the component, but allow the service to continue working. In that time, other devs could either untangle the spaghetti and refactor the code into something workable or rewrite it. In both cases a significant amount of resources would be spent, but this is a scenario that's unlikely to occur often and the fact that the component was owned by a single person places a soft cap on the size of the component (and ideally an employee would maintain a couple of unrelated components to ensure they can continue working if one service is deprecated) ensuring it could be replaced within reasonable time.

As the top comment points out, the author comes off as arrogant and their view is unbalanced, but they do have a point.

I find the saying "What a programmer can do in a month, two programmers can do in two months" is quite true. I consider myself competent and the people I work with are even more so, but human communication is always very imprecise and slow. If you stack it into a hierarchy of teams and managers, efficiency loss becomes exponential.

I really do think that the best way to organize software development is to have discrete components with exactly one person in charge of a component. Of course there are notable downsides. If only one person is in charge of a component it would become quite opinionated and it would be difficult for devs to spot each other's errors, but I think it would be a great tradeoff nonetheless.

I really don't want to spend even 5 minutes of my life debating whether we should split a folder into 2 smaller folders or not. I'd much rather have any member of the team go with their gut on this. An individual's choice may not be as good as that of the entire group, but it's good enough.

I'm surprised that seemingly there are no other major FOSS OCRs than Tesseract and Tesseract is quite frankly horrible. I once tried to use it on a high-resolution screenshot of a Discord message containing only the characters "0" and "1". I cropped it to only have the text, restricted character sets, tried fiddling with the images contrast and what not and the result was still quite poor, with many characters mistaken or straight up ignored.

I have little expertise in ML, but from my limited understanding, OCR is the bread and butter of the field. I've read exactly one "Intro to ML" article and it was about recognising digits. And yet, we have an abundance of high quality proprietary OCRs that can recognise printed or even hand-written text and the single open source one is having trouble with perfectly formatted text with a readable font.

Could anyone with more expertise shine some light on this current state of affairs?

Yeet is only a placeholder for avoiding bikeshedding (https://rust-lang.github.io/rfcs/3058-try-trait-v2.html#poss...), but I do wonder if having it as the final keyword would in fact be a net negative.

Sure, some people won't know the meaning of the word, but I'd argue that "raise" or "throw" meaning "propagate the previously caught error" is not obvious either, we're simply used to it. And it would take no time at all to infer from context/look up and it would be easy to remember.

The biggest potential downside I can think of is opening the floodgates for adding more memey words to the language which could indeed be harmful.

But I do think that having a quirky keyword like this could be a great benefit and not just in the "relating to them kids" sense. In my experience, the biggest obstacle to entering technical fields (a more relevant subtype of this is learning complex programming languages, such as Rust) is, for most people, not the lack of intelligence or resources, but rather the feeling that the insiders of those fields are in a different "category" of people.

This is especially evident in interactions with PhDs. Even smart people, who have themselves successfully studied the fields in question at some point in their lives, upon finding out that someone has a PhD cease all attempts of analyzing what the PhD is saying and just nod along, as if the degree is an impenetrable intellectual barrier.

In spite of being a decent programmer, it took me a long time to start reading computer science papers. Not because they were too complicated or I lacked context, but because the intentionally the language used made the work appear alien.

And including even just a bit of spontaneous humanity can completely break this perception. I find this especially effective in textbooks. All of the textbooks I found most useful added many humorous tidbits. The purpose of those was not to have the amusement counteract boredom, the topics were fascinating by themselves, but rather to demonstrate to the reader that the author is in fact an individual of the same species. This is important, because such connection cannot be established if the book restricts itself solely to its main topic. The author is infinitely more knowledgeable than the reader in the relevant field (otherwise the reader would have no use for the textbook), so this demonstration of equality must come from elsewhere.

I’m surprised by the bad response this article received. All media I’m aware of speak of nuclear war in very vague terms and suggest an outcome similar to that which we see in entertainment science fiction. Long before the war in Ukraine I have been occasionally trying to dig a little deeper into the actual possible outcome of a nuclear war, but found only vague or outdated information and I’m very grateful to the author of the article for doing good research. Yes, it is based on major assumptions, but those truly are the best thing we have since the discussed situation is genuinely unprecedented. I’m also surprised by the disgust people here express towards the supposed “normalisation of nuclear war”. Much like the general public was taught by films such as Terminator that AI is something that will end the world, the perception of nuclear warfare was similarly shaped by media. When AI started seeing widespread use in daily life it became important to address the ingrained misconceptions. In the same way, now that there’s a war in Europe and Russia is threatening the use of nukes it is important for people to have a reasonably accurate idea of what such use would entail. The idea of “nuclear war is simply unacceptable and we must avoid it at all costs” is good very getting upvotes on social media, but truth is that taking all available steps to prevent such a war is equivalent to appeasing Russia in all cases.

> It costs $10,000 USD to build one of these

> The ten thousandth one costs $15

As a software engineer, I'm used to being able to build essentially whatever I want, with the only cost being my time. I'm often unpleasantly reminded that software is an outlier in that regard and as soon as physical items are concerned, especially hardware, it turns out that manufacturing even a simple thing is prohibitively expensive if it's done at a small scale.

The linked tweets imply that this decline in search results was Google's choice, led by desire for further monetization or exec incompetence, but I think Google is simply facing an impossible task.

Receiving an arbitrary question and finding the most helpful site for that question out of the entire web is already nearly impossible.

Now consider the above problem, except the sites you have to search are highly adversarial. More precisely, the internet is roughly divided into people who post useful content and have little interest in SEO and those who only care about SEO and clicks and not about creating useful content. The latter are more motivated and have more resources. For every useful site, they can take that site and create 100 of their own copies with the same content, more aggressive SEO and their own ads.

How is Google, or anyone else, supposed to navigate this landscape?

I wonder what the methodology was. The vast majority of people use tiktok on mobile, so surely it can't be actual website visits. If it's requests, then that's a fairly arbitrary metric as it depends mostly on the service's architecture. And if it's data volume, then obviously tiktok would win as it serves videos rather than text with some images like google search.

On a different note, did tiktok not click for anyone else? I'm seemingly the target audience, but the content served just didn't work for me. Most of it was uninteresting and even after consistently swiping away the content that I disliked the praised algorithm kept showing more of the same.

> 97% of UK companies surveyed use open source and 89% are running open source software.

Is it at all possible that this first number is accurate? I would assume every company at least uses a web browser, which would mean using open source (Blink/WebKit/Gecko).

I doubt it, as puns like this are generally not Lem's style in my opinion. "Tichy Ijon" kinda sounds like tachion, which is polish for tachyon, but I would chalk it up to coincidence.

Truly, being able to read Lem's works untranslated is my favourite thing about being a native polish speaker. There are some fantastic translations out there, but somehow, when it comes to sci-fi, I find works written in polish or other eastern european languages to flow better. In addition to the above, I find that reading an older physical edition adds much charm to vintage sci-fi. The copy of The Truth I own comes from 1967 and the feel of the old, yellowed pages does enhance the reading experience.

It's very surprising to me that progressive loading techniques have been around for decades, but have barely been used on the web. Images often make for most of a websites content, size wise, and are frequently far larger than they need to be. Even those with generally good internet experience waiting for images to load for a noticeable amount of time. A 95% compressed version of an image is almost always good enough for a first glance and then the rest of the image can be seamlessly, progressively loaded. It's apparently been a ubiquitous problem for decades, with a known solution, yet it has not been applied. I'm curious as to why.

> Most notable for large-scale deployments is yescrypt's optional initialization and reuse of a large lookup table, typically occupying at least tens of gigabytes of RAM and essentially forming a site-specific ROM. This limits attackers' use of pre-existing hardware such as botnet nodes.

Is this needed? Assuming proper salting it is not feasible to crack SHA-2,blake2 etc hashes, let alone bcrypt and argon2 with thousands of iterations of them, is that not correct?

While Brave does turn many away with its built in cryptocurrency and its questionable userbase, it's a damn good browser. I switched from FF after the layoffs and in short it has better privacy, UX and feature set and all BAT functionality can be easily and completely disabled.

It appears that beyond BAT integration most people are concerned about it being Chromium derived. While it's true that a more diverse ecosystem would benefit the users, I can't think of any organisation capable of creating a new browser from scratch that would be able to compete with Chrome. While I acknowledge that by using Brave I contribute to Google's dominance over the web, the only alternative appears to be using an inferior product - which would at best merely slow down Google's plans.

There have been multiple attacks like this and it seems the stolen code is usually made public in the end. I presume people will look at it and reuse some concepts and I wonder if this could lead to the technical state of the industry becoming better as a whole.

This and the fact that uBlock detects 9 trackers on the site is quite puzzling given that its basically an ad/pr stunt by protonmail which itself generally doesn't have any trackers/cookie pop-ups