neolefty

And for those on a phone outdoors!

I find the Google Pixel line fits that description pretty well, but very differently. I prefer the software over iOS, and hardware is good enough, although not nearly on the same level as an iPhone.

Yes! Plus, great partnerships are a wonder to behold. The article quotes Woz:

> [Jobs] wasn’t really capable, engineering wise, you know, computer hardware, software

That's (almost) like Hawking saying you aren't a great physicist. I wonder how much Jobs was motivated by Woz's excellence in engineering.

I would guess that cognitive biases are in play, in part. People want to believe that their country is doing something good, and that their suffering is for a good cause. So if a news source reinforces that (such as "Special Operation to liberate Ukraine from Nazis"), it's easier to listen to than a narrative that runs counter ("Destroying both countries to appease a tyrant's ego").

That's not the only factor, but here in the US it's certainly a big part of the appeal of misleading news sources.

Taken to certain extremes, yes it is a bad thing.

In moderation — for example if you take a wholistic view that incorporates benefit to the society at large as well, then it can be very good.

I agree that throwing out what we have is a recipe for disaster and reconstitution in the same or worse form. But I think we can build anew from within, constructively.

I like the Baha'i view that breaks it down into 3 components: the individual, community, and institutions, and then works on gradually reforming each of them, and recognizing their interactions. Here's my summary; there are undoubtedly better summaries out there too:

* Individual: Empower people to act on ethics first, and material benefit second — by emphasizing the inherent value of ethics, based on the view of humans as intellectual/spiritual as well as physical. Educate them to be good electors (see Institutions, below).

* Community: This is the one I understand least, but I think it's about the emergent behaviors of groups of people who interact informally. Like a neighborhood or interest group.

* Institutions: Reform their selection process & functioning. There are plenty of people who would make great public servants, but they are precisely the people who avoid our current electoral processes which are so poisonous and dumb. So have elections that focus on the qualities that are good for office — caring for the well-being of the whole, wisdom, appropriate skills & abilities — and prohibit all campaigning or discussion of individuals. You'd think it's impossible, but the Baha'i electoral process actually works in practice and people love it.

All of these need reform. A good place to look at current Baha'i thinking is the "Baha'i International Community" website: https://www.bic.org/ which is kind of a public policy outreach site.

Thank you! There are high-res versions of the images from the article embedded in the PDF (linked in the article) as well. (You can use pdfimages to extract them.)

That would be nice.

However, a big problem is the opacity of engineering, especially software engineering. It can be hard to tell the quality of code from the outside, and the less technical you are, the harder it is to see. There are signs of course, such as the number of bugs, but it can be hard to tell the difference between style and quality.

Excellent point! As you imply, bad code compounds the need for job openings:

* bad code requires more maintainers than good code

* it's hard to find people to work on it — partly because the code is bad, and partly because whatever process that _led to_ bad code is probably still around

Good point from a global view. I'd like to see a little more international cooperation, leading towards a global standard, but we have many hurdles between here and there, especially involving trust between nations.

Is this about market fundamentals? One way to think about ARM is as a vehicle for R&D, shared amongs competitors such as Apple, Qualcomm, Samsung, and Huawei.

* Do they each benefit from the R&D done by ARM?

* Is that benefit enough to be worth the cost, even shared amongst the recipients?

* Can they "agree" on an arrangement, and can ARM function well enough to stay healthy?

Great historical perspective. I'm curious how international intellectual "piracy" looks when one thinks of the world as a single place and humanity as a single people.

Thank you, this is very encouraging. I've felt guilty about a new part-time project not going well, but it's my first one in my current pattern. So to consider "start a new part-time project" to be itself a project makes a lot of sense.

Interesting! Thanks especially for the link to the Wikipedia page.

So in the demo, the black (uncolored) shape _kind of_ represents the commitment. Although as you pointed out, it doesn't explain how it is verified! Instead of a black shape, it would be a shape made out of hash values that are meaningless until the random number for any one of them is revealed. And the protocol is to only reveal one of them each time?

For medium-sized state — for example a single-level object — I usually use useReducer, with the "reduce" function a simple destructure merge. The reducer looks like this:

    const shallowMergeReducer = <T extends {}>(state: T, action: Partial<T>): T => Object.freeze({
        ...state,
        ...action,
    })

It ends up looking a lot like the "setExtendedState" function in the article.

Often I'll throw in a few helper functions in a useMemo, too, and then provide the whole thing through Context. It's like a mini-Redux for some section of the app.

The material quality of the competitors has certainly improved! We bought some knockoffs while living in China that were pretty darn good. We learned which were better than others for sure.

Not relevant to this, which is about physically placing antennae at a location, to provide a local service.

I think that is a fine question to ask in this forum. Maybe not a question that people in the situation described can handle of course!

Related may be "Too broken to imagine (myself) being fixed." Which is probably more of a failure of imagination (and possibly of support) than a reality.

And then you get into what does "fixed" mean, vs "good", in a _person_ ...

I wonder if, at the same level of technology, quantum and classical computers end up performing similarly — do you need exponentially less noise for more qubits? If so, it seems similar to me to requiring exponentially more classical compute power to equal it, and they kinda end up equivalent?

Are the bugs something you've personally experienced?

Would their competitors be Microsoft (Windows, Office, etc) and Android?

My understanding is that it was a loss of institutional knowledge that came from the passage of time and from arrogance. The engineers who knew why the additive was required were fired or ignored or both. Could also be a lack of documentation?

Location: US / Midwest

Remote: Yes, last 3 years 95% remote, with lots of communication

Willing to relocate: Fractional — up to two weeks per quarter on-site

Technologies: Developer generalist & hands-on trainer — Full stack React / TS, Python, C#, Bash, and most things in between, about 20 years of professional experience.

Résumé/CV: https://neolefty.org/resume/resume.txt

Email: hn@orangecrayon.com

Interested in: Helping teams make transitions; Startups; Work with interesting outcomes.

Hello! I'm a generalist developer who leans towards front ends, and a hands-on trainer. I'm finishing up a 3-year contract development project to help a company transition from legacy techs to a mobile-first web app — leading front-end development and training employees in React & devops. They're just about ready to go on their own now, so it's time for something new.

Before that I worked with startups and academic research projects, with time off in China to teach high school 2011-2016.

That's true for some explanations — for example the various proofs of the Pythagorean Theorem — but you still have to watch out for explanations that are flat-out wrong, and can even be harmful because they obscure the real explanation. I think equal-transit theory seems to be one of those, haha.

Maybe the damage is limited because very few of us will be designing airfoils. That may also be why it has been so hard to correct! The consequences for getting it wrong are minimal.

Something much more dangerous would be an untruth that directly harms people. The debate around those tends to be much more rigorous, although I'm surprised how long some of those can endure when people get attached to them!

I like this explanation that likens the search for principles to compression:

The natural human urge to look for simple explanations is a compression problem. If you can find a simple mechanism for operating in a complex universe, you can teach it to your children more easily.

Training AIs has a similar motivation — a simpler function is cheaper to store and compute.

Perhaps we can call the simplest explanations we've found so far "Principles". We want to believe they are universally true. For example, conservation of energy, or humans should have equal rights. They seem to fit our current reality, and they are vast simplifications over doing things ad-hoc, but are they more than lucky simplifications of a complex universe?

Nuclear power sources are still mighty expensive too. Solar is hard past Mars, and near impossible past Jupiter, AFAIK.

That's an herbicide, best not to conflate, if only because people will use it as evidence of ignorance. The article mentions pesticides:

> States with the most significant dip in bee numbers have the largest increase in the use of pesticides like neonicotinoids, insecticides, and fungicides, per Live Science.

How much of that success depends on having such a large audience already using the platform?

I played around with a perceptual color space and made an interactive doodle that you can see here: https://hexpansion.io/ → click on "Colors".

The blobs attempt to spread out in a perceptual color space. You can add more blobs with + and remove them by clicking on their pie slices or on a blob directly.

Code is based on an older perceptual color space: https://github.com/neolefty/hexerals/tree/master/src/color

> This chip is not Tesla designing something that is better than everyone else all by themselves. We are not at the liberty to reveal the name of their partner(s), but the astute readers will know exactly who we are talking about when we reference the external SerDes and photonics IP.

Any "astute readers" here who know who the partner would be?