pradn

The website is good. But I urge people to get the book. It's a charming object. Every time you open it you land up at a charming, humanistic idea - with wonderfully evocative images. I cherish the summer I spent reading the patterns willy-nilly. It permanently changed the way I thought about space - it really matters, it changes how you feel and think, and the best part - you have agency! Make a beautiful life for yourself and those around you.

I find it far more tiring because I don't have "micro-breaks" where I'm slowly typing code. I just have to be in a serious "check the logic" mode for a longer period of time.

It also makes it a lot easier for juniors to chuck random code at seniors for review.

It's also a way to compel action across all professors, not just professors from historically-underrepresented groups, who would likely be bearing the brunt of the work.

That's because caring and liquidity/fungibility are at opposing poles. People sell cattle but not their pet cows. Something like that.

It's worthwhile to note the big impact a small set of driven volunteers can have in archival and preservation work! This was not inevitable!

The key thing is AI models are services not products. The real world changes, so you have to change your model. Same goes for new training data (examples, yes/no labels, feedback from production use), updating biases (compliance, changing societal mores). And running models in a highly-available way is also expertise. Not every company wants to be in the ML-ops business.

It might be helpful to catalog a few reasons why software engineering can be so stressful. Many of these are common to other professions as well, to varying degrees.

* It's hard to predict how long something will take so you stress out when you take longer. Even if requirements are clear, all sorts of things can delay implementation: debugging, build issues, plugging in dependencies, bugs in underlying libraries. All these can take a limitless amount of time.

* Complexity can be overwhelming. Staring at a thousand line, convoluted class can make you shut down, just because it's too much.

* Being new and not able to produce at the same level as others. This one hopefully goes away after some time as you ramp up, but you might be new at different projects in the same team.

* Changing requirements, increasing scope.

* Priority inversion - you depend on another team for your work, but they aren't working on it, and you have to answer for that.

* Having to give an update at a status meeting when you know you haven't made as much progress as you'd like.

* Feeling bad about your productivity, so you don't take care of yourself (wasting time at night), are tired, and aren't able to be productive the next day. This whole loop can last for a long time if you can't break it.

* You can't ask for help because you feel like others will think you're stupid for asking those questions. And you can't make progress bc you really need to know those things.

Many of these things are exacerbated by life circumstance, social position, personality, previous mental health history, and management/peers. The way you can improve this stuff for yourself is by having a solid wellness routine (exercise, sleep, diet), good communication with your peers/manager (this is a chicken/egg situation), and pushing for reasonable organizational changes. Of these, only wellness is totally under your control. The others require people around you to change, which may not be possible.

> In any case, I added a secret preference to do it the right way

It's harder to do these sort of guerrilla things when every line is code-reviewed. Or maybe you snuck it past your peer?

I think OSs are generally over bundling helpful software, unless its a funnel to a paid version. The security risk is too high, and so is the legal risk of anti-monopoly action ("why are you killing independent movie editor businesses?").

That's probably true. In my ideal world, the OSS community comes together in a suite of offline-first, in-browser alternatives to common user needs. We need a site for document conversion (using WASM Pandoc?), PDF merging, image conversion, text utils (lower case, spell check). All these would live on one trusted site. Hopefully users can discover the site and be done searching, and spread its name by word of mouth.

I had to merge a bunch of PDFs for a rental application recently and it was painful. Having to upload very sensitive docs, every site being a funnel to their paid version, etc.

If it's 2-3x of native code, that's plenty good enough. Everyone uses Handbrake in an async mode - just set up the conversion and let it run overnight.

Of course, a website would be better for smaller conversion jobs (in case you have browser restarts or whatnot). Desktop apps can block computer restarts to a greater degree than websites.

This proposal is to offer competition to web-based conversion websites. If users are willing and able to find Handbrake and download it, it can work for them. But everyday users are right to distrust software downloaded from the Internet.

Many users are in environments where its not possible to download new software (schools, work places, universities).

The browser has its disadvantages, but it is the most widely-deployed sandboxed execution environment providing incredibly easy distribution of software.

There's a low-hanging fruit that I think would make ffmpeg more helpful for regular people.

There's a million terrible websites that offer file conversion services. They're ad-ridden, with god-knows-what privacy/security postures. There's little reason for users to need to upload their files to a third-party when they can do it locally. But getting them to download fiddly technical software is tough - and they're right to mistrust it.

So, there's a WASM version of ffmpeg, already working and hosted at Netlify [1]. It downloads the WASM bundle to your browser and you can run conversions/transformations as you wish, in your browser. Sandboxed and pretty performant too!

If this tool a) was updated regularly b) had a nicer, non-CLI UI for everyday users and c) was available at an easily-Googlable domain name - it would solve all the problems I mentioned above.

[1]: https://ffmpegwasm.netlify.app/

The expense of saffron is overblown. You really don't need much for entire dishes. A few strands of saffron can flavor and color a whole pot of rice, enough for six people. A gram of saffron might have dozens of strands!

You have to use it properly - grind it in a mortar/pestle with some hot water, and then use the aromatic water in your cooking. This method gets much more of the flavor out.

Many cultures that grow saffron, they themselves use safflower and lower grades of saffron to add just color, if not flavor - without breaking the bank.

It's probably better for society for people to frequent third-places more. More sociability, connections - the human touch. It's of course just selling overpriced sugar drinks, but there's also this aspect.

In the past twenty years, the job of "software engineer" has taken upon ops/QA/DBA/support.

Those are true statements in the exact same way, though! "Hinges" and "rests" are used in the same way as "critical". Ofc, this requires some interpretive thought - and that may be a lot to ask of a general reader.

We don't have the vocabulary to separate two ways people use "critical": "required for something's functioning", and "not substitutable".

A tire is critical to a car's functioning, but there's plenty of brands to choose from if one tire company goes bust. Ofc, substitutability is a matter of degree - cost/time.

The legal regime just prevents the state from going too far in promoting one faith. But whether you encounter someone with a different belief system depends on geography, modes of transport, openness to other beliefs, etc. There's a lot more to it! I'm thinking of it as a stochastic process.

Yes, America is one of the most Christian of the major Western countries. However, the geography of faith is quite varied. We run around in cars, jetting to exactly the institutions we want to patronize. So it's possible to easily stay only in your own community.

That's true for nearly all folks who would tell you they're part of a certain faith. As in any time, only a few minority ever seem to want to contemplate creation, the nature of god, the particular logics behind faith, etc etc. That's not all bad - people come in a million types.

For most, faith and culture are intertwined as they go about their day. You fast because of course you do, not because you know the thousand-year history of that practice and the relevant scriptural phrases.

There is this odd split in American society that makes this possible. You can go through your entire life, end up a professional journalist at the Times and not actually have asked someone about their sincerely held faith and practice. Kids rarely talked about religion in HS, outside of like the Interfaith club. (I ran my high school's and we had an annual panel of a rep from each major religion. I was was quite popular.)

Colleges, especially large ones, do have tons of students of different faiths, but I felt contacts were still minimal. My randomly-assigned freshman year room-mate was a devout Christian and would sing in worship - super wonderful guy. But after that, not much. It's so easy to just hang out with people similar to you - at all stages of life.

Even when you meet someone of a certain faith, you're likely to experience that interaction through holiday, festival, food, dress and so on - think asking a Muslim about Ramadan or being invited to a Hanukah party - but you're not likely to ask doctrinal or theological questions.

Thank you - it's baffling to me that something as basic as saving some data to a file has become so convoluted!

fsync() guarantees that writes have hit the disk. But is there a guarantee about what's written before an fsync()? Can it be anywhere between "nothing" and "everything"? I suppose this must be a loose guarantee if the "write-back" parameter can be tweaked at will.

Teens get bullied if they show up as green bubbles in group chats. I've had people tell me they wouldn't want to show up as green bubbles to potential romantic partners. The iMessage lock-in effects are real.

Oops, you're right - I counted w/ Ctrl-F and that's not accurate with references.

There's only ~34 paintings firmly attributed to Vermeer, and - fun fact - 11 of them are on 5th Avenue in New York (between The Met and The Frick).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_paintings_by_Johannes_...

Sorry added a spoiler alert.

== Spoilers for the first book ==

I tell everyone to skip the first one. The problem is that when you hear of the series, it sounds so cool. "What if humanity knew aliens were arriving in ~X hundred years?" But it takes until the end of the first book for that to premise to even arrive.

You can read a summary of the first book, and go directly to the second, which has a different set of characters on a different timeline.

All the cool stuff in the first book:

1. The alien planet is at the mercy of 2 suns, so it deals with extreme heat and cold. Predicting the trajectory of their planet (the "three-body problem" in question) is a life-or-death problem.

2. To solve this, the aliens set up computers using a lot of alien-people, each acting as a logic gate - each person passes information to the next.

3. A pro-alien group uses lasers to cut up ships at the Panama canal or whatever.

Pretty much the rest of the book is quite boring. The pro-alien society that meets in a video game is laughable.

The second book has a propulsive cadence that's super fun to read, and the third has a series of amazing conceptually-creative micro-worlds - so captivating!

There's levels to tinkering though. When I was running Ubuntu, a lot of the tinkering came down to searching for what config files to update. Sure, that freedom is nice if you care to use it, but it's mostly just searching, configuring, experimenting. This is hardly fun or instructive.

A deeper form of tinkering is actually working on the code. I think an instructive example is writing your own X windowing system with xmonad. You get to see exactly how a whole windowing system works.