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pramsey

368 karma · joined July 23, 2015

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pramsey··on OpenAI GPT–6 Astra breaks Enigma message that has resisted solution since 2005
Reminds me of the chicken sandwich... https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/sep/23/1500-sa...
pramsey··on NASA figured out how to keep its Voyager 2 probe running for another year
Pitch perfect.
pramsey··on GeoJSON
At the SQL level, the ST_AsGeoJSON(record) variant will convert a tuple that includes a geometry and any combination of other columns into a GeoJSON output.
pramsey··on GeoJSON
MobilityDB might also be of interest, for people handling trajectories.
pramsey··on GeoJSON
GeoJSON is not TopoJSON. Saying that is "falling down" is like criticizing a zebra for not being a giraffe. GeoJSON is a mapping of the (non-topological) "simple features" model into JSON, full stop. It does that fine.
pramsey··on Voyager 1 runs on 69 KB of memory and an 8-track tape recorder
Such a wonderful meditation on career and meaning and fellowship and purpose. I loved it.
pramsey··on My first year in sales as technical founder
I feel this howl. I found that sales work was forming relationships so that you could make promises, personal promises. And what drove me out of it was that, beyond a certain point, there was no way I could guarantee that the promises I was making would be met. There was too much uncertainty, too much risk. But the client, in their heart, wanted you to look them in the eye and say "we'll get it done". Real sales people could do that and then go home to dinner and bed and a good sleep. I would do that and then go home and stare at the ceiling for 12 hours.
pramsey··on Danish pension fund divesting US Treasuries
Same. Changing out VXC for VIU.
pramsey··on New Apple Study Shows LLMs Can Tell What You're Doing from Audio and Motion Data
In 1984 the idea was there were not enough people to listen to everyone, all the time, but the mere possibility was enough. Of course, for us with AI, things are considerable worse. Also, tele screens were mandatory. We are not there with cell phones in a de jure sense, but certainly there in a de facto sense. Of course, if enough people carry phones, it doesn't matter if a few stragglers don't, they will get caught in the net unless they live as hermits, in which case who cares about them. All the pieces are in place, there is no reason we cannot have a global North Korea.
pramsey··on You can't refuse to be scanned by ICE's facial recognition app, DHS document say
Last couple times over the border the officers have pointed a camera at me (travelling on US passport), so I assume my mug is in there. Seems completely routine and universal at airports now? I wonder if the original passport photo has similarly been scanned at this point.
pramsey··on They Don't Have the Money: OpenAI Edition
Already have.
pramsey··on Interviewing a software engineer who prepared with AI
> Suits were out in tech 30 years ago when I first interviewed. They have only gone more out of style. Fashion doesn't work the way you think it works.

Or maybe it works exactly the way they think? Suits are so out, that wearing one is a strong signal of "different thinking" in a way that being casual once was. A colleague of mind would wear a three-piece on "casual Friday", and always showed up to the nines for interviews. Never harmed him, just reinforced his "think different" bona fides.

pramsey··on Postgres Powered by DuckDB: The Modern Data Stack in a Box
Why is it that grafting a whole other query engine in is working, while attempts at bringing column storage (cstore) in, in a more integrated way, did not?
pramsey··on Can We Just Throw in the Towel on Airport Security Theater Already?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9MYxAlA5wuk
pramsey··on Can We Just Throw in the Towel on Airport Security Theater Already?
Even further back, before the hijacking spree of the 70s, when I was a kid I remember our local airport had no division between ground side and air side. You just got out of your car, walked to the gate, and they checked your boarding pass. This would be in the late 1970s, it was a remote city, so probably the transition to a "secure boarding area" was later than in the big cities.
pramsey··on I asked ChatGPT to summarize 14501 books in 5 bullet points. Here's the result
For any book popular enough to have be put into GPT training data, you can get a summary without uploading it. The idea that these big, corporate models (their "intellectual property" if you will) have been trained on data they downloaded from ebook pirating sites... it's a real head shaker.

https://aicopyright.substack.com/p/has-your-book-been-used-t...

pramsey··on The rise of batteries in six charts
Testing and development by an actual operational airline, but running into regulation and certification issues. Could be a while even for this relatively narrow use case of seaplane flights of under an hour duration. Interesting update. https://harbourair.com/earth-day-eplane-update/

In terms of battery density, the fact that they have an operational, flyable aircraft, just stuffing batteries and an electric motor into a 60 year old air frame... pretty good and only going to get better!

pramsey··on Signs that it's time to leave a company
Crisis! Head to the conference room!
pramsey··on U.S. cities opt to ditch their off-street parking minimums
Yep, good read and wonderful on the vicious cycle that led to the downtowns of most US cities looking like WWII bombed out zones by 1975.
pramsey··on The rise of the forever renters
The decision is really surprisingly multi-dimensional and, no, most people don't even scratch the surface of it. I thought this calculator was brilliant a decade ago, and my opinions hasn't changed.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/upshot/buy-rent-cal...

pramsey··on Canada's surging cost of living fuels reverse immigration
Yes, all the data in the story contradicts the frame. Journalistic malpractice.
pramsey··on Superlinear Returns
PG radically underestimates the continuing importance of institutions in the modern world, which is understandable given how and with whom he spends his days. The public sector is huge and largely old fashioned heirarchical/institutional. What is the Fortune 500, if not a big list of institutions.

Read the CV of any new-minted corporate CEO almost without fail you'll find that before leaping into the C-suite they first laboured for 15 years in one big institution, building credibility and experience.

Big law firms, big financial firms, the military, academia, on and on it goes, large institutions within which career advancement depends on finding ones way through the institutional culture and comporting oneself to it, in greater and lesser ways.

pramsey··on Humans are biased. Generative AI is even worse
Paging Dr Pangloss, paging Dr Pangloss...
pramsey··on Dalle-3 Examples
I guess the text was generated by an LLM :)
pramsey··on Return to Office Is Bullshit and Everyone Knows It
100% agree. I've been a remote since 2009 (!!) and although it is entirely my "normal" I do remember that it was nice to have co-workers and the rhythms of standard work day. I am a much lonelier person than I was before.
pramsey··on Tech Workers Deserve a Union: An Interview with Ethan Marcotte
The NBA Players Association would like a word.
pramsey··on Close to the Machine: Technophilia and its discontents
Both genius. Other readable computers books from an earlier time, that still resonate.

- Soul of a new Machine, Tracy Kidder - Dawn of the New Everything, Jaron Lanier

pramsey··on Pg_later: Asynchronous Queries for Postgres
Similar to https://github.com/vibhorkum/pg_background
pramsey··on Toyota has been developing a solid-state battery for EVs with a range of 745mi
This is the most true-to-myself comment I've seen so far. I've only ever bought Toyota cars, but my next car will be an EV and Toyota's offerings are... subpar, and barely there. I trust Toyota build quality and manufacturing, but my current vehicle is probably going to need replacing before they have a proven, large volume native EV on the market. They waited too long.
pramsey··on Ways to shoot yourself in the foot with Postgres
If you let the JSON blobs grow past the page size the cost of recovering TOAST tuples can be 10x reading main storage. Also JSON is fundamentally de-normalized so you can incur scan and read costs just from hauling out duplicate values where a nice normalized lookup would be snappy. And finally JSON recovery is going to pull the whole object every time, even though you are probably only interested in one element of the object, so again, higher recovery times compared to an equivalent normalized model.
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