rebeccaskinner

I had a similar experience. I simply deleted my account and left the site. If my contributions weren't welcome then that's the choice of the moderators, but I had no desire to try to participate in a forum where simply linking to relevant non-promotional content that happens to be posted on your own website will get you accused of being a spammer.

> Or for stealing from large supermarkets?

This isn’t the right analogy. It’s more like someone opens up a shop where you can walk to the counter and ask for some food, and they stick a sample of some product in the bag when they give you the food. It’s not immoral to throw away the sample if you don’t want it, just like it’s not immoral to not play back the ad you get served along side a video you request if you don’t want to watch it.

> I’m not interested in why anarcho-fascists or tinfoil hat libertarians or Luddites think it’s a bad idea - I’d like to know why your average reasonable man would have a problem with this.

I think this is an overly adversarial view of people trying to take a long and systems based view of this, but even if we do focus on the immediate practicalities, there are a couple of obvious ones.

First, and foremost, I don't trust TSA to get it right. Facial recognition is one of many technologies that works well enough most of the time that it might be fine for non-critical infrastructure, but there are enough issues with it that at the scale of imposing it on all passengers we should anticipate a lot of negative impact. This can include both the possibility of bad actors being allowed to travel because they can find effective ways to defeat the system, and innocent people being negatively impacted through no fault of their own. Early on the system may be opt-in, and in the medium term there may be reasonable paths to opt out, but once the system is mandatory- or a significant default, people will be punished with a significantly degraded experience because the technology doesn't work well for them.

There's also the infosec angle. I don't trust TSA to get security right any more than I trust them to get facial recognition working right. We've already seen leaks of images from millimeter wave scanners. Although a photo of your face may not be as private as the images leaked from those scanners, there are a lot of potential negative outcomes from someone getting a hold of a corpus of facial recognition data, especially if it contains more than just a raw photo and includes information that could help someone to impersonate you.

I don't really see how list comprehensions aren't functional- it's just a different notation for dealing with maps, filters, and cartesian products. Python borrowed list comprehensions from Haskell in the first place.

I’ve seen some variation of this accusation being thrown around for years- and frequently by people who I regard as smart, capable developers. On the other hand, having worked with languages all over the spectrum of static typing- I’ve also seen first how how high the bar really is for benefiting from static types before you hit diminishing returns.

The best answer I can come up with is that people just seem to have differently wired brains. For me, static typing- even fairly sophisticated static typing, is simple. It makes the code simpler, easier to reason about, easier to refactor, and with a sufficiently expressive type system it lets you build things in a much more intuitive way than you could otherwise. It’s not about solving puzzles for the sake of them- types remove a big part of the puzzle by letting me explicitly write things down- and letting the compiler keep track of the details.

Certainly plenty of people don’t see it that way, and I’ve heard a lot of people make similar arguments about dynamic typing being simpler and more expressive. I don’t think they are lying but I see a big pile of inscrutable pain when I work in large dynamically types codebases.

I know I’m right about my experience, and I trust other people are right about theirs, so there must be some significant divide in how we conceptualize code that makes one persons elegant simplicity another’s intolerable complexity.

I remember running across simulavr a couple of years ago, and after Apple's announcement I went to check out what they are up to. I hope they get the funding they're looking for, because this is a product I'd love to see exist in the market.

This post is a bit old now, and might not be entirely what you were looking for, but I wrote about getting my personal blog building with nix, including an example of using an overlay and patching and upstream dependency:

https://rebeccaskinner.net/posts/2021-06-06-nixifying-a-haky...

NixOS gives you precisely this kind of control- through a few different mechanisms. Some packages in nixpkgs, and most NixOS and home manager modules, expose a lot of configuration options where you can configure various plugins, add extra packages, etc. Nix also lets you provide overlays and overrides to add custom packages (new packages, or customized versions of existing packages) and gives you the option of changing parts of a package. If none of that is sufficient, you can even supply your own patches to the code, or build the package from your own fork of the upstream repository.

In practice this is one of my favorite things about nix. I find that I contribute much more to open source in general because it’s so easy to say “replace this dependency with my version when you build this package”.

I’ve been using Kagi for over a year and it just keeps getting better. I really appreciate Kagis user and privacy-centric view of the web, and I love how the quality of the product proves that sticking to those ideals is really a better way to build. I hope they continue to gain enough momentum with non-tech audiences to continue to exist for a long time.

Thanks! I spent a lot of time trying to get the introduction just right in a way that was practical and accessible, I’m really happy to see it’s been landing very well with people.

I think this is a great idea. I love working with haskell and I’m always excited to see more opportunities for people to learn it in ways that work for them. I learned Haskell mostly through building things without a lot of structured reading, and it can be a rough path but I think it can work out in the end for sufficiently motivated people.

For people learning Haskell, one of the big challenges I see is that learning about monads is often when people need to start understanding higher kinded types. It’s not so bad as long as you focus on container-ish things like lists, Maybe, and Either, because people tend to have an easier time thinking “the m is the box and the a is the value inside it”, but it really tends to throw people off balance when they need to think about something like IO or State where the intuition is less immediately obvious.

Ultimately I don’t think learning them has to be hard, but it can be, and it does usually require a bit of patience to let the full picture sink in.

Anonymity is in the eyes of the beholder. In this case, self-hosting might make your interactions "anonymous" in the eyes of Google, Microsoft, or Meta, even if it doesn't make you anonymous to whatever platform you use to host the software.

No worries, sorry if my reply was a bit short too. Sounds like we're both happy for what we use, and willing to do a bit of lighthearted teasing of people on the other side with no real ill-will. I think that's a pretty good state for the world to be in.

It did come across as quite condescending. The fact is that I’ve tried IDEs, many times. They aren’t a good fit for me.

If we’re doing unkind takes though, I’d say a better analogy isn’t that the non-ide users are ignorant so much as it is that the ide users are, through a lack of ability or motivation, unable to create their own tools to improve their craft, and so take whatever bland uninspiring monument to mediocrity that someone tries to sell them. Like a person who condescendingly eats ramen dry from the package and informs the person cooking a good meal that surely they must be ignorant to not realize you can buy perfectly edible food at the gas station on the corner.

Now, personally, I prefer to think better of people than that- and I assume that people are just choosing to use what works for them, and to not be a jerk about it.

I don’t think this is true largely because an experienced text editor user will generally have access to most of the same capabilities in a different form. Where there are differences, the win sometimes goes to the ide, and sometimes to the text editor, but generally people adapt their tools to themselves, and themselves to the tools, and in the end it shakes out to be about the same level of productivity.

I’m not convinced that people can easily switch though. I’ve met people who never really get the hang of working efficiently in the “Unix is the IDE” style of using text editors, and I can say from personal experience that I’m just never going to be particularly good at IDEs. I suspect that each tool simply appeals to a different personality type- and that’s okay as long as our projects don’t lock us in to something and we let people have the flexibility to use the tool that works for them.

I've been meaning to learn more about this for a while, but haven't made time for it because I had assumed it would be more complicated than this. It's surprisingly accessible. As a haskell person, the implementation here brings to mind a free monad (https://serokell.io/blog/introduction-to-free-monads) with a fairly trivial interpreter.

I haven’t used faster-whisper so I can’t compare performance, but whisper.cpp does support cuda via CUBLAS, and it’s noticeably faster than the cpu version. I used it earlier this year to generate subtitles for 6 seasons of an old tv show I backed up from dvd that didn’t include subtitles on the disc.

I'm glad to see this idea getting some traction again. I haven't used Go much in the last few years, but I started playing around with a similar idea back in 2016 when I was working on a small compiler for a configuration management tool, and later put together a small stand-alone proof of concept library(https://github.com/rebeccaskinner/gofpher) as part of a talk (https://speakerdeck.com/rebeccaskinner/monadic-error-handlin...) I gave in 2017.

At the time, I remember finding FP in go surprisingly ergonomic. Implementing the library to support it was a pain since the type system wasn't expressive enough to prevent everything from devolving into a pile of untyped reflection, but it was reasonably easy to keep that an implementation detail. On the whole, I felt like go would have lent itself well to the "dash of FP for flavor" style of programming that seems to be gaining popularity these days. Unfortunately, in 2017 at least, the Go community seemed to have very little interest in the idea.

I still have a fondness for Go. It always felt nice to use. If the language features have caught up to the point where a robust library like this is feasible, and the communities attitude has shifted, I might take another look at the language.

> It's better now, but now Canada also has shit like: "tired of waiting? try assisted suicide".

This is a huge problem, and it's one of the reasons that I say Canada is definitely not a perfect solution. I agree with you here.

> The US might have high standard costs but at least you have the option to pay for better than standard.

For a lot of people this is becoming less true over time, depending on where you live. Today there are states where no amount of money can buy you a (legal) abortion, and states where no amount of money can get your child gender affirming care. Tomorrow traveling for that care might be a felony too.

It seems reasonable that if someone is in a position to move to Canada, they are probably in a position to move to California, New York, or some other safer state, but I understand why people might opt to leave the US altogether.

You are right, but a lot of states are like Florida for things like reproductive health care and LGBT rights. If someone is going to uproot their entire life to move someplace that is safer (and will almost certainly have a higher cost of living) it's not unreasonable that they choose another country. I'm not saying it's the only reasonable choice, just that there's a lot more to the rationale than political performance. Real people are having to make real decisions because of actual impacts to their lives. I think it's important to remind people of that.

You can enjoy your gun hobby. A lot of other people prefer their “ability to legally receive health care” and “not being targeted by the state for their identity” hobbies, and while imperfect Canada is certainly better than a lot of the US in that regard. People wanting to protect themselves isn’t political performance.

For me, there's no money or perks or flexibility that will get me into an office. I haven't had covid, don't plan to get it, and it's honestly a lot riskier today than it would have been in 2020 since we've collectively given up on precautions. I need my brain to work effectively, and the risk of cognitive impairment caused by long covid is just too high to be worth the risk.

Unfortunately I don't think so. Since PragProg doesn't directly sell the print copies, so I don't think they have a lot of control over bundling. Seem to remember some of the print books might have a discount code for the ebook, but I'm not certain- and I haven't received my own print copy yet to check.

You don't need to buy it again to get the final release of the eBook. You can download the latest version of the book from the orders page on pragprog. Unfortunately you will need to buy it again if you want a print copy.

Author here. I wanted to share that Effective Haskell is now out of beta and available as both a DRM-free eBook and available in print. Since I've finished writing the book, I've been working on putting up some extra content at https://effective-haskell.com. The site is still quite a work in progress, but there are solutions to the exercises in the first half of the book so far, plus detailed descriptions of each exercise and chapter.

> 1) I am a niche small business - how do I let people know that I exist? 2) I run a website and would like to monetize it - how can I get paid for the content that I produce?

The thing is, this isn’t my problem. The fact that someone wants to market their business doesn’t entitle them to my attention.

Early signals to me are that regulatory capture will end up being the moat that gets used here. I think it's a horrible outcome for society, but likely one that will make some companies a lot of money. Early grumblings around regulation for a lot of AI models seem at risk of making open source models (and even open-weigh models) effectively illegal. Training from scratch is also going to both remain prohibitively expensive for individuals and most bootstrapped startups, plus with more of the common sources of data locking out companies from using training data it's going to be hard for new entrants to catch up.

I personally think the only way AI will end up being a benefit to society is if we end up with unencumbered free and open models that run locally and can be refined locally. Every financial incentive is pushing in the other direction though.

Until Apple allows other browser engines, everything is still limited to the same set of blockers you can get in safari. None of them are remotely good enough compared to ublock origin. My current phone probably has around 6-12 months of life left in it, and if Apple doesn’t have a solution by then I’m dropping the iPhone and either going with a de-Googled android build or giving up on smart phones altogether.

My personal experience with ad blocking on iOS is that it’s both far less effective overall than ublock origin, and still manages to break a lot more sites. I have 0 tolerance for ads though- so even a 99% success rate on a site is unacceptable to me and I’ll just not use that site on my phone. Maybe 2/3rds of sites fail by that criteria for me. If ublock origin on my desktop computer also fails, then I don’t use the site at all- but that’s a vanishingly rate occurrence.