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The word by word translation sounds like it's trying to say that it isn't very competent at lojban, but that it can try to learn lojban if you provide it with parallel examples. All this said in broken lojban, as expected. Quite reasonable, actually.

No, I was explicitly watching for this. In one of the sessions where we asked it to generate Kłeti sentences and the conversation passed the token limit it started inserting characters like ı (the Turkish dotless i). A week earlier I was playing with interpreting go positions, and at some point the model switched to talking about Chess (a bit less subtle than inserting unusual characters).

As the author of the piece I feel that your comment triggered a great teachable moment :)

We'd love to see that too! However, I'm afraid that creating a substantial number of examples would transform this delightful family activity into something akin to punishment. Kłeti is quite the challenge for us Indo-Europeans, and it seems that even its creator isn't immune to the struggle.

YouTube's music library feels richer than Spotify. A few years ago I was contemplating a switch from YT Music to Spotify (I like Spotify's UX), but a lot of stuff I enjoy listening to was missing. But I might just have a weird taste in music.

I'm afraid it's lost. However, note that I had never gotten it quite right, and it was for StumpWM 14 years ago.

It is a downgrade, but it's a conscious trade-off for me. I've been fine with that for the last 14 years. I switched to the Mac to get a mostly adequate environment that I wouldn't be tempted to hack.

The thing I actually care about is navigating between windows by typing something that gets autocompleted. Spotlight or Alfred get me mostly there. In chrome I use Powerswitch to navigate between windows, and there's Cmd K for Slack. Having one interface for those would be grand, but I'm not holding my breath.

A long time ago my setup was StumpWM with Emacs with Slime connected to StumpWM's lisp image. The non-trivial part was getting one interface to navigate both buffers and windows using C-x b. It was non-trivial because of the somehow circuitous nature of the arrangement.

At some point I moved to a Mac because I realized that perfecting my window manager setup was just killing my productivity. I hope that one day I'll be able to get back to it – maybe when I retire.

What are some good resources to start playing with SD add an amateur?

One interesting thing about Portuguese and Spanish is that the comprehension isn't symmetrical: Portuguese speakers understand Spanish ones all right, but vice versa is a bit of a struggle.

I used to work at Google, and a friend reached out to me for help – his company's app was in a similar situation, with similar communication from Google. This was a good friend from high school, so I pressed the issue using internal channels. The person handling it on Google's side was very assertive about them violating a policy, and after some back and forth I received a _vague hint_ about what was the supposed violation. I passed the hint along, and after some digging, lo and behold, it turned out one of their people had lifted someone else's images without permission, violating copyright (kudos to Google for figuring it out). My friend apologized profusely to me, to the support rep, his boss, and let the culprit go. They purged the app's assets, changed their processes, and eventually the app was reinstated.

Now, this was a special situation. I had a personal relationship with the developer, and I was happy to vouch for their honesty. Yet it still turned out Google had been right all along. Now, it's a shame Google couldn't let them know what was the issue. However, it's a safe assumption that the vast majority of people Google support deals with are spammers. And there's a lot of them. If Google gave a detailed explanation to all of them it would mean a ton of additional work – which would create an unsustainable situation at this scale.

In Poland this is becoming the norm for job ads in IT. I mean, it's not obligatory, butit you can expect at least 20-30% of the candidates won't talk to you if you don't publish ranges.

I was the CTO of an R&D consulting company in Poland, and parent is mostly spot on. I disagree, however, about the way they describe in-house management vs giving engineers to the customer.

The only thing of real value in a software agency is the team. If your programmers get pissed off and move to another company, you are going to have to spend money to hire and onboard someone, and leave money on the table (you need engineers to fulfill your contracts). So, unless an agency's management totally sucks, they will put a lot of effort to keep their personnel happy. This means, for example, having decent project management (and that's kinda natural, as you tend to do a lot of projects). Second, working the engineers to the bone is very much _not_ in the interest of the agency – if you work super hard and burn out, the customer gets all the upside (project delivered), and the agency gets all the downside. So, a decent agency will be good at pushing back when the client tries to abuse their employees.

This is one of the reasons why we strongly preferred managing the work ourselves, and why we stuck to hourly billing (which is super annoying to most of the time, but it aligns the incentives in that regard slightly better than if you bill by the day).

If the agency is doing staff augmentation, the developers are mostly left to fend for themselves. This is problematic, as it makes the devs to (justly) wonder what is the agency doing to deserve their margins.

(Of course, your mileage may vary. Ours was a small shop with very senior people, and we were doing very interesting projects. Working at a huge Indian outsourcing company is going to be a very different experience.)

I'm waiting for "Lisp as an alternative to Rust." :)

He also used money from his books to do some in depth, almost journalistic research for subsequent ones. Eg. as soon as the USSR had fallen he traveled to Russia.

John Le Carre is one of my favorite authors. It was a great pleasure to discover that his son is a great author on his own right — his novel Gnomon is absolutely amazing.

Or rather, I should say, I read this great book titled Gnomon after a random Amazon recommendation, and it turned out the author is the son of John Le Carre. It's only a shame he doesn't publish more often.

I found this reddit answer especially interesting, as it turns out it's the opposite of what you would expect. Soviet submarines were big on automation, had small crews (Alfa-class submarine – 30 people, vs 130 in a Virginia-class sub), and used lots of innovative design to make them quieter (sometimes redundantly – they were assuming the US would match Soviet capabilities in some aspects of sub detection, but that still hasn't happened). What is more, they were much, much safer (in terms of crew survivability) and harder to sink, with a double hull design (as opposed to American single hull).

Part of the reason this worked this way was that the USSR had a number of fiercely competing design bureaus, while the US had a very centralized process with a very domineering research head. Quoting a Soviet designer: "We had competition in submarine design. You (with Rickover) had Stalinism!"

It's interesting how different this was from their aircraft design philosophy: https://www.reddit.com/r/WarCollege/comments/9abbo3/what_wer....

For me the greatest benefit of learning Prolog was really understanding recursion – the only way to iterate through something is with a tail-recursive call. Also, it really makes you appreciate the For loop ;)

Another cool aspect of Prolog is how simple it is to write a meta interpreter. Fort example, you can easily change Prolog's default depth first search through the solution space to breadth first, or iterative deepening: https://www.metalevel.at/acomip/

Delightful article. I only wish I found it the day before I needed to figure CSS animations on my own, not they day after :) This is by far the best piece I found on the subject.

This is the sweetest and most wholesome thing I've seen in a very long time. Kudos to you!

My bet is that it's MIT's Scratch. Notsomething used in production, but if you have a kid learning how to program these days, it's the obvious good choice (and I've done a ton of research).

The language itself is surprisingly pleasant to program (even for a professional programmer). The real problem is the lack of data structures (like a dict), so some projects (unfortunately, many my 7yo comes up with) become extremely annoying to program.

This article may be unnecessarily alarmist: https://twitter.com/BallouxFrancois/status/13240857614493040...

Infermedica [1] is a company that uses Bayesian networks [2] to map symptoms to potential causes (they are used to triage patients in call centers, etc.). They have just published a REST API that targets COVID-19 specifically, and made it free to use to everyone free of charge. If you are thinking working on a SARS-CoV-2 pandemic related app, this may come handy.

Feel free to ask any questions, if there's interest I'll try to get someone from the company to this thread.

[1] https://infermedica.com/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayesian_network

I read his new book, Agency, sick in bed last week. It hits very close home.

Scratch is right now my 6yo's favorite toy. It beats the Lego robot because you don't have to worry about having the right parts and you can concentrate on the "fun parts," that is programming.

What really amazes me was how different the progression looked from what I was expecting. The move from "the dinosaur moves and that is fun" to fully fleshed mini games took me by surprise. No linearity there.

What I really appreciate about Scratch is how you can use the system without having to understand big parts of it. For example, one of the most complicated parts is the sprite editor (which does both vector and raster graphics). However, there's a huge library of sprites, so it's not a problem. You'll only have to learn the editor when your ambitions grow and you want custom sprites.

Another curious thing is that Scratch encourages concurrent code right off the bat (every script runs in their own thread). My son is coming up with rather elegant patterns which are nevertheless quite different from my intuition, like controlling the sprite's horizontal and vertical movement in separate scripts – which actually gives you easier to understand code.

Finally, there's a social aspect – discovering programs written by other kids and analyzing their code, and remixing them for your own projects. My son is a great fan of "Kimberly from Canada" who did a lot of "cook your own pizza" type of games, which have been a big inspiration.

This sounds insane. My hobby is medium distance hiking in (say, 250 km/155 mi na week) in the Scandinavian Arctic, so I have to carry all my food. I'm a fan of ultralight hiking, so my whole summer baggage weights around 10 kg/20 lbs excluding water. I invested some money in lighter equipment, yes, but most of my weight savings is stuff I simply do not take with me, or things that serve in multiple roles (eg. my hiking poles double as tent poles). A common piece of advice in the ultralight community is "don't pack your fears" – take only what you know you're gonna need, avoid redundancy (and be careful not to lose your crap), and consider what you can do without (an example: you don't really need a big ass knife).

Anyway, with 10 kg pack a trip is extremely physically challenging, but overall pleasant. I can actually enjoy the view, as opposed to just wanting to throw my backpack on the ground (I didn't get to my low weight immediately, I used to carry much more before).

Hiking like I do, but with 100 lbs of gear sounds like a nightmare. A soldier may not care about the views, but he should watch out for people who are trying to kill him. If my experience translates at all, the weight is interfering with that goal.

Rather bad. I guess it's getting better, especially in bigger cities, but even in Warsaw I don't think it would be a good idea for a gay couple to walk hand in hand. Poland is a mostly a great place to live, but this is a disgrace.

I've been to Taipei, and the language barrier was quite horrible. People speaking English seemed to be the exception, not the norm – I'd never appreciated Google Translate as much as I did in Taiwan. And a lot of things work quite a bit differently than in the West – so a few times I had to be borderline rude to trigger someone enough to attempt to explain stuff to me in English instead of just shooing me away.

I also had mixed feelings about the protomolecule (for the same reason as yours), but in later parts of the books it contributes to the plot in a meaningful way (that is, it's but just a bogeyman). Can't say more without spoiling it :)

This is one of those movies I used to watch every now and then with my dad when I was a teenager (although it's way too long to watch in one sitting). It's one of my father's favorites, along with Rio Bravo, The Deer Hunter, Apocalypse Now, and Deliverance (I wholeheartedly recommend all of them, the last one is some heavy shit). Such a shame that most people get to experience it in the butchered version. And to think we were getting the real thing on Polish cable TV and didn't even appreciate it...