waterproof

The incentive structure doesn’t encourage it. Nobody gets a promotion for going back and fixing issues; it’s all about new initiatives and boosting metrics with new ideas.

USAA had a similar issue for some time, but with the password field. One interface (web or mobile, I don’t remember) would silently truncate the password. You couldn’t even tell it was being truncated because it was all **!

Yeah, why not? Even if the railgun described was perfectly vertical, it would have 20km of length (vs presumably ~10m max for a military railgun that hits mach 3+). If I'm doing the math right, at 20km of length you need an acceleration of about 160 Gs to reach 8 km/s over that length. Survivable for some payloads.

If the railgun is sloped at a 1% grade, it has ~2,000km of length. On that track, a comfy 1.6 Gs of acceleration for 500 seconds gets you up to 8 km/s.

We call it the hug of death.

Some logs… and some other customers’ training data and code… and SAP’s internal docker image repository (with read-write access!)

You would think. The easier, five-color theorem proof fits in a few paragraphs but the four-color theorem really resists a simple explanation. Even the simplified 1990s version of the proof (which came ~20 years after the original proof and 100 years after the 5CT proof) required enumeration of hundreds of individual cases.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_color_theorem

That seems like a very weak “law”. Is it meant as a joke? The supporting evidence is just numbers pulled apparently from nowhere (“let’s assume…”) and the conclusion is wildly off base. They seem to imply that if optimization improves the performance of much of the world’s software, by 4% each year, then it’s a waste of time.

Murphy’s law is the only comparison given. I wonder what the comparative expense is to develop faster and faster hardware, vs. to keep improving compilers. Depending on how the ROIs compare, (in dollars-per-percent gain, let’s say) maybe this “law” is worth some weight.

OTOH, the Postgres article in question seems to show diminishing returns from optimization, which belies the whole premise of the “law” which assumes the gain is consistent from year to year. And might prove Prorbstig’s implied point about optimization being a bad investment over the long term!

So this would be kind of like hypnotic suggestion but for LLMs.

Yes, the problem here is that capitalism is good at some things (making microwaves cheap) and not others (dealing with externalities). We’ve let it be the dominant force shaping “progress” for quite some time, so we’ve made progress on a lot is things capitalism is good at solving. In the meantime we’re also backsliding or stagnant on various issues that capitalism can’t address alone.

The pro- and anti-capitalist sides both have a point.

> Fixing this problem will require a large collaborative effort between carriers, government stakeholders, and cell phone manufacturers.

Do we know if any of this has been patched since the paper in 2019? One could hope…

iOS already has three-finger pinch to copy/paste, and three-finger swipe to undo/redo. But I find that these gestures are too unreliable for regular use, the gestures almost always activate some other click target plus my other fingers are busy holding the phone.

I disagree- on SO you’ll usually get some literal answers as well as the more high-level, question-the-premise ones. Why not both?

In this case, the question actually says “and more importantly, what do you think?”

So the answer is actually on topic.

It may be a bit… stylistically unusual, but I think I came away with a pretty good idea of what the answerer thinks.

Eyeballing the tps graph, OrioleDB is doing 5x tps while using 2x the CPU. So about 5/2=2.5x the CPU per transaction.

Checks out.

Can you make “concise” mode more aggressively concise? Usually I just want a one-liner, but even in concise mode I usually have to wait through a preamble that repeats my question, setup steps and imports, etc.

I would love it if this had a voice input feature. I’ve never used voice input for search in the past, but LLMs are so good that typing has actually become a significant bottleneck. I’ve been using whisper through https://yakgpt.vercel.app/ for this reason!

I’ve made similar choices, ultimately taking a deep pay cut to do work that matches my values.

But I’m aware that I did that out of decent financial security, not out of some deep moral courage.

If writing spam was my only way out of poverty or to feed my family, I’m sure I would act differently.

Maybe use this to create a voice interface connected to a LangChain agent?

My life has changed since I learned that reusable zip ties are a thing. They have a little lever you can press to release the cam.

They cost more of course, but I’m never going back.

This sounds like a great use case for a few lines of petl: https://petl.readthedocs.io/en/stable/

Petl makes it very ergonomic to write ETL scripts like what you’re describing. Take a look at the regex.search method and the fieldmap method.

The “code” example starts with an image recognition neural net prompt and ends 400 lines later by moving a turtle around the screen.

I mean, we know AI isn’t very good at these things, but it’s pretty bold to use these as marketing examples!

This site don’t even provide actual attribution to the original artists? And yet they encourage you to share those same images without attribution. Wild.

Points are a forcing function to agree on scope and have everyone think about complexity. Even if they’re upstream of nothing, they’re downstream of valuable discussions that get the team on the same page and support each other better. This is what it usually looks like:

“OK I think we agree on the scope of this task. How many points do we think it is?” “Well, that depends if we include X” (it turns out, we didn’t agree on the scope of the task!)

You can’t anticipate everything, but I’ve had countless valuable discussions off the pack of pointing that resulted in things like: - agreeing on whether to include an anticipated set of clean-up as part of a task, that the team might have missed or disagreed on later - realizing a task is bigger than anyone thought or maybe could be parallelized, allowing the team to approach it more effectively or reprioritize to deliver more value

Basically pointing results in a ton of timely & valuable insight that helps the team learn faster and row together better. There may be better ways to drive these conversations but I find pointing to be a pretty good driver.

That said, points and valocity are not upstream of nothing - predictable velocity lets you know when to stop sprint planning. It lets you have these discussions on a reasonable cadence and not waste time fleshing out the tasks you won’t have time to touch until next sprint.

Thanks for the interpretation, very compelling if that's what they're showing. Sci-hub doesn't seem to have this paper so I haven't been able to read the whole thing. But from what I can see the data doesn't seem to agree with what you're saying -

> The interesting part is this: If the vertically-oriented motors are made to move up-down on linear straight paths instead of curved paths, the net movement of the arm is not observed

In the video, it looks like the same kind of net movement is observed with the cylindrical configuration as with the spherical configuration. With the cylindrical configuration the average position migrates by about 0.2rad and stays there, compared with 0.3rad for the spherical configuration. So the spherical configuration seems "better"(?) but it's hardly a convincing difference given how much slop there seems to be - there's even significant net rotation in the "plateau regime" where it's apparently supposed to stop migrating.

And why is there a "plateau regime" anyway? If they can pull off a delta-V with no momentum transfer, I'd expect the robot to keep migrating around in a circle. But it stops. The abstract says:

> While this simple geometric effect predominates over short time, eventually the dissipative (frictional) and conservative forces, ubiquitous in real systems, couple to it to generate an emergent dynamics in which the swimming motion produces a force that is counter-balanced against residual gravitational forces.

I think this translates to "it just stops working after a bit". What's your take?

You can do that in Caltopo. They have a lot of really handy mapmaking features (like viewsheds and their “measure distance” tool that can snap to roads and trails), though their UI leaves a lot to be desired.

It is valuable for gov’t agencies to be able to act broadly on their mandates without needing congress to dictate everything. As the dissent puts it, “A key reason Congress makes broad delegations like Section 111 is so an agency can respond, appropriately and commensurately, to new and big problems.”

We can hope that Congress will step up and legislate, but that seems pretty unrealistic to me. I fear that this is just the latest wave of successes by the party that wants our government to be as toothless and inept as possible and already has a stranglehold on Congress for the foreseeable future.

One great tool for fighting complexity is to Always Consider Option Zero: whenever comparing possible solutions to a problem, consider the option (Option Zero) where you simply don’t solve the problem. It’s amazing how much it changes the conversation when you stack up the pros and cons of the status quo, against the pros and cons of each solution. Quite often you realize the best path is much simpler than you thought.

It’s not a panacea, but it really does help slow the growth of your complexity.

Looking forward to trying this. Last time I searched around for a tool like this, all I found was OnTrajectory (which seems right up your alley). Do you have a comparison with that or other similar tools?

> If I argue that Rust is better than Pearl am I "putting down" Pearl programmers?

Only if you come in telling the Perl programmers that they can’t possibly have written useful code. Which is what i hear when zmmmmm says

> I actually started bulking up in my upper arms for the first time in my life.

and you say

> No you didn’t

Or when Kiro says,

> Pistol Whip is great for building leg muscles

and you say

> bodyweight squats don't make you stronger.

To give you the benefit of the doubt, maybe you are using some very specific definition of the word strong. But it’s not the definition that the rest of us are using. Body weight exercise can absolutely help folks reach all kinds of fitness and life goals, which is all we’re trying to say here.

Plus as some folks have pointed out, there’s no reason you can’t wear some weights in VR either.

So yeah, it’s fine to extol the virtues of weight training, but you’re sounding to me like a Rust programmer saying Perl can’t possibly be used to save time or practice your problem solving.

Yeah. Up front they say:

> what it sees is not personally identifiable

Then later on in the article:

> [the new HomePod could] [detect] the user's identity based on their gait, height, and physical profile

Uh-huh.

…did they read their own article?