wirthjason

Sounds like a great time! From the brats comment I’m guessing you’re in Wisconsin or may Chicago.

I saw a term in the comments: AFOL. I had to look it up: Adult Fan Of Legos.

I loved legos as a kid and would spend hours building stuff. Now the kits seem more like models to be assembled and put on display and not touched rather than “a paint brush of blocks” where I can use my imagination. It lost my interest. My attention is now on software where I feel I can build anything. I liken it to my lego experience as a child.

I don’t necessarily think there’s a right or wrong thing here. It’s interesting to note how our mind changes as we age and grow older. The ”do anything” mentality get displaced with something else. This would make for an interesting PhD topic. :)

I found another quote from a related article that captured this feeling.

    “It’s like a blast to the past, straight to our childhoods,” said Deason, 40, who lives in Connellsville, Pa. “It took me by surprise, but it makes sense: Life is so structured. But with Lego, you can do anything.”

    Deason has a few million Lego pieces, which she organizes by type and color. The Star Wars and Architecture sets, she says, are the most popular among adults, who almost always look for the instruction manuals.

    “The younger kids come in and it’s all about their imaginations — playing pretend, building zombie towns,” she said. “But at some point that gets lost. The adults seem to value the final finished project. That’s where they get their satisfaction.”

I always like the covers of Big Nerd Ranch books. I can’t quite describe it but there’s something very aesthetically pleasing about them which stood out from all the other tech books at the time. It almost made me want to become an iOS developer because it was so cool.

Why is the bottom smooth and not flat like traditional octagon design? As far as I can tell that’s the only difference from this pot and their other ones.

I feel like Google is dropping the ball in this area. Lately when I search for something I find a lot of sites in the top results that have simply scraped Stack Overflow and reposted their content verbatim.

I don’t know if these copy-paste sites are a new thing, or they have always been there but I never noticed because Google de-prioritized their score because it’s low value content and recent algorithm changes now promote then higher.

Any suggestions?

I’ve recent switched from vanilla bash to ZSH. I mainly use oh-my-zsh and Power10k. Once again the defaults without much customization.

The easy access of facts on line is a good thing. This kind of “knowledge” is shallow, assembling the parts together to synthesize new knowledge is the important step. That part isn’t easily found online.

This reminds me of leaning math. At one point “doing math” meant calculating numbers, like memorizing multiplication tables or performing long division. I was always relieved when the teacher said we could use a calculator on a test. But at some point I came to realize that math is not calculating. Math is about relationships between numbers and their general properties.

Googling facts is akin to using a calculator. Extracting meaning from that jumbled pile of facts is knowledge.

Bio-dome, Buuuddee!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bio-Dome

While people can learn to program at any age I wonder what kind of psychological experiments could tell us about old programmers vs young/kid programmers and how a developer’s mind changes over time.

Not exactly the same but reminds me of nissan.com. One is a car company the other is a computer company named after a guy with the last name Nissan.

The first game I remember having a story was The Legend of Zelda. The competition at the time was Mario, Duck Hunt, Excitebike, and all the arcade and Atari games.

This story brings back memories of my college days studying philosophy and reading about Jeremy Bentham’a Panopticon.

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

Philosophy classes should have a field day with Munger’s design and these kinds of social experiments.

C programmers love front-end development. The compiler front-end! :)

I assume you’re talking about driving. To me Google Maps has worked well when walking around Tokyo, particularly when finding small, hole in the wall ramen shops off the beaten path. I haven’t used it in the city for driving but it’s worked well when going to rural onsen locations. And I prefer it to the rental car’s built in navigation system (which is almost always a Nissan Note).

There is one time it really screwed up. I like walking along those micro streets, lots of interesting stuff to see in neighborhoods. My wife and I were pushing out baby in a stroller and Google maps route sent us along a path that included a giant steep flight of stairs! It wasn’t a big deal by there was no mention that the rout would be in accessible to people who couldn’t climb stairs.

There’s an old fable that the abstract painter Jackson Pollock would sit in art museums and watch people view his art. One day a man sat staring for a long time. After a while Jackson was curious what the man was thinking so he got up and approached the man and asked his thoughts. The man replied, “I don’t know why this is hanging in a museum, I could have made that.” Jackson replied, “yes, your right, you could have done that, but I did it first. “

    > We will reject these apps unless they provide a unique, high-quality experience.

It makes sense. If there’s a crowded market but you’re good and unique they will let you in. Feels fair to me.

I looked around for the site thinking there might a web version. Can’t find anything. All the top hits just return articles about the App Store rejection. I feel Apple made the right choice.

They also say the English “green”, as pointed out in the Wiki article. So there’s 3. :)

In most context ao is definitely blue. It’s not green at all. The color of the sky is blue. Blue as green shows up in a few spots, the city/prefecture Aomori, the blew Forrest, or aotogarashi, the blue chili pepper (which is like a mini Serrano). I’m not an expert on the language but I’m sure there’s a bunch more.

Language is fascinating. I’ve found it interesting that two different cultures can have the exact same idioms. For example in English I say “goosebumps” while in Japanese it’s exact same, tori-hara (鳥肌) or chicken skin. Both cultures map the concept to a bird’s skin.

On a separate linguistic note, you’d probably really love the book “Metaphors We Live By” by George Lakoff. It’s all about how languages have the power to hide and highlight. It blew my mind when I first read it.

    > Languages treat this spectrum in different ways: Some have separate words for “green” and “blue,” others lump the two together. Some barely bother with color terms at all.

Although not mentioned in the article, in Japan the the street light for go is “blue light” (青信号) while in the US it’s a “green light” despite being virtually identical in color.

I’m not sure how this came to be but it’s s fun to dispute amongst international friends (particularly while drinking).

I came across this while reading the Python 3.11 release notes and see Pablo’s name everywhere and decided to look him up. Quite an impressive collection of work!

This makes me curious, how are crossword puzzles made? Clues -> words? Or working backwards from words to clues? Some blend of the two?

For some reason only the first paragraph was shown. I had to view it in privacy mode to see the whole article. I wonder if the ad blocker on my iPhone triggered something.

I’m waiting for the 2021 post on software maintainability and legacy code.

For everyone’s questions about satire, the blog is called “zero credibility”

The article talks about big tech but it’s interesting to think of big tech in a couple ways. One is “Big Tech” (capital B and T) the other would be “big tech”. The destination is that the first is mainly the FANGs of the world that easily come to mind.

The second is other large companies that deploy huge amounts of tech but have different business models. Banks are an example. Apparently JP Morgan Chase’s annual tech budget is $12 billion!!! That’s a lot of money.

At night both tail lamps are lit.

A fascinating book on Turing and Church is “The Annotated Turing”. It’s a walk through of Turings paper with analysis and commentary.

It was written by Charles Petzold, who also wrote the immensity popular book “CODE”.

https://www.amazon.com/Annotated-Turing-Through-Historic-Com...

I love scrapy! It’s a wonderful tool.

One of the most underrated features is the request caching. It really helps with the problem of finding out your spider crashed or you didn’t parse all the data you wanted and rerunning the job. Rather than making hundred or thousands of requests you can get them from the cache.

One nitpick is that the documentation could be a bit better about integrating scrapy with other Python projects / code rather than running it directly from the command line.

Also, some of their internal names are a bit vague. There’s a Spider and a Crawler. What’s the difference? To most people these would be the same thing. This makes reading the source code a little tricky.

As others said, TY doesn’t seem aligned with the model of technical content. Obviously there’s exceptions like conferences and a handful of individuals.

Paid is really the way to go. O’Reilly has a lot of great technical content in video form. They also have live learning sessions.

https://www.oreilly.com

Anyone have an idea how a graph database like Neo4J is implemented? I imagine it as a unique query language (cypher) sitting on top of a traditional relational database.

I love these histories of technology. The people and the times are fascinating. I never watched Toy Story growing up. I was in high school and it seemed like a child’s movie so I wasn’t interested in it. Now, 25+ years later, I have daughter who is of the age (2.5) to understand it. Recently we did a marathon watching all movies over a couple days. It’s shocking to see how the animation improves over the years but even more astonishing is how good the original one was for being made back in 1995. I can only imagine how magical it felt back then. As the article points out, algorithms and raw computation is necessary, but not sufficient, for success. Creativity and artistry are required to truly be great.