alexambarch

It’s been hard for me to overcome the feeling that anything I can do, the machine can do better and faster.

I know people have been saying “If you’re worried about it replacing you, you weren’t a good engineer to start with,” but it doesn’t make it hurt any less. I had a lot of fun solving problems and thinking deeply, but now my time is much better spent reviewing the plans and code of a machine that’s done that part for me.

Yes it’s still a hobby I can do on the side, but at my day job it’s just sucked all the energy out of me.

“Soon” we will see celebrity AI gossip?

Someone clearly missed the first season of Fruit Love Island[0].

[0]: https://www.nbcnews.com/pop-culture/viral/ai-fruit-love-isla...

As an Ableton user myself, I’m pretty surprised that this musician could just… switch from Ableton to Bitwig. Goes to show how dire the situation was I guess.

I still have yet to hear any non-technical person I know encounter issues on Windows and seriously consider switching away. The learned helplessness instilled by Microsoft is very difficult to get people to shake off.

I’d argue Terraform/HCL is quite popular as a Level 4 configuration language. My biggest issue with it is that once things get sufficiently complex, you wish you were using a Level 5 language.

In fact, it’s hard to see where a Level 4 language perfectly fits. After you’ve surpassed the abilities of JSON or YAML (and you don’t opt for slapping on a templating engine like Helm does), it feels like jumping straight to Level 5 is worth the effort for the tooling and larger community.

I really like lazygit when I need something quicker and more ergonomic than the VSCode git extension.

I’m still partial to magit over everything else but lazygit has replaced a lot of my CLI usage of git. Thanks Jesse.

As someone who’s too young to have been around for HyperCard, what was the main draw? Was it the accessibility of the tech or was it just really well executed?

If these vehicles tackle the roads of Boston, there will be no stopping this company. That place has one of the most confusing road networks I’ve ever seen in addition to some of the most confused drivers.

NYC is another obvious challenge but Boston seems like a challenging middle ground.

From what I got out of the article and my own limited understanding of double entry bookkeeping, the "double" seems to be referring to the part where we split a transaction into credits and debits as opposed to a transaction with positive or negative balance. The doubling is happening with the labels we use to describe what's happening with the money.

From an individual account perspective, there's a doubling of the number of columns you could enter a transaction's amount into.

The most interesting takeaway from this article for me was that there's an inverse correlation between the number of syllables spoken per second and the bits of information conveyed in that time.

> Japanese, for example, has an extremely high number of syllables spoken per second. But Japanese also has an extremely low degree of complexity in its syllables, and much less information encoded per syllable.

It seems like our brains might only be capable of processing ~39 bits of spoken information per second. Now I want to see a comparison of the information throughput of other forms of communication!

Oh boy I sure hope I receive my grandmother's Monero cold wallet in her will!

As someone who has managed keycloak in production for work, it's a solid solution but boy is it easy to make mistakes that cause difficult to debug issues. It's a headache that does what it says on the tin.

I stopped being interested in poker when I realized that by far the best strategy is simply to play with the worst players you can find. Everything else pales in comparison to simply playing with new players.

I understand that these are people who are willingly coming to play the game and putting up their money but I just don’t feel comfortable intentionally seeking them out to take it from them.

Pretty sure that means I’m simply not cut out to play the game but the theory is definitely interesting.

Brokers fees for the apartment in Cambridge I rent were $4k. This was in addition to first and last months’ rent. Extremely annoying but when every other apartment is doing it too, you don’t have much of a choice if you want to live in the area.

> Also, oh, man, Jazelle. I'd forgotten about that. Hardware support for Java bytecode... that did not pan out well.

As someone who was too young to be paying any attention during this time, what were some of the reasons this didn’t pan out? Java seems so dominant looking back that I’m surprised something like this wouldn’t have been a success.

Honest question: what do we even do? I'm not European but it seems like you can't talk about the "housing crisis" without having to specify whether you're talking about Europe, Canada, the US, etc.

I see suggestions to build more housing through taller buildings, but without any incentive to do that from people who care, what policies will realistically get passed to change anything?

I've seen Infracost around and think it looks cool, do you have any plans to add support for Pulumi? One advantage Terraform seems to have over Pulumi is the ecosystem of tools that support it.

If you're desperate enough, you can nixtamalize corn by getting your hands on some calcium hydroxide (referrred to as cal) and giving some kernels a good overnight bath in a mixture of cal and water. The obvious downside being that it takes forever (and also the mixture is caustic so you can't touch it).

For the record, "188,000 views on TikTok" is not that many for a single video to reach, let alone an entire search term's worth of videos.

As a zoomer reading this article I can tell you this very literally boils down to "funny voice = funny joke" and you could just as easily swap out the british accent for a Kermit impression. The popularity of british reality TV has exposed the young americans that watch it to funny sounding british slang (e.g. "fanny flutters") and now those sayings are making their way into jokes.

I promise you no one except for the Miami content creators and former reality TV cast members quoted in the article are slipping into British accents at Burger King.

A while back I somehow managed to watch Space Is the Place[1] without knowing anything about Sun Ra. The discovery that he was not an actor and was instead a great jazz musician was a wild one. If you haven't seen it, Space Is the Place is a super interesting look into early Afrofuturist films and Sun Ra as a character.

[1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0072195/

What entity an ENS record is registered to, who owns what JPEG, who sent who some Ether...

Ethereum is one big state machine so that state holds everything.

> You can already rent compute globally and perform computation in an environment orders of magnitude faster than on the EVM

True, but Ethereum also has the benefit of having a globally agreed upon state that is transparent and traceable when a change occurs. Not saying this setup couldn't be done any other way, but the fact that all you need to enable yourself to make those changes is a digital token is what I find interesting about it. The use of this token combined with the fact that people arguably care about the state of this system is what I feel gives it intrinsic value.

In my haste I guess I didn't make this clear enough, sorry. By "blockchains" I was trying to emphasize the fact in Nano that we are talking about many blockchains as opposed to one main chain. Every account has its own blockchain which all get connected via a DAG that they call a block lattice.

The interesting part of this to me back when I was investing in 2017 was that I previously didn't think it was possible to get instant, feeless transactions on a blockchain due to the fact that transactions on the chain still had to be verified somehow.

From looking around the internet I am starting to believe I might be the only person holding crypto strictly because I just happen to think it's neat.

I think it's interesting that via Ethereum, I can spend Ether to perform distributed computations on nodes across the globe and that this also serves as a store of value. I find Iota's Tangle interesting as an application of a DAG for financial and data transactions. I think it's interesting that I can send Nano to someone instantly and without any gas fees while still using blockchains.

It would be nice if this technology was given a larger purpose, but I think any possibility of that quickly went out the window once someone realized they could get rich. I understand and agree with a lot of the hate crypto gets and a significant amount of the use cases are nothing more than pipe dreams (or just outright scams,) but from a theory perspective I can't help but think it's at least a little bit fascinating to see people try to apply data structures this way.

I didn't exactly understand this feature. Usually when I'm opening a file, the chances that my cursor is already where I want it and I can just start typing is next to zero.

While I don’t think she cheated, the reasoning she gives at the table for why she calls the hand is really weird.

The first explanation I hear her give is “I thought you were on Ace high,” which when asked “So why call with Jack high then?” she immediately changes the subject. Eventually she states that she was playing him as opposed to playing poker, which is a much more plausible thing to say.

Given that her initial justification didn’t make any sense, I genuinely just think she won by making a bad decision. It’s a perfectly valid thing to do in poker, but I can understand the argument for why she could have been cheating.

> It also went ahead and put non binary... which is like, right there

I think the general idea of adding a word for non-binary was that there were already words for man and woman, but if you didn't identify with either of those, you'd have to come up with your own phrase as opposed to other people who got their own dedicated word. A surprisingly high number of non-binary people speak toki pona (or at least that's my impression from the Discord server), so I think it made sense to add.

If you want to pick up a new language purely for fun, I wholeheartedly recommend toki pona[1]. Its small vocabulary (<200 words) and simple grammar force you to break down complex thoughts into simple ideas. This feels limiting at first, but because there isn't a prescribed way to express certain ideas, it can provide an interesting look at how you see the world compared to others.

As a quick example, there is no word for "child" in toki pona, many speakers say "jan lili" (small person), while others choose to say "jan sin" (new person).

It's shockingly easy to learn and one can become pretty proficient in very little time. There's a great community to learn from on Discord[2], along with plenty of great online resources like /dev/urandom's toki pona page[3].

[1]: https://tokipona.org [2]: https://discord.gg/nbgXCC6 [3]: https://devurandom.xyz/tokipona/

I love watching people go in depth and get passionate about something that seems so trivial. The next time someone asks why I don't use Microsoft's emojis I'll let them know it's because it takes too long to cut things with their scissor emoji.

I got mine through the Oculus store, although you might be able to find them cheaper from a different seller.

https://www.meta.com/quest/accessories/quest-2-virtuclear-le...

For the record, you can purchase corrective lenses that fit over the ones on the headset. I have a pair and they’re great, the only downside being that any new prescription you get needs to be updated on your VR headset too…