cstoner

Thank your for posting this. I disagreed with OP but couldn't _quite_ find the words to describe why. But your post covers what i was trying to say.

I was quite literally asked to implement an in-memory cache to avoid a "full table scan" caused by a join to a small DB table recently. Our architect saw "full table scans" in our database stats and assumed that must mean a performance problem. I feel like he thought he was making a data-driven profiling decision, but seemed to misunderstand that a full-table scan is faster for a small table than a lookup. That whole table is in RAM in the DB already.

So now we have a complex Redis PubSub cache invalidation strategy to save maybe a ms or two.

I would believe that we have performance problems in this chunk of code, and it's possible an in-memory cache may "fix" the issue, but if it does, then the root of the problem was more likely an N+1 query (that an in-memory cache bandaids over). But by focusing on this cache, suddenly we have a much more complex chunk of code that needs to be maintained than if we had just tracked down the N+1 query and fixed _that_

Yeah, I interpret "premature optimization" as taking a request that takes 500ms and focusing on saving a couple ms by refactoring logic to avoid a SQL JOIN or something.

Your users are not going to notice. Sure, it's faster but it's not focused on the problem.

My friend once told me an analogy about modern software engineering that went something along the lines of the following.

There are piles of money just sitting around waiting for someone to pick them up. Unfortunately it's really hard to do because the piles are scattered around and hard for any one person to pick up.

So the best way to coordinate picking up all of these piles of money is to figure out how to convince a bunch of people with autism spectrum disorder to program machines to do it for you.

In this analogy you can get rich by doing one of a few jobs:

* Finding the piles of money (sales)

* Coding robots to pick up the piles of money (engineering)

* Coordinating the above two in come capacity (management)

AI certainly makes it less lucrative to pick up some of these piles because there will be more people picking them up. But will probably also be the case that it will let us pick up piles of money we didn't even know existed before. Or ones that we knew about but were hidden deep inside of sprawling caves that were intractable to search before.

If it turns out that we don't need any coordination to pick up these piles any more, then pretty much everyone is out of a job. Not just software engineers, but pretty much every white collar job. Once that's done it'll only be a matter of time before they can automate away the blue collar jobs, too.

I guess I'm just skeptical that we'll actually automate away all of the white collar jobs.

Generally, when someone says something like "left wing groups" they mean something with a formal organization.

"Antifa" is less of an organization than even some loose collective like "anonymous"

Are there left-wing agitators? Sure, black bloc and other "direct action" protestors have been around since at least the world trade protests in the 90s.

But to the best of my knowledge there isn't really a formal "antifa" organization to dismantle or anything.

> all i know about these LLMs is that even if they understand language or can create it, they know nothing of the subjects they speak of.

As a recent example of this, I was recently curious about how the heart gets the oxygen depleted blood back to the heart. Pumping blood out made sense to me, but the return path was less obvious.

So I asked chatgpt whether the heart sucks in the blood from veins.

It told me that the heart does not suck in the blood, it creates a negative pressure zone that causes the blood to flow into it ... :facepalm:

Sure, my language was non-technical/imprecise, but I bet if I asked a cardiologist about this they would have said something like "That's not the language I would have used, but basically."

I don't know why, but lately I've been getting a lot of cases where these models contradicts themself even within the same response. I'm working out a lot (debating a triathlon) and it told me to swim and do upper body weight lifting on the same day to "avoid working out the same muscle group in the same day". Similarly it told me to run and do leg workouts on the same day.

> i do like it as a bit of a glorified google, but looking at what code it outputs my confidence it its findings lessens every prompt

I'm having the exact same reaction. I'm finding they are still more useful than google, even with an error rate close to 70%, but I am quickly learning that you can't trust anything they output and should double check everything.

While it's true that total net energy is what ultimately matters, the article points out that 99% of the energy that goes towards the lasers is wasted. So it seems like a logical next milestone.

I don't necessarily disagree. However, I do think that people spend a lot of time on things that don't actually matter that much in the grand scheme.

I'm not saying that people shouldn't be doing tickets that have been assigned to them or whatever, but I am saying that if people took 30 minutes to step back and look at the big picture objectives more often - or if their managers spent more time clearly communicating such things - they'd stop wasting a lot of time on things that seem important in the very myopic context of the task they just completed.

My takeaway from the article was that "too busy" really means "spending too much time on things that don't actually matter." Or perhaps more concretely, being too inefficient with your time.

Not OP, but I give myself a little reward. Specifically, I "X" out the task on my daily task list. I take this so far as to add items I just completed to my list just so that I can mark them off.

It's stupid, but it works. At least for me. I think it comes down to 2 different types of positive reinforcement:

1. It feels good to mark a task done. 2. It feels good to look at a list of all of the things I did that day, even if they were the size of taking out the trash.

The vast majority of people take the standard deduction, so offering a "here's what we think you owe, but if you disagree feel free to do the full return" form would be a huge efficiency gain.

Your comment seems like a prime case of perfect being the enemy of good.

The only time "tests in a separate repo" makes sense to me is if they are truly cross-functional end to end tests that exercise several systems.

Those tests should be as small as possible to verify that everything is still wired together correctly.

Everything else should be either unit tests or narrow integration tests between a small handful of components. And as you said, they should live in the repository of the software they test.

I'm not saying that there aren't potential problems, but warmer water coming off of power plants in Florida has acted as a bit of a manatee sanctuary. So it's not a guaranteed bad thing.

It's actually a bit of a problem now that the power plants are starting to shut down.

I would say that any sense of sane immigration reform is completely unrealistic right now.

By "sane" I specifically mean "acknowledges the shortcomings of the current system, at the same time as we acknowledge our dependence on foreign labor"

This article has been widely discredited. The author of the paper says they are misrepresenting the research.

I'm on mobile or I'd track down more links, but it was pretty easy for me to find several articles about how this is bad science reporting.

> More protection in schools could be a starting point to address these awful events.

The evidence in this area shows that increased police presence in schools does not reduce the amount of school shootings, but does increase the number of students arrested.

> Now I tend to view fashionable office supplies as productivity fetish items. It's easy to geek out on that stuff, but does a better notebook make me more productive? Seems to make me less productive, if history is an indicator.

I agree with you 95%. This comment is really just wanting to explain that 5%.

I have found that a little extra money goes a long way, and that a lot of money doesn't ever go far enough.

My bullet journal "daily caries" are:

* Apica CD 5mm grid notebook - $14.00 (one per year)

* Pilot Metropolitan fountain pen - $17.00 (one time purchase)

* Disposable black refills for the fountain pen - $5.00 per 20 (maybe twice a year)

In the realm of fancy pens/notebooks these are pretty cheap, but I really enjoy them. I feel like they are at a very nice sweet spot where they're cheap enough that I could lose them, but not "too good to use".

Maybe I'm lying to myself, but I feel like I journal more often because of how much I like them. It's just nice to use nice things.

I've been using YNAB since March 2014. I started doing manual entry with YNAB4 and was an early adopter of YNAB5.

I manage my own personal budget as well a joint budget for myself and my fiance.

Here's my takeaway:

* The YNAB model to budgeting is how I want all future budgeting tools I use to work. They call the framework "The Four Rules" (https://www.youneedabudget.com/the-four-rules/) and they are a very pragmatic way to think about budgeting.

* Specifically, I like to be able to have my budget cover multiple months into the future. I have fairly bursty and somewhat unpredictable income. I like to have a reserve of 6 months of expenses covered just to make sure that I can handle any ebb and flow of my income.

* I have successfully convinced my partner to use YNAB and they find it valuable. It really is super useful software that is pretty straight forward to use and that makes budgeting very quick and easy.

* Sharing budgets with a partner doesn't really work the way you'd want it to. You would need to share a single set of credentials, and there isn't really any fine grained access controls.

* YNAB has been raising their prices lately, and I think it's reasonable to assume that they are going to be raising them again in the future. I am not convinced that I, personally, am getting value out of the things they say they are improving. While I have a lot of my financial history with them, I'm definitely investigating competitors to see if they would fit my needs. So far, none have but I'm going to keep looking because honestly I'm not sure YNAB is worth $100/yr ($200/yr between my partner and I is fucking crazy).

Overall, would I recommend YNAB? Yeah, probably. I would bet that if you haven't been budgeting before and started using YNAB at the current price that you would probably make at least $100 worth of better financial decisions in the first year. But there's a huge asterisk next to the price.

I remember paying $30 for YNAB4 and being happy with it. They introduced the SaaS version that would sync to import your transactions at $50/yr and I remember thinking that was kinda pricy. You could always import the transactions from your bank by downloading the Quicken files, but I understand they need a subscription model to sustain an actual business around the product.

I am not convinced that the recent price hikes have been justified by an increase in the value of the product.

I think you drastically over-estimate what percentage of income the rich spend on luxury goods. People don't stay rich by buying things.

I consider myself pretty high income. If I was just taxed on consumption, I would bet I'd pay probably half as much tax as I do now.

True, but this source is carbon neutral.

Granted, we need to be carbon negative but it could still be used for some of portion of existing supply that is carbon positive.

The carbon byproduct is essentially coke, and coke already has a lot of industrial uses.

> It is easier to right than to read.

I just wanted to point out that I found that particular error really funny given the context.

> It’s a huge pity that the state of the art in modern troll combat is behind NDAs.

I mean... do _you_ have any ideas about how to fix this sort of thing that would survive being published for the world to see?

I don't mean to offend you or anything, I just want to point out that the second you go public with your rules about how these things are detected, the people you are targeting will adjust their behavior to evade them.

I think that the secrecy is unfortunately a hard requirement until perhaps we could all coordinate into a global "behavioral score" system. And to be honest, that sort of shit is terrifying, so we should probably never do it.

Seiko's "spring drive" is a pretty cool innovation, though it's not purely mechanical.

I think at the very core of the issue is that mechanical watches are really art pieces at this point. Quartz watches are just cheaper and more reliable. So, if you wanting a watch for the pure utility of it all that's what you should be going for.

Your examples seem like cases that can easily be handled by a checking account.

> Fundamentally, I should not have to explain why I would desire immediate access to my own cash reserves at a moment's notice to excuse broken financial infrastructure.

Yes, if you are investing in less-liquid assets to get a better RoI then you absolutely do. If you don't like the terms then you are free to keep your cash in your checking account.

If you're buying a classic car with funds directly from your emergency fund, then more power to you I guess but maybe you should be less impulsive with money set aside for emergencies.

Personally, if I'm expecting to make a large cash purchase I have more than a few days notice.

> I have had to come up with a dollar amount worth several months of expenses on very short notice (same day, life is unpredictable).

That seems like a perfect use case for using a credit card to cover the expense and then pay yourself back when your money moves out of the savings account.

I have trouble imagining a case outside of a hostage situation where you would need access to your emergency fund same day.

They built a messaging platform that could be used by litterally anyone to spread any message, and have done a pretty poor job of preventing its use by outside aggitators.

That's definitely a tetanus filled rusty playground if I ever heard of it.

Well, usually this comes from written statements right after the event right? It's not like there's a several week gap between the event and the report.... right?

Is that really much worse than what advertisers are paying?

I'm only kind of kidding.

Because a corporation should not be considered "effectively a person".

Corporations are made up of people, yes, but giving them personhood is a pretty dangerous idea. Should they get to vote? Obviously, the answer has to be "no" or else people will register companies to rig elections.

If they can't vote, are they really people?