sigmaml

Hello Shawn!

I have been "hear"ing people out, without trying to "help", for over two decades.

In case you wish to talk to me, please mail me: Gmail sigma.ml.

The GP probably meant "unclear".

I strongly second this. In my own experience of about 30 years, I have seen this method to work almost always.

Did you mean to say "in addition to" rather than "instead of"?

If yes, then the answer is: sometimes, depending on the other factors.

You parsed it incorrectly. It is the other way, in fact.

Several times, people do very interesting personal projects, but fail to perform at the same level at work. That gives a clue that it may have been an unsuitable work environment that impeded their performance. It could also be a difference pertaining to their orientation to structured vs. unstructured working conditions. It could be related to explicit objectives with tight deadlines vs. exploratory development with open deadlines. And, more.

Knowing what my work environment is, I usually could understand their medium-to-long term fitness.

Hope this clarifies what I meant.

When I interview people, I ask them to describe one of their difficult work projects. I also ask them if they ever developed anything just for fun. I take their responses to both the questions into account when making a decision on taking them to the next round.

> We have no way of telling a dynamic universe apart from a static one where we're all just suspended in a single unchanging moment.

I am curious to know why you think so. What would you say about repeatably observable causality, in that case?

> Tangentially, this induces an obvious concern about cheat and cheat-detection arms races.

This exists in every domain, and is - perhaps - inevitable. Look at what SEO has done to web search.

Here is my quick list.

- Linux + GNU: My servers would never have been the same without them.

- Emacs: So many varied use cases over the years. I can type in Telugu (my mother tongue) and Devanagari so seamlessly ... bliss!

- LaTeX: From papers to books to presentations.

- Helix: A very recent discovery that replaced Vim for me in just a week!

- Kitty terminal: I no longer use GNU screen or tmux locally.

- Go, Ruby, Python: They have been paying my bills for so long.

- KDE: The other half of the Linux spirit!

- ffmpeg: Such a boon!

- Homebrew: So convenient.

A quick question.

Have you also included:

  - storage costs (equivalent of EBS, S3 and Glacier) and
  - cost of analytics pipelines (equivalent of EMR, Athena, SageMaker, ...)

in the above price comparison?

Would you have some insights there? Thanks.

Firstly, not many kids and young adults are capable of assessing and understanding what they "truly want".

Secondly, someone "truly wanting" something does not always make that "something" good or correct. When I was an adolescent myself, there were several things that I "truly wanted", which would have led me down paths of ruin.

Thirdly, engaging the adolescent / young adult in productive ways - that don't necessarily need computers - is one thing that I have seen to be demonstrably beneficial. This involves a certain degree of interaction with them and doing things together.

All the best!

1. This kind of pagination can be done for any key as long as its data type admits total ordering.

2. The WHERE condition typically uses `>` or `<`, so it doesn't fail even when that record is deleted before the next client request referring to it.

You appear to be referring to a database cursor.

It is quite simple to implement pagination in the application layer using a unique record identifier (primary key or ULID or ...) as an anchor for the navigation. From that unique ID, we can then fetch the previous `n` or the next `n` records, depending on the direction of the navigation.

This way, the server remains stateless, since the anchor (possibly sent as an encoded / obfuscated token, which can include some other parameters such as page size) is supplied by the client with each pagination request.

Unless I am missing something in your argument.

I made a crude proposal for generics in 2011[1], in which I proposed a pair of concepts ("storage class" and "type class") that are somewhat similar to the concept of this "gcshape".

I proposed it as a compromise between full monomorphisation and runtime code generation.

[1] http://oneofmanyworlds.blogspot.com/2011/11/draft-2-of-propo...

Fascinating! Thanks for the visualisation!

This view is probably too US-centric. There is a lot of the world (including developed world), where people get around everyday without relying on cars for everything.

I do not negate your point that marketing has a strong component of creating a need where there isn't one. But, its success in doing so relies on a strong combination of cultural, economic and political backgrounds.

Highly expressive type systems can lead people to as much design hell as does deep OOP. I have seen and experienced this in at least a couple of projects.

The only difference is: instead of brittle hierarchies, we get ossified compositions (depending on how much nominal vs structural typing happens).

We, of course, agree that we are quite some distance from having advanced type systems brought to day-to-day industrial programming.

Yes, they do.

I frequently research historical topics on India, and I get no results or single digit number of results.

That applies to our society at large, as well.

As for Wikipedia itself, I stopped contributing a few years ago, since I did not have the energy and the time needed to fight the systemic bias that the editors had (and have) on a variety of topics.

Also, 2021 was probably the first year in which I did not donate to Wikipedia.

Hey Steve!

Io is a beautiful language that I got interested in about the time I was learning Ruby (2004 perhaps).

Also, for a few years, your pages were the top sources of information on Objective C!

Thanks for all the work!

My submission did violate the conditions. I was just recollecting what happened; it is not a complaint.

I am at variance with those conditions, though. I refer to the benchmarks suite itself, broadly. When programs dip into GMP, PCRE, etc., we are no longer comparing the speeds of the different language implementations per se. Now, they are mixed with FFI speeds of those implementations, the choices of the foreign language libraries/algorithms, etc..

In the same vein, as you remark in your second footnote, for a fair comparison, the same algorithm should be used in all programs. That will shed light on the strengths and weaknesses of the different language implementations better. I don't intend to say that the current system is useless; I am saying that using the same set of algorithms is likely to be more illustrative.

Several (about 10) years ago, I submitted essentially the same program. It was one of the fastest of all the implementations across all the languages.

However, Isaac rejected it, saying it violated the conditions.

Not GP, but in India (where I am from), Google Workspace is fairly common in SMBs.

Also: https://www.statista.com/statistics/961105/japan-market-shar...

That report seems to indicate that Google Workspace is actually the leader even in the US!

This can happen with any company!

I had Apple lock me out of iTunes, App Store, Mac Store, ... - for an entire month, if not more - alleging that I spammed others with my iMessage account.

The fact is that I never, ever used iMessage! I used only WhatsApp, Telegram and SMS.

In every support call, I would hear them say the same thing. I would tell them that I never used iMessage, let alone spam others. But, they would say, some users marked your iMessage account as spamming. I would ask them for proof, with iMessage records; they would say they cannot disclose that!

After that experience, I simply moved off iPhone to a Pixel.

I still have an MBP for work purposes, but I needed to create a different AppleID.

Summary: This can happen with any company!

Thanks for all the great work on both 'ecryptfs' and 'fs-crypt'!

Evidently, it depends on multiple factors.

My son's school uses Google Meet for online classes. 2 instructors + 36 students per section. All participants have their videos switched on. Even when the bandwidth fluctuates, we haven't noticed issues. In particular, Meet degrades well: audio continues to be high quality, with video becoming grainy or getting suspended. But, that is pretty rare. And, slide shows are never a problem.