skeeter2020

"in academics the in-fighting is so vicious because the stakes are so low" - interesting to see what happens now that that stakes are just democracy and an entire country!

which is why one or more gravitate to academic administrator, eventually become a professional politician and we're right back to where we started. In the meantime either something exciting or absolutely nothing might happen!

and IME the #1 rule for us is work in a profit center, not a cost center. When you're cutting there's a law of diminishing returns, but the floor is so incredibly low you don't want to be near it just to clear the blade.

>> I've started largely using this site in a read-only fashion. The SNR here now is too low and I'm too busy. Found my time better spent in more focused offline and online communities.

How's that going for you?

I have seen at least one example develop in real time. You typically spent years building before you had a platform, then lack the enthusiasm from senior leadership to invest the next 12-18 months with no new features and hard to quantify - maybe no - returns. Then you get displaced by newcomers who are "platform native"; what this really means is their engineering misteps haven't been discovered yet, or even if they guessed correctly the world has turned and made their previously correct solution now a failing one. And now we have something called "AI-native" that is going to solve this once and for all with some sort of magic, and you can't lead these companies unless you truly believe in the magic.

We shipped more code! We merged 5x faster! We spent more tokens!

>> Every time we sped up one step, work piled up at the next... we started going through the entire process of shipping software, one step at a time...

I feel like I'm being gaslit here. You can become CTO with this lack of business fundamentals, and a basic misunderstanding of systems engineering?

tangentially related - I remember my Dad bringing home a Vic-20, pecking in a sample program and then nothing but syntax errors, despite it being entered exactly the same as the printed manual. Turns out the number 0 and the letter O are not the same thing to a computer.

Why are you writing tests on the actual provider? IME these types of tests are slow, brittle and don't give you much value. Even if you get a true positive, what can you do about it?

Based on the ground you're treading I'd be careful with your casual use of "death sentence" when talking about something that is nothing of the sort, but behaviours that are only a few steps from the real thing.

>> but also given the insane behavior of the Trump administration, it seems like Instacart had no choice

That's a terrible attitude that's resulted in some of the worst behaviour of capitulation history has ever recorded. What will you call their "pragmatism" when your the target?

I find it kind of odd that you equate a small oligopoly of intermediaries gatekeeping information as "democratization". Similarly Google maybe made it easy to find for a while, but that was/is not democracy either.

>> I will take books...

and you can, without attacking the GP statement about their PERSONAL preference, or clumsily trying to tar them with some sort of pejorative NASCAR paintbrush.

My initial reaction as well. If you believe AI has made what you do irrelevant, change what you do. If you really want to do something different, stop playing the knowledge arms race game with a computer program. There has been "analog" LLM-like ventures (aka big, rich tech corporations) for a long time, yet they didn't previously solve all engineering problems; you can now use technology as a great equalizer, or change your focus to something AI can't even do if you don't want to play the game.

Maybe you're not actually solving a problem, but revisiting a solved problem? Maybe you need to pursue bigger problems, or stop playing this version of the game? How can the title be "Challenge is Gone", then the post be about how what you used to do is (you believe) no longer relevant, and you're not sure what's next - isn't this the answer you're looking for?

MY kids are now teenagers and stopped playing with lego years ago, but even when they were ALL about the lego it was a very different approach. They have a lot more than I ever did, and it was collect-assemble-display for the most part, compared to my childhood remix approach. I guess when you have a shark that's essentially two-pieces snapped together, or branded minifigs it dramatically cuts down on flexibility & imagination...

isn't this essentially a state broadcaster? You might get one decent show but the committee and bike shedding mostly gives you terrible niche programming that's unsustainable without massive subsidies - and most still show adverts.

>> It’ll increase your opportunities to let people know what OS you’re running by at least 10-fold.

Two types of people will benefit: 1. the genuine & naive who want to help but don't make much progress; 2. those who attended Harvard.

it's not hard to imagine Google stating "we're removing this opt-out path because next to no-one uses it, and it will help streamline Android, which will protect the children!"

it's maybe histronic, but definitely drives home their point

I'm in Alberta, Canada where energy is (at least for now!) cheap and plentiful. I'm with a community-owned energy marketer and pay 6 cents per kwh, and just of $3 per GJ. If we paid anywhere near your rates the seperation referendum would have turned out differently!

I thought they were a despot :)

it's not that they don't take it personally and actually feel the pain/ disgust / fear / <whatever>, it's that they hold the tenets of law as absolute and the most important part of the system. This definitely takes a particular type of person.

I find you get more space & amenities for the same price, but it's not much - if any - cheaper.

I recently used airbnb quite a bit in Newfoundland, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick and found quite a bit of that old vibe, ranging from a spare room in a young brother & sister's house, to more suite-style accomodation. I was very happy with all my stays, specifically the hosts who balanced privacy with friendly helpfulness.

yes, makes sense because bandwidth is less likely to be the bottleneck

Helps use all of the available bandwidth by not blocking (otherwise idle) worker threads waiting for data to arrive. Requests and processing are managed independently, so you essentially get better utilization & improved performance.

do you have not-big big data* that individuals or sub-teams/groups use? Lots of companies have centralized data <things> (bases, warehouses, lakes, swamps, etc) and runtime security is a challenging issue (i.e row-based security). If your audience measures their data in GB or MB, DuckDB can be an excellent way to punt on the security challenges and just provide them with ALL their data - maybe even locally - while they still get first-class DB tooling and performance (or even better than classic client-server). Example - old way: build a bunch of dimensions and facts for marketing, manage their access and permissions, produce reports, make sure you don't leak data they shouldn't see. new way: write (explore using AI) some extract/transforms from your SoT & create parquet files, use duckdb to serve that up to an individual or group's reporting solution or adhoc usage. IME that one-time investment is not that big and replaces a lifetime of scaling & access issues, or worrying about someone writing a query that doesn't join with the user table correctly!

* IME most companies don't actually have BIG data, but are talking about (at most) a few TB, which DuckDB is fine with.

isn't it widely accepted that supressed appetite (i.e. what makes glp work) is ONLY sustainable on the shots, and that you're on them for life?

this is not true; I do extended bikepacking trips nutrionally similar to the GP's experience and you feel amazing. Maybe your first time or the first day can be tough but the human body loves to move and consume. I think a good frame of mind is you're a high efficiency furnace pumping out the heat on a very cold day. but this machine actually heals & improves the more it's used!

I do agree that losing weight is easier at first with just eating less, but to play the advocate role: you need a gap of about 3500 calories to lose a pound, but there's a hard daily floor of zero calories. You need to eat less over a long period of time (ideally the rest of your life) and exercise (or medication more commonly) is what keeps you going.