chikere232

It's certainly a skill to launch quickly at that scale. There are plenty of bureaucratically managed slowly launched duds too

I hate meta with a passion, but I don't deny they have some great infrastructure and engineers to enable the bad things they do to the world

Last year's Advent of Code had a task that was NP complete and lacked good well known approximation algorithms. I almost gave up on it when I realised as that feels impossible

In practice the data was well behaved enough and small enough that it was very doable.

It would be most fair to hash the names first, especially for this paper

I imagine one reason people have a hard time with the monty hall problem is that they have learnt a rule that seems to fit but really doesn't. A person not trained at all in math might do better as they haven't learnt that rule.

There's probably a name for that cognitive bias, but I don't know it.

"Probably beyond help" means they're not going to change their opinions no matter what, so trying to find phrasing that helps change their opinions is a waste of time.

Being a musk supporter in this day and age isn't a simple difference in opinion, unless you're a good person who's been living under a rock, in which case a mention of musk being pretty awful could actually help you.

I think there are lots of sort of tuned out but generally nice people who might shy away from buying a tesla if the perfidity of Musk is mentioned whenever tesla is discussed.

The people who like Musk are probably beyond help

It's pretty useful to remind people that buying a tesla is supporting Musk.

Singletons are just globals for people who have learnt "globals are bad" but lack a deeper understanding

With tesla, the bad apple is in charge

yeah, it follows their documentation, it's just a bad idea.

A lot of the things they break are pretty minor cleanups and it seems they could easily not have broken things. Many other languages, even compiled languages where the explosions happen at compilation, are much more careful about these things. For a dynamic language like python it's an especially bad idea.

That's fair. Too many languages and frameworks are all too happy to break things for pointless cleanups or renames.

Python for example makes breaking changes in minor releases and seems to think it's fine, even though it's especially bad for a language where you might only find that out runtime

Often some bits are automatable, or some manual steps are verifiable, and then suddenly it's a do something script

When I do this I keep some persistent state so I can interrupt it, e.g. if the thing is a yearly task I run it like `./do-the-thing.sh 2025`, and make a 2025 dir where I keep state on how far I've gotten

So if you OK the first step, I can touch a 2025/first-step file. If the script crashes or is interrupted and rerun, it can check for that file and skip the first step

If something has changed so the automation doesn't work, it's nice to be able to crash out without losing state, fix the script and rerun.

I usually have the script tell me just the next manual step and then exit, because that frees the terminal up for me to do other things. I can use the command history to rerun the script easily

I do this for some yearly tax stuff, as the big issue for me is that it was a year since I did it last and getting started with a complex and boring thing is hard

So I built a script that tells me what the first step is. When it's done I run the script again and it tells me what to do next. Often the first few steps are "download this CSV from the bank" so the script can detect I've done than and go directly to the next step when I rerun the script

The reason I have a script I rerun rather than a "press enter to continue" is because it then only keeps persistent state, and I can easily do a bit every day until done

A common pattern is

    if ! [[ -e checked-all-the-receipts ]]; then
         echo "check that the receipts match the list of expenses, then"
         echo "  touch checked-all-the-receipts"
         exit 0
    fi

Then over time, I have automated some parts and added some checks. E.g. when I have downloaded a CSV I can check that the format looks right before considering the step done. I've added some autogeneration of documents I need, built a python script to add up transactions and check the that the totals match etc

It just means it's in the best shape of any of the languages in it's domain