Recent submissions

Comment · 9 months ago
He's writing from a certain time, place, and culture, in reference to the teas that were available to him at that time. I'm not sure what you're arguing - that black tea didn't subjectively make him feel wiser, braver or more optimistic? And his tips for making black tea are perfectly sound.

If I remember correctly, he actually wrote that essay because there was a world event that his compatriots were getting outraged about, and this was his way of being provocative by not covering it. But I may have that wrong.

Comment · 1 year ago
I've climbed routes in ichinokura a few times. It is impressive, and some of them are quite poorly protected. But 800 climbers seems like an exceedingly high number, and that report seems quite vague and unsubstantiated, even if it does come from the government. So I remain sceptical.
Comment · 1 year ago
This is a creepy station, green filters notwithstanding. The article repeats this statement that I've seen elsewhere and always found pretty questionable - that 800 people have died on Tanigawa. I've no idea where this data comes from but it seems very unlikely. If you just want to get to the top by the simplest route then it's a non-technical day hike up a not-very-high mountain. It's also a multi-pitch rock climbing area but I'd struggle to imagine that 800 rock climbers have killed themselves there over the past 100 or so years.
Comment · 1 year ago
I've been wondering about this for some time. My initial assumption was that would be that LLMs will ultimately be the death of typed languages, because type systems are there to help programmers not make obvious mistakes, and near-perfect LLMs would almost never make obvious mistakes. So in a world of near-perfect LLMs, a type system is just adding pointless overhead.

In this current world of quite imperfect LLMs, I agree with the OP, though. I also wonder whether, even if LLMs improve, we will be able to use type systems not exactly for their original purpose but more as a way of establishing that the generated code is really doing what we want it to, something similar to formal verification.

Comment · 2 years ago
How should they be funded, for you to consider them impartial?
Comment · 2 years ago
I agree. If Helix had a client/server model like Kakoune, I'd move to it right away.
Comment · 2 years ago
I agree. I think that these fancy visuals are not the right way to appeal to the target user base. I just want to read some text.
Comment · 2 years ago
I think that this does fill a niche. You can still compile to bash outside of this austere environment, and run the scripts within it. And python isn't very ergonomic for running external shell commands (or, say accessing environment variables), the syntax for doing so in amber looks much neater.
Comment · 2 years ago
The people directly managing the investment are unlikely to also be holding REITs, so your assumption is valid. I think it's basically that: - The people who care about company profit are the asset managers, who will tend to implement their ideas by selling/buying shares, rather than trying to encourage a given company's management towards better practice - Corporate governance itself is therefore usually outsourced to proxy voting companies, who are quite conservatively-minded (and spread quite thin) and so won't tend to micro-manage, they'll assume that profit maximization is the job of management - The only thing the proxy voting companies will tend to have a say on is ESG-related, and WFH doesn't really fit into that
Comment · 2 years ago
I'm using a System76 Lemur pro. I've had it more than two years and I only have good things to say about it, some of which are: - The battery life started off as spectacular and is still not bad, I get about 5 hours out of it for general use, including compiling code - When it arrived it had a dead pixel in the middle of the screen. They replaced it in a very low-fuss way, sending the replacement immediately (before I'd sent back the original, so that I didn't have any downtime) - The spec is well-suited for coding/general linux work. It doesn't have a fancy graphics card or a hi-res screen, but I don't want those things,they add weight and cost and decrease battery life. - I installed NixOS from the get-go so didn't ever experiment with PopOS so nothing really to say there
Comment · 3 years ago
I think this is exactly right. Function names actually fulfil the role of documentation really well. I personally tend to make them long and quite verbose, like

`def start_the_car_and_accelerate`

Comment · 3 years ago
I'm sure that somebody has thought this through more fully than myself, but the impression I have is that for software, the benevolent dictator model works best. Python and Javascript occupy adjacent places in the programming language firmament, but the Python language (with van Rossum having fairly tight control over it), although bloating somewhat over time, has still ended up quite a lot more elegant than Javascript.
Comment · 4 years ago
These are still pretty rare, and there's always a member of staff present, usually at the counter right next to the self-checkout till.
Comment · 4 years ago
I also am quite neurotic about version control, updates etc and if you're prepared to climb up a fairly steep learning curve, I'd recommend Nix/NixOS. It's a much more robust and comprehensive solution than Docker. Docker is not as good a technology as it should be in this use case, and it does stuff like cacheing CMD instructions in the Dockerfile based on their value as a string (rather than the result of the command). This can and does lead to Docker images changing between builds even when the Dockerfile itself has not changed.
Comment · 4 years ago
Most of the time with configuration files, you want to be able to do at least basic validation on the config without having to run the whole piece of software. Python has no native typing, so there's nothing to stop the user from creating a configuration file where, for example, they have set a field that is intended to specify a port number, as a string. This error will become obvious when you run the software (and it presumably fails some way in) but for some use cases this is too late. With dhall you can specify that the field for the port number needs to not just be an integer, but be a natural number, so you're able to catch plenty of config errors nice and early, and can go some way to validating the config in isolation from the software it's intended to be used for.

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