elvinyung

Joined 12 years ago

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2,133
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553
Member since
Aug 12
"But Thamus replied, 'Most ingenious Theuth, one [person] has the ability to beget arts, but the ability to judge of their usefulness or harmfulness to their users belongs to another; and now you [...] have been led by your affection to ascribe to them a power the opposite of that which they really possess.'"

-- Plato, Phaedrus

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Comment · 6 days ago
which andy are you? :p
Comment · 2 years ago
How was the beef stew?
Comment · 3 years ago
https://calpaterson.com/bank-python.html

> One of things that tends to boggle programmer brains is while most software dealing with money uses multiple-precision numbers to make sure the pennies are accurate, financial modelling uses floats instead. This is because clients generally do not ring up about pennies.

Comment · 4 years ago
That doesn't seem mutually exclusive with the fact that the oldest service is written in the oldest-used language.
Comment · 5 years ago
I learned about Paolo Soleri from William Gibson's Count Zero (sequel to the much more well-known Neuromancer). Gibson always had a knack for foreseeing not just the automobile, but also the traffic jam:

> But today’s episode kept veering weirdly away from Michele’s frantically complex romantic entanglements, which Bobby had anyway never bothered to keep track of, and jerking itself into detailed socioarchitectural descriptions of Soleri-style mincome arcologies. Some of the detail, even to Bobby, seemed suspect; he doubted, for instance, that there really were entire levels devoted to the sale of ice-blue shaved-velour lounge suites with diamond-buckled knees, or that there were other levels, perpetually dark, inhabited exclusively by starving babies. This last, he seemed to recall, had been an article of faith to Marsha, who regarded the Projects with superstitious horror, as though they were some looming vertical hell to which she might one day be forced to ascend.

> Other segments of the jack-dream reminded him of the Knowledge channel Sense/Net piped in free with every stim subscription; there were elaborate animated diagrams of the Projects’ interior structure, and droning lectures in voice-over on the life-styles of various types of residents. These, when he was able to focus on them, seemed even less convincing than the flashes of ice-blue velour and feral babies creeping silently through the dark. He watched a cheerful young mother slice pizza with a huge industrial waterknife in the kitchen corner of a spotless one-room. An entire wall opened onto a shallow balcony and a rectangle of cartoon-blue sky.

Comment · 5 years ago
Would you say the same about a house? A car?

You might say that buying a house on credit isn't frivolous but a pair of shoes on credit is, but where do you draw the line in the middle?

(Disclaimer: I work at Square, but I am otherwise completely uninvolved with this acquisition or product area.)

Comment · 6 years ago
Maybe "he" is short for "Helios" :-)
Comment · 6 years ago
I guess the word "magic" is cursed. General Magic, GetMagic.com, and now this (not that we didn't see it coming)...
Comment · 6 years ago
Needs a (2015).
Comment · 6 years ago
Note that as you mentioned since most shops in Japan specialize in a specific type of soup (i.e. the only differentiator is the tare and the toppings), it might be more useful to familiarize oneself with the characteristics some of the more common regional styles. For example, "Hakata-style" ramen generally describes a creamy tonkotsu soup, "Kitakata-style" is generally a chintan with shoyu tare and hand kneaded "temomi" noodles, Yokohama "iekei" generally tends to be a paitan with shoyu tare, Sapporo ramen is generally a pork soup with miso tare, etc.

This is not to say that e.g. Sapporo only has Sapporo-style ramen or Fukuoka only has Hakata-style ramen, but the names describe where the style is perceived to have originated from.

The water is slightly muddied (no pun intended...) by techniques like "double soups", i.e. mixing multiple soups in the same bowl. In some cases a chintan might be mixed with a paitan, etc.

Comment · 6 years ago
Remember all that stuff about the Cayce Pollard Units :P
Comment · 7 years ago
I also like this analysis of general high infrastructure costs in America: https://pedestrianobservations.com/2019/03/03/why-american-c...

This tidbit is particularly infuriating:

> In California, the problem is, in two words, Tutor-Perini. This contractor underbids and then does shoddy work requiring change orders, litigated to the maximum. Ron Tutor’s dishonesty is well-known and goes back decades: in 1992 Los Angeles’s then-mayor Tom Bradley called him the change order king. And yet, he keeps getting contracts, all of which have large cost overruns, going over the amount the state or city would have paid had it awarded the contract to the second lowest bidder. In San Francisco, cost overrun battles involving Tutor-Perini led to a 40% cost overrun. This process repeated for high-speed rail: Tutor submitted lowest but technically worst bid, got the contract as price was weighted too high, and then demanded expensive changes. It speaks to California’s poor oversight of contractors that Tutor remains a contractor in good standing and has not been prosecuted for fraud.

Edit: oh, wait, just realized this is from the same blog, so the same body of work.

Comment · 7 years ago

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