speedplane

This is a nice idea, but it's empty. There were widely reported ICE operations in Minnesota over the past few days, yet it's blank on the map. Seems like a fun vibe-code project, but not useful w/o data.

Legal-tech: Using AI to help attorneys bill flat-rate instead of hourly. It's data intensive, but possible if you go through their old time entries and tell them the flat-rate price of all of their hourly work. 93% of attorneys bill hourly, primarily b/c they don't have any sense of the cost of the upcoming work. DM me if you want to work on these problems.

Saw both the movie and the real thing multiple times. Subject of numerous a heist fantasy… even today though, the MTA guys collecting money from the machines are escorted by NYPD conspicuously showing their firearms while giving you the eye. The attitude remains.

The question is whether consciousness is emergent from large enough models, or whether it’ll be something we’ll need to design/build.

“Power is not a material possession that can be given, it is the ability to act. Power must be taken, it is never given.”

“‘This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing Government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it, or their revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow it.’ Abraham Lincoln”

> Instead, we should be using game-style "data oriented programming" a.k.a. "column databases" for a much higher performance.

This makes logical sense, but I don’t buy it in practice. Most of the heavy data reads are handled by databases, which do optimize for this stuff. I just doubt that, in most software, a significant amount of software performance issues are a result of poor memory alignment of data structures.

> I don't think that being able to replace a library at runtime is a useful enough feature to justify the high maintenance cost of shared libraries.

We’re moving to a world where every program is containerized or sandboxed. There is no more real “sharing” of libraries, everything gets “statically linked” in a Docker image anyway.

> Can someone explain the value of such a list, am I missing something?

You can glean information about your competitors’ usage and advertising, which can help you optimize your own app’s advertising spend.

Scale it

You can do Unicode in Python 2. You can do Unicode faster and easier in Python 3. But by gaining that ability, they set the existing community back by 10 years.

> There are literally savings accounts with interest rate over my mortgage interest, meaning there is a zero risk arbitrage opportunity.

Many utilities give an 8-9% interest rate on bonds, with very little risk (Comcast isn't going bankrupt soon). That said, there's no such thing as zero-risk arbitrage.

> Wealth inequality is not a problem in itself. Poverty or theft is.

Inequality leads to power centers. Power centers lead to systemic corruption. Systemic corruption is a problem.

So yes, extreme inequality is itself a problem.

> It is often best to avoid non-ASCII characters in source code. ... >> Depends of the language. In Python 3, files are expected to be utf8 by default, and you can change that by adding a "# coding: <charset>" header.

It's interesting that many languages avoid unicode and non-ASCII text, yet they make assumptions about file and directory structures about the underlying system. It's as if interpreting directory and file system structures is "okay", but interpreting file formats is not.

> In fact, it's one of the reasons it was a breaking release in the first place, and being able to put non-ASCII characters in strings and comments in my source code are a huge plus.

Sorry, but as a Python dev that went from 2 to 3, yes native unicode features are nice, but no, it was not worth breaking two decades of existing code.

> they've been heralding the death of Moore's law since he started and that the "one trick ponies" just keep coming. He says he doesn't doubt that they will continue.

The situation is clearly far worse than what you suggest. Back in the 1990s and early 2000s, apparent computer performance was doubling roughly every two years. Your shiny new desktop was obsolete in 24 months.

Today, we're lucky to get a 15% gain in two years. The "one-trick ponies" help narrow the "apparent performance" gap, but by definition, are implemented out of desperation. They aren't enough to keep Moore's law alive (it's already dead), and their very existence is evidence of the death of Moore's law.

> We should all be happy for the millions of people that didn't starve to death, and for the millions who didn't have to walk their children off of cliffs or have the family hug a grenade.

Before we thank ourselves for all the lives we "saved", we should remember all of those that died in the name of an unnecessary exercise in human greed and cruelty.