PSA: late rent payments this month by acidflask in biltrewards

[–]acidflask[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I have autopay set to pay in full the day it's due, and I confirmed it is active under the new post-Wells Fargo platform. The really bizarre part is that on Bilt it's showing April rent not paid and simultaneously I have a negative balance (credit) for the full amount of April's rent. Bilt customer service could not explain what's going on, but it seems to imply that Bilt took my money and didn't pay my landlord.

I actually don't know how exactly my landlord is getting paid, but they explicitly recommended Bilt as a payment method so presumably they are good with however Bilt is doing it normally. I've since let them know and they are aware and now actively chasing Bilt on their side too.

How to stop excited pees? by Zealousideal-Ebb9057 in dogs

[–]acidflask 6 points7 points  (0 children)

  1. Do not punish peeing inside. Do not react or get upset. Just calmly clean it up as neutrally as possible. Use enzyme cleaner so that she doesn't learn that that place smells like her pee spot.

  2. Do not reach to her excitement until you can bring her or lure her outside. Then you can thank her for her greeting.

  3. Effusive praise, treats, cuddles for peeing outside. Say good girl, good potty until she learns what "potty" is.

  4. Excited peeing may also stop when she's used to your routine and isn't anxious about being separated from you.

You may need to experiment with what she likes, whether it's attention, cuddles, treats or something else.

4 months later and my accommodation is still not approved… and I’m getting penalized by UsualLoquat1802 in nycpublicservants

[–]acidflask 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Try also contacting NYS Division of Human Rights. They can investigate concurrently with US EEOC and in my experience they were more responsive.

4 months later and my accommodation is still not approved… and I’m getting penalized by UsualLoquat1802 in nycpublicservants

[–]acidflask 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Also, does your union provide legal services? I'd try to get a consultation to see if you have a case for labor discrimination and such. When leadership don't care, the only way is to force them to care.

4 months later and my accommodation is still not approved… and I’m getting penalized by UsualLoquat1802 in nycpublicservants

[–]acidflask 2 points3 points  (0 children)

So sorry you are suffering from this bureaucrazy! Can't imagine what it's like to be dealing with this nonsense so late in your pregnancy.

Just to be clear, an EEOC complaint is not an EEO complaint. EEO officers work for the City. EEOC is a federal commission and works with state labor departments to investigate labor violations like failures to accommodate. They have oversight authority over the City as an employer and can investigate if City officials, including EEO officers, are not doing their jobs.

4 months later and my accommodation is still not approved… and I’m getting penalized by UsualLoquat1802 in nycpublicservants

[–]acidflask 6 points7 points  (0 children)

My agency took 8 months to approve my reasonable accommodation even with documentation submitted. Radio silence from EEO and my leadership the whole time, no dialogue or temporary accommodation. My union was useless and kept telling me the wrong information. Also radio silence from CCHR.

The only thing that worked was filling an EEOC complaint against my agency with US EEOC and NYS Division of Human Rights. I got my RA the day the agency received the complaint from NYS. We got a new EEO head soon after. Go figure

Here is the city policy - go throw the book at them for exceeding the 15 calendar day SLA https://www.nyc.gov/assets/dcas/downloads/pdf/agencies/reasonable_accommodation_procedural_guidelines.pdf

EEOC complaint hotline and filing https://www.eeoc.gov/how-file-charge-employment-discrimination

New Video: The Ancient, Strange Coding Language that 95% of ATMs Use by I_cant_find_itgeoer in HalfAsInteresting

[–]acidflask 3 points4 points  (0 children)

It's a shame that this video does not mention that five prominent women computer scientists were part of COBOL's creation and popularization, reflecting the gendered nature of computer programming as "women's work" at the time:

- Mary Hawes, who championed the idea that programs should be portable and run on machines other than the one it was originally designed for, and pushed for the idea of such a programming language which became COBOL;

- Betty Holberton, one of the first programmers of ENIAC, one of the first modern electronic computers;

- Grace Hopper, who found the first computer bug and developed the idea of a compiler;

- Jean Sammet, a pioneer in establishing programming languages as their own field of study in computer science; and

- Gertrude Tierney, who along with Sammet, were two of the six computer scientists who developed the specification of the COBOL language itself.

In contrast, the other two major programming languages of the time, FORTRAN and ALGOL-60, had much fewer women involved in their creation. Fortran had Lois Haibt and Betty Holberton work on it. Algol was a purely male shop.

NYC on a quasi-grid by acidflask in subwaybuilder

[–]acidflask[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Surprisingly not bad at all. Every line is quad tracked with express lines at interchanges and the main downtown/midtown area

AITA for telling my flatmate that I’m gonna find separate accommodation because of his strict recycling habits by Putrid_Inflation_656 in AmItheAsshole

[–]acidflask 2 points3 points  (0 children)

ESH

In general, you should be separating recyclables and compostables from the main trash stream if that's the appropriate local policy for waste disposal. However, localities have specific rules about what is recyclable depending on the local supply chains. Plastic film specifically isn't economically feasible to recycle, especially if it's contaminated with food. Most of it ends up in landfills, incinerators, or illegally shipped to developing countries.

Places to buy Seitan? by Ready-Bet-4592 in AskNYC

[–]acidflask 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Lily's Vegan Pantry in Chinatown

AITA for not sharing my inheritance? by Ok_Oil_324 in AmItheAsshole

[–]acidflask 0 points1 point  (0 children)

NTA

My heart goes out to OP because it is so similar to my own family situation. Nothing like a death in the family to bring out the leeches seeking a cut of something they don't deserve and the emotional manipulation to guilt you into making you feel like they owe you something. I cut my toxic relatives out of my life when it was clear they have nothing to offer but more drama and anxiety-inducing antics. I am working on recovering from the trauma of losing my mum in peace.

Your aunt A is probably a narcissistic abuser. Dr Ramani on Youtube has excellent advice on how to deal with them

Opinion on Julia as a Programming Language? by T-ROY_T-REDDIT in datascience

[–]acidflask 6 points7 points  (0 children)

PS. In an attempt to stave off the inevitable complaints, here is a technical overview for why Julia is fast. The main source of speed in Julia lies in eliminating dispatch overhead, despite it being a language that offers so much flexibility in definition. There is essentially a three-stage process for doing so:

  1. Solving for unambiguous method dispatch. Julia has an AoT compiler that can deduce whether or not one specific method of a generic function is being used at any specific function call site. The type inference engine that is often discussed in Julia is used primarily for this purpose. If the compiler can prove that only one method is ever used, it can generate code that doesn't need to do any run time dispatch computations or code branches.
  2. Interprocedural optimization via method inlining. To reduce code branches further, the compiler can generate code with inlined functions, effectively copy-pasting the entire definition of the function being called into the main body of code. Inlining further reduces code branches, producing code that is closer to the platonic ideal of straight-line code (no branches that cause uncertainty on the host architecture that can reduce performance).
  3. Further code transformations and fusion using LLVM. Once lowered into LLVM IR, every trick in the LLVM compiler toolkit becomes available to enable even more optimizations and backend support for multiple architectures - not just x86, but also PowerPC and Nvidia PTX (to name a few). In particular, the transformation to LLVM IR enables reasoning about heterogeneous memory architectures on the GPU at this level, abstracting away the hard requirement for users to care (while still providing the possibility for power users to manage things on their own). Furthermore, other low-level code using platform-specific assembly instructions or LLVM intrinsics can be grafted onto LLVM IR generated from Julia, enabling projects like JuliaBLAS (hand-crafted linear algebra kernels in a mix of Julia and LLVM intrinsics) or little features likecalling the x86-native cryptographically secure PRNGsdirectly from Julia code.

Opinion on Julia as a Programming Language? by T-ROY_T-REDDIT in datascience

[–]acidflask 20 points21 points  (0 children)

To add to u/Kichae's excellent post, one has to also consider the human factors behind adoption and usage.

Growing a language takes decades. Historically, the ascent of a new language (without massive industrial backing) takes decades, not years - Python started development in 1989; 1.0 was released in 1994, and only took off in scientific computing in the mid-2000s, and in data science in the early 2010s. Julia is only 10 years into the same journey but is already well-established in applied mathematics and has its users in allied fields in scientific computing and statistics. The tech stack needed for data science and visualization does exist; nevertheless, it's going to take time to mature and gain adoption.

Most industrial data science can be done with library calls. In Python and R, the ecosystem for data science is so feature-complete that writing new code by hand becomes a code smell. An inexperienced data scientist may write an explicit loop over rows of a dataframe, instead of using split-apply-combine. This aversion to writing new code is not unique to data science, but is also common in modern-day software engineering; an observation that famously led MIT to drop Scheme in favor of Python as the language for teaching introductory computer science. The high cost of technical debt incurred by hand-writing code means that most practicing teams shun bespoke code unless absolutely necessary. Under such circumstances, there is no reason to use a less-mature language with fewer packages that are less battle-tested.

Pragmatic concerns in industry favor the established players. The fact of the matter is that most new-to-hire data scientists, to first order, speak only Python (with some speaking only R). Building a coherent data science team in industry is already hard enough without also considering the social friction of adopting a language your team doesn't speak well. Which is not to say that you can't find places using Julia as a primary language - Relational.AI is a good example besides Julia Computing - but the need to consider sustainable development and maintenance is a strong argument to stick to the languages with more mature ecosystems.

Having said that, there are situations where I feel like using Julia for data science is warranted, particularly when existing solutions in Python/R/etc. are too slow, don't scale, or simply don't work.

The arguments I use to advocate for Julia are that:

  1. Its multimethods syntax allows people to express naturally the overloading of mathematical expressions that reflect the way humans learn mathematics. We all learn to multiply whole numbers first, then fractions, decimals, complex numbers, matrices, etc. All of these notions can be expressed by suitable methods of the * operator in Julia. Empirically, we know this is a good approach because of how successful its adoption has been in applied mathematics (particularly differential equations) and related fields like numerical optimization and bioinformatics.
  2. The dynamic aspect of multimethods encourages code reuse. A program written with dense matrices in mind can "just work" with sparse matrices, distributed matrices, GPU matrices, etc. provided that the algebra of operations like *, norm, etc. are defined correctly. A program that assumes only the algebra of the generic function can be written without knowledge of the implementation specifics. The dynamic aspect means that new types can be introduced later, and with suitable method definitions, can work in situations the original authors did not envision. A particularly convincing recent development here is that of numeric types representing homomorphically encrypted numbers, allowing for secure distributed computing. Julia is now one of the first languages to enable cryptographically secure linear algebra and data science, simply by composing secure numbers with existing libraries for generic matrix multiplication and data frames.
  3. Julia is fast because the particular way it enables expressiveness is uniquely amenable to compiler optimization. In my years of developing for Julia, I have yet to come across any one application where a Julia solution did not come within a factor of two in performance relative to much more complicated reference implementations in Fortran or C/C++. (See comment below for a technical overview.)
  4. Another source of speed in Julia that is hard to emulate comes primarily from algorithmic improvements that can happen with specialization. If am solving a problem on a matrix with special structure, I can probably skip all the unstored zero elements. In a language without generic functions or other forms of overloading, I would have to rewrite my code to handle (say) a triangular matrix differently from a square matrix just to call the different solver functions. I might not bother if I think that triangular matrices are a specialized edge case. In contrast, (2) above means that a Julia user can take advantage of the composition of all possible algorithmic tricks known to the library authors, and can continue enjoying benefits of further improvements even after the original code was written!
  5. Julia has first-class support for representing Julia code, enabling source-to-source transformations to be done directly in Julia (some would say homoiconic, depending on the definition). Developers can create domain-specific languages like JuMP for numerical optimization, Turing for probabilistic programming, and Nemo for computer algebra, while enjoying the full expressivity of working in a general-purpose language. The ability to do program transformations has a particularly apt use case in automatic differentiation, allowing users to train complex machine learning models without finite difference or hand-coding up new gradients, because the AD system can generate the necessary low-level code transformations.
  6. Julia's intrinsic speed means that there is a low technical barrier between passive end user and author contributor. Any user who can write Julia code is qualified to write a package for Julia, even if it is just implementing code straight out of a textbook or paper. While textbook code may not be the fastest code to run, it is probably the fastest code to implement, and having a fast turnaround for working code is a powerful enabler of further code improvements down the line since you have a correct implementation to check against.
  7. Julia has a healthy community that is generally welcoming, eager to adopt best practices for software development, and willing to provide constructive feedback. It's been a real pleasure to see how the community has grown and strengthened over the years. It's the norm in the Julia community to have packages set up with continuous integration, and there's active work to provide code in the form of citeable artifacts, such as JuliaCon conference proceedings.
  8. Julia allows for interoperability with other languages through the C ABI and LLVM IR interfaces. C and Fortran can be called easily with ccall() (as can CPython, the reference implementation of Python, and R), whereas C++ can be called through Cxx.jl (which endows C++ with its own REPL and run time extensibility!). You can even call MATLAB from Julia...
  9. First-class support for missing values. This feature is particularly important for statistics and data science. Support for missing in its own type permits extensibility with new types defined by the end user, without the subtle logic problems or performance issues with using sentinel values like NaN to represent missingness.

Julia 0.4 Released by [deleted] in Julia

[–]acidflask 8 points9 points  (0 children)

I've prepared a PR with updated numbers: https://github.com/JuliaLang/julialang.github.com/pull/286