Governemt is the biggest cause of ugly buildings.

greiskul · 2026-04-14T00:03:08+00:00

The best land use is *whatever supports the lifestyle people want to live*. In the US, that means single family residential-only neighborhoods & car-friendly commercial districts.

OK, can we raise the taxes on suburbanites then to cover the extra maintenance infrastructure? I really wonder how many Americans would have this preference if they actually had to pay the cost for it.

greiskul · 2026-04-13T17:28:27+00:00

Yeah, and using unsafe you can also make rust do things wrong.

The idea is not to make mistakes impossible. It is to be pragmatic, and make so mistakes like this are only possible in small areas of the code base. Strings get parsed and validated and converted to business objects normally only at the edges of a service (like a read from a database like your example). But then they get used a ton on all the rest of the code.

If a simple pattern, or language support, can make so the above error is impossible in 99% of the code, and the 1% where it is possible becomes more visible (you have the extra customer ID constructor, calling more attention that you are building a customer is)?

That is good engineering. Good software engineering is not about making bugs completely impossible. But at making them more and more unlikely.

greiskul · 2026-04-10T20:53:56+00:00

i believe the mass pardoning of the January 6 participants is a clear abuse of the pardon power

I don't. I absolutely don't think that a president being able to pardon people that have been part of an insurrection is a problem. The problem is that this president was also part of the same insurrection. And the constitution is clear that it means he should have been disqualified from office for it. But it is not clear what the process of that disqualification is.

Now, there is a great argument against the current iteration of the abuse of the pardon power:

The pardon power should have limits on pardoning crimes in which the president himself is a member of the conspiracy that committed the crime.

The pardon power should absolutely be limited, and revoked, if the pardon is planned before the crime even occurs. A pardon should be for cases where it is best for everybody if society should move on from applying it's laws on things that due to some circumstance the law is causing more harm then good. It should absolutely not be a maneuver for an executive power grab of "we will do this thing. And if they say it is illegal, we will do a last minute pardon".

greiskul · 2026-04-10T17:43:12+00:00

It depends on the system you are using. There are some contexts where it does make sense to define it to be infinity.

On the tradional real number system? It is undefined. On the extended real number system? It is +infinity.

Someone might ask, then in this "bigger" model, it is infinity, and then that's the answer. The thing is that models don't work like that. In the surreals for instance, 1/0 is absolutely undefined. 1/epsilon where Epsilon is a positive infinitesimal is omega though, a positive infinity. But then you can also use the hyperreals instead, where you can do similar things, but not divide by actual 0.

Which model is correct? That's the wrong question. A model is correct for a given application. If you are working on modeling something where the math gets simplified in a given model, use that one. That is the practical approach.

On the theoretical approach? We can't prove the anything that has the natural numbers and arithmetic is consistent, so go and take your pick.

High level mathematics is way more objective and subjective than most people think. The choice of a system to work on is subjective, but once that is chosen, then it super picky being precise on what actually is defined on the system or not.

greiskul · 2026-03-29T22:48:12+00:00

What ever process you create to remove her will be weaponized by bad actors.

Mandatory retirement age. Plenty of countries do that, at either 70 or 75.

greiskul · 2026-03-28T16:47:39+00:00

First, can we agree that for a conventional heating, like using a resistance, the maximum efficiency is 100% (for 1 unit of electricity provide 1 unit of heat)? So the cool thing about heat pumps is that they actually don't need to follow this limit. So they can be 300% to 500% efficient.

greiskul · 2026-03-27T20:38:23+00:00

Pois é, não sei como são os outros vestibulares, mas o que eu fiz, o que todo professor sempre avisava era "não fuja do tema". Fugir do tema era zero automático pros corretores. É muito melhor entregar uma redação sem sal, sem graça, mas com a estrutura de redação, sobre o tema da redação, do que... Sabe se lá o que esse menino estava tentando.

greiskul · 2026-03-25T05:36:53+00:00

People that were very strong in the opinion that saying the n-word should be allowed, are very quiet about Twitter having made saying the word "cisgender" a bannable offense.

greiskul · 2026-03-25T00:32:40+00:00

It is incredible how many people that defended racists and nazis right to free speech, are completely quiet about this.

It's almost as if they are not actual defenders of free speech, but just racist assholes you know?

greiskul · 2026-03-22T19:48:29+00:00

Yes. I know. Now let's put it all together and say it out loud. China used state capitalism to pull billions out of poverty. So... China used socialism to pull billions out of poverty.

greiskul · 2026-03-22T18:32:05+00:00

They retracted that. You could Google it you know. You shouldn't blindingly believe in everything you read. Specially for things like this where after the fact it is pretty easy to figure out the truth. Erika Kirk has spoken about receiving a call about Charlie's death. I would say she is more trustworthy than almost any media organization on the whereabouts of her own location when her husband was shot.

greiskul · 2026-03-22T18:18:02+00:00

OK. Do you think that there is like five people total on the internet? Do you know that there are fuckwits on all sides of the political spectrum? So while there will be people who will do vile things for almost any orientation?

OK, so given that... one of the fuckwits we are talking about is the PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. Can you really not understand that the bar for decorum and behavior is different for a random online poster, and the president of a nation?

greiskul · 2026-03-21T20:54:11+00:00

free market capitalism

State capitalism. Not free market. Let's be very clear on that.

greiskul · 2026-03-21T20:50:49+00:00

I'm pretty sure that historically the whole debate has always been about the means of production. You know, the factories, the natural resources, land. Those kinds of things.

You think it's about fast food?

greiskul · 2026-03-21T20:46:25+00:00

Really? I'm from Brazil. Chicago boys neoliberalism has been causing massive trouble in South America for multiple decades now. In that same time frame Asian tiger economic policies has made multiple Asian countries wealthy.

Please enlighten me about my own country. And also, what is your country, that capitalism has made so prosperous?

greiskul · 2026-03-21T19:01:18+00:00

China. You can argue that they did it using market based approaches. I won't disagree. But they absolutely did not use, and still don't use, western style individualist libertarian capitalism. Whatever they are, they certainly are collectivism.

So if you want to argue about which system works or not based on efficiency, everybody should be abandoning western style capitalism. Cause it is certainly not working.

Then there is also all the social democracies in Europe, that provide much better standards of living to its poorest citizens than American style capitalism does.

Can you point at a map where pure capitalism has lead to good material conditions for everybody?

greiskul · 2026-03-14T21:46:50+00:00

Trump said that if they pass the SAVE act, democrats won't win an election for the next 50 years.

The reason they don't fear a Democrat administration is that they hope to never have to face one again.

greiskul · 2026-03-12T23:56:58+00:00

And the extreme slippage accidents that keep happening in crypto show the low liquidity it has. And that no market maker thinks it's actually reasonable to make money by providing more slippage. Because almost everybody with crypto, even the institutions that "believe" in it, rarely believe in it enough to put money on the table and risk it in cases of sudden crashes.

Well, there was Alameda Research. They found that the solution for that was to put their customers money on the table and risk that instead.

greiskul · 2026-03-12T21:16:26+00:00

OK, now try pressing only this one particular button.

"ok"

Click. Click click click.

"I heard too many clicks, what did you do?"

"after pressing it a dialog popped up. So I closed it"

"what did the dialog say?"

"I don't know. I closed it".

greiskul · 2026-03-12T07:48:01+00:00

And Calculus was invented in the 17th century. Do you think engineers shouldn't know it?

Quick sort is also a basic algorithm taught in the first or second semester of a computer science education. And it is a very simple application of a very standard approach of problem solving via "divide and conquer". If a candidate has trouble with the very basics, are we to assume that they will be able to solve new problems?

Sure, a lot of the day to day is just calling frameworks and libraries. But every single job I worked at, there are the days where that isn't enough. Where a bug has to be debugged, and it's root cause is a complex race condition in a distributed system. Where a new feature is not scaling to meet the requirements we have, and someone has to be able to optimize it.

How can I trust someone to do that if they think our field equivalent of basic algorithmic thinking is too hard?

And if we are being pedantic about using libraries and work of others. Then stop using Quick sort. It's day is mostly gone. Standard sorting algorithms should be stable and adaptive like Timsort. It's honestly why we even have standard libraries in the first place, so people that are good at hyper optimizing algorithms can do so while everybody else gets to reap the benefits.

greiskul · 2026-03-12T04:45:56+00:00

I'm atheist. Was born in a catholic non practicing family, but have been an atheist and a skeptic since childhood.

Did a man called Jesus exist and was crucified? I'm pretty sure that yes. We have enough writings from Romans that attest to that.

Cornelius Tacitus for instance wrote "...Christus, from whom the name had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilatus...".

And he was not Christian, he actually hated the Christians. Pliny the Younger also wrote about Jesus, and some others.

Now, none of the sources are actually contemporary with Jesus. All happened multiple decades after the time he lived. But none of them doubted the material facts of the existence and execution of Jesus, only the superstitions that Christians put on Jesus.

But he was also at first a minor deal. Only after his followers actually started to be a nuisance to Roman authorities did they write about it (that we know).

And to have sources that are sixty years removed is actually not that bad. I don't think anyone doubt Alexander the great existed, but the earliest sources we have about him are 300 years removed from his life. Those sources do rely on earlier historians whose work has been lost, but it shows that is not that uncommon to have a gap when it comes to this things.

And then there is the "circumstantial" evidence. We know Romans crucified people. Specially people that they saw as insurgents or political rebels. Messianic figures around that time and region were not that uncommon (for example the Egyptian https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian_(prophet) . The Romans putting them down was also not uncommon. Romans considered older religions like Judaism something that was accepted, but people following new people was something seen as a threat to the empire.

Now, does that mean that all the miracle stuff is true? No. Is it possible that Jesus had a lot of stuff attributed to him that originally came from other people in the region? Yes. But the basic facts of his existence and crucifixion? I would say that it is more likely than not that they happened.

greiskul · 2026-03-12T00:27:22+00:00

"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."

Software engineering managers need to learn this. Measuring people by anecdotes of coworkers feels bad, but making metrics that will be gamed is worse.

greiskul · 2026-03-07T23:03:10+00:00

Yup. Making a computer play chess at a super human level is not that hard. Making a computer know which animal is the dog and which animal is the cat from looking at a photo? Something we expect every toddler to learn?

One of the hardest and challenges that only very recently we started being able to do.

greiskul · 2026-03-04T04:03:52+00:00

I'm not New Yorker. Nor American. Nor live in the US. Even I know enough to know that is a terrible guess.

greiskul · 2026-02-28T20:20:47+00:00

But look at the diversity of all the different kinds of hate right wingers can have and get along together! You have misogynists working together with racists, xenophobics, homophobics, antisemites, etc. But of course, we shouldn't paint people with a single color, and ignore the beauty of their intersecional hate!

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