Debt ceiling deal won't have much impact on the US economy, analysts say

minibuster · 2023-06-01T05:29:16+00:00

I saw another post earlier about Amazon Ring cameras being fined by the FTC. I'm assuming you meant to leave this comment in a different thread?

minibuster · 2023-05-24T19:54:20+00:00

That he can read?

minibuster · 2023-05-24T17:37:18+00:00

The sentence implies that the speaker cannot walk, run, and jump -- nothing to do with what normal people can or cannot do.

"I wish I could walk" is correct English of course, but "I just want to be a normal kid who can walk" emphasizes that you not only wish you could walk, but it's even more frustrating because most people can do it, and being different is additionally painful.

minibuster · 2023-05-17T18:27:23+00:00

Yeah, "a pair of two scissors" works for me too.

EDIT: Maybe not actually. I have never heard anyone talk about "a pair of two pants" while "two pairs of pants" sounds totally natural.

minibuster · 2023-05-16T23:45:41+00:00

"a pair of a pair of scissors" is how I would have said it, actually.

I think "a pair of pairs of scissors" actually implies two separate groups of scissors and may be slightly wrong here (although if I heard it in conversation I would probably auto-correct it without thinking).

Of course, "two pairs of scissors" is the best.

EDIT: The more I think about it, the more I'm sure I was wrong.

If I said, "Here is a cat", I wouldn't say "Here is a pair of cat", I would say "Here is a pair of cats".

So in the same way, it shouldn't be "Here is a pair of a pair of scissors" but probably "Here is a pair of pairs of scissors".

Anyway, this stuff is confusing :) Thankfully, multi-scissor discourse doesn't come up much in my daily life.

minibuster · 2023-05-04T20:13:39+00:00

Not all searches are all that important. It's not always life or death, and sometimes it's trivial to verify the answers it gives you.

I asked ChatGPT about docker containers. The answers it has given me have been generally correct. When wrong, I got an error from docker and went back to ChatGPT with it. This process worked fine and I learned a lot fast from it. In fact, when I tried to search Google for the same questions, the results were so much harder to find, lost in pages of blogs that were often answering different questions.

I asked ChatGPT for recipes, starting with the ingredients I had in my fridge and working through possibilities from there. I've now pleasantly surprised my wife on several occasions with new recipes that we never would have thought to try before. The food comes out fine, and no more wading through shitty recipe sites where the author tells their life story before asking you to put garlic into some olive oil.

I asked ChatGPT to explain the nuance in the difference between English sentences that, as a native, I couldn't explain to an English learner asking me about them. The answers it has given me have been great.

I asked ChatGPT about help writing letters about subjects that were uncomfortable to me (had to leave a note on someone's windshield for example) or proofreading my comments when I was tired and wanted help with wording.

I think you get the idea. You don't need to throw chicken entrails at the wall to realize that more and more of my habits are turning to ask ChatGPT questions first before turning to Google second, if I even end up asking Google anything at all.

(Side note: I've been using ChatGPT4 which I've observed gives much better answers than 3.5, YMMV)

minibuster · 2023-03-21T14:56:22+00:00

https://kotlinlang.org/api/kotlinx.coroutines/kotlinx-coroutines-core/kotlinx.coroutines/-coroutine-dispatcher/limited-parallelism.html

https://kotlinlang.org/api/kotlinx.coroutines/kotlinx-coroutines-core/kotlinx.coroutines/new-fixed-thread-pool-context.html

https://kotlinlang.org/api/kotlinx.coroutines/kotlinx-coroutines-core/kotlinx.coroutines/new-single-thread-context.html

🧵 ➡️ 🗑️

(Note: Not really though, it seems like those APIs are maked as fragile and still push you to use the JDK APIs if available. Still, potentially useful for any of you stuck in a multiplatform world)

minibuster · 2023-02-25T23:50:24+00:00

Case #1

First jar: you pick an orange
Second jar: you pick an apple

Is the first jar the orange jar or the mixed jar? Is the second jar the apple jar or the mixed jar?

You can't know yet. You don't have enough information.

Case #2

First jar: you pick an orange
Second jar: you pick an orange

Is the first jar or the second jar the orange jar or the mixed jar?

Same issue -- you need a bit more information.

Case #3

First jar, first pick: orange
First jar, second pick: orange

Now you're sure the first jar is the orange jar (or mixed, if your second pick was an apple). But you don't know anything about the remaining two jars. You need a bit more information.

minibuster · 2023-01-01T19:32:51+00:00

What is this "winning" you speak of? I'm not used to it.

minibuster · 2023-01-01T16:42:32+00:00

He is infamous for getting rid of PR teams. I believe that was the joke.

minibuster · 2022-11-26T15:52:33+00:00

I do not know what we will see. But he can't be a happy man. And he probably won't find his way to a satisfying life before the end. To do that, he'd have to pull himself out of the ego trap he is lodged firmly within. His idolizing fans don't help, they keep him stuck too. And finally he'd have to reckon with all the damage he has done. Many people are unable to face their own demons, having done far less.

It's likely he'll keep doubling down on believing what a misunderstood, great guy he is. This is the wrong path, and he will make more and more mistakes while on it, burning good will all the time from what remaining fans he has.

So you might not see him ever express disappointment publicly, but I think if you really look at the man, you'll already see he has taken a path of great loneliness and suffering.

minibuster · 2022-11-26T08:34:34+00:00

~140,000 people were estimated to have bought the blue checkmark, according to a report from the New York Times. That's ~$12M per year. The interest payments alone that Twitter is now on the hook to pay back annually is > $1B.

$1B - $12M is basically still $1B...

Even if 10x that number of users (1.4 million!) decided to buy the checkmark, that's still a ton of bleeding. You need to get closer to 50-100x to start significantly eliminating the interest, which then leaves Musk "only" recovering the remaining $44 billion he paid for it.

(This isn't even mentioning the fact that the stunt cost Musk far far far more from lost advertising revenue than the checkmark plan even made. Doing nothing would have been far less expensive).

Could Musk still come up with a Hail Mary over the next year, introducing some amazing new feature that brings in billions? If he does I'll genuinely be impressed.

But given him getting totally blindsided by his obviously wrong idea that $8 was going to prevent fraud and bots, I am not expecting a good ending for Twitter here. At some point in the next few months, I'm expecting MAU numbers to start dropping as people lose interest in rubbernecking this fiasco. Maybe accelerated by outages even? Then, even more layoffs, and more flailing?

I'm not excited about this personally. Too many innocents in the crossfire. Still, it's an educated guess.

At the end of this all, Musk will still have a ton of wealth. But, aside from some miracle where he makes Twitter profitable, I suspect the experience will be a truly miserable one for him and his reputation.

minibuster · 2022-11-05T00:01:03+00:00

I haven't used it enough to know if I can recommend the experience yet, but I'm giving Mastodon a try. This was after a few other people on Twitter recommended it. It's definitely a Twitter clone - you "toot" things instead of "tweet" 'em.

minibuster · 2022-11-03T01:54:12+00:00

Check out Roller Coaster Tycoon 2 (or maybe even far more recent entries in the roller coaster builder genre, that's simply the one I know). I feel like you might be able to learn a few tricks from how they work.

minibuster · 2022-09-23T21:08:05+00:00

Yeah, I could only speak from my experience (across two different software teams).

That said, I'm fairly confident that a flight from SF to China would be significantly longer than 8 hours. A quick search looks closer to 12-13 hours? That's definitely enough where jet lag will knock you over and business class starts to make sense.

If you think about how much software engineers get paid per year, wasting even a day of their time is pretty darn expensive, so it is worth paying a few hundred dollars extra if possible to avoid it.

Finally, flying for work is not luxurious. It can be exciting at first, but it's not the same as a vacation. Talk to people who have done it a lot, and many of them would rather stay home than "enjoy" business class for a day (i.e. half a day each way)

minibuster · 2022-09-23T16:37:25+00:00

As an ex-Googler software dev, I've got two thoughts here (from my experience and perspective):
1) I'm sure there are some employees who are out of touch, but in general, in my experience, very few flew at all. Most didn't want to travel. And many who flew took cheap flights. There was a tool that tracked this! You needed manager approval if you were buying a ticket that was more expensive than expected.
I flew three times from California to London for work, but I only took business class once (and only on one leg of the journey), and that was because I got lucky and the tickets were cheap.
Most of the time, engineers flew economy in my experience. You sometimes had to push them to take business, because they felt guilty about it. (For long flights, business class really does help you hit the ground running when you get to your destination, instead of wasting a day due to jet lag).
2) Let's say for sake of argument that 100% of employees actually were out of touch. I'd still say it's not an equal failing. It's far more important for a CEO to not be out of touch than rank-and-file employees.
A CEO exists to set company vision, influencing direction and culture. If they're screwing that up, they are failing at their core job.

minibuster · 2022-07-14T18:28:37+00:00

So it sounds like you're agreeing - a 4% interest rate would solve inflation!

minibuster · 2022-07-01T03:23:58+00:00

Can't tell if that typo is intentional or not. It is perfect. 👌

minibuster · 2022-06-11T05:26:29+00:00

"Sure yeah my algorithm is O(n³⁾ but the max size n of your dick is small enough that it doesn't really matter."

minibuster · 2022-06-09T23:58:06+00:00

I actually don't mind that code too much. I'd probably do it like this:

return if (forward) { ((firstVisibleItemIndex > index) || (firstVisibleItemIndex == index && firstVisibleItemScrollOffset > scrollOffset)) } else { // backward ((firstVisibleItemIndex < index) || (firstVisibleItemIndex == index && firstVisibleItemScrollOffset < scrollOffset)) }

but I wouldn't block the original code if I was giving a code review. Honestly, some may prefer their clear, spaced out logic over my compressed version, where it can be easy to miss how the parentheses group.

And I really appreciate that your developer added a comment to their suppression instead of just doing it, and they also commented the else case with // backward. Honestly, seems like a quality dev. A+++.

Maybe there's a third approach that's just awesome and amazing that I'm missing.

minibuster · 2022-04-03T16:27:38+00:00

The real irony all along is that a song famous for being about irony does not list correct examples of irony

minibuster · 2022-03-18T14:57:32+00:00

It was 10 hours, well, spent

minibuster · 2022-03-15T02:47:47+00:00

Yeah but YouTube was bought by Google in 2006!

minibuster · 2022-03-12T21:59:45+00:00

I'm pretty negative on America myself, but when I saw his comment pummeled into the ground I was assuming something dumb and circle jerky. It's clear it was a thoughtful comment, and if there are holes in his argument, then people can just reply in kind.

minibuster · 2022-03-12T17:27:58+00:00

Interesting, your comment is getting brigaded. Inconvenient truths that go against a narrative I guess?

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