It's a bit dark, but I'm doing much better now, so happy ending. No need to wish me well or anything, I'm the happiest I've ever been (thankfully).
After reaching an age where bi-polar disorder goes full swing, I was unable to manage manic episodes; they'd spring up and I'd be awake for days and then crash horribly. I lost all hope that I'd be able to hold down a typical job ever again. I became a 24h/7d alcoholic with the goal of never being conscious and trying to sleep through life until it ended.
I was at the local shop where I bought my booze buying a bunch of beer and vodka around 7-8am. A guy near me at the counter made a comment about what a great party must be coming. I looked at him, probably dead-eyed, and said, "I'm an alcoholic."
He put his hand on my shoulder. He didn't say anything. It was just a moment of compassion. It was deeply kind. What was communicated was simply that someone cared and, to this day, I wish I had a way to thank him for that profound gesture.
Alas is right, China is poised to dominate battery, solar, and EV technology and to translate it to military technology as well. Meanwhile the Republicans are blowing up US alliances and sabotaging the battery/EV industrial development policy that was actually making progress in giving the US hope in catching up.
My best friend, his girlfriend, brother, sister and I piled into a minivan in July of 2018 and drove from Boston to SF. Best friend and I both took jobs there out of school and decided to make a trip of the life move.
We painted BOS > SF on the back window. At a gas station in Memphis a random guy walked up to us and said "Make sure you go to Graceland. Can't miss it."
We sort of smile and nod politely and then walk into the gas station to use the bathroom, reload on snacks etc.
10 mins later we come back outside and the same guy comes over "I bought you all tickets to Graceland, who can I text them to?"
Truly such a sick moment. Graceland was a highlight of the trip and to have someone just do such a random kind thing made it that much better. Long live Elvis, long live the King. Thanks again to whoever you are that did that. Respect.
It's a positive for a nameless middle manager somewhere who can show their boss a graph with a line moving to the right and up with a title like "AI Adoption Across Platforms" and hit their bonus target.
The best ”algorithm” for discovering new music was digging through profiles on last.fm back when the social functions of the site were still active. Sure, it was a lot of manual work, but the results were amazing. It wasn't completely blind, I found that people I had high similarity with, it was more likely I'll like what they like, even across different genres. Sometimes people were nice and took the effort to recommend based on my profile. I got introduced to varied music, different genres and even a bit from different countries.
The worst was Pandora, which did recommendations based on breakdown of musical instruments and elements in the song. It did what it aimed to do pretty well, only it was a bad idea. It gave you a lot of uninspiring music that sounded like a bland copy of something you actually liked.
Spotify's recommendations are not super awful, but definitely feel closer to Pandora's style. I wonder why is the result like that even though I'm sure they train their model based on listening history.
I live in Minnesota and do not own a snowblower. Probably my mistake, but I always joke that I get most of my exercise in the winter. Snow is really heavy for those without context.
A couple years ago we had a particularly bad snowfall. The plow has a nasty hate filled habit of dumping all its snow in my driveway. I had a drift at the end of my driveway about 4 feet high and 6 feet deep. Literally up to my chest. I had spent a solid hour just chipping away at it trying to get my car out and had made very little progress.
Right as I was about to give up in frustration, a man in a bobcat drove by. Moments later he turned around, came back, and asked "would you like me to clear that for you?" I told him that would be amazing. Took him a couple minutes and then he waved and drove off before I got a chance to offer him any money or even thank him.
I think about this guy pretty often, it's absolutely the random act of kindness in my life I have appreciated most.
I'd forgotten what an unusually strong and culturally-resonant line of movies the man had without (I think) the popular acclaim you might associate with them, like a low-profile Spielberg.
I am the founder of a niche SaaS (https://partsbox.com/ — software for managing electronic parts inventory and production). While I am somewhat worried about AI capabilities, I'm not losing too much sleep over it.
The worry is that customers who do not realize the full depth of the problem will implement their own app using AI. But that happens today, too: people use spreadsheets to manage their electronic parts (please don't) and BOMs (bills of materials). The spreadsheet is my biggest competitor.
I've been designing and building the software for 10 years now and most of the difficulty and complexity is not in the code. Coding is the last part, and the easiest one. The real value is in understanding the world (the processes involved) and modeling it in a way that cuts a good compromise between ease of use and complexity.
Sadly, as I found out, once you spend a lot of time thinking and come up with a model, copycats will clone that (as well as they can, but superficially it will look similar).
It's not nearly as smart as Opus 4.5 or 5.2-Pro or whatever, but it has a very distinct writing style and also a much more direct "interpersonal" style. As a writer of very-short-form stuff like emails, it's probably the best model available right now. As a chatbot, it's the only one that seems to really relish calling you out on mistakes or nonsense, and it doesn't hesitate to be blunt with you.
I get the feeling that it was trained very differently from the other models, which makes it situationally useful even if it's not very good for data analysis or working through complex questions. For instance, as it's both a good prose stylist and very direct/blunt, it's an extremely good editor.
I like it enough that I actually pay for a Kimi subscription.
Surely if Copilot was so useful and great, it wouldn't be free and they wouldn't be trying to force it down unwilling people's throats at every opportunity.
I'm beginning to think this AI stuff isn't all it's cracked up to be...
I'm working on porting KiCad to the browser. It's a lot of sweat and tears, multithreading issues and some more sweat. I've updated a port of WxWidgets and now I support all the features KiCad needs with ~200 tests.
Right now I have a build that loads in the browser, but I really want to have "multithreading" which means workers in the web. One can use asyncify with emscripten to translate blocking C++ to WASM, but that transition is not perfect, right now I'm debugging a bug where there's a race condition that halts all execution and the main thread runs in an infinite loop waiting for the workers to stand up. I guess I'll have a few of those ahead.
The main goal is to 1. just have fun 2. use yjs as a collab backend so multiple people can edit the same PCB. This will probably work with pcbnew, KiCad's layout editor, since it has a plugin system and AFAIK I can do the sync layer there. For the rest ( schematic, component editor etc. ) I'll have to figure out something..
KiCad does not sync automatically if you modify a file, I'll have to do some lifting there.
Anyway, it's a lot of fun, I really want this thing to exist, I'm hoping that I won't run into a "wellll, this is just not going to work" kind of issue in the end.
Focused on all the interesting and exciting happenings in tech here, from AI to defence to deeptech, and posting the most interesting job openings too. Did you know Europe had two space launch startups? I didn't until I started this project!
> In a 2016 interview with PEOPLE, Nick spoke about his years-long struggle with drug addiction, which began in his early teens and eventually left him living on the streets. He said he cycled in and out of rehab beginning around age 15, but as his addiction escalated, he drifted farther from home and spent significant stretches homeless in multiple states.
Rob Reiner directed a movie from a semi-autobiographical script his son co-wrote a few years ago. Hard to imagine many things worse than going through the pain of having a kid who seemed lost, getting him back, and then whatever must have been going on more recently that apparently led to this.
The reality is that the HTML+CSS+JS is the canonical form, because it is the form that humans consume, and at least for the time being, we're the most important consumer.
The API may be equivalent, but it is still conceptually secondary. If it went stale, readers would still see the site, and it makes sense for a scraper to follow what readers can see (or alternately to consume both, and mine both).
The author might be right to be annoyed with the scrapers for many other reasons, but I don't think this is one of them.
> The main problem GraphQL tries to solve is overfetching.
My issue with this article is that, as someone who is a GraphQL fan, that is far from what I see as its primary benefit, and so the rest of the article feels like a strawman to me.
TBH I see the biggest benefits of GraphQL are that it (a) forces a much tighter contract around endpoint and object definition with its type system, and (b) schema evolution is much easier than in other API tech.
For the first point, the entire ecosystem guarantees that when a server receives an input object, that object will conform to the type, and similarly, a client receiving a return object is guaranteed to conform to the endpoint response type. Coupled with custom scalar types (e.g. "phone number" types, "email address" types), this can eliminate a whole class of bugs and security issues. Yes, other API tech does something similar, but I find the guarantees are far less "guaranteed" and it's much easier to have errors slip through. Like GraphQL always prunes return objects to just the fields requested, which most other API tech doesn't do, and this can be a really nice security benefit.
When it comes to schema evolution, I've found that adding new fields and deprecating old ones, and especially that new clients only ever have to be concerned with the new fields, is a huge benefit. Again, other API tech allows you to do something like this, but it's much less standardized and requires a lot more work and cognitive load on both the server and client devs.
> It's no wonder that morale among journalists is at an all-time low. Is any other profession held to such an impossible standard?
Morale is not low amongst journalists because the job is tough, it's low because they're being fired all over the place, pay has decreased, and corporatism is making the whole thing pretty mediocre.
I'm a long time user of the Arduino IDE for third party boards such as the Teensy. Recently I've switched to Platformio for coding. So I should be satisfied with never needing Arduino's cloud service.
But Adafruit points out a problem, which is that the cloud service is the only available option for students using school-issued Chromebooks. I can confirm that a school-issued Chromebook is likely to be set up to lock out access to any programming tools. We wouldn't want children to learn coding after all, right?
I think relying on a corporation to preserve our freedom to code is a bit too optimistic.
The scaling up of battery manufacturing for EVs and now solar storage has lead to prices I would have never imagined I'd see in my lifetime. It's one of the success stories that, having lived through it, has been a real joy.
I know that folks might have been able to point to a graph years ago and said we'd be here eventually, but I had my doubts given the scale required and hacking through all the lobbying efforts we saw against solar/battery. Alas, we made it here!
I saw my mom do something as a child that really stuck with me. This was back in the 70s cause I’m old. It was summer in the Midwest we were in the car in a store parking lot gettin ready to leave. An African-American lady pulled into a spot beside our car. In front of her was a pickup truck with two men and a pregnant woman. They started accosting the lady telling her she had bumped their vehicle and now the pregnant woman was in pain. This was the 70s so everyone’s windows were down so we heard the whole thing. The gist was these people were clearly trying to extort money from this lady. My mom got out and dressed them down because she had been watching and the ladies car didn’t touch their truck. They sulked and drove away. The lady was very afraid and very grateful. This was a time and place where not a lot of African Americans lived. That really stuck with me over the years.
1. Never connect the TV panel itself to the internet. Keep it air-gapped. Treat it solely as a dumb monitor.
2. Use an Apple TV for the "smart" features.
3. Avoid Fire TV, Chromecast, or Roku.
The logic is simple, Google (Chromecast) and Amazon (Fire TV) operate on the same business model as the TV manufacturers subsidized hardware in exchange for user data and ad inventory. Apple is the only mainstream option where the hardware cost covers the experience, rather than your viewing habits subsidizing the device.
You can't just blanket block all VPN access, that's not how the internet works... they could pick some common/well-known providers of VPN services and block their IPs/ASN/etc., but you can't just flip a switch and make all forms of VPN/proxy stop working, as there's no way to tell with certainty that someone is using one.
I'm a fan of anything that allows me to build with javascript that doesn't require a build step.
Modern HTML/CSS with Web Components and JSDoc is underrated. Not for everyone but should be more in the running for a modern frontend stack than it is.
Pro tip for anyone wanting to avoid liquid [gl]ass and install iOS 18.7.3: Apple is actively hiding 18.7.3 on most iPhones, despite the update showing on iPads. Perhaps a mistake, perhaps an attempt to force 26 onto users.
Simply select "iOS 18 Developer Beta" under beta updates (might need a developer account) and it will allow you to install it. The update currently offered is the production release.
Thousands of systems, from Google to script kiddies to OpenAI to nigerian call scammers to cybersecurity firms, actively watch the certificate transparency logs for exactly this reason. Yawn.
Everybody using the same three centralized inference providers? That would be as absurd and unrealistic as everybody hosting in us-east-1 and behind Cloudflare today!
> It's likely there's a single source of truth for where you pull libraries or shared resources from, when team A wants to update the pointer to library-latest to 2.0 but the current reference of library-latest is still 1.0, everyone needs to migrate off of it otherwise things will break due to backwards compatibility or whatever.
No, this misses one of the biggest benefits of services; you explicitly don't need everyone to upgrade library-latest to 2.0 at the same time. If you do find yourself in a situation where you can't upgrade a core library like e.g. SQLAlchemy or Spring, or the underlying Python/Java/Go/etc runtime, without requiring updates to every service, you are back in the realm of a distributed monolith.
After reaching an age where bi-polar disorder goes full swing, I was unable to manage manic episodes; they'd spring up and I'd be awake for days and then crash horribly. I lost all hope that I'd be able to hold down a typical job ever again. I became a 24h/7d alcoholic with the goal of never being conscious and trying to sleep through life until it ended.
I was at the local shop where I bought my booze buying a bunch of beer and vodka around 7-8am. A guy near me at the counter made a comment about what a great party must be coming. I looked at him, probably dead-eyed, and said, "I'm an alcoholic."
He put his hand on my shoulder. He didn't say anything. It was just a moment of compassion. It was deeply kind. What was communicated was simply that someone cared and, to this day, I wish I had a way to thank him for that profound gesture.