skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A pluralization once popular in 14th Century Middle English that died out until ressurected in central north American business English.

In 2016 Grammarist was to the point.

"Learnings is a pluralization of an erroneous form of learning as a singular noun. Said singular noun (e.g., a learning) does not exist, at least according to most dictionaries. Colloquially, especially in the medical field, learnings means specific items that were newly discovered or learned."

https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-plural-form-of-learning-Is...

they're since softened that stance and now discuss how it is poorly used.

https://grammarist.com/usage/learnings/
I think the main driver is a lot more simple than other people have said: when you don’t need that efficiency you can focus on resilience instead. As the pandemic showed with JIT supply chains, efficiency and resilience are often at odds. And the bigger you are the more resilience you want to protect your core business and let you just turn the fly wheel that’s making you profitable. That’s also why you see companies start to engage in monopolistic and anticompetitive practices - now that they have the weight they can waste resources on protecting their business instead of just growing it by being more efficient.

This is 100% bad from a country/market level but is what you get when you let local optimizations trump capitalism. In some sense that local optimization also isn’t bad - it’s not uncommon that that behavior is also what lets efficiencies be extracted.

In other words, in many ways all of this is inevitable behavior as things grow and a lot of it are themselves (perhaps inevitable) symptoms of the mechanics at play rather than the mechanics themselves.

In other words, once “founder mode” is documented, you’ll have everyone claiming they’re doing founder mode same as how everyone says they’re now doing agile or whatever other fad you want to pick and you’ll be back at square one until someone then invents “strategic founder mode” or “growth founder mode” and claims to have figured out how you can spot that vs what everyone is just pretending to do right now.
Part of the problem is the idea of mind-body duality. Your body is your mind, but a physiological reaction relayed from a nerve is only part of the equation that’s you.
"Unskilled labour" isn't the same as "unskilled worker"

IMHO more appropriate would be "low skilled labour".

We should use the correct term when describing jobs that require little specialised skill and separate them from the persons performing it (who may be very skillful in other non-related areas).

If there is cultural stigma in using this term, should we sacrifice accuracy and succinctness in technical/professional discussions on related topics by dancing around with terminologies? If we "evolve" and use a new term that is not currently associated with the same stigma, will this neutral term eventually still be associated with the same stigma? If so, is it worth the effort and penalties (e.g. interim confusion) as a whole?

I am genuinely curious about this, I think there are many good points on "both sides of the coin".
Undefined behavior in C is a reading error (2021)
I feel that this is exactly what it is. In fact, I've got a two year old journal entry detailing a theory very close to this, that I wrote in the depths of a scorching case of depression.

My depression was preceded by several months of extreme psychological stress and was, in my belief, a result of that.

After getting rid of the source of the stress, and 18 months of anti-depressant medication, I am now much better.
A personal website is a bit like a quilt
For those who have a use for the touch screen, like drawing, I get it.

I was thinking more about people who solely use the iPad docked with the keyboard and trackpad.

I’ve had 6 or 7 iPads. They all end up sitting around with a dead battery after a while, because all I ever want is a keyboard and mouse, and at that point, the laptop is easier to deal with.
I love seeing all the amazing solutions, but I’m suspecting some of those are merely saying what they’d want to do instead of what their real answer is, which is slack.

*limitations apply.
I see what you did htere
14,975,435MWh for one year (8760 hrs) = 1709 MW load. Or about 1.7 mil servers using 1kW each (total, including its share of data center cooling). That's a lotta servers.

Another way to look at it.. they say they have about 3.14 bil daily active users across all platforms. So that's about 13Wh per daily user session. At $0.15/kWh, that's about $0.002 of electricity which doesn't seem that horrible.
As an HP mini calculator user since the late 1970s I use dc as my favorite calculator on every terminal since the late 1980s. Annoyingly it is not installed on every server or embedded system.
>lower classes poured the milk first

>Good tea cups would never crack from boiling water

That's sort of the point OP was making, I think. Poor folks wouldn't be able to afford good quality tea cups?
Since we're chiming in, exercise doesn't usually improve my condition when I'm depressed and occasionally instead exacerbates it.
I don't think Iger is comparable; all his groomed successors left before he did, so Chapek ended up with the hot potato to terrible results.

Apple has not lost a single potential successor to Tim Cook. And don't count Johnny Ive it's ridiculous to assume he could run that company. In 2004 maybe but certainly not the giant of 2024.
If you're going to be spending a substantial part of your waking life working on a tool, spending a few hours to get the basics right is not an unreasonable ask.
And as it turns out, all non-trivial programming languages that have some sort of packaging system or module system have some version of the problems involved.

You don't see people complaining that musical instruments are unreasonably complex when that complexity usually gets solved after a couple months of training, or when someone who wants to basic woodworking has to have at least a passing knowledge of the different types of hardwoods, MDFs, and essential joinery techniques.

Hate to say, but it definitely sounds like skills issues.
Neat little tool! It helped me figure out my websites logo is getting cropped on some socials. Making it easy to see how I need to modify it to fix the issue.
40% of the cells but much less of the mass: bacterial cells are much smaller.
Wow. They have got to turn this into a 99% Invisible podcast episode. (if you stopped at the weaving - which is incredible in its own right - you missed the much more amazing story)
They will start to happen when things get bad on a large scale. Right now they are not bad on a large scale.
I think `COBOL` is (nowadays) a catch-all term for `COBOL` &/ `IBM assembler` &/ `IMS/hierarchical databases` and/or batch jobs. I can't fault a journalist for referring to all of that inexactly by `COBOL`.

Second, maintainability is absolutely not given freely. A gov't merely "purchasing software" does not necessarily get them the source code, let alone proper documentation. Seriously. Contractors have no incentive to make things easy for you, and all the incentive to make it hard. The tail often wags the dog.

"The powerpoint slides didn't say anything about lock-in" &c &c &c
That seems to be the “or” thinking. How about And. And when you away from desk like in the sub (us) or train (uk), you can have a look and test or just study a part of the code you have troubled to debug, understand or learn.

At the same time, some “developer” might like to stay in one Env. Sadly there is no dual Env for mac, and windows tablet mode …
I think it's possible that learning programming could be the gateway to learning those other things, otherwise they're of little use. Many people don't even need to know the filesystem. They store their stuff in Google Docs or somewhere like that. If they use mostly canned software (such as EPIC or SAP) for their jobs, then their data are stored in some magical special unknown place.

I learned programming (in BASIC, in 1981) before I heard about the filesystem or shell. Making more complex programs do interesting work was my reason for learning more about the innards of computer systems.
I've got concerns about the --delete - since you're copying-with-delete from desktop first, it automatically assumes that anything you put in /home/me on the mac is going to get blown away.
Jesus Christ I hope you're joking with the brewing tea in milk.

That's terrifying.
Galloway Hoard
i agree that the difference in capacity factor is very important, and i should have made that clearer in my comment. nuclear is typically around 85%, solar typically around 20%. solar farms in the california desert are 29%, so this desert plant might have a similarly high capacity factor, but last time i checked, the prc average was more like 10%, and i don't understand why. possibly factors like transmission congestion are to blame and will be at play here too

especially if it's cheaper to put up more solar panels somewhere more overcast than to build hvdc transmission lines from urumqi to shanghai

it turns out that, if you use solar panels the same way you'd use nuclear reactors, by centralizing them hundreds or thousands of kilometers away from where the energy is used (as in this case), or by concreting over prime beachfront property (which nuclear power plants need) to build giant solar farms on, they can cost almost as much as nuclear reactors do, or even more

this is analogous to how factories first used electric motors: they installed a giant electric motor in the factory's powerhouse to drive the line shafts, replacing the steam-engine the powerhouse was built for. consequently electrification famously didn't increase factory productivity for decades

when i said that nuclear power plants 'need to be installed far from the point of use', i didn't mean that they couldn't be tens of kilometers, or even single-digit kilometers, from the point of use. i meant that they can't be single-digit meters from the point of use. solar panels can, and that dramatically drops costs

i appreciate the correction about the ap1000! naval nuclear reactors have been able to rapidly ramp up and down since forever, so it's good to see that capability making it into commercial nuclear power
> For instance, calling out LLMs for what they are is appropriate to me,

Well perhaps you're unaware of the tone of your writing, or perhaps I am, but I'd suggest that your original comment sounds rather hostile towards the field. Following it up with a comment like 'for what they are' is again not a comment that fosters discussion or thought. It implies you know 'what they are' and anyone with another opinion is simply incorrect.

> One of the biggest criticism against all of this AI slop is its capacity to “fool” people

I considered not using that term because I thought we might have this understanding. I put 'the people generating them' in hoping to avoid it, and thankfully you noticed.

I see we still weren't quite talking about the same people, as I misunderstood your 'people' to be person that might be paying to use the flux.1 image generation models. If I'm understanding now you're focused on the ones that might take what's generated at face value because they haven't heard about hallucinations.

On that front I'd just mention that it's worth spending some time looking in to the research being done on the topic. It's interesting some of methods being looked in to in order to prevent it. (Also your 'glue pizza' isn't in the same category of hallucinations because it was simply summarizing websites pull from a search).

> A field that stole the whole of human creativity to sell it back to us for the empowering of the unethical sociopaths who control it.
>
> Why yes, I have considered my reasons; have you?

How do you steal creativity? I'm really not sure I understand what you mean here. I'm not even sure if you're using it in the "you wouldn't download a car" meaning, or that it's literally replacing creative work so stealing that... but then does that even make sense?

Either way, consider this, maybe the field will burn through a ton of billionaire money and all that will come out of it will be a bunch of open research papers and a bunch of open models. Would that really be so bad?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abductive_reasoning

Is abductive inference synonymous with bayesian inference?
Your negative bias towards my people is showing; most raw raw Canadian federalists insist the mixture of both nations benefited the country, not made it more difficult to manage.
It also corresponds to 2-3 nuclear reactors.

I am also not shocked. But somewhat surprised by the choice of unit in the article.
So your position is that people who have free time mostly do awful things and your support for this position is like... a misquoted aphorism from the bible ("idle hands are the devil's workshop")? I don't find that particularly compelling at all. People find things to do with their time when they don't have external pressure on them. Most of those things are "useless" but also pretty harmless, and make them happy. Often people spend their free time building community with other people, which can often be valuable to others as well. Sometimes they do stuff like discover laws of physics or write novels. To claim that there is some great evil that comes from merely giving people more leisure time is an extraordinary claim that to me seems to lack even a modicum of evidence. Sure, some people do harmful things and we should stop them from doing those things. To attribute this to people being able to pursue their own interests is not even wrong, it's completely incoherent
But the fundamental fact is that "accessing someone else's web server" is not that trivial of an affair and has never been when you get down and dirty into the details of networking.
Aliexpress is legit, they'll usually be "tray"/OEM CPUs but there's no reason to assume that they're fake.
> You should try explaining virtual environments to students

can you? Because I can't.

e.g. "What is the difference between venv, pyvenv, pyenv, virtualenv, virtualenvwrapper, pipenv, etc?" ( https://stackoverflow.com/questions/41573587/what-is-the-dif... )

what is the difference between conda and anaconda?

etc etc
The 30 page story is a classic, a great work of art by Herman Melville.

Would you skim "War and Peace"?

And who you callin' old?
If you see the BIOS screen, then it isn't suspended.

It could still be suspend-to-disk, but desktop PCs don't do that.

Windows 'fast boot' does work by saving some critical state on shutdown, but it's still a complete shutdown.
> Thread doesn’t stand a chance

Twitter/X has 368m MAU. Threads has 200m.

Based on trajectories Threads will be the biggest text-first social network in less than a year.

It's amazing how out of touch people on here about what is popular or not.
Is there a beta one can try ?
> PQ has largely transitioned away from soverignity[sic] and largely campaigns on culture war issues like Bill 21 and immigration.

Your initial point was not that people chose the PQ over language concerns, but that the party had transitioned. The party has done no such thing. It's doubling down on separatism if anything. It's crazy.
Examples of things you can do with ZKPs:

- Anonymous credentials (this is what Signal does) - maintain an encrypted blob representing a group chat (members list etc all stay encrypted and Signal cannot tell who is in a group chat). A normal client can provide a zkp that they are in a particular group chat (the decrypted blob contains this member for example) and have a message delivered to other group members. Both the client and the recipient can keep their identities encrypted and the zkp proves the membership of the plaintext client / recipient.

- Encrypt some metadata of a message sent to someone. You can build a ZKP that the plaintext behind the encrypted metadata satsifies some properties such as recipient is not in some blacklist (and so on). All this can be done by maintaining privacy because the metadata stays encrypted.

- Given an electronic medical record, you can prove that the record contains a vaccine without sending the record over the wire to some other party.

Lots more such ideas exist.

zkVMs are a good place to start playing with things.
Probably best to tape it out to https://tinytapeout.com/ first
Completely agree. There are few more:

- The window preview size in window switcher (alt tab) is so small that it is useless.

- Windows switcher only shows the title of the focused item instead of showing title of all the windows.

- Window switcher is not a grid view so when the number of windows increases it shows them in a single long list.

- This is weird one: Start steam close the window so that steam is running in background, try logout but don't actually click logout on the dialog that ask for confirmation and you will find that steam in background is quitting :)

- Libadwaita based apps that uses tabs have this weird thing where the focused tab is darker then the non-focused tabs which is completely opposite of any GUI toolkit (where the focused tab is lighter then the non-focused one)

- Notifications are shown at top and middle of screen. Not sure how that is aligned with Gnome philosophy of "getting out of your way"
one can only wish he was just as thorough when deciding which convicted felon's private jet to board... must have slipped his mind that one time
(I already have a 4-bit CPU there)
Always tell this story how today stat evolve out from experimental design and becomes non-baynesian
Oh how I wish this was true.

I've a high propensity for depression because basically my life has been very difficult. Was late to many many milestones in my life - I know it's individual but I've missed out on a ton of things.

Last time it hit me was the worst. Despite having a great toolset for dealing with it because it wasn't the first time, it was by the worst that I have ever seen.

I went to the gym and became fit and muscular. Added a ton of muscle even had visible abs but it barely did anything. If it did anything it was so small that it was barely noticable. Meditation didn't help. Nothing did. Just flashbacks persistent anxiety to the point where I couldn't even relax to have a chill conversation with anyone I was in robotic mode. It was triggered by heartbreak & the covid.

The worst was the inability to focus no matter the coffee my brain was just barely working. Attention span was at most 15 minutes. Everything seemed boring. The default state was so utterly bleak that a video on YT where people were chill and laughing was like absurd. The fatigue and lack of focus were the worst my mind just didn't grab onto things like it did before. It was terrifying.

I'm out of it now and happy as a clam. I'm not wiser at all through the process. What I've found is that this world is out of our control and if life wants us tomorrow to dismantle us. There are no guides, no tips, no tricks, no plans, no escaping to reason, no escaping to the gym nor anything like that.

Depression hits the control unit of the mind.
Have you thought about the deeper aspects of what git is doing?
Delivery trucks certainly do and very regularly at that. A delivery truck can easily cause about 300x the wear of a large SUV or full size pickup.

A full sized school bus will regularly drive on just about any road. Fully loaded they’ll do 1000x as much damage as a large SUV.

Fire trucks, septic tank pump trucks, big furniture delivery trucks, landscaping trucks, motor homes etc… will also drive on pretty much every small local road.

And much bigger commercial trucks drive on very small local roads enough to dwarf the damage of a large SUV. My neighbor just had a foundation for an addition poured. 3 cement trucks came out. 3 fully loaded cement trucks would cause something like 20,000 times as much damage as a large suv.

I’d need to drive on my street once a day for 50 years in an enormous suv cause as much damage.

Given normal weathering and damage caused by frequent or even infrequent large commercial vehicles, larger local passenger vehicles aren’t going to increase maintenance costs.
So _that's_ what a Jacquard loom is. I've seen it mentioned often. Thank you.
The L in DSL is "Language", so it's a programming language that is domain, or niche, specific. These are code.

Diagramming is a domain, and within diagramming are any number of diagram type domains, leading to concise code for particular niches.

Compare 25+ of these niches here: https://kroki.io/
On top of that I doubt every country can afford to give everyone free money. US maybe can for their own citizens but will they give money also to e.g. Malaysians? (they currently do a lot of hollywood vfx and postproduction). I highly doubt that and there is only US, China and maybe France in AI race game right now.
That's exactly the Amazon scammer business model. They can have a new store with a new name in seconds and be back in business with none of that pesky customer service and other accountability.
Nice just in time for the end of ice by anthropomorphic warming.
It's more about time than the final temperature.

When you pour hot tea into an empty cup, the innermost layer of the cup goes from room temp to ~80C within a fraction of a second.

When you pour hot tea into a cup that already contains a fair amount of milk, it goes from $milkTemp to ~60C gradually over a few seconds as the tea mixes with the milk, giving enough time for the cup to expand evenly.
I appreciate all the comments. I agree with most, even when they disagree with me or each other. I especially agree with the questions several people raise: What it is that we should teach? In which order?

I think there is a consensus about what a student should end up knowing. Even if they are not going to become developers, they should be able to edit text files; they should be able to run commands from the terminal; they should understand PATH. They should create a virtual environment every time they start a new project.

Where we might disagree is how to get them to the point where they know all those things.

I offered to write this post for a colleague who is now facing the issue I faced when I taught last spring. My only goal was to help the students who can't get started running Python from python.org. When I say that they don't know what an editor is or how to use the command line, I just taking those as the facts on the ground. What I didn't say (at least not very clearly) is that they need to learn these other things. I did hint in the end that some of these probably need to come before learning to use a virtual environment. I know this is controversial.

Because the first post was narrowly focused, I wrote a subsequent blog post called "Environment as Code" that is more specific about the goal and offers a specific sequence to follow to get there.

If you have any reactions, I'd be interested to hear them. In a deep sense, I think that the issue here is how to free students from the GUI. If we can do this, it will change how they interact with the computer for the rest of their lives. If there is a better way, I'll be happy to support it.
Serious Cryptography (2nd Edition)
So it sounds like people choose to be drug addicts and also choose not to be if the consequences are in place. Got it.
Isn’t this the plot of Idiocracy?