It’s impossible to tell the dumbest human and the smartest bot apart, because anything one bleets out with no thought or intelligence to ground it against an underlying reality… Could also have been bleeted out with no thought or intelligence to ground it against an underlying reality by the other.

Unless they use en dash when it “should” be used according to the grammar books, apparently.

I’ve had to explain this to more executives than I wish to remember. Computer code is a recipe, not a cake. When you see a recipe that’s super long, and requires two kitchens worth of bakeware and tools, you probably think it’s a bad recipe. Short, elegant, easy to follow recipes with a little note in the margin from your grandmother about what to do when the dough is too sticky are the best recipes.

Unfortunately, one learned the exact wrong lesson from this, and started measuring lower lines of code produced as better… Which worked for a while, but lead to a lot of weirdness around new features for no particular reason.

He has a plus one, and a minus one, a plus two, and a minus two, and so on. This is analogous to how conditionally convergent series can be modified to give any finite (or infinite) sum merely by changing the order of the terms.

If you don’t drive, you cease being a driver.

If you drive a typical distance per year, the purchase price of a new vehicle is almost always more than the cost of all the fuel or electricity you will use in the lifespan of the car, so for some people the lower initial purchase price of an ICE vehicle could produce durable savings.

Some US drivers would not save money by switching to an EV.

Some laptops let you set a maximum charge for the battery at 70 or 80%, which is better for long term storage, and still offers the backup power supply if needed.

I (and my siblings) had a total of 6 hamsters. 4 died of old age, 1 suddenly bled out overnight, and 1 died pretty young, but nothing was obviously wrong, so I dunno.

My neighbors had more than a dozen rodents (including 5 guinea pigs). They all died horrifically, including 4 that were killed by mouse traps. Because of course you should have mouse traps, and also keep small rodents that you allow to escape constantly. As an adult, I think the parents were seriously negligent in teaching their children, and then also negligent in buying more rodents for the grinder after the first two or three met horrible fates.

I get a similar vibe from psychology. There’s a number of “experts” that are out in the field, doing the hard work day after day, putting in those hours… And hopelessly blinded by their own confirmation bias and survivorship bias. Clinical therapists in surveys prove very willing to overlook strong research in support of certain methods because they believe they see results in their clinical work that can’t be reproduced in a lab.

Then each field also has a research wing, slowly carving a path towards useful ideas, expending tremendous effort for each new finding, method, and result (even negative results!).

I’ve got no strong contenders.

“Blind coding” “Script slopping” “Junk writing” “Not knowing what you’re doing, but it’s fine because you also aren’t capable of knowing what you’re doing” “Slop slapping” (as in “I had a problem with my computer, so I slop slapped a solution on it”) “Wasting GPU cycles so you can also waste CPU cycles”

50 years ago was 1976, which was before the 1983 reforms. In 2023, I see a prediction it will run out of trust money by 2035. In 2009, they were predicting the same trust exhaustion in 2037. In 2005, Bush’s campaign warned it would run out by 2042. You’ll notice that these dates keep moving closer and closer as we get more data. There are real structural problems in social security.

With the cap, social security collected 1,159,984 + 188,399 million dollars in 2024, on the 6.2% + 6.2% tax rate. Medicare with no cap at the 1.45% + 1.45% tax rate collected 441,003 million dollars.

That implies taxable income for medicare was 14,172,517 million dollars, and for social security it was 10,874,056 million dollars. Completely removing the cap on social security would fix the current shortfall, but leave the structural issues in the program intact. Maybe it would buy us 25 more years. There are still people living today that would pay in more than they can possibly receive back from the system.

In short, you’re telling the people funding your lifestyle, “Fuck you, I got mine”, then denying that that is what’s happening.

That’s something else stealing the name. As you can see, the wikipedia page doesn’t even mention support for unitless metrics as variable types.

In case you don’t know, C is the successor to B (which used imperial variables). There was a planned successor to C called D, which would use all unitless quantities, like they do in Fermi approximations, but it turns out those aren’t very good. That’s why we have C++ (which supports metric and imperial) instead.

If it’s all if statements and if it uses well nested logic and if it’s written in a modern language and if the number of if statements doesn’t exceed 57, it could be good. Otherwise it is overly verbose. Otherwise it is dated. Otherwise it is spaghetti code. Otherwise it should go to the regular code check routine function.

It makes a lot more sense if you know about chains. A chain is 22 yards, and there are 80 chains in a mile. There are also rods (a quarter of a chain) and furlongs (10 chains)

So: 3 Barleycorn in an inch 4 inches in a hand 3 hands in a foot 3 feet in a yard 5.5 yards in a rod 4 rods in a chain 10 chains in a furlong 8 furlongs in a mile

… And of course there’s the overlapping systems of length for manufacturing, agriculture, maritime, and horse racing, which have their own, separate subdivisions and largest units, but usually you can get away with just the nail, the fathom, the nautical mile, and the span.

I get that she’s an English major, but how is that an excuse to not know that cameras typically have a flash so they can illuminate the object being photographed?

For me, it’s losing weight. Several times, I’ve burned 40-50 pounds, and can move much better, sweat less, sleep better, etc. Then I regain it, and have to climb the mountain again.

Powerade, “Very Real Power” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lh5XrXMwB2U

This is only enough fish fingers for like… 0 children.

In industrial software, I’m sure performance is a pretty stark line between “good enough” and “costing us money”.

The pattern I’ve seen in customer facing software is a software backend will depend on some external service (e.g. postgres), then blame any slowness (and even stability issues…) on that other service. Each time I’ve been able to dig into a case like this, the developer has been lazy, not understanding how the external service works, or how to use it efficiently. For example, a coworker told me our postgres system was overloaded, because his select queries were taking too long, and he had already created indexes. When I examined his query, it wasn’t able to use any of the indexes he created, and it was querying without appropriate statistics, so it always did a full table scan. All but 2 of the indexes he made were unused, so I deleted those, then added a suitable extended statistics object, and an index his query could use. That made the query run thousands of times faster, sped up writes, and saved disk space.

Most of the optimization I see is in algorithms, and most of the slowness I see is fundamentally misunderstanding what a program does and/or how a computer works.

Slowness makes customers unhappy too, but with no solid line between “I have what I want” and “this product is inadequate”.

Apple put inadequate coolers in the later Intel Macbooks to make Apple Silicon feel faster by contrast. When I wake mine, loading the clock takes 1.5 seconds, and it flips back and forth between recognizing and not recognizing key presses in the password field for 12 seconds. Meanwhile, the Thinkpad T400 (running Arch, btw) that I had back in 2010 could boot in 8.5 seconds, and not have a blinking cursor that would ignore key presses.

Apple has done pretty well, but they aren’t immune from the performance massacre happening across the industry.

The battery life is really good, though. I get 10-14 hours without trying to save battery life, which is easily enough to not worry about whether I have a way to charge for a day.

Are you working with 20 bit integers? You’ll never get it down to a million lines like that…

There’s a million lines of If >4096, subtract 4096

Then a quick lookup case statement for whether the remaining number is even.