Honestly I think micro mobility is an undervalued topic. It has the potential to really change the viability of transit in a ton of major cities, where transit infrastructure has poor coverage. And honestly anything at all that helps people not use cars has huge social benefits in my eyes.
Readit NewsTheSoftwareGuy commented on Python is not a great language for data science blog.genesmindsmachines.c... · Posted by u/speckx
I know the primary data structure in Lua is called a table, but I’m not very familiar with them and if they map to what’s expected from tables in data science.
IIRC those are basically hash tables, which are first-class citizens in many languages already
This is a game of cat and mouse -- to the extent that LLMs really give consumers an advantage here (and I'm a bit skeptical that they truly do) companies would eventually learn how to game this to their advantage, just like they ruined online reviews. I would even wager that if you told a teenager right now that online reviews used to be amazing and deeply accurate, they would disbelieve you and just assume you were naive. That's how far the pendulum has swung.
Yeah, this is one of my favorite things about LLMs right now: they haven't gone through any enshittification. Its like how google search used to be so much better
I could have benefited from this in the construction of our house. Riddled with inaccuracies, the engineer signed off on the foundations, but we found out when the walls were up that the builders used the internal dimensions as exterior dimensions. So our house is smaller by ~250mm on each side.
We had to make so many compromises and wastages as a result. Bathrooms now smaller if we want to keep other rooms the same, bathtubs couldn't fit, aw man.
Then when the house went up to 2nd and 3rd levels, the staircase was narrow and wasn't connecting between the levels. That alone delayed us by 3 months as we had to get the architect to build a 3D model of the affected area so we could figure it out. We have to hoist furniture up through balconies as it can't fit through the stairs.
I think having some machinery that minimises human error would be very helpful.
That's awful. I hope you were able to recover damages from the builders
TheSoftwareGuy commented on Amazon-backed, nuclear facility for Washington state geekwire.com/2025/a-first... · Posted by u/stikit
Huh. I'm pleasantly surprised about this. Maybe there will be a long-lasting positive outcome from all this AI stuff after all
TheSoftwareGuy commented on Let's write a macro in Rust hackeryarn.com/post/rust-... · Posted by u/hackeryarn
For those interested, this blog post also has a part 2 and 3:
Yes, if AI proves to be a 10x productivity booster, it probably means most people will be unemployed
Not necessarily. If $x is enough to get you 10x more Software engineering effort, people may be willing to increase their spending on software engineering, rather than decrease it
To be clear, they crashed into the vertical cable hanging down from the end of the crane. Not into the structure of the crane itself.
So it's not as bad as "they don't see cranes". But it absolutely raises the question of whether they can see cables, whether hanging from cranes or spanning telephone poles.
And honestly, cables are really hard to see in the air. That's literally why high-voltage power lines hang those big red-orange marker balls on them for pilots to see.
Genuinely curious what the solution here is. Hard-code some logic to identify cranes and always assume there's a cable dangling from the end? Never fly underneath anything? Implement some kind of specialized detection for thin cables if that's possible?
>Hard-code some logic to identify cranes and always assume there's a cable dangling from the end.
Probably this one. Even if the drone sees the crane, there's no guarantee the cable won't move faster than the drone can react.
TheSoftwareGuy commented on Will Amazon S3 Vectors kill vector databases or save them? zilliz.com/blog/will-amaz... · Posted by u/Fendy
And yet "Hyrum's Law" famously says people will come to rely on features of your system anyway, even if they are undocumented. So I'm not convinced this is really customer-centric, it's more AWS being able to say: hey sorry this change broke things for you, but you were relying on an internal detail. I do think there is a better option here where there are important details that are published but with a "this is subject to change at any time" warning slapped on them. Otherwise, like OP says, customers just have to figure it all out on their own.
You're right, people absolutely do rely on internal behavior intentionally and sometimes even unintentionally. And we tried our hardest not to break any of those customers either. but the point is that putting something in the docs is seen as a promise that you can rely on it. And going back on a promise is the exact opposite of the "Earns Trust" leadership principal that everyone is evaluated against.
I always understood shift-left as doing more tests earlier. That is pretty uncontroversial and where the article is still on the right track. It derails at the moment it equates shift-left with dev-owned testing - a common mistake.
You can have quality owned by QA specialists in every development cycle and it is something that consistently works.