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crabbone commented on Designing software for things that rot   drobinin.com/posts/design... · Posted by u/valzevul
rpearl · 4 months ago
The point of measuring is reproducibility. If you want to get the same result repeatedly the easiest way is to measure.

Obviously people have been making sourdough for a very long time; you don't have to measure.

crabbone · 4 months ago
Absolutely.

This is also a typical approach from the chefs I know: they don't care about precision in most recipes (eg. dishes like soups, or pasta, or salads...), but then sometimes there are dishes where precision is absolutely crucial, and baking is one place where precision is really important.

With sourdough, if you don't measure, you may still get good results, but you will have to babysit the dough and try to figure out when it's ready by checking frequently. Some people can afford it time-wise, and to some this would be prohibitively inconvenient.

crabbone commented on Meta is axing 600 roles across its AI division   theverge.com/news/804253/... · Posted by u/Lionga
hkt · 4 months ago
Many companies will roll out to slices of production and monitor error rates. It is part of SRE and I would eat my hat if that wasn't the case here.
crabbone · 4 months ago
The big events that shatter everything to smithereens aren't that common or really dangerous: most of the time you can lose something, revert and move on from such an event.

The real unmitigated danger of unchecked push to production is the velocity with which this generates technical debt. Shipping something implicitly promises the user that that feature will live on for some time, and that removal will be gradual and may require substitute or compensation. So, if you keep shipping half-baked product over and over, you'll be drowning in features that you wish you never shipped, and your support team will be overloaded, and, eventually, the product will become such a mess that developing it further will become too expensive or just too difficult, and then you'll have to spend a lot of money and time doing it all over... and it's also possible you won't have that much money and time.

crabbone commented on How has mathematics gotten so abstract?   lcamtuf.substack.com/p/ho... · Posted by u/thadt
btilly · 4 months ago
Proposed rule: People writing about the history of mathematics, should learn something about the history of mathematics.

Mathematicians didn't just randomly decide to go to abstraction and the foundations of mathematics. They were forced there by a series of crises where the mathematics that they knew fell apart. For example Joseph Fourier came up with a way to add up a bunch of well-behaved functions - sin and cos - and came up to something that wasn't considered a function - a square wave.

The focus on abstraction and axiomatization came after decades of trying to repair mathematics over and over again. Trying to retell the story in terms of the resulting mathematical flow of the ideas, completely mangles the actual flow of events.

crabbone · 4 months ago
Yeah... The article doesn't even attempt to answer the question in its title. It's just a watered down Intro to Mathematics 101.
crabbone commented on F-Droid and Google’s developer registration decree   f-droid.org/2025/09/29/go... · Posted by u/gumby271
cft · 4 months ago
"Best among the imperfect choices"?

What's wrong about the current situation? Why imperfect?

I have had Android phones starting from G1, and never had any problems with them, that I could install any APK that I wished on my own hardware. There's nothing imperfect for me, as a user. What's "imperfect" is that there are apps like ReVanced and PipePipe that deprive Google of the advertising revenue. But that's imperfect for Google, and perfect for the user. Just charge me 30 bucks for Android OS instead.

crabbone · 4 months ago
Oh, you opened a can of worms... In terms of user experience Android is garbage. It forces on you features you cannot remove unless you break into the system (which is kinda illegal or, at a minimum, voids your warranty).

Stuff like "do not disturb" that turns on accidentally and makes me miss calls, and is impossible to remove. It's impossible to remove a bunch of trash from the lock screen, and with some workarounds sometimes only the picture is removed, but it stays interactive or affects other widgets, like the audio player, for instance. Lockscreen randomly trying to dial random numbers, especially if I don't answer an incoming call. Also, taking screenshots randomly, so after almost every run I have to spend some time deleting these screenshots.

Now, when it comes to the subject in OP, it's not really about Android, it's about Google's policies around developers and app store. The whole idea behind Android is very similar to MS Windows: oppress the user because the system provider "knows better". Make choices on user's behalf, prevent users doing from useful things jut to blanket "secure" them from some imaginary threat. Manipulate users into doing a thing that's harmful for them, but beneficial for the system provider.

So, the app store managed by Google is one example of such policies. Google doesn't have the best interest of the user in mind. They are maliciously complying with regulations that want them not to abuse their users. They check the applications submitted to the app store, but they check them for the wrong things. Just to say they did.

I ended up using an FTP server app from F-Droid and a file manager from F-Droid because the stuff that was available for the same functionality found in app store is some atrocious predatory trash. It doesn't matter if I can afford to buy an app. Whatever I tried was just garbage. Once you get used to freedom and the approach of free software after you've spent some time with eg. Linux, using Android will make your blood boil because of how hostile both the system and the programs written for it are.

crabbone commented on Python developers are embracing type hints   pyrefly.org/blog/why-type... · Posted by u/ocamoss
throw-the-towel · 4 months ago
"Lipstick on a pig"? Although that's quite more combative than the Russian phrase.
crabbone · 4 months ago
Yeah... this seems like it would fit the bill nicely. At least, this is the way I'd translate it if I had to. Just didn't think about it.
crabbone commented on Python developers are embracing type hints   pyrefly.org/blog/why-type... · Posted by u/ocamoss
bc569a80a344f9c · 4 months ago
> In Russian, there's an expression "like a saddle on a cow", I'm not sure what the equivalent in English would be

“To fit a square peg into a round hole”

crabbone · 4 months ago
Close but not the same. In Russian, the expression implies an "upgrade", a failed attempt at improving something that either doesn't require improvement or cannot be improved in this particular way. This would be a typical example of how it's used: "I'm going to be a welder, I need this bachelor's degree like a saddle on a cow!".
crabbone commented on Python developers are embracing type hints   pyrefly.org/blog/why-type... · Posted by u/ocamoss
detaro · 4 months ago
Can't you define your own hint for "type that has __getitem__ taking int"?
crabbone · 4 months ago
The way I understand parent is that such a type would be too broad.

The bigger problem is that the type system expressed through hints in Python is not the type system Python is actually using. It's not even an approximation. You can express in the hint type system things that are nonsense in Python and write Python that is nonsense in the type system implied by hints.

The type system introduced through typing package and the hints is a tribute to the stupid fashion. But, also, there is no syntax and no formal definitions to describe Python's actual type system. Nor do I think it's a very good system, not to the point that it would be useful to formalize and study.

In Russian, there's an expression "like a saddle on a cow", I'm not sure what the equivalent in English would be. This describes a situation where someone is desperately trying to add a desirable feature to an exiting product that ultimately is not compatible with such a feature. This, in my mind, is the best description of the relationship between Python's actual type system and the one from typing package.

crabbone commented on Python developers are embracing type hints   pyrefly.org/blog/why-type... · Posted by u/ocamoss
seanparsons · 4 months ago
As a static typing advocate I do find it funny how all the popular dynamic languages have slowly become statically typed. After decades of people saying it's not at all necessary and being so critical of statically typed languages.

When I was working on a fairly large TypeScript project it became the norm for dependencies to have type definitions in a relatively short space of time.

crabbone · 4 months ago
Same nonsense repeated over and over again... There aren't dynamic languages. It's not a thing. The static types aren't what you think they are... You just don't know what you are saying and your conclusion is just a word salad.

What happened to Python is that it used to be a "cool" language, whose community liked to make fun of Java for their obsession with red-taping, which included the love for specifying unnecessary restrictions everywhere. Well, just like you'd expect from a poorly functioning government office.

But then everyone wanted to be cool, and Python was adopted by the programming analogue of the government bureaucrats: large corporations which treat programming as a bureaucratic mill. They don't want fun or creativity or one-of bespoke solutions. They want an industrial process that works on as large a scale as possible, to employ thousands of worst quality programmers, but still reliably produce slop.

And incrementally, Python was made into Java. Because, really, Java is great for producing slop on an industrial scale. But the "cool" factor was important to attract talent because there used to be a shortage, so, now you have Python that was remade to be a Java. People who didn't enjoy Java left Python over a decade ago. So that Python today has nothing in common with what it was when it was "cool". It's still a worse Java than Java, but people don't like to admit defeat, and... well, there's also the sunk cost fallacy: so much effort was already spent at making Python into a Java, that it seems like a good idea to waste even more effort to try to make it a better Java.

crabbone commented on Org-social is a decentralized social network that runs on Org Mode   github.com/tanrax/org-soc... · Posted by u/andros
crabbone · 6 months ago
We kind of already have groups in Gnus... I even messaged one group, like twice in my life.
crabbone commented on Org-social is a decentralized social network that runs on Org Mode   github.com/tanrax/org-soc... · Posted by u/andros
gentooflux · 6 months ago
This seems less "decentralized social network" and more "html-less www with extra steps," especially since it's only going to allow socializing between the specific types of people who fall within 3 very specific Venn diagram circles who 1) use emacs, 2) use org-mode, and 3) want to go through the trouble of hosting their own section of the network.
crabbone · 6 months ago
Sort of. There's Org for Vim users :)

u/crabbone

KarmaCake day1364May 24, 2022View Original