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etbebl commented on Ireland’s Diarmuid Early wins world Microsoft Excel title   bbc.com/news/articles/cj4... · Posted by u/1659447091
lysace · 5 days ago
Programming efficiency isn’t about typing/editing fast - it’s about great decision-making. Although I have seen the combo of both working out very well.

If you focus on fast typing/editing skills to level up, but still have bad decision-making skills, you'll just end up burying yourself (and possibly your team) faster and more decisively. (I have seen that, too.)

etbebl · 5 days ago
I interpreted the original comment totally differently - I thought they were saying that the programmers [who created these tools] should pay more attention to how productive [or not] power users can be with the tools [that they created]. And use that as an important metric for software quality. Which I definitely agree with.
etbebl commented on Prepare for That Stupid World   ploum.net/2025-12-19-prep... · Posted by u/speckx
jcstk · 6 days ago
Any information that comes to you for free or is on a screen is an advertisement. All of it. That's the point. Do you think people spend millions and billions of dollars creating and maintaining a content delivery network because they just want you to know about things?
etbebl · 6 days ago
Well, of course almost all information comes with an agenda, but perhaps the more useful distinction is whether the information is presented in good faith, i.e. is honest about the agenda (which actual advertising can also be).
etbebl commented on The Anatomy of a macOS App   eclecticlight.co/2025/12/... · Posted by u/elashri
ryandrake · 18 days ago
Wow. I haven't written software for Windows in over a decade. I always thought Apple was alone in its invasive treatment of developers on their platform. Windows used to be "just post the exe on your web site, and you're good to go." I guess Microsoft has finally managed to aggressively insert themselves into the distribution process there, too. Sad to see.
etbebl · 17 days ago
I get that if you're distributing software to the wider public, you have to make sure these scary alerts don't pop up regardless of platform. But as a savvy user, I think the situation is still better on Windows. As far as I've seen there's still always a (small) link in these popups (I think it's SmartScreen?) to run anyway - no need to dig into settings before even trying to run it.
etbebl commented on Why don't you use dependent types?   lawrencecpaulson.github.i... · Posted by u/baruchel
Sharlin · 2 months ago
> For example, I wish Python had the ability to express "a 10 x 5 matrix of float32s" as a type

To clarify, as long as 5 and 10 are constants, this is entirely possible in C++ and Rust^1, neither of which are dependently typed (or at most are dependently typed in a very weak sense). In general, neither can ensure at compile time that an index only known at runtime is in bounds, even if the bounds themselves are statically known. A proper dependently-typed language can prevent runtime out-of-bound errors even if neither the indices nor the bounds are known at type check time.

^1 And weakly in many other languages whose builtin array types have compile-time bounds. But C++ and Rust let user-defined generic types abstract over constant values.

etbebl · 2 months ago
The latter is what would be most useful imo. Even Matlab can type check matrix sizes with constants these days, but I often wish I could use variables to express relationships between the sizes of different dimensions of inputs to a function.
etbebl commented on How can I influence others without manipulating them?   andiroberts.com/leadershi... · Posted by u/kiyanwang
klodolph · 3 months ago
I really don’t like this article. I think this article reflects more our desire to categorize things into neatly numbered lists, and reflects less any thorough understanding of influence. Big lists of aphorisms. Less in the way of concrete detail. Words are used the wrong way. Concepts are broken up into incoherent lists.

“Ratianolising” is the word used in the most wrong way. The word normally describes inventing post-hoc reasons for some decision or behavior.

“Negotiating” is a big list of aphorisms which pull in different directions. Some of the advice sounds like amateurish art-of-the-deal tips which encourage you to extract as many concessions as you can from the other side. Some of the advice pulls in the opposite direction. And then, to mix everything up, the advice to compromise and meet half-way rears its ugly head.

The more I read in this article, the worse my opinion gets. I’m stopping.

:-(

etbebl · 3 months ago
I can see that some of the categories are a stretch semantically; however, I didn't see the specific categories and their names as central to the point of the article. I think the goal is to demonstrate that 1) everyone engages in persuasion in some form; 2) there are various different styles of persuasion with different strengths and weaknesses, and it's useful to be self-aware about what style(s) you tend to use and whether there are other styles you might want to try out in certain situations. I think breaking it down into 5 somewhat artificial categories is a good framework for making this topic approachable and providing good examples to think about.

I think if you already have well-developed thoughts about persuasion and social interaction, it might not add much, but it was useful for me.

etbebl commented on The "most hated" CSS feature: cos() and sin()   css-tricks.com/the-most-h... · Posted by u/rapawel
etbebl · 3 months ago
It's crazy to me that a significant number of people know "cos" and "sin" primarily though CSS. Is that really what this is implying? Or maybe people just find them hard in general, but it seems odd to think of them as features you dislike, rather than attributing the dislike to the underlying math, if you've ever taken a trig class before.
etbebl commented on A critique of package managers   gingerbill.org/article/20... · Posted by u/gingerBill
etbebl · 3 months ago
> In real life, when you have a dependency, you are responsible for it. If the thing that is dependent on you does something wrong, like a child or business, you might end up in jail, as you are responsible for that.

Isn't this backwards? In real life, if you have a dependent, you are responsible for it. On the other hand, if you have a dependency on something, you rely on that thing, in other words it should be responsible for you. A package that is widely used in security-critical applications ought to be able to be held accountable if its failure causes harm due to downstream applications. But because that is in general impossible and most library authors would never take on the risk of making such guarantees, the risk of each dependency is taken on by the person who decides it is safe to use it, and I agree package managers sometimes make that too easy.

etbebl commented on Not paying with cash   rubenerd.com/not-paying-w... · Posted by u/mikece
etbebl · 4 months ago
How milquetoast... "Young people want to pay with cash more, and there might be interesting reasons for that, but ehh cards are convenient and cash is gross so still no cash for me!" What's the point of this?
etbebl commented on The day Return became Enter (2023)   aresluna.org/the-day-retu... · Posted by u/sohkamyung
Someone · 4 months ago
FTA: Apple also added Enter to the numeric keypad, although an Enter that almost exclusively did the same thing as Return.

If applications followed the UI guidelines, Enter behaved like Return if enter didn’t make sense in the context and vice versa. Yes, that was mostly (when do you have UI to enter a multi-line text to be processed as a separate unit?) but when it mattered, return started a new line, and enter sent entered text to be processed by the application.

MPW shell was a (?the?) prime example. In its editor, Return started a new line, Enter executed the current selection or, if there was none, line.

etbebl · 4 months ago
I have a faint memory of Enter creating a page break rather than a newline on a school Mac when I was a kid. Maybe that was in AppleWorks?
etbebl commented on The Synology End Game   lowendbox.com/blog/they-u... · Posted by u/amacbride
snowwrestler · 4 months ago
Is NAS a growth market at all anymore? My somewhat unexamined opinion is that most folks can and probably do just store everything in the cloud.

I would not be surprised to find out that Synology is seeing a smaller market year over year and becoming desperate to find new revenue per person who is shopping for a NAS today.

etbebl · 4 months ago
Isn't the conventional wisdom "at least 2 backups, one offsite"? My lab gets by with 2 copies for most of our data: one on our Synology NAS and one mirrored to Box.

With the size of data we're dealing with, loading everything from cloud all the time would slow analyses down to a crawl. The Synology is networked with 10G Ethernet to most of our workstations.

u/etbebl

KarmaCake day143May 23, 2019View Original