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harrisi commented on Itch.io: Update on NSFW Content   itch.io/updates/update-on... · Posted by u/panic
rsync · a month ago
It need not be that extreme… what with the theft and confiscation of property, etc.

A much milder, and more sensible, expression of your underlying sentiment is:

If an activity becomes this essential, the government should provide a competitive entrant in the same field.

Now the incumbent provider has competition, and there is a market participant tied to other incentives, etc.

No theft necessary.

harrisi · a month ago
I don't understand how this would work. If the government created some entity to handle processing payments (or whatever), I assume it would be a publicly funded non-profit, since there is precedent for that. How much funding does it get? Where does that money come from? How does it compete with the existing massively powerful corporations? What incentives does the government entity have to compete? What happens if it goes bankrupt or is purchased? What happens to whatever capital was used to fund it?

It just seems like the government entity would need to actively engage with seeking profits or just existing to artificially lower costs. I don't think the majority of people would want the government to have a for-profit arm that exists to compete with businesses, and I don't think corporations would just play nice.

I'd say that USPS is the closest example of this, and it's a pretty good example of how things can go wrong as well. The active attack against the postal service to try to privatize it is terrible. It will do nothing but continue to isolate power to the ultra wealthy and make people's lives worse. For-profit corporations and the government just have (or ought to have) fundamentally different incentives to exist.

I'd be curious to know of any examples of this working well. I don't mean to be so antagonistic, I just am really struggling to understand how this could work in any way.

harrisi commented on Why Elixir? Common misconceptions   matthewsinclair.com/blog/... · Posted by u/ahamez
Einenlum · a month ago
Am I the only one who never tried Elixir just because it has no strict typing? Seems very hard for me to go back to a language with dynamic typing. Maybe I'm just wrong and I should give it a try.
harrisi · a month ago
I believe you meant static typing. There's active ongoing work in this space, and Elixir is actually gradually typed now. You can read more about it in the docs: https://hexdocs.pm/elixir/gradual-set-theoretic-types.html
harrisi commented on Erlang 28 on GRiSP Nano using only 16 MB   grisp.org/blog/posts/2025... · Posted by u/plainOldText
elcritch · a month ago
Right GRiSP has support for creating RTOS tasks in C, IIRC.

Within BEAM itself there’s no priority mechanism, however, on a RPi3 or BeagleBone you could get about an 200 uS average response time to GPIO on Linux, even under moderate load. The jitter was pretty low too, like 10-20 uS on average, but the 99.9% tail latencies could get up to hundreds of millis.

That’s fine for many use cases. Still I now prefer programming on esp32’s with Nim for anything realtime. Imperative programming just makes handling arrays easier. Just wish FreeRTOS tasks had error handling akin to OTP supervisors.

Now Beam/Elixir would be amazing for something like HomeAssistant or large networked control systems.

harrisi · a month ago
Erlang does have a mechanism to modify process priority, with process_flag/2,3.

As of OTP 28 there's also priority messaging that a process can opt in to. Not really related, but it's new and interesting to note.

harrisi commented on Beyond Meat fights for survival   foodinstitute.com/focus/b... · Posted by u/airstrike
rpdillon · a month ago
> Ultra-processed foods are operationally distinguishable from processed foods by the presence of food substances of no culinary use (varieties of sugars such as fructose, high-fructose corn syrup, 'fruit juice concentrates', invert sugar, maltodextrin, dextrose and lactose; modified starches; modified oils such as hydrogenated or interesterified oils; and protein sources such as hydrolysed proteins, soya protein isolate, gluten, casein, whey protein and 'mechanically separated meat') or of additives with cosmetic functions (flavours, flavour enhancers, colours, emulsifiers, emulsifying salts, sweeteners, thickeners and anti-foaming, bulking, carbonating, foaming, gelling and glazing agents) in their list of ingredients.

They have a different definition of "no culinary use" than I do!

harrisi · a month ago
Earlier in the definition it uses the more conservative phrase "no or rare culinary use," which I think is more accurate. The point is just to attempt to categorize foods by processing levels in a way the public can understand.

I am curious what items in the list differ for you. When's the last time you grabbed your isolated fructose and maltodextrin to season your steak?

The way I think of it is if I were to cook a chicken breast or bake a loaf of bread and then write down the ingredients, they'd be chicken, oil, salt, pepper; or flour, water, yeast, salt. Now go look at the ingredients of a chicken breast (raw, marinated, or cooked) and a loaf of bread in the grocery store and note the differences between the ingredient list. If the ingredient list for an item from the store includes things a household wouldn't have at home, like fructose or maltodextrin, that item would be considered ultra processed.

I'll note that I don't eat as healthy as I should, people should do what they want, and it's possible to still be unhealthy while avoiding ultra processed foods.

harrisi commented on Beyond Meat fights for survival   foodinstitute.com/focus/b... · Posted by u/airstrike
Aardwolf · a month ago
Which types of processing exactly is implied by that, and which are not?

Where's the line drawn, is ground beef ultra processed or not? how about a chicken schnitzel? canned sardines? dark chocolate?

Which part of the ultra-processing is making the foot unhealthy, is it chemicals they add? the fact that they heat it up (but at home when you cook you also heat up stuff)? something else they do with it?

If you bake fries yourself from potatoes with olive oil, is it ultra processed?

harrisi · a month ago
The term comes from the Nova classification.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nova_classification

harrisi commented on What the Fuck Python   colab.research.google.com... · Posted by u/sundarurfriend
kazinator · a month ago
Bad requirements are bugs.

Bugs in understanding. Bugs in good taste.

A roach in your soup is a bug, even if the recipe says it should be there.

harrisi · a month ago
I think I know what you mean, but there's a line somewhere. Just because everyone doesn't understand the intricacies of the micro ops their cpu is using or every type of cache involved in various situations doesn't mean their computer is full of bugs.

Similarly, as long as the mental model of a Python programmer is in line with the results of executing some computation with Python, all is well.

harrisi commented on What the Fuck Python   colab.research.google.com... · Posted by u/sundarurfriend
msgodel · a month ago
It probably wasn't a good idea to start it out is showing string constants aren't optimized. If they wanted to talk about really unintuitive reference gotchas initialization in optional function parameters would have been a way better example.
harrisi · a month ago
I appreciate the sentiment, but even this is a good example of why this stuff is interesting. Because some strings _are_ optimized (using some definition of "optimized"), but only in some cases.

It's these quirky little things where the code doesn't exactly represent the way execution happens in most straightforward mental models of how execution works. Again, it's not bad and it's not unique to Python. It's just the nitty gritty of how some things work.

I will say that calling it "What The Fuck Python" is certainly more attention-grabbing than "Some Interesting Bits About Python Internals You Probably Don't Need To Know". What're you gonna do. :)

harrisi commented on What the Fuck Python   colab.research.google.com... · Posted by u/sundarurfriend
harrisi · a month ago
I'm surprised by the reactions to this. It's made immediately clear in the notebook that this is a fun look at some interesting behaviors of Python. There's no implication that there are bugs - I have no idea where anyone got that idea - except for the single actual bug in CPython that is mentioned (https://github.com/python/cpython/issues/54753).

I don't feel strongly about Python, but I do think CPython is a great way for people to learn a bit about how interpreted languages work. The code is quite easy to understand, and you can easily play with these interesting aspects of how languages and runtimes work. Does every Python programmer need to know the difference between `a = 256` and `a = 257`? No. Is it interesting? Yes. Should someone on your team know? Probably.

There's a lot of interesting stuff here. Understanding the difference between the conceptual idea of each line of code and what actually happens is fun, and, in some cases, important.

harrisi commented on Things I learned from 5 years at Vercel   leerob.com/vercel... · Posted by u/gk1
sunaookami · 2 months ago
Next.js has many weird bugs and things that just... don't work and when you hit these edge cases and a >5 year old open GitHub issue you know you will spend the next two weeks searching for another way or just abandoning it because it doesn't work. Got burned out hard by Next.js while rewriting a very old project - it worked in the end and I was proud of it but just using something... simpler would've been better. Deploying Next.js outside Vercel is hell, too...

Also tried SvelteKit (with Svelte 4) which was quiet nice but it completely misbehave in production with a lot of corner-case bugs that were not reproducable in development and I abandoned it for good. Didn't the creator of Svelte even joined Vercel? They seem to want to "unite" all the JS frameworks "under one roof" which I find a bit... disturbing?

harrisi · 2 months ago
I believe all the core contributors to Svelte and SvelteKit are employed by Vercel.
harrisi commented on NuxtLabs is joining Vercel   nuxtlabs.com/... · Posted by u/blinky88
fragmede · 2 months ago
Where's the "even more control" though? A proprietary closed source version of the same would be the other way to do it, but then it would be closed source.

If we want open source to be viable we have to support actually having businesses around it. Vercel making it easy to deploy to their servers seems like a fairly decent business model compared to some of the other options.

harrisi · 2 months ago
I would love if Vercel paid all the people in the teams I mentioned earlier, told them to do whatever they want, and checked in only to make sure they had enough snacks. But that's probably not the case. Vercel employs these people. To some degree, simplistically, the employees are there to further the goals of the company.

I don't claim to know their plans. I've never been in charge of a multibillion dollar company. I just think I have a vague idea of what their general strategy is, and I don't love it.

I'll also say that I definitely want open source projects to succeed. I don't know how they can in a great way in a capitalist system. So maybe this is, from my standpoint, the best of a bad situation. I still think it's worth pointing out and paying attention to from a free software and business position.

Also just want to say thanks for what seems to be a genuine discussion in good faith.

u/harrisi

KarmaCake day460February 1, 2016View Original