rockostrich (u/rockostrich)

rockostrich commented on Google's Liquid Cooling chipsandcheese.com/p/goog... · Posted by u/giuliomagnifico

bilater · 2 days ago

I’ve always wondered: what if we could actually use this heat? For example, could we take the heated water from cooling a data center and pump it to places that need it (Greenhouses, Industrial processes, Desalination and water treatment)?

rockostrich · 2 days ago

It's done sparingly. If you search for "data center waste heat uses" you'll find cases like you mention [1] [2] but the ROI on implementing it seems to be lower than renewable energy infrastructure.

[1] https://www.informationweek.com/sustainability/reusing-waste... [2] https://www.techspot.com/news/97995-data-center-uses-waste-h...

rockostrich commented on Attention Is the New Big-O: A Systems Design Approach to Prompt Engineering alexchesser.medium.com/at... · Posted by u/alexc05

gashmol · 9 days ago

Aside - It's funny to me how many developers still don't like to call their craft engineering and how fast LLM users jumped on the opportunity.

rockostrich · 9 days ago

Not sure if this is a part of it, but there are places where "engineer" is a protected title that requires a degree or license. I work with a bunch of folks in Quebec and they have to use the title "software developer" unless they are a member of the Order of Engineers. I find this to be pretty silly considering someone can have a degree in Mechanical Engineering and use the title "Software Engineer" but someone with a degree in Computer Science can't.

rockostrich commented on To be a better programmer, write little proofs in your head the-nerve-blog.ghost.io/t... · Posted by u/mprast

hiAndrewQuinn · a month ago

Indeed, this is actually one reason why I like Python's closed-left, open-right syntax. It lets us sidestep the inclusive bound issue entirely, because, as noted in the post, for all 0 ≤ l ≤ r ≤ len(L) where L is a Python list,

    L
    == L[0:len(L)]
    == L[0:l] + L[l:len(L)]
    == L[0:l] + L[l:r] + L[r:len(L)]

I actually didn't like this syntax until I had to work this out. Now everyone else's approach seems silly to me.

rockostrich · a month ago

Don't most slice methods behave this way? Javascript's `Array.prototype.slice`, Java's `Arrays.copyOfRange`, Golang's slicing syntax is similar to Python's except the 3rd value is the max size of the resulting slice rather than the step value all behave this way.

rockostrich commented on Async Queue – One of my favorite programming interview questions davidgomes.com/async-queu... · Posted by u/davidgomes

brettgriffin · 2 months ago

I'm not going to dive into the specifics of my thoughts on this question. I think a lot of comments here address this.

But does anyone else get embarrassed of their career choice when you read things like this?

I've loved software since I was a kid, but as I get older, and my friends' careers develop in private equity, medicine, law, {basically anything else}, I can tell a distinct difference between their field and mine. Like, there's no way a grown adult in another field evaluates another grown adult in the equivalent mechanism of what we see here. I know this as a fact.

I just saw a comment last week of a guy who proudly serves millions of webpages off a CSV-powered database, citing only reasons that were also covered by literally any other database.

It just doesn't feel like this is right.

rockostrich · 2 months ago

Other fields definitely involve similar lines of questioning in interviews. Medicine and law are special cases because they have their own set of standards that must be passed before you can even get an interview, but private equity interviews definitely include case studies/technical questions in a similar vein to the one shared in this post.

rockostrich commented on Build Systems à la Carte (2018) [pdf] microsoft.com/en-us/resea... · Posted by u/djoldman

webdevver · 2 months ago

Most of what we call "computer science" today is nothing more than digital carpentry.

rockostrich · 2 months ago

> is nothing more than digital carpentry

Or you could just call it what everyone has been calling it for the past 20 years and say "software engineering."

rockostrich commented on The Power and Beauty of Incrementalism supernuclear.substack.com... · Posted by u/surprisetalk

all2 · 2 months ago

> They're all super nice and we're friendly, but none of them are coming over to lift heavy weights in the garage while Creed is blasting.

Tell me when and where, I'll bring the pre-workout.

rockostrich · 2 months ago

Just dial into the harmonics generated by the voice of Scott Stapp combined with the rev of a 1993 JDM Impreza WRX and let it be your guide.

rockostrich commented on I built something that changed my friend group's social fabric blog.danpetrolito.xyz/i-b... · Posted by u/dandano

sneak · 2 months ago

The problem is that Discord isn’t e2ee and logs all chats in plaintext for all time, including all DMs. This makes it a nonstarter for me; friends don’t serve as honey in the surveillance trap for communication with their friends.

Nothing that builds up an ever-growing surveillance database on private conversations between friends can be in the running for “best”.

rockostrich · 2 months ago

We're all aware of this and we have multiple people working in the defense industry with high clearances in the server. If something needs to be shared that can't be made public then it doesn't go in Discord. This covers about 99.9% of our correspondences.

rockostrich commented on I built something that changed my friend group's social fabric blog.danpetrolito.xyz/i-b... · Posted by u/dandano

rockostrich · 2 months ago

I think Discord is the best chat app for friend groups and it's not even close. At this point I've written the following bots specifically for my friend group's server:

# Music Quiz Bot

Existing apps work ok. A lot of paid and don't let you use a specific Spotify playlist.

The only thing annoying about this one is that none of the Discord API wrappers handle audio very well so I've found that this one gets a bit flaky if you're trying to play a lot.

This one is probably like 500 lines of Typescript but a lot of that is for the Spotify API. The game logic is pretty minimal.

# Birthday Bot

This is like 10 lines of Python. It's a cron that reads from a Google Sheet my friends and I keep up to date with personal information. If it's someone's birthday then it'll post a happy birthday message to them.

# Plex Bot

I wrote this before I discovered that Overseerr just has this built-in. My Plex was set up with a webhook to hit whenever new media was downloaded. The bot would post to a specific thread with the metadata about the new media. This included another webserver for serving the cover art from the private Plex metadata server.

# Movie Quiz Bot

Similar to the music bot although I don't think existing apps exist that do this. Essentially it's https://framed.wtf/ except as a game in a Discord channel where random frames are pulled from movies in my media library and everyone competes to name the movie first. This one required some ffmpeg fun to make pulling the stills not take forever. I considered doing static stills or having a cronjob do it, but it's more fun when it's completely random.

rockostrich commented on The $25k car is going extinct? media.hubspot.com/why-the... · Posted by u/pseudolus

wsc981 · 2 months ago

In 2024 Toyota in Thailand introduced a cheap pick-up that is a bit under 15.000 USD when THB is converted to USD. I think it's rather neat - the basic model is /very/ basic, but lots of options to customize.

https://www.toyota.co.th/en/model/hilux_champ?tab=commercial...

rockostrich · 2 months ago

This doesn't really have anything to do with the US though. Importing that vehicle is not possible for another 24 years and USD$15k goes a lot farther in southeast Asia than it does in the US. For the past half century there has been a plethora of cheap pick-up trucks available in Asia and that has not carried over to the US.

rockostrich commented on The Power and Beauty of Incrementalism supernuclear.substack.com... · Posted by u/surprisetalk

bogwog · 2 months ago

Yeah, it seems easier (and healthier?) to make friends with your current neighbors than to try to build a concentration camp of friends.

rockostrich · 2 months ago

This comparison feels like it's in very poor taste. The article doesn't promote any kind of ostracizing and certainly isn't promoting that anyone in the community is forced to be there. Making friends, especially with people who already probably have their own social lives, tends to be a lot harder than maintaining friends. It's completely valid for people who are already in each other's social circles to plan to live close to each other.

My partner and I moved into a house on a pretty secluded street of a very suburban township. There are 5 houses on the block. We're friendly with everyone but we're all in very different periods of our lives. Two of the houses have younger kids, one has older kids, and one is empty nesters. They're all super nice and we're friendly, but none of them are coming over to lift heavy weights in the garage while Creed is blasting.