It's fascinating to me that we went from "embedding important information in QR codes is silly because they look ridiculous and no one will ever use them" ( https://picturesofpeoplescanningqrcodes.tumblr.com/ ) all the way to "sweet, I can read the whole menu online and order and pay when I'm ready, this is great" in like 3 months.
Yeah. It's baffling to me that Private Eye covered this in explicit, specific detail a decade ago and there were essentially no consequences for many years after.
Heinlein's "The Roads Must Roll" posits a network of very fast, very long moving walkways which could be used for mass transit (you'd ramp up speed on slower ones then hop over to a fast one). Wikipedia says that moving walkways had been in sf for decades by that point, but Heinlein also almost incidentally invents the Segway in the story -- just a little treat.
I love peoplemovers (like the Hong Kong Central-Mid Level escalators and the delightfully bouncy SFO walkways) and always wondered what would have to be different for us to get super-fast ones for transit.
In Boston, IMO they would be at least as good as the Green Line :)
Gosh I think I'll be a little sad about that future? I'm reminded of how we used to know really fun tricks for squeezing another bit of performance out of our assembly code -- "The Story of Mel" -- and then compilers started doing all the work for us.
The past year or so of published literature on LLMs has been kind of hilarious because there is a substantial chunk of stuff whose contribution is "putting this extra English sentence into the input produces measurably better output".
It's like watching alchemists puzzle out chemistry, or like watching wizards fill their spellbooks. What a cool time.
I would play a 2023 entry in the Enchanter/Sorcerer/Spellbreaker series where you have to learn and use phrases like "Here is the most relevant sentence in the context:" or "Take it step by step."
Some of the best ambassadors for Brutalist architecture I've experienced are the Barbican in London and the Bonaventure in Los Angeles. They make good spaces for people.
Gosh. I just emailed myself a .png of the barcode containing my library card number and open it in, like, the Photos or Gmail app when I'm at the kiosk.
I *swear* that a year or two into this whole thing there were a wave of articles about how individual state marketplaces were having insurers exit the state marketplace. The story which I am *sure* I read more than once said that an insurer found they were losing money on a small number of patients with very expensive treatment needs which drove up their costs so much that no one else wanted to buy their product at its new price.
I went looking for articles about this recently and couldn't find them any more. Did I imagine this happening?
* the identification of the person who called LeMessurier in 1978 and whose questions made him redo the math (whose name is not listed in the New Yorker article) as Lee DeCarolis ( https://onlineethics.org/node/41606 )
Reading this writeup, the procedure takes up to two minutes:
* each person in the room pulls up the stem when their individual second hand is pointing at 0, and also sets the time to the prearranged hour/minute,
* then everyone waits a bit longer until this is done;
* after another minute, everyone pushes down the stem simultaneously
Is there an alternative where you could have some way to force your second hand to the 0 position rather than waiting up to a minute for it to get there on its own then freeze it?
I do see why hacking is nice for time zone changes.
I like the suggestion to rethink whether you actually need to be doing asynchronous computing with a message broker/queue/stream or whether you can represent your work another way.
A little over ten years ago I worked in the Excel Services team that makes the consumer-visible Excel Web App and also the SharePoint-integrated Excel Services product (server side processing accessible via API or web UI).
I loved seeing the genuine joy our PMs had whenever they found an honest to goodness calc bug and could get it reproduced and fixed in The State Machine. It was also a delight to see the web app approach parity with the desktop client experience -- we got to listen to a wide swath of users and build out the stuff we thought would be most useful to the most folks. And I loved our group PM's insight about what the heck Excel could be good for versus purpose built BI tools, other web sheet apps, pure SQL, etc.
This is a very fun kind of product to create and it's awesome that you were able to ship it in a way people could use!
If the Earth's rotation speeds up or slows down, would you like the "6pm local time" to be 6pm plus the leap seconds that come in between now and 2030? (We don't know how many there will be yet.)
Whenever I want to think about "what does it mean to prove something?" I dig into my copy of Imre Lakatos's "Proofs and Refutations", a Socratic dialogue-style story where a bunch of aspiring theorem-provers try to prove a particular theorem about the Euler characteristic of polyhedra and discuss what they are actually doing and why it works or doesn't.
I originally picked up the book because I was trying to understand Euler's polyhedral formula better -- which in retrospect is kind of like reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance because you wanted to fix a motorcycle.
I'm not wired for pure math -- I loved real analysis then quit while I was ahead. Still it's fun to pretend sometimes, and Lakatos does a great job of making you feel like you're learning inside knowledge about what mathematicians do. He introduces fun concepts like "monster-barring" (the way people sometimes carve out special cases in a proof when they encounter counterexamples).
I've never made it the whole way through, but I like to go back every few months and absorb a little more.
edit to add: I just now skimmed the author's Wikipedia entry and the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy's story about the author's interaction with someone named Éva Izsák and I have a ton of questions.