You try 3D printing a house on a Pentium, or running inference models. We needed the compute. We need so much compute it boggles the mind and we don't know what to do with it.
Only then, as we are drowning in compute, does it spill over into other areas and allow that compute to be used as leverage towards enhancing or automating areas compute has yet to break into. Only then are crazy ideas like having large clusters of transistors act as neurons in a neural net actually possible, and efficient enough.
This is at least what I mean when I occasionally say something flippant like "(technology/computers/software) will eat the world". Maybe our relentless pursuit of more compute isn't the best way to solve complex problems, but it increasingly seems like it may be a way.
Denver is taking the same approach, and, really, it's the only tool we have for preventing huge increases in traffic as population increases and actually getting people to rely on public transit. I live in a transit-oriented development zone near train+bus stop and love how easy it is to walk to anything I want.
Transit-oriented development is the only sensible approach I've seen to scaling a modern city.
I learned some cool new features coming in Ruby 2.7 and I am very much looking forward to them now.
The rest of this post is drivel, complaints, and ends with begging questions answered in his opening bullets. How does this optimize ruby for happiness? Flexibility and choice.
Backwards compatibility is maintained. You can write the same old ruby you wrote before if you want to avoid change. I'm very happy to have some new syntax tools in the toolbox.
This is good for everyone. Hopefully the adoption is swift and we can pretend the myriad Thunderbolt/USB-C/USB 3.0 issues, differences, and confusion never happened.
I didn't know they sold homes. Kind of amazing. It's a surprising footnote in the tragedy of Sears.
The popular narrative of an out-of-touch company unable to compete with the likes of Amazon is false. The CEO is a hedge fund manager who pillaged the company, sold off it's best assets (sometimes to himself), loaded up the company with debt, and used it to pay himself millions.
It's not all doom and gloom. Major American cities are also being invaded by a litany of battery powered vehicles, especially through ebike and electric scooter rental services. Some places, like here in Denver, seem to be embracing this with open arms and it could eventually help with both congestion and pollution.
Inexpensive power-dense batteries will unlock a real revolution, not just in car-like transportation, but transportation you can pick up and carry with you, or stow under your desk at work.
Electric skateboards, electric kick scooters, electric mopeds, electric giant wheels you straddle like a snowboard (OneWheel), electric unicycles, electric rollerskates... these are just a few of the device categories exploding in popularity.
I think the battery transport revolution is already upon us, it's just harder to see because it's much smaller than we expected.
I think most of us want our code to see the light of day. If given an actual problem to solve, we aren't going to toil away at tiny details forever. We want to see it run!
A good manager knows this and will give you room to find that balance yourself, unless you have demonstrated you need help with that.
I was lucky that my first technical role was where I found the best manager I've had. He was my 2nd supervisor in that first role.
After that I got to be pickier than most about where to go next, so my results might be rosier than others. In total I've had 7 "supervisors" in my technical career. 2 of them were amazing and I would take a (small) pay cut right now to work with either. 2 were good, mostly hands off, and easy to work with. The other 3 were nice people with good intentions, but significant managerial shortcomings. None of them were bad or insufferable.
In one case, an extraordinary mentor almost entirely made up for shortcomings of the manager. Working with great people alongside you often makes the incompetency of the people above a little less relevant, or at least more tolerable.
He tore down barriers and made sure interactions with other parts of the organization or external parties were as frictionless as possible. He would take any non-technical chores off our plate where possible. He would give clear and frequent feedback, good and bad, and really cared about where I wanted to go with my career and what kind of projects I wanted to work on. He trusted me when I said I would do something and would just make sure everything was out of my way until I asked for help or deadlines were being missed.
He was a shield for those of us who worked for him.
I bring my own laptop to work, which runs a linux distro I installed myself (Ubuntu). I also have to use my camera and mic quite a bit, so, they remain free of obstructions most of the time.
If I was using my work supplied laptop I would likely take efforts to blind the machine outside of work hours.
I am a lot more worried about my phone. The android update process is slow and opaque and I have no idea what the manufacturer might be slipping into updates. Again, I use it a lot, so it generally remains un-obstructed.
I value privacy, but, apparently I value convenience of being able to actually use my devices a little more.
I misread the headline. I was really worried I wouldn't be able to search C-SPAN archives anymore. I'm glad I can still find old clips of bonehead senators trying to grandstand at hearings.
Mickey has been on the verge of entering the public domain for decades now. Every time it gets close Disney and other companies are successful in re-writing copyright law to whatever they want it to be. No, Mickey probably won't be in the public domain in 5 years.
The GPD Pocket fits this bill. It was available with Ubuntu pre-installed during it's crowd sourcing campaign. The support under Ubuntu is pretty good, including good support for the touch screen. 7" 1080p, atom CPU, 8GB RAM, 128GB SSD. More expensive, but under $500.
10000mah and an ARM A53 mean it should last 10 hours or more with moderate brightness settings. It's hard to beat this for a light cheap terminal/browser with plenty of battery if that is something you need.
Pretty sure the are just banking on SpaceX dominating the global space launch services market for the next few years. Signs increasingly point to this being a safe bet.
The valuation is higher than the annual global launch market, but below what it's projected to reach in the next few years. If SpaceX can maintain their current share of the global market for a few years the valuation may be conservative.
Impressed a girl once who's friend had a Mac Classic with important files that needed to be removed. The only removable storage option was a broken floppy drive. It did have a network card, but couldn't find any way to move files to my modern mac, linux, or windows machines over the network.
It did have an ancient version of Netscape, so I tried to upload the files, but the browser was just too old to handle Dropbox, Google Drive, or any other service I could think of. An obvious solution, then, would be an upload service built for ancient browsers.
So, in about 5 minutes flat I made a sinatra app that used the simplest HTML upload form possible and dumped uploaded files to a folder on my desktop machine.
Maybe there was an easier solution I missed, but she found mine quite impressive.
Only then, as we are drowning in compute, does it spill over into other areas and allow that compute to be used as leverage towards enhancing or automating areas compute has yet to break into. Only then are crazy ideas like having large clusters of transistors act as neurons in a neural net actually possible, and efficient enough.
This is at least what I mean when I occasionally say something flippant like "(technology/computers/software) will eat the world". Maybe our relentless pursuit of more compute isn't the best way to solve complex problems, but it increasingly seems like it may be a way.