How would you ensure things like industrial farms use a more expensive multi-antibiotic approach instead of a cheaper single-antibiotic one without effective regulation?
People who experienced a stable childhood seem to have a natural tendency to view the period they grew up in as, if not a golden age, then a safer, simpler time. Which makes sense: You’re too young to be aware of much of the complexity of the world, and your parents provide most of your essential needs and shield you from a lot of bad stuff.
That’s not to say all eras are the same. Clearly there’s better and worse times to be alive, but it’s hard to be objective about our childhoods.
This is often quoted advice, but like many things it’s only true in moderation. People who take it too literally come across like therapists or interviewers. Some people are not comfortable talking about themselves, and most well adjusted people don’t want to talk endlessly about themselves. A good conversation should usually be an exchange.
For biology, Synthace supports designing experimental protocols using DOE, executing them on robotically automated lab equipment, then performing analysis on the results: https://www.synthace.com/
The principle reason I've stopped using Stack Overflow much, which I haven't seen mentioned elsewhere, is that its content has become too dated.
Most of my questions relate to web development — how to do something in HTML/CSS/JS. When I Google, I can almost always find a related questions on Stack Overflow, but both the question and the answers are usually from a decade ago. The techniques they recommend are totally anachronistic by modern standards.
For example, search "how to vertically center a div". The top Stack Overflow result is a question from _14 years ago_, wanting to know how to do it in all browsers "including Internet Explorer 6". And the the accepted answer is a horribly convoluted hack that could be replaced with a couple of line of CSS nowadays.
As I said, as a developer working on a software project for your employer, you often inherit dependencies you had no say in. Nor can you force your employer to negotiate a contract with the maintainer.
Don't get me wrong: I'm not arguing the maintainer has any responsibility to fix your issue. I'm only saying that the situation for the developer facing the bug is not always as simple as the article implies. Their choices are constrained by factors outside their control, and they are under pressure to deliver. It's this pressure that explains some of the frustration and anger that can bubble up in open source discussions.
I don't think there's an easy solution, but more empathy on all sides might be a start.
I agree with the article in general, but the wrinkle comes when you encounter a bug in a large, popular open source project (naming no names, but any of the major web frameworks for example) that you're using for a work project.
Fix it? Sure, except despite their ostensibly open nature, many of these projects are run as internal projects of large tech corps, and the bandwidth and interest of the team in reviewing and merging external PRs is limited to nonexistent. I've submitted small, obvious bug fixes, complete with test coverage, to projects and had them sit unreviewed for years.
Fork it? Well there is a big, big difference between spending an hour fixing a bug and submitting a PR, and forking a large and complex dependency. You're committing yourself and your team and employer to the ongoing maintenance of the fork and merging of upstream changes, just so you can merge a bug fix. Usually, that's just not practical.
Fuck off? Many third-party dependencies in mature projects are non-negotiable. Removing them would require a complete rewrite. You may not even have been the person who chose them, but you're stuck with them, and then your boss asks you to implement a feature or fix something that relies on a change or fix in a dependency. Being blocked due to upstream intransigence is very frustrating, and there is often a professional cost to saying "no" to a request, especially a bug fix, no matter how convincing you argue that it's not your fault or under your control.
This is an exasperating article. Where is the data on who these 2.6m people are, demographically speaking, what their reasons are for not seeking work, and how they supporting themselves if they don't work? 2.6m young people not working is very different from 2.6m people who've basically chosen early retirement, for example. It talks about a skills problem, but without giving real any numbers or context.
Which is not an answer to the question “Was The Washington Post the tipping point where Amazon started to collapse?”, which you were responding to.
I don’t eat at McDonalds, but that doesn’t make me think they’re going to collapse. In fact they’re likely successful for precisely for the reasons I don’t eat there.
While it's true that a LAB gradient will produce a more perceptually uniform gradient, it doesn't alter the article's point that sRGB isn't a colorspace. It has an associated nonlinear gamma function that is used to help compress values to 8-bit, and the result is that interpolating between two sRGB values is not the same as interpolating between them in a proper RGB colorspace, with the result that you'll get brightness problems.
So yes, LAB will produce more perceptually uniform gradients than RGB, but browsers are exacerbating the problems of RGB gradients by not implementing them properly.
Supposedly because at the time of the acquisition, "Canyon Bridge was licensed and regulated by US law." but "Since then it has moved its headquarters to the Cayman Islands and as such is no longer a US-controlled entity." [1]. Although that sounds pretty flimsy. I suspect, given it happened in 2017, it was judged politically unwise to block a Chinese state investor when the UK was looking to increase global trade post-Brexit.
Eventually it seems the UK gov woke up and blocked a Chinese attempt to take over the board and move the company to China[2]. Now it seems there's a plan to IPO again in London or Nasdaq[3] so the Chinese owners can exit.
I am very excited for this. For those unaware, Ron Gilbert was the creative force behind The Secret of Monkey Island 1 and 2, but then left Lucasarts and the subsequent Monkey Island games were made by others. He's said for a long time that those games, while perfectly fine, didn't represent his vision for how the series would have continued (and Monkey Island 2 finished on an intriguing cliffhanger), so it's cool that we'll finally get his version of things, as the new game will continue from where MI2 left off (although apparently the other games will remain as canon somehow).
Also, a few years ago Gilbert and many of the others working on this new game made a retro-styled point-and-click adventure game called Thimbleweed Park[1]. It wasn't a smash hit in terms of sales, but I thought it was a lot of fun, and had some very sharp dialogue and design, and reassures me that the creative team haven't lost their touch and this won't be another Underworld Ascendant debacle.
Yeah, I can't think of a single real app or website I've seen that uses this style. It seems instead like a single designer doing some self-promotion by inventing these new "trends". And this one seems to be inspired by cheap DVD menu screens from the 2000s.
Having used Copilot for a while, I am quite certain it will replace me as a programmer.
It appears to me that when it comes to language models, intelligence = experience * context. Where experience is the amount what's encoded in the model, and context is the prompt. And the biggest limitation on Copilot currently is context. It behaves as an "advanced autocomplete" because it all is has to go on is what regular autocomplete sees, e.g. the last few characters and lines of code.
So, you can write a function name called createUserInDB() and it will attempt to complete it for you. But how does it know what DB technology you're using? Or what your user record looks like? It doesn't, and so you typically end up with a "generic" looking function using the most common DB tech and naming conventions for your language of choice.
But now imagine a future version of Copilot that is automatically provided with a lot more context. It also gets fed a list of your dependencies, from which it can derive which DB library you're using. It gets any locatable SQL schema file, so it can determine the columns in the user table. It gets the text of the Jira ticket, so it can determine the requirements.
As a programmer a great deal of time is spent checking these different sources and synthesising them in your head into an approach, which you then code. But they are all just text, of one form or another, and language models can work with them just as easily, and much faster, than you can.
And one the ML train coding gets running, it'll only get faster. Sooner or later Github will have a "Copilot bot" that can automatically make a stab at fixing issues, which you then approve, reject, or fix. And as thousands of these issues pile up, the training set will get bigger, and the model will get better. Sooner or later it'll be possible to create a repo, start filing issues, and rely on the bot to implement everything.
Elon Musk trying to save humanity from going extinct as a "one planet species" and in the process causing us to miss a near-Earth asteroid whose impact wipes us out would be rather ironic.