so a specific event like covid would nuke toilet paper supplies, even if the demand each store was within expected parameters
now, covid might have been big enough at each individual store it would have been a problem regardless, but the concept remains the same
I saw this working on supply chain optimization at Target: a big point of having distribution centers is to pool the uncertainty at individual stores, letting us serve uncertain demand with less inventory
Money Stuff today had a section “In a crisis all correlations go to 1”
that's a useful idea for understanding some complex systems behavior in general
a lot of systems—often implicitly—work because randomness "cancels out" at scale... so it's exciting when it suddenly doesn't
we already had a ton of bad code, but building a machine for generating industrial quantities of deceptively bad code might still make things qualitatively worse
Legitimacy, by contrast, determines whether that control is accepted as justified.
cutlefish.substack.com/p/tbm-414-le...
I think letting people specify default values for record fields is pretty natural, but I haven't thought through that in detail
Code can be right for the wrong reason, a subtle but legitimately dangerous dynamic. I like to think about it like a "Gettier counterexample but for code" :P
what we really need are anonymous structurally typed records, which would also work for named arguments
you're saying that as if Oscar can function without cat snacks
I had an email recently about some Haskell community stuff I'm helping with, that ended by asking if I could suggest anybody else who could also help out.
GMail's auto suggested response included a specific person's name and an endorsement for them :P
a lot of this comes down to leadership that is afraid to give anyone the scope or autonomy to make independent decisions over longer time horizons
which is to say that it's perfectly coherent to see what ai companies are doing as "theft" without endorsing the licensing bullshit around disco elysium and similar
I haven't spent enough time thinking about it to distinguish it more clearly, but enough to strongly suspect there's something there
"intellectual property" conflates several concepts that need to be distinct, and I figure people have some strong intuition for which ones are good and which ones are bad, even if they don't have the words—don't realize they need the words—to distinguish them
ideally the search tool should normalize for that
I'm far from a Unicode expert—thankfully—but I understand the standard actually specifies some rules for handling this sort of thing
sometimes computers just don't work
seems like the same applies to tech companies
People sometimes quote Deming: "if you can't measure it, you can't manage it"
His full quote is completely the opposite though: "It is wrong to suppose that if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it – a costly myth."
Too bad the full version didn't catch on :P
deming.org/myth-if-you-...
People sometimes quote Deming: "if you can't measure it, you can't manage it"
His full quote is completely the opposite though: "It is wrong to suppose that if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it – a costly myth."
Too bad the full version didn't catch on :P
deming.org/myth-if-you-...
When you professionalise, you narrow the operation of an entity to just that one thing. In a human context, that means your only job is to make size 21b fussplocker wheels or whatever. It is not your job to know or care that the only use for them is in a torture tool or a nuke.
When Lean Startup started catching on and everyone in and around Silicon Valley software startups was going on about pivots, I remember wondering where this left people who wanted to build a thing or do a thing, as opposed to being a capital-F Founder.
theleanstartup.com
I guess folks at the windows factory aren't big vim users :/
funny, I'm the opposite—it takes much less energy to pay attention to audio compared to text
audiobooks have been great for learning things without taking time (or, more importantly, mental activation energy) from the rest of my day
a 5 lb bag of shelled Georgia Pecans from the Hudson Pecan Company
I ordered some hair product on Amazon, and for some reason they included an extra 5 pounds of pecans with the order :P
I have no ideas of what to do with them, so would love suggestions!
One of my favorite books.
I had forgotten why it was on my to-read list, and from the cover it looked like a generic police/mystery novel, so I picked it up with no real expectations, and didn't see anything coming :P
That experience left an impression!
that just sounds like how work works
I've definitely seen people use datetimes to represent, say, hours or even days. (For the latter we already have just the date type without a time, but...)
Sometimes datetimes represent points in time, sometimes they implicitly represent some interval.
"Of all these legions of people doing the work to deliver computers capable of browsing the web, only Marc Andreessen and a handful of others (such as Bill Gates) became megarich, while the rest had largely ordinary salaries." (from July) www.liberalcurrents.com/marc-andrees...
AI Snake Oil seems good, but I haven't read it yet.
It's by the same authors as the "AI as a Normal Technology" paper, which has some solid insight and is a great counterpoint to over-the-top AI rhetoric.
knightcolumbia.org/content/ai-a...
Really reminds me of that scene in Singing in the Rain where they try to hide a microphone in a flower by Lina Lamont's neck :P
I'm not a fan of any variation on this (eg separating "product" and "engineering" work or whatever) because that's the wrong foundation for understanding how to do tech stuff *well*