Singular “they” is older than singular “you.” And note, of course, that the pronoun “you” is conjugated as a plural, and we deal with it just fine.

Because some more microseconds later, it’s the difference between being able to serve 1k requests per second and dropping connections, vs. 100k requests per second and working smoothly.

Doesn’t this assume that the bottleneck is that particular function? If the service as a whole chokes on something else at 500 requests per second, then making that particular function capable of handling 100k requests isn’t going to make a difference. For web apps, the bottleneck is often some kind of storage I/O or the limits of the network infrastructure.

Vim is a text editor that works in a command line and therefore doesn’t require a graphical interface or windowing system, or anything like a mouse or trackpad or touch interface. It has a whole system of using the keyboard to do a bunch of things really efficiently, but the user has to actively go and learn those keyboard shortcuts, and almost an entire language of how to move the cursor around and edit stuff. It’s great once you learn it, so it creates a certain type of evangelist who tries to spread the word.

This meme template is perfect, because the vim user really did learn a bunch of stuff, and then wants to try to convince other people to do the same, using a pretty unpersuasive rationale (not using a mouse while programming).

Young people tend to be more persuadable before 30, and tend to bake in their political views around that age. So big events in one’s 20’s tend to lead to lasting partisan affiliations for life after that.

FDR’s presidency won over a lot of people to the Democrats in the 30’s and 40’s. Eisenhower’s presidency shifted people over to Republicans in the 50’s. Nixon pushed people away from Republicans. But by the 70’s Democrats were losing a lot of voters, and then Reagan won a bunch of people over to the GOP. Then 9/11 won people over to Republicans, while the Iraq war pushed them away.

But each of these things had an outsized effect on those under 30. So Boomers who remember getting fed up with Democrats in the 70s and crossing over for Reagan (and then voting Republican in every election since) just thought it was the effect of age, rather than the effect of that particular political moment in 1980.

And even though this data and the analysis is mainly for Americans, it’s probably reflective of how people shape their own political beliefs everywhere.

Sorry, in Linux everything is a file, so there is no “everything else.”

I thought the hard part would be switching to another email provider, but that turned out to be easy enough. Turns out, despite having my own 100% self hosted photo storage and backup solution, I still like the ease of Google Photos for sharing, especially group-maintained albums. And I haven’t looked recently at alternatives, but the keyword search and face/pet recognition in Google Photos is something really, really useful.

Thanks! I found that this brand of optimism was a nice counterweight to my belief that people are just generally fundamentally flawed (and often irredeemably so). But the same is true of computer systems and technology, and I realized that I can love things (technology, TV shows, books, music, websites, cities, foods) while acknowledging their shortcomings, so I can do the same for people and institutions made out of people. Once I abandoned the idea that I could only like things that were perfect (or even good), and decoupled my perception of whether something was good with whether I liked it or not, it really helped me with my outlook towards people and physical things and intangible concepts.

That’s great that hardware support for Windows-oriented laptops has made the progress it has!

The reason why I basically quit Linux in 2015 was because my hardware lost support from nvidia’s proprietary driver, and I never could get nouveau or the others to play friendly. That’s on top of the fact I never got bluetooth or the webcam to work (not that I ever intended to use those), and the proprietary Broadcom wifi driver didn’t seem to work as well as Windows. And the CPU/thermal management was atrocious, with progressively worse battery life over time. So I gave it up.

So my experience with a 2017 model of Macbook, using 2023 versions of all the firmware/software, is actually better than where I was in 2015 with a Dell laptop that literally shipped with preinstalled Linux in 2010. I think all I need to do is get past the initial setup of the non-standard or quirky hardware, and I’ll be in a better place with this laptop today than I was with my laptop in 2015.

If the typical off the shelf laptop available today is a one click installation with the typical beginner-friendly liveUSB installer, that’s great. It certainly wasn’t true in 2006 when I first switched, and wasn’t true in 2015 when I gave it up.

Some portion of the “data” fed into these models is copyrighted, though. Github’s copilot is trained on code. Does it violate the GPL to train an AI model on all GPL source code published out there?

It’s kinda liberating to peek under the hood and confirm that society, like the internet, is mostly held together with figurative duct tape, that someone put there as a temporary fix that became semi-permanent. The concept of technical debt for software and technology projects exists everywhere, including in the backlogs of what our government agencies, court systems, and corporate organizations are doing (and what they simply haven’t done yet).

But the whole thing is still pretty resilient. The individuals who make the decisions that feed into the unimaginably complex web of interdependent relationships and rules might not actually understand every detail, and mostly aren’t even benevolent actors who want the best for everyone, but the system as a whole still trudges along, mostly making life better than if the system didn’t exist at all. And once you learn how at least some parts of it work, you can make some changes here and there for the better, either for yourself or for the people/issues you care about or for the entirety of the system.

The learning curve is more like a vertical cliff face.

I had experience with headless servers before 2010, but lots of things have just changed, not least of which is the availability of good documentation. A big chunk of knowledge out there is in the form of informal blog posts or Stack Overflow/Quora/Reddit threads that don’t give version information so you don’t have a good sense of whether the information is still current. And then quite a few of the people doing things are just shoving everything into a container and blindly following commands they pasted from somewhere else, so it’s not clear which instructions are vestiges of some earlier process that is no longer necessary, which are just cargo cult steps done simply because they watched someone else do it, etc.

I actually just canceled my preorder for the AMD Framework. I decided I didn’t need a new device if I could stretch out the life of this laptop for as long as it stays alive. My next new machine will probably be Framework, but that might not be for years.