> many programmers are smart, and if instead of creating a magic system they have no access to, you show them the data structure, the tradeoffs, they can build more things, and model their use cases in specific ways. And your system will be simpler, too.
Basically my entire full-time job is spent prosecuting this argument. It is indeed true that many programmers are smart, but it is equally true that many programmers _are not_ smart, and those programmers have to contribute too. More hands is usually better than simpler systems for reasons that have nothing to do with technical proficiency.
>> More hands is usually better than simpler systems for reasons that have nothing to do with technical proficiency.
If you are working on open source databases, or something close to the metal I agree with antirez, if you are working at some established tech business (e.g: a very old ecommerce site), I agree with you
To be clear, I'm not disagreeing with antirez at all. I feel his argument in my bones. I am a smart programmer. I want simple, powerful systems that leave the kid gloves in the drawer.
The unfortunate reality is that a large cadre of people cannot handle such tools, and those people still have extremely valuable contributions to make.
I say this as a full-time research engineer at a top-10 university. We are not short on talent, new problems, or funding. There is ample opportunity to make our systems as simple/"pure" as possible, and I make that case vigorously. The fact remains that intentionally limiting scope for the sake of the many is often better than cultivating an elite few.
I'm really curious about the shape of your problem. I was an early hire at a tech unicorn and helped build many high scale systems and definitely found that our later stage hires really had a harder time dealing with the complexity tradeoff than earlier hires (though our earlier hires were limited by a demand to execute fast or lose business which added other, bad constraints.) I'm curious what your iteration of the problem looks like. We managed it by only trusting the bedrocks of our systems to engineers who demonstrated enough restraint to architect those.
Thank you for the many tool links! You seems to know this space well. I have come to pick your brain for more.
I have been searching for a while for good tools to split/regroup diffs in a patch series. hunk.nvim looks interesting. Do you know of similar/competing tools?
I frequently hit a problem where removing a spurious hunk from an old commit causes cascading conflicts in all subsequent commits. Are there tools to propagate hunk removal into the future without the manual conflict-resolution pain?
Not the GP, but I might recommend Jujutsu for that, try it and see. It does the right thing when you resolve commits, and it propagates them to git. However, I'm not sure if it'll work, try it and see.
I can't help with your actual problem but I am incredibly curious about how/why you run into this so frequently you need a tool for it. I feel like in my 15 or whatever years of using git I have basically never wanted to remove a hunk from an old commit or anything similar.
I try to leave a good commit trail in my PRs. These are often _not_ the reality of how the code was written and originally committed, but a rough approximation of the intended steps with the benefit of hindsight.
git absorb works surprisingly well. I was quite skeptical in the beginning, but it really turned into something I used daily (until I switched to jj, where I haven't found a replacement yet). If you use stepwise commits I can really recommend it.
small edit: It seems that jj supports `jj absorb` now as well. Wonderful!
Indeed, though I don't think it can create fixup commits if that's what you're looking for. However, it might work great for that if you pair it with jj-spr: https://github.com/LucioFranco/jj-spr
I am often responsible for landing branches created by colleagues who are less disciplined about their diff cleanliness than me. Very often, attempting to regroup a spurious change from an early commit to a separate "cleanup" commit results in a long conflict hell.
An underrated reason to remove eligibility testing is to make programs accessible for people in poverty. Navigating a means-tested welfare program is byzantine in the worst way-- accessing and submitting countless forms with confusing, often ambiguous or incomplete instructions; standing in long lines at specific times/locations far from the city center to get help or make progress; complete lack of process transparency; and dependence on faceless bureaucrats to decide your fate.
My family once had to navigate Medicaid. I was well-resourced, understood the expected outcome thoroughly, was motivated to get it done, and committed the time to follow the required process. When our initial application was mishandled due to inaccurate guidance, it took over 2 years of persistent failed communications with the various county, state, and federal agencies, back-office middlemen, doctors, and legislators to get any response beyond "apply again and hope for the best", which we did several times to no avail. In the mean time, having a Medicaid application open changes the availability of medical care, as some doctors will not or cannot by law accept additional Medicaid patients. Eventually by some mild social engineering I procured direct access to a specific empowered bureaucrat who had knowledge of a separate set of applicable rules/processes and resolved our case immediately.
Most people in poverty do not have the time, attention, or stamina to persist through means testing on top of struggling against whatever landed them in poverty in the first place. Every time I visited the county office, I would hear someone complaining about how they had applied 8 times without success for a program everyone in the room agreed they should qualify for. Means-testing is designed, by popular demand, to make accessing benefits difficult for the sake of spending less. UBI, for all its faults, at least addresses that problem.
This is the main benefit of UBI specifically - if something is truly universal, you don't have to spend inordinate amounts of time, energy, labour, and money on making sure people don't get it. In fact, there are a lot of articles about the idea of UBI and how governments could pay for it that tend to show that more than half the cost of UBI could be paid for by the funds going to existing programs and the funds going to keeping people off of those existing programs.
It could also replace existing government programs like employment insurance, parental leave, child welfare payments, sales tax rebates, and so on, and simplify the rules for all of the above. Did you know that in Canada the government pays for parental leave? Did you know that it's capped at a fixed amount regardless of your income or the cost of living where you are? Did you know that if you make any income while you're on parental leave - even if it's 'passive income' like sales of an ebook - you have to report it and they take it out of your benefits? So that you're legally not allowed to make up the difference between what they're willing to pay and what you actually need to live?
Sure, they're trying to avoid people double-dipping and getting government benefits they don't need on top of income they're already getting, but in practice it means that you're getting a maximum wage and if you don't have savings then the government may be forcing you into (temporary) poverty if the number they've picked won't pay your rent.
A universal and consistent basic income process with a proper sliding scale (so that each dollar you earn privately doesn't remove one dollar publicly) would simplify everything and let everyone get by to some degree.
I had a similar experience helping a disabled family member. Without being too specific, it's amazing how much effort and expertise it takes to access benefits to which a person is legally entitled. It's almost as if the means testing is inverted, you cannot access benefits without the means to navigate a system designed to prevent benefits from being distributed. We have a homelessness epidemic for a reason.
I used Tcl at my very first internship for test automation. Coming from a self-taught Javascript/Java/C#/C++ background, Tcl really stretched my concept of what a programming language is, especially how it plays with stack frames and munges string values.
Coincidentally Tcl also inspired my first deep dive into Vim. The test automation framework at that company required meaty Tcl expressions packed into CSV cells. Tcl was mind-boggling enough when properly formatted, so hand-editing squashed 1800 character long expressions on a single line was way too much. I'm fairly certain the assignment was part hazing and the framework part "job security".
Jokes on them, I spent 2 weeks on a side quest to make a Vim plugin that could add line breaks and indent a Tcl expression into a split temporary buffer for editing and squash it back to the right cell when I was done. Halfway through the summer I had completed the entire backlog. The manager got a reprimand for being a jerk and I spent the rest of the summer making the framework less painful.
You’re right, shallowly — the quality of their implementation bears on these results.
One could read this paper as Salesforce publicly weighing their own reputation for wielding existing tools with competence against the challenges they met getting those tools to work. Seemingly they would not want to sully that reputation by publishing a half-baked experiment, easily refuted by a competitor to their shame? It’s not conclusive, but it is relevant evidence about the state of LLMs today.
I interpreted this to mean he holds clean water (e.g. from a bottle) in his mouth when entering the toilet, for the purpose of wetting toilet paper. A clever solution, IMO.
Certainly! The limit is your creativity. My first idea: generate very large scale 2D noise. Choose a threshold to divide it into regions. For each region, choose a direction of motion. Design a “mountain envelope” function that considers distance from the nearest border to create mountains/subversion zones based on the direction of each plate and the shape of the border.
In the second quote, the phrases "in their official capacity" and "as the position of the United States" are doing a lot of heavy lifting.
The EO is going out of its way to broadcast that its purpose is to establish a unitary policy position of the executive branch that stems from the President, rather than having "independent" agencies providing contrary position from within "in their official capacity" "as the position of the United States." The logical leap from there to "the President's (unrestricted) opinion is the law (without reference to Congress or the Courts)" is vast.
The EO does not bear on the balance of powers between branches of government, but on the ability for the executive branch to function as a single entity within that balance, rather than a multiplicity of quasi-"independent" agencies.
The disincentives that have always prevented the executive from blatantly violating the law are still in force and unchanged. They have been functional through 250 years of Presidents testing the limits of their authority.
> The disincentives that have always prevented the executive from blatantly violating the law are still in force and unchanged. They have been functional through 250 years of Presidents testing the limits of their authority.
Can you elaborate on what those disincentives are? I am thinking:
- Impeachment
- Charged with a crime, found guilty, sent to jail. It seems like this one is no longer possible due to Trump v. United States
- Killed by opponents
Without the criminal charges being on the table, those disincentives look a lot weaker to me.
Similar to Roe v Wade and Chevron, they'd need to overturn Trump v. United States and then charge him with crime (or contempt). So there is a ball in the judicial branch if they get pushed too far. Just extra steps.
The 4th one is us getting a retroactive watergate effect where republicans wake up and approval plummets. There's a non-zero chance Trump steps down if he pisses off everyone.
This only happens with some truly heinous actions that can't be spun. Like, bombing american soil or a ulta-blatant conspiracy with China/Russia. Or you know, him killing Medicare/social security (the most likely actions, given the budget proposal).
>> Similar to Roe v Wade and Chevron, they'd need to overturn Trump v. United States and then charge him with crime (or contempt). So there is a ball in the judicial branch if they get pushed too far. Just extra steps.
_Who_ would charge him with a crime? Prosecution is the responsibility of the Executive branch via the Department of Justice. The only option the court would have is Contempt, and I don't see that being particularly effective.
The only legal avenue this order leaves open is impeachment, and because that requires a 2/3rds majority in the Senate, there's all sorts of ways to prevent it. Even if the republican senators started to oppose him, the DoJ could be used to threaten and investigate senators who step out of line. Or a violent mob could be used to interrupt the impeachment vote.
>_Who_ would charge him with a crime? Prosecution is the responsibility of the Executive branch via the Department of Justice.
He only needs to piss off two SCOTUS's to start to have the entire book thrown at him. Unlike Congress, Judges tend to be somewhat resiliant to the political atmosphere. That's a lot more viable than congress. Less people to squabble with and people less concerned about losing their job. I woudn't even count out the entire DoJ on this either.They've been denying some of Trump's craziest EO's.
>Or a violent mob could be used to interrupt the impeachment vote.
Good. I'm tired of being blamed for "rebellion" everytime someone stands in front of a building with a sign. Let Jan 6th repeat while all eyes are on the Capitol looking at Trump.
I'm no legal scholar, but sure, I'll elaborate as a layman.
During the Presidency, impeachment and judicial review are the important checks. During the transition of power, state-controlled (as in, not federally controlled) elections and Congressional certification are the important checks.
While many people are disappointed with Congress' hesitation to impeach, impeachment as an institutional protection still works as a protection against blatant disregard of the law. Congress faces the threat of re-election practically constantly, and obvious disregard of the law without impeachment is not in Congress' best interest.
Judicial review is clearly working. I don't need to recap the large number of cases that have be brought against the Trump administration this term. The administration is abiding by stays/injunctions, and the Courts are issuing opinions independently. The Supreme Court, even Trump-appointed Justices, has ruled against Trump before and will likely do it again.
State-level control of Presidential elections and Congressional accountability to the public during certification protect against the spectre of a third Trump term or end of democracy. This scenario is extremely unpopular even among Trump supporters and would be a disaster for those in Congress.
The recent Supreme Court opinion about Presidential immunity in his official capacity explicitly defers and leaves to the lower Courts to determine the precise limits of that official capacity. It is beyond belief that the entire judicial branch would collectively enable dictatorship "bEcAuSe iMmUnItY".
That opinion specifically defers to lower courts to define the precise limits of the President's immunity. I refuse to believe that the collective effort of the judicial branch would construct those limits in a manner that enables dictatorship.
The lower courts can be appealed to the higher courts, so the opinion of the supreme court was effectively that the president is immune if they say so, on a case by case basis.
It was a clever but blatant way to give their side immunity without giving it to Biden
You're correct that the Supreme Court ultimately has final appellate jurisdiction on matters of immunity, but that's a long way from enabling dictatorship.
To get there, we would need to assume that the Supreme Court, including only 3 Trump-appointed Justices, is both unwaveringly partisan and unwaveringly supportive of dictatorship.
The Supreme Court is unwaveringly partisan and corrupt; its members have taken bribes and invented new rights for Trump to keep him out of jail. I wouldn't assume that they'd reject a dictatorship.
> TikTok is perhaps the most impressively addictive gambling app ever created.
> Geopolitics aside, I think everyone is kind of aware that gambling is a vice, and like it or not, this could just be the beginning of our society beginning to scrutinize these platforms.
The comparison here is a slot machine: you pay a a few to play, you pull the lever to play, you win a prize.
Here, the payment is your attention, you swipe to the next video to play the game, and the prize if you land on a good video is a small hit of dopamine.
Everyone's losing their collective mind about people watching videos on a platform not approved by our oligarchs, while there's an epidemic of people racking up gambling debt from the sudden prevalence of DraftKings and other mobile sports betting apps.
At least in circles I frequent, people are pretty upset with the state of sports betting too. Feels like lots of things are pretty crappy these days, simultaneously
The comments here are focused on how much energy it would take to turn this into fuel. The real story here is decentralized fertilizer production, buried at the end of the article:
> this innovation could fundamentally reshape fertilizer manufacturing by providing a more sustainable, cost-effective alternative to centralized production
The high energy cost of Haber-Bosch, plus the additional cost of transportation from manufacturer to farmer could potentially be eliminated by distributed, passive fertilizer generators scattered around in the fields.
I'm no expert, but assuming sufficient local production, low concentration could potentially be overcome by continuous fertilization with irrigation throughout the growing season.
Let's find out. Some quick fiddling with a molarity calculator and an almanac:
-- 100 uM ammonia -> 1.7 mg / L ammonia
-- 82% nitrogen -> 1.4 mg / L nitrogen
-- My lawn needs around 1 lb / 1000 sq ft, or around 5 g / m2
-- So my lawn needs about 3500 L / m2 of fertilized irrigation total for the season
-- Ballpark farming irrigation is around 0.2 inches per day, or around 5L/m2
I would need to water my lawn about 700 days in the year, or more realistically up my irrigation rate by about a factor of 4, AND source all of the water from the fertilizer box.
I'm a little skeptical that I can allocate space for enough production and still have a lawn left to fertilize. The tech probably isn't ready for the big time on an industrial farm yet, but for research demo, this seems like a promising direction! Much more than concentrating it for fuel.
So, farms are definitely setup already to accomplish this. Most farms have moved to central pivots for irrigation, and they already inject fertilizer into the pivot [1]. If fertilization could be generated onsite, then you could theoretically have everything plumbed together to "just work" without much intervention or shipping of chemicals.
Rain will wash nitrogen away (down to streams, rivers, and then the ocean creating lots of problems) so you want to apply nitrogen with an eye on when it will rain so your fertilizer stays on the field where you want it. Your link doesn't specify what fertilizer is being applied, I would guess nitrogen is not one.
Ammonia should be applied to the soil - in the air it is a hazard that can kill people and harm the plants (farmers wear lots of protective gear when working with ammonia, with more other things they don't bother).
As such I'm not convinced that is the right answer. You want a system that will apply nitrogen
Farmers use anhydrous ammonia that bounds with water in the soil and then bonds to the soil.
I don't know that farmers wear anything special when applying it, but there are safety procedures. I work with a farmer and he was telling me about one time he forgot to switch one of the valves off and when he disconnected a hose, the fumes knocked him out. Luckily it was just the fumes from the hose and not the whole tank or he likely would have died instead of just being knocked out.
Farmers already do keep an eye when it will rain before applying fertilisers. So, this is already part of their calculation. Although, yes , this means they will not apply it everyday. Depending on their location this means that a lot of weeks are out of the picture.
Cows and chickens cannot fix nitrogen from the air. They eat the nitrogen-fixing plants. So in a sense they don't "generate" fertiliser, they only concentrate it.
In Western Europe at least, cows are kept in pastures, which are permanently dedicated to that use and not used as fields to grow crops. All in all, cows are probably only low carbon in premodern rural contexts in West Africa and Asia for instance.
Of course you can't have cows wandering through your corn or soybeans, they'll eat and/or crush it. But if you had fields that you could rotate between pasture and planted that could work.
ANFO is explosives made with ammonium nitrate(Ammonium Nitrate Fuel Oil), however ammonium nitrate is by itself rather energetic and will explode when store improperly. The most recent memorable incident would be 2020 Beirut: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Beirut_explosion
Imagine one of these units left somewhere, slowly filling a tank that has not been sealed, water evaporating back out leaving a nice ammonium nitrate powder behind....
NGL, it would be an easy sell. You are just a hop/skip and a quack away from turning that decentralized fertilizer into a decentralized bomb making system.
A hop, skip, quack, jump, and fairly obvious high-energy distillation process away. The national security angle probably isn't a concern here for the same reason that this process doesn't produce good fuel.
Ammonium nitrate is made from ammonia and nitric acid (which is also made from ammonia). Therefore, ammonia is the only necessary direct precursor to ammonium nitrate, which is probably the most relevant oxidizer in improvised explosives today.
Not saying that it should be regulated on the basis of national security, but it’s not like there isn’t a potential security concern.
It's not out of business. It merged with Bayer. It's a change in ownership, and to some degree a change in upper management, but large swathes of the company are unchanged.
Its assets were sold to Bayer and BASF and some former Monsanto workers may have begun working at those other businesses, that is true. That kind of scenario is true of all businesses that close down, though, at least unless they truly have no remaining assets to sell or workers wanting new jobs, both of which are unlikely for anything beyond the simplest of sole proprietorships. By your logic, there is almost no business in history that has ever gone out of business.
I mean, you can vertically scale these, right? It isn't solar powered.
Also while I understand the local delivery aspect, why waste arable soil on this, use desert. Hm, do you need moist air? They were testing it near water. Maybe on the Pacific side of the Rockies? That air is moist enough to drop feet of snow at once.
It's a recent use. I'm still not convinced it's a good use case. I think it's mostly greenwashig (bluewashing?) to avoid the explicit release of CO2, but probably biodiesel is a more ecological friendly alternative.
Basically my entire full-time job is spent prosecuting this argument. It is indeed true that many programmers are smart, but it is equally true that many programmers _are not_ smart, and those programmers have to contribute too. More hands is usually better than simpler systems for reasons that have nothing to do with technical proficiency.