dblotsky's comments

dblotsky | 6 years ago | on: Facebook Bans Louis Farrakhan, Milo Yiannopoulos, InfoWars and Others

Yeah, just with 4 billion people in it.

The analogy also doesn’t work because it’s impossible to have 4 billion people in your house.

dblotsky | 6 years ago | on: Facebook Bans Louis Farrakhan, Milo Yiannopoulos, InfoWars and Others

There are people who have different viewpoints (even very conservative ones) from the mainstream and they don’t get banned. What’s their secret? A mystery, to be sure.

dblotsky | 6 years ago | on: Tesla Posts Big Quarterly Loss as Its Electric-Car Sales Lag

Oh, that makes sense. I wouldn’t believe that either.

The computer was the central point though, I thought. All of that seemed very believable.

dblotsky | 6 years ago | on: Tesla Posts Big Quarterly Loss as Its Electric-Car Sales Lag

What from Autonomy day was unbelievable?

dblotsky | 6 years ago | on: Tesla Live Stream – Autonomy Day [video]

Aside from the timing of this event, why else are you convinced that Tesla is nowhere close to Waymo?

dblotsky | 6 years ago | on: Rich countries tend to have a bigger middle-class, except the USA

Based on what data would you expect that?

dblotsky | 6 years ago | on: Rich countries tend to have a bigger middle-class, except the USA

But they might also spend more of that money on things that are free in Europe.

dblotsky | 6 years ago | on: Rich countries tend to have a bigger middle-class, except the USA

It’s unfair for many other reasons as well. In the US more of that income might go to services that are cheaper in other countries (e.g. healthcare, education).

So, what looks like a higher number (even adjusted for PPP) might still be lower in practice.

dblotsky | 7 years ago | on: Tech workers in China’s Silicon Valley face burnout before they reach 30

And also in America’s Silicon Valley.

dblotsky | 7 years ago | on: Blackmail Should Be Illegal

I think the author’s hypotheticals are off. In a world where blackmail is allowed, I think transparency would just be more normal, and secrets would be more rare. For example, people would be more open about cheating, sexual preferences, etc. I think in that world, along with blackmail, many taboo things would become more normalized.

dblotsky | 7 years ago | on: The Machine Stops

To me, the author's response is mostly to change of scale. Social intimacy and human connection still exist, just in less populated areas. It's unrealistic to expect a busy city to stay the same over the course of a lifetime.

Also relevant: https://xkcd.com/1601/.

dblotsky | 7 years ago | on: Show HN: HeyFromTheFuture – Advice people wish they had at your age

Meta-lesson from this site:

Hey X year-old: 90% of advice, like everything else, is bad.

dblotsky | 7 years ago | on: Please do not attempt to simplify this code

> “human business processes were never that complex.”

That’s a falsifiable claim. Human problems / laws are some of the most difficult to code for, IMO. Examples: legal software, economics software, etc. Usually complexity increases as you delve out of the abstract and deal with real-life processes with humans.

dblotsky | 7 years ago | on: Patreon Bars Anti-Feminist for Racist Speech, Inciting Revolt

Patreon is as free to deny someone service as their customers are to express themselves. No affront to free speech there.

dblotsky | 7 years ago | on: What happens when packages go bad?

In the scenario I proposed, nothing stops you from updating your dependencies.

It just doesn't happen without your knowledge and consent (unlike the default NPM settings).

dblotsky | 7 years ago | on: What happens when packages go bad?

Lock the dependencies: checksums, lock file, “=“ versions, whatever.

Even better, store them yourself: cache, mirror, zips in the repo, whatever.

This won’t protect you from an initial hack, but it means that if the dependency was good when you got it, it will stay good.

dblotsky | 7 years ago | on: Pattern Matching Without Regex – Introducing the Rosie Pattern Language

I was going to agree with everyone about how it’s not a language, but reading into it more, I proved myself wrong.

This is a different language insofar as it describes PEGs, not regexes, which is fundamentally different and more powerful (it can parse more things).

The naming of patterns isn’t unique, since you can just put regexes in variables in every other language too. However, the syntax in Rosie seems nicer, and sharing is easier.

dblotsky | 7 years ago | on: Cloud Computing Without Containers

> An Isolate-based system runs all of the code in a single process and uses its own mechanisms to ensure safe memory access.

What property of this application allows it to share CPU time and memory more efficiently than the OS can?

dblotsky | 7 years ago | on: The Worm Ouroboros

Physical virtual machines? ;)

dblotsky | 7 years ago | on: The Worm Ouroboros

Almost any “can” question will lead to something like this.

This can happen if the OS lets you use user-space file systems, the same way it can happen if you have custom hardware with memory-mapped temperature sensors (and suddenly your code literally “depends” on the weather).