z77dj3kl's comments

z77dj3kl | 4 years ago | on: Life Improvements Since the 1990s

I'm extremely interest the general feeling and views societies had in the past: how they perceived the present and the future, as a whole.

Objectively life has become better and more comfortable for the vast majority of humans since then (Hans Rosling does a beautiful job of exploring this).

But I do think that perceptions and feelings matter, and even though material wellbeing is a prerequisite to that, so is also the general feeling and view that those around you hold, and in many ways I feel we've gone backwards in that.

z77dj3kl | 4 years ago | on: GitHub’s engineering team has moved to Codespaces

It's a slightly different flavor of the same thing.

VS Code is an amazing tool that's getting huge adoption because of how awesome it is, and how open source and community centric it is, etc. They've gotten a lot of mindshare and dev love, that's the embrace bit.

The next step is the set of closed source addons. Have you noticed that a lot of the new VS Code features are now in addons that are under a different license. This includes the new remote dev and python tooling. Still free to use and awesome tools, of course, but fully under MS exclusive and controlled. That's the extend.

I don't know what the longer-term plan is. I'm hoping that it won't lead to an extinguish. But if that's what they want, then they could e.g. cripple the open source version, moving all their dev effort into a closed-source, Azure/Github only web environment. Who knows?

z77dj3kl | 4 years ago | on: OpenAI Codex

I thought OpenAI was originally supposed to be some kind of for-the-good, non-profit institution studying AI and its safe use in particular with an effort to make it more accessible and available to all through more open collaboration. This is cool research, sure; but what happened to making models available for use by others instead of just through some opaque APIs?

Maybe I'm just remembering wrong or conflating OpenAI with some other entity? Or maybe I bought too much of the marketing early on.

z77dj3kl | 4 years ago | on: New in Git: switch and restore

A more apt comparison would be to using a saw vs using a saw with gloves on.

With gloves it's safer and more comfortable, but you're not quite as in touch with the wood as you would be without one.

Without gloves you feel badass because you don't care about safety, and you might be able to carve out some slightly more intricate things.

Either way the outcome is roughly the same and it really doesn't matter what your personal preference is.

z77dj3kl | 4 years ago | on: Why the Substack hype is much ado about very little

Advertising? Have some articles be part of the bundle as a "preview", and most articles behind an individual subscription?

This idea of building your own newspaper sounds kind of interesting actually: a mix of authors you've picked and an automatically curated content from other authors to help you find new authors.

z77dj3kl | 4 years ago | on: Some stuff I found interesting about number theory research

The social networks are offline. Universities are great at open collaboration, it's just not a kind of online collaboration where anybody can walk in and partake. People spend a lot of time on a different type of communication: going to conferences, attending seminars, and meeting one-on-one. Why should it be online?

Also keep in mind that a lot of mathematicians are also older, less tech-savvy. This might change in the next decade or two!

z77dj3kl | 4 years ago | on: Some stuff I found interesting about number theory research

I've heard of mathematicians being frustrated by physicists who use fancy stuff without full understanding of the underlying principles, and sometimes they just manipulate the notation without fully justifying what that manipulation means (e.g. you may have an integral operator on some space, and you might just swap an infinite sum and that integral operator, but that requires a justification that you might omit).

z77dj3kl | 4 years ago | on: No Code Reviews by Default

Pitting code review against trust and responsibility is just disingenuous. The point of code review is not that you distrust others. It's that everyone makes mistakes and often someone else having a quick look over your changes can come up with some really cheap wins that are safer, more maintainable, faster, etc.

z77dj3kl | 4 years ago | on: Maplibre: community-driven Mapbox GL fork

The OSM style is here: https://github.com/gravitystorm/openstreetmap-carto

There is an issue about converting it to vector: https://github.com/gravitystorm/openstreetmap-carto/issues/3...

Doesn't seem like there's any current vector versions of that style, but you could make one yourself using Maputnik or similar; you'd probably want to start with OpenMapTiles and maybe even one of the pre-existing styles for OMT like OSM bright.

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