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rcfox
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ryan@rcfox.ca

http://rcfox.ca

@RyanFox


  1. > For Linux, just use the emacs that comes with the distro.

    Are the major distros shipping packages with tree-sitter support yet?

  2. Your comment heavily implied (to me) scaling databases horizontally. Yes, it's not necessarily "Google scale" either, but it's a ton of extra complexity that I'm happy to avoid. But a Google employee is probably going to approach every public-facing project with the assumption of scaling everything horizontally.

    With multiple servers talking to a single database, I'd still prefer to let the database handle generating IDs.

  3. "Distributed systems" doesn't have to mean some fancy, purpose-built thing. Just correlating between two Postgres databases might be a thing you need to do. Or a database and a flat text file.
  4. Do most people? Not everyone is Google.
  5. Just following the chat for a few minutes, people posted links to a couple of other locations:

    Okaukuejo waterhole in Etosha National Park: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AeMUdOPFcXI (at the time of posting, a herd of elephants are enjoying the water)

    Kalahari Desert: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ME0dPuBtzug

  6. I worked on creating a card game with a couple of my friends. We kept all of the cards in a Google Sheet, allowing everyone to easily edit or create new cards. Then, I wrote a script to compile the sheet into a card atlas so that it could be consumed by Tabletop Simulator. It worked amazingly well.

    The only issue was that I had to run the script myself, since my friends were less technical. I'd probably see if I could setup a workflow in Github Actions to do it for me if I were to do this again.

  7. In Python, every variable is either defined or imported in the file in which it's used, so you always know where to find it. (Assuming you don't do `from foo import *`, which is frowned upon.)

    In C++, a variable might be defined in a header or in a parent class somewhere else, and there's no indication of where it came from.

  8. Is this just because LLMs don't have state?

    As far as I understand it, as you have a back-and-forth conversation with an LLM, you have to provide the entire history of the conversation plus your new response each time.

  9. With Typescript, I find it pretty eager to just try `(foo as any).bar` when it gets the initial typing wrong. It also likes to redefine types in every file they're used instead of importing.

    It will fix those if you catch them, but I haven't been able to figure out a prompt that prevents this in the first place.

  10. These days, I'd say always start with the YouTube tabs.
  11. I also went into that book blind. I was in grade 12 and some organization was offering scholarships to people who wrote an essay about the book. I had a twice-daily 45-minute bus ride to fill, so it seemed like an easy win.

    I didn't end up finishing the book.

  12. Ultimately, you need to decide who your target user is. Do you want to cater to the lowest common denominator, or do you want to want to make something power users can customize to fit their workflow?

    Neither answer is necessarily wrong, you just need to make a choice.

  13. I welcome being out of touch. The current trends seem ridiculous to me.

    There's no practical difference between sending a message via Instagram vs via email. It's all just marketing. You probably can't even get an Instagram account without first getting an email account.

  14. But why not just email?
  15. I wonder if asking it to respond in the style of Linus Torvalds would be an improvement.
  16. I graduated 15 years ago, so who know if my advice is worth anything anymore...

    I think the best part of my computer engineering program at the University of Waterloo was the integrated co-op system. (Basically, internships.) It meant my degree was 5 years instead of 4, but I got work experience and professional connections at several companies and came out with a slight profit instead of a ton of debt. I even turned my last internship into a full-time job after I graduated.

  17. Back before ChatGPT was publicly available, there was AI Dungeon. It was such a yes-man though. You could be in a scene with a king and a princess, then write "I eat the demon", and it would just invent a demon in the scene, and then describe how you unhinge your jaw and gobble it down.
  18. Why not tell them not to use them?
  19. As far as radiation treatment software bugs go, it could be far worse... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25
  20. My friend got his pilot's license somewhat recently and I went on a $100 hamburger run with him. It was a lot of fun! I studied gliders when I was in air cadets as a teen, so I knew a little bit about what was going on, and he let me take control for a few minutes (both seats had controls), but I was too nervous to do very much.
  21. I'm able to login to the GCP dashboard, but it isn't able to find any of my projects.
  22. Doesn't podman get around a lot of those issues?
  23. How do you validate an idea with 1000 paying customers if you don't have a product?
  24. Could you share how you did that?
  25. Not only does that second NPC suffer from PTSD, he's absent from the village for the first year, serving in the military that's actively fighting a war.
  26. > nothing does better than a simple black box

    You still need to be aware of the context that you're censoring in. Just adding black boxes over text in a PDF will hide the text on the screen, but might still allow the text to be extracted from the file.

  27. Usually you would do it in your main function, or a code path starting from there. Executing code with non-local side effects during import is generally frowned upon. Maybe it's fine for a project-local module that won't be shared, but it's a bad habit and can make it had to track down.
  28. Reminds me of the late 90s when people would add effects to their websites, like snow or trails of sparks that follow the mouse.
  29. YouTube has a speed changer built in. I'm curious what your extension would add.

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