metrognome

13 วันที่ผ่านมาdiscuss

To play devil's advocate here, imagine a world where the exact opposite has occurred: physical media (CDs specifically) is the norm, and there's no DRM, so the raw data can be copied right off of it. In this world, scalpers scoop up all available inventory of physical media from local retailers, consumers pay a premium to them for the original product, the scalpers sell cheaper copies where the game binary has been modified to insert advertisements or mine cryptocurrency, out of the woodwork appears a cottage industry of companies offering services to modify game binaries and connect them to the ad networks and crypto exchanges. The scalper gets a cut, the gamer gets a cheaper game, everyone is happy.

metrognome

เดือนที่แล้วdiscuss

I'm with you but I see a bigger problem. I'm not sure if you noticed but there are threads of low desire within our society. Young people, in particular young men, increasingly seem to be checking out of dating and higher education, both examples being paths towards enriching oneself. As these people age, lose mental plasticity, and become entrenched in their ways, how likely are we to be able to convince them to begin valuing those things again?

I'm less concerned about the impact of AI specifically and more about concerned about people simply losing the will for one another or anything at all. None of this stuff in the real world will matter too much if people are getting their basic needs and desires met in a virtual one.

metrognome

2 เดือนที่ผ่านมาdiscuss

The rhetoric of this comment seems to imply that this is a bad thing, but is it really? If it becomes more difficult to make money through creative endeavors, then that leaves us with fewer reasons to be creative other than for the sake of self-expression... which is what we want, right?

metrognome

ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

Zen of Python in 2025:

  There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it.

Python String Formatting in 2025:

- t-strings

- f-strings

- %-operator

- +-operator

- str.format()

metrognome

ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

I'm surprised that there's been no mention of Operation Paperclip, neither in the article nor in the comments here. Seems like a huge part of the story to leave out.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Paperclip

metrognome

2 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

I'm going to leave this here for anyone who wants some good focus-time music: https://youtu.be/Do5_wU9X1pc

metrognome

2 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

It's about writing code that your peers can read. "DO NOT SUBMIT" is clear as day. "ASDFASD" probably does not mean "this is a debugging string" to most people.

metrognome

2 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

I live in California.

metrognome

2 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

I live in an apartment complex that uses RealPage. My roommates and I re-signed the lease earlier this year, with a projected 15% rent price increase. We then walked to our leasing office to ask about it, they simply cancelled the increase. We're now paying the same rate we were last year.

I am fairly certain that 15% increase was the automatic recommendation by RealPage.

metrognome

2 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

According to the article, he disappeared in 1976 (48 years ago). Apologies for the pedantry.

metrognome

2 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

There are plenty of projects smaller than the Linux kernel that have developed and employed DSLs (to varying degrees of success, I'll grant). I wonder, are there any languages out there designed specifically for kernel programming?

Given the number of preprocessor hacks used in the kernel, and the amount of GCC-specific behavior that the codebase depends on, it seems like they are already halfway there.

metrognome

2 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

I gained a a few years of experience in SQL-based OLAP systems at my current job. In this time I developed a strong appreciation for SQL, especially for its composability. Recently, I started a project in Google Colab, gluing together queries from several systems with Pandas DataFrames. I can honestly say that I've never been more frustrated learning an API than I have with Pandas.

Need some window function like LAG() or LEAD()? Too bad, I hope you like writing Python "for i in range(...):" loops. My notebook is littered with ".reset_index()" calls, ".replace(np.nan, None)", "axis='columns'", "foo.assign(bar=lambda df: df.apply(lambda row: ...))". groupby is especially confusing to me, as a Pandas GroupBy is difficult to compose with a normal DataFrame until you call .reset_index(). Compare this to SQL, where a subquery is a subquery, whether or not it has a GROUP BY clause.

The Pandas documentation also leaves a lot to be desired. Take the documentation of pandas.NaT[1] for example. "pandas.NaT: alias of NaT". Ok? That still doesn't tell me what NaT is, nor does it link to the thing that it aliases. The groupby documentation[2] also caused me some headaches, as it covers only the simplest aggregation use-cases.

Pandas is clearly better for some use-cases, but mostly for simple operations that are well-supported by the API (perhaps numeric operations that are implemented with native numpy routines). But if I'm doing some interactive OLAP stuff, I'll reach for SQL. Perhaps the problem is I'm trying to use Pandas like it's SQL, when it's not. But for manipulating data, I'd rather use a language than a library.

[1] https://pandas.pydata.org/docs/reference/api/pandas.NaT.html [2] https://pandas.pydata.org/docs/user_guide/groupby.html

edit: half a sentence

metrognome

2 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

Remember everyone, your bubbles are green because you have an iPhone, not because the person you are texting has an Android.