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Cake day: July 10th, 2023

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  • That’s not necessarily true, how clocks display time, and how they maintain time don’t have to match up. You can get digital or analog clocks that keep time by setting them then using a quartz clock to count the passage of time. You can also get digital or analog clocks that talk to a network time server, and can keep within tens to low hundreds of milliseconds easily. Gear-driven analog clocks are reasonably common, and you can even find a gear-driven clock with a digital face, though those are more of a gimmick.

    Obviously, a clock with an analog face that speaks NTP is digital electronics, and there’s a certain aesthetic loss, in that something like a grandfather clock that does this is a silly thing to make. But you absolutely could if you wanted to.








  • This is one of many examples of a class of problem where the technology is the easy part. There’s room to improve the tech certainly, but the technology sufficient to solve the problem is already well understood.

    The hard part is how to get people to actually do the necessary changes. To consume less, get fewer gas cars on the road, increase the amount of nuclear, hydro, solar, geothermal, and wind in the grid, and minimize coal and gas use. To reduce land use by cows, and increase land use by trees and native plants.

    But maybe AI is the secret here. We have tools that are in the hype moment whose training data already contains several reasonable solutions to climate change. Maybe if AI “finds” the solution to climate change, people will finally listen




  • The thing is business is more booming than it’s ever been, but making the line go up forever is a fool’s errand, at some point you’ll hit a peak. Hitting that peak is immensely punished in our economic system.

    If you make a hammer that’ll last 100 years, you’ll sell as many as you can reach customers who need one, before hammer sales plummet. Instead of being rewarded for making a great product, you’ll be punished when sales fall because you’ve solved a problem for most people.

    Advertising is kind of neutral in abstract in my head. Make a great product for a fair price, and let people know about it, and that’s actually probably a benefit to both parties. Make a terrible product, and tell a bunch of people it’s great, and you’ve spent resources doing them a disservice. But if you can convince them it’s good enough to spend money on it, and keep your revenue per customer above the cost to acquire them, it’s profitable. And that’s all they care about. It’s basically the same pattern as a scam, but profit is the only thing they’re told they’re allowed to care about.



  • It’s not that there wasn’t any political pressure. It’s that the slightest bit of pressure caused them to pull the plug swiftly.

    I think the companies who were led by people personally antagonistic to DEI already weren’t doing it. They started it when the political winds were in favor of DEI, found that it did something beneficial for them that was worth the investment (ultimately, increasing profits, probably through PR) and reaped what they could. But the slightest headwinds caused them to drop it, for lack of confidence it would be worth the continued investment. For others, it was beneficial enough this pressure didn’t change their decisions.

    None of this is likely coming from company leaders caring about DEI for some sort of principled reason, just companies who care about only one thing, reassessing the value of DEI in terms of that one thing, $ return on spend. This is a group who needs subtler treatment than the anti-DEI crowd, this is fair weather friends who don’t care. What little we can do is reward those who don’t give in to the slightest push.


  • The way Java is practically written, most of the overhead (read: inefficient slowdown) happens on load time, rather than in the middle of execution. The amount of speedup in hardware since the early 2000s has also definitely made programmers less worried about smaller inefficiencies.

    Languages like Python or JavaScript have a lot more overhead while they’re running, and are less well-suited to running a server that needs to respond quickly, but certainly can do the job well enough, if a bit worse compared to something like Java/C++/Rust. I suspect this is basically what they meant by Java being well-suited.



  • two billionaires, unfathomably rich individuals, in the last ten years that having a good public image was overrated, but decided they’d rather use their platform to hurt people, and alienate anyone who liked them, but wasn’t a raging bigot. is the allure of being mean to people on twitter.com that great?

    if Musk had shut up just 5 years ago, he’d probably have more money, more respect, but somewhat less power. instead he’s become the guy a lot of people are excited to see have a total breakdown, and hopefully lose everything.


  • There’s an important distinction here: “is a good idea” is not “is the right way to do it”. You can also keep kids off of dating apps by banning dating apps, banning children from the Internet, or even just banning children. All of those are horrible solutions, but they achieve the goal.

    The goal should be to balance protecting kids with minimizing collateral damage. Forcing adults to hand over significant amounts of private data to prove their identity has the same basic fault as the hyperbolic examples, that it disregards the collateral damage side of the equation.