It's written by AI. I have made LLMs adopt the same tone by prompting to be engaging. Short sentences. Every point intended to land with impact. Artificial gravitas. I consider that a failed experiment and rewrote it, rather than posting to Medium
Finally, the "AI" turns out to be 700 Indians. We now have the full loop of humans asking machines asking humans pretending to be machines. Civilisation collapses
I'd argue this is the wrong design goal: correctness is more important.
I'm in the UK but my work PC's Internet exit node is in New York due to enforced use of corporate proxies, so the time shown to me is 5 hours out. Javascript would report the correct timezone.
It is not possible to correctly identify physical location from IP addresses. Not just because of proxies and VPNs and the accuracy of the data: you can go near a border and find your mobile phone connects to a cell tower in a neighbouring country, without even visiting! IP Geolocation is accurate enough for statistics and marketing but probably shouldn't be used for anything user-facing.
I missed a bus because my phone connected to Morocco and updated its clock, when I was on the beach in Spain. Weirdly it was near Málaga, not even that close.
I love that this comment is on a novelty meme generator. Imagine if someone was late to their job interview because they were relying on the "What a day, huh?" meme to tell the time.
I suggest people badly underestimate how very rapidly expertise falls of as one moves away from a specific tightly-scoped feedback-intensive area of skill. Ask a wizzy quantum chemist a protein chemistry question, and don't be surprised to get the answer of a grad or undergrad student. There's a news genre of "Harvard MBA's don't understand seasons!"-like stories - if someone last saw something years ago in middle school, don't be surprised now by a middle schooler's understanding. A person can both be a highly-regarded <model organism> researcher, and have gone rather nutter on <diet thing> that very isn't their research area.
Physicists are stereotypically famous for misjudging expertise decay. https://xkcd.com/793/ Some things, like deep intellectual humility, do seem to consistently transfer well between fields. Being "right, a lot", not so consistently.
That’s never been my observation. Tech people are some of the most arrogant people I’ve encountered, often asserting things outside of their domain. The delusion that being right in one area makes them right in other areas is real.
It’s the whole circle jerk about STEM being the ultimate degree fields in university, while humanities and liberal arts are looked down upon and sneered at.
The humanities is a lot of nonsense. And any STEM student can read a humanity study and understand it and write a valid critique. The opposite is definitely not the case.
STEM students are just better at modelling than non-STEM (on a whole).
As for programmers. I’ve met several who only work in a specific industry for a few years. They have no problems moving to a new industry and within 6 months they understand the new domain and can model that accurately as well.
I have not once met a marketing or hr guy who was able to model anything, let alone a different domain.
Funnely enough I was nodding to parent post until I read your answer and was abit emberrased. I got a bad case of STEM hubris too. The STM can go home though.
How you see it depends on how highly you think of non-STEM work, I guess - but I will say anecdotally that the folks who were good at math/science when I was in school also seemed to be solidly above average at English.
I wish those sorts of people would realize that they are showing their whole ass when they act like that. Only the deeply insecure mask their ignorance with arrogance. We can hear your thoughts and feel your motivations.
It is actually very easy to correctly assert certain statements outside of your domain as long as the domain you are butting in on is obviously fraudulent, pseudoscientific, full of charlatans, practitioners don't have any skin in the game, is almost entirely funded by political money (and wouldn't be funded otherwise), or is heavily based on some sort of mysticism, and I'm sure this isn't an exhaustive list. Turns out that is a lot of domains of human activity.
We've all been a young person[0], so it's easy to criticise from that angle.
However, I'd like to think the readership of HN are hacker enough to like to think that, given a desert island (with minor deps like sand and the Friday hardware fab!) and a few spare years, they'd be capable of Robinson Crusoe'ing up a personal development environment.
From that point of view, I find[1] this effort admirable: it's several hundred pages, by Martin Richards, about the port of the BCPL toolchain (language, compiler, bytecode interpreter, libraries, debugger, etc. all by Martin Richards?) to a new system (was it a new arch as well?)... by Martin Richards.
How many among us get a machine with new graphics, decide to write a flight simulator, and then —only as a minor[2] implementation detail mind you— plumb float support through our entire language ecosystem? Who needs a shaved yak when you're pursuing the buttery-smooth shaded yak?
"when I was your age all we had were 1's and 0's, and sometimes not even 0's, so we'd stay up all night xor'ing 1's to have enough for the next day..."
[1] when I did this sort of thing to pay the bills, I had someone else doing the tech writing and someone else providing toolchain and debugger sources, and it was still not a trivial lift.
[2] compare Wirth FPGA'ing up an entire homebrewed arch just so he could have a personal workstation using his favourite mouse.
What we call cornflour in British English, and cornstarch in US English, is flour heavily processed to remove everything except starch, giving a flavourless thickener.
If you use wheat flour you will change the flavour and also add a slight graininess as the flour grains don't completely homogenise.
Also pipx isn't reproducible - it re-resolves dependencies so you may end up with different versions over time or in different places, eventually causing something to break.
If you have a shiv working it stays working, assuming you have a solution to distribute the required interpreter version.
Floats are fine for speculation. But they should not be used to record actual transactions.
I typically use the smaller unit of a currency to store transaction amounts. E.g., for a US transaction of $10, I would store the integer 1000 because that is 1000 cents.
> The finance industry mostly uses floats for currency, up until settlement etc.
Having done some work on pensions and insurance point-of-sale illustrations & related in the 00s and very early 10s, I'd say that is not correct, at least not here in the UK. Almost everything was specified as intermediate values to 4dp (so hundredths of a penny) and rounded to 2dp for final results.
Though it wasn't consistent: one of the problems we experienced was that while actuarial departments were following this rule others modelling for themselves in Excel or using online calculators (written in JS) were not (as those are all based on IEEE double-precision floats by default, you have to scale and manage scaled ints yourself to get accurate 4dp decimal) so we'd get reports that our calcs were off compared to what the planner's workbook gave (over the length of a pension the rounding errors can compound to quite a noticeable difference).
I've not worked in that are for well over a decade now so maybe things have changed towards floats being the default, but that seems odd to my as it isn't an industry that tends to be happy with reducing precision.
