What makes large things slow is not the individual pieces of code but the way the architecture dynamically reacts to changes in the load. Sync vs async calls, buffers, parallel vs sequential processing. This includes optimizations made: do we want to wait until the call returns or do we proceed anyway and deal with the negative response later? Most developers can’t coherently (ie, with math, graphs and figures) explain, how a connection pool prevents undesirable consequences of brief spikes in incoming requests. And I’m pretty sure AI can’t either.
Harassment is not permissible. But if he had been a black researcher in, say, microbiology, it wouldn’t have materialized to that extent. His research tried to shame a very large chunk of the society for being racist. And it turns out people react in unpredictable and unpleasant ways to accusations towards their core identity that are based on lies.
There’s a difference between normalizing harassment and understanding where it comes from. I’d also like to be more forgiving about people talking bs about me. But I’m not.
Also, imagine being a black person trying to build a career in academia after such a story. The vitriol _they_ will receive, the scrutiny of _their_ work.
> imagine being a black person trying to build a career in academia after such a story
Honestly, I hope nothing like that happens. It would be outrageously racist to say "There was that one fabulist black person in academia, here's a different black person applying for a job in academica, therefore they must also be a fabulist". How on earth could you justify that thought?
I think any applicant's work should speak for itself, it should be based on their papers published, their impact and reach, and if they're teaching staff, the aggregate reviews left by their students.
I'm not sure I'd be a fair judge in a sociology department, because I'm on Sokal's side in the Sokal hoax and think appointments in humanities departments run on bullshit and social networking, not hard data.
I think there are a lot more white bullshitters in UK sociology departments right now, and they think the equitable thing to do is to try to skew that social networking to admit more black people. I think the right thing to do is to put a hard ban on the social networking aspect of academic recruitment and promotion, and run the all the bullshitters out of town.
If the bar was provably lowered for him due to an attribute [0], then doesn't that invite scrutiny on others with the same attribute? To your critique, the attribute could be political affiliation, familial relationships, academic lineage, social circles, nationality, <your choice>.
Also, imagine being a black person trying to build a career in academia after such a story.
Indeed. It's a disaster for any minority or outsider trying to build a pathway for themselves, as well as people working in the 'soft' sciences; no matter how rigorous the qualitative methods a researcher uses, the additional effort involved in explaining/understanding them vs quantitative methods leads to reflexive dismissal from many.
Everyone deserves compassion. I feel sorry for him. But the fact remains, that he deliberately used lies and deception to gain a high social position in a very politically derisive context. It couldn’t have come as a surprise, that every single racist out there would jump at the opportunity to pull him down should there ever be doubt about his academic work. Plus the people, who really care about academic integrity. Plus a whole lot of folks who simply do not like people blatantly lying for massive personal gains. The vitriol was entirely predictable. The internet is not known for being forgiving. He very deliberately and knowingly took a huge and, given the absurdity of some of his claims, unfounded risk the materialization of which he could not handle. I do feel sorry for him to have started on this path. What state of mind would push a person to take such risk? He must have been a tortured man long before it all exploded into the open.
Maybe it’s niche, but if you do endurance sports like triathlon, you can easily become a power user. I think I did. You constantly look at your watch during workouts. It does navigation on trails, it measures your heart rate, tracks workouts, keeps pace during races. The metrics it gathers about hrv, sleep, rest hr etc are vital to adjusting the routine. It acts as a data recorder for multiple sensors: hr strap does a million running metrics, a separate strap does hydration, on a bike there’s a power meter. It supports my routine alerting me about the fast, timing my morning porrige (14 min). It’s my payment method on long rides when I need water and could play audio if I wanted to. I care about advanced features like multi-band gps and handover with my bike computer. It’s a vital tool, I need it for so many things. But vast majority of smartwatches do not cater for this crowd at all. Even the Apple Ultra feels like a toy. Garmin upper end stuff is where it is.
The Garmin stuff is so good at its niche (and passable at the other "nice to have" stuff) that the market is already segmented. If you're this kind of "power user" you're already in the Garmin ecosystem.
It's tough for me to imagine what a Pixel Watch could possibly do to win me over (and I say this as somebody who has a Pixel phone and even had an Android Wear device early on).
Tbqh, it's the problem for Garmin itself - they want to sell new Fenix every year but the old one is already very good so they are segmenting their own product by holding off updates on the old watches for now but it's only going to work for so long until there is either nothing to update or they push down their value under that of competition's. E.g. Google could give Garmin a scare of its life if they made a watch with a MIP display, ANT+ support and power profile to run GPS for 8-10 hours - I'd buy such a watch from Google instead of Garmin just because Google is going to support it for longer (not that Google is known for longevity of its support but it's still better than Garmin's).
I've got a pixel watch and would love to use it for navigation while running but (admittedly without much in the way of trying) haven't stumbled across a way to do this. What do you use to make it do that? Strava?
I assume you could set up a "walking" journey with multiple stops as waypoints on your phone then when you press start your watch should pick it up and give you the direct route between each waypoint. Not sure if that would sufficiently provide what you were hoping for.
It’s not at all immediately obvious as to why the bicycle stands upright or turns. The physics is non-trivial and, based on the drawings, offsetting the center of the wheel from the axis of thw wheel being turned was not a thing. But it is this feature, that allows the modern bike to maneuver. Counter-steering is very unintuitive. If you lack the underlying physics or, in fact, personal experience, the bicycle sounds utterly mad. It doesn’t make sense. Which is why people did not work on it.
Yes. If one had never seen a bicycle, and were not told in advance that it works, one naturally would expect balancing upon its seat to be no easier in motion than at rest.
Looking at the state of stomatology and medicine back then early velocipedes and bicycles were indeed mad. I wouldn't get on any of it earlier that sometime 1910s, once the safety bicycle was somehow perfected.
The process itself is necessary, not the notes. I used to take notes in classes and meetings. At some point I realized I never read them because they were illegible. No structure, bad handwriting, just key words, no sentences. What I do now is play cards on my phone. It performs the same function of keeping my mind focused on the conversation rather than wandering off. I’ve learned to combine this with focused note-taking where I write down specific things to remember: tasks, facts, significant statements. But it’s the process that allows me to focus, the notes or gazillion solitaire games completed are a side effect.
What’s weird is how emotional people get on this. I told publicly (because I was asked, not out of an obligation to have an opinion), that the prices we pay for LLMs are likely to go up because that’s what happens when the ratio of operational assets to foreign capital drops due to the capital having been turned into heat rather than operational assets. The grief I got from people, dear Lord…
I think that opinion is as reasonable as any. I feel compelled to argue against it (I even thought out the arguments in my head!) but my compulsion to have an opinion on HN is a disease, and you made a point of saying that you gave the opinion because asked.
It’s a simplified example of a broader principle. This structure shows how oscillation can emerge from a very simple system and how it can be remedied by adjustments of the delays. Oscillating systems are very much a thing and this explains why.
By the way, what you said about stock levels is correct, of course, but doesn’t necessarily avoid oscillations. See, all of these metrics are feedback-based as well. With a delay. How much history do we take into account? Are account lead times influenced by delivery times. This is a classic problem in system dynamics: where do we draw the system boundary? Since everything is connected to everything, the right thing to do is to model the entire universe. Since this is not practical, we draw a line _somewhere_. _Where_ exactly does not matter much as long as the resulting model is useful.
Mac user for 20+ years now. Helped my mother with two Windows laptops. One would not allow her to reset her pin. Nothing allowed me to do a safe boot, the option to enter the password was just not there. The other wouldn’t connect to her wifi. Switched to an admin account and, after login, am greeted with a black screen, a cursor and nothing else. Yesterday OneDrive just randomly would not sync a specific file. Just wouldn’t.
I could go on. That’s the network effect for you. The only reason I ever touch MS (or Meta or whatever) software is because someone I’m connected to cannot switch. And they can’t switch because others are in the same situation. At some point you don’t have to care any more. There’s no money in working software compared to igniting a massive feedback loop that just can’t stop regardless of if and what you do.
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