I like using the word 'internet' in moderation comments as a sort of mild pejorative—it nicely expresses the shared semi-embarrassment we all feel about whatever this is.
I think it helps take pressure off people personally—because even if you're being scolded, you know..."internet" - how high can the bar really get. It's scolding on a curve.
Rebellion Defense | Remote, potentially w/travel to DC - USA only | Full Time | Mid-SR SDE | ~$157,000 to ~$236,000 + options
Your team will be focused on building autonomous systems for some of the company's most important initiatives. Domain experience isn't required, but we're looking for strong backend devs.
The work is mostly in Python and Go; your environment will range from being in the cloud to what I like to call "a hostile development environments" (but don't worry, you'll be surrounded by people that have battlescars in these environments, and they're _fun_).
About RD: Rebellion Defense is an amalgamation of folks coming from all walks of life (FAANG, Gov, neither) - all of us are aligned on one thing: software systems (ML/AI in this case) "will be critical in how we understand, decide, and act in the realm of national security" - and we have to show up for that.
We have great benefits and a structured interviewing process that you can read about on the job page below.
If you have hesitations (ethical, cultural, compensation, or otherwise) about working in national security, feel free to ping me (kelvin), at <my_name> at rebelliondefense.com. I'm not on the team that's hiring, but I can talk to you about RD and why I joined.
Yep; a huge portion of Google results, especially for spicy searches like “best ______ 2021” are just lists of affiliate links to top 10 selling items on Amazon from made-up brand names that are rotated once a product receives a few bad reviews.
It’s really hard to find legit review sites; at least Wirecutter seems to actually test things, but sites like SeriousEats, OutdoorGearLab, Carryology, DCRainMaker, SoundOnSound, Adventure Journal, Magnetic Magazine, The Loam Wolf, etc that are quite niche / domain-specific are where I go for actual trustworthy reviews.
I agree that Google seems to be dominated by clickbait ad-riddled BS SEO sites now more than ever, and I can’t help but think that Google is allowing this to happen because it pays the bills. I’ve posted about this before, but at the end of the day, Google and FB are advertising companies trying to be more than that. The difference to me is that I’m willing to reward actual reviews and effort with rev share if I decide to buy something reviewed, but I’m super unimpressed with all the irrelevant ads we still get in 2021 despite having so much personalization data about users.
Another thing that advertisers don’t seem to understand somehow: if I searched for a thing or even clicked through a FB ad and bought it, the chances that I’m also interested in buying a similar thing in the next few days / weeks are drastically reduced. They seem to be totally missing this signal, showing me ads for some category of thing I already purchased for a very long time after I don’t need any more suggestions.
Lastly, I would literally pay per month for an Amazon search that filters out all the fake brands. If I search for “webcam”, there are half a dozen brands I want to see, yet instead I’m forced to sift through piles of junk that I would never even consider purchasing to find what I’m looking for. I’ve heard that Amazon knows this is a thing but chooses not to fix it due to some psychological allure of sifting through the junk to find the nuggets of gold. In the worst cases, I have to use Google to find stuff on Amazon because their own search is so horrendous, with the categories being an absolute joke.
I've always imagined it as a big tower shoved under someone's desk. The side panel of the case is off because otherwise it overheats. On the screen there's a single maximized window of DrRacket. A post it note warns you not to quit or reboot the system.
I buried a wooden ship in the sand at the beach when my little boy was 5 years old.
We were digging sand castles when "he found it".
Back at the house when his grandfather was having a closer look at the ship, grandad "discovered" an old map and little key inside the ship - strange we hadn't noticed it earlier.
The map had a big X marked on it - also down at the beach near a big cave. I happened to know just that area....
So we went down there and dug in the sand and found a wooden treasure box wrapped in a metal chain and padlocked. When my little boy tried the key in the lock.... it fit!
Inside the box was overflowing with jewellery and coins and weird little trinkets. He had discovered buried treasure!
In fact I had bought the wooden ship, and the wooden jewellery box from the local opportunity shop and also bought $5 worth of shiny junk jewellery and old overseas coins and trinkets and filled it up. I then bought a chain and padlock and wrapped it up and buried it.
He's 11 years old now and still doesn't know the true story. Credit is due to my friend who did this first - he buried a pouch in the sand for his kids to find - I just expanded on the idea with the ship and the map and the treasure box, chains and padlock etc.
Knitting is just a monoid in the category of endofunctors. Once you realize that a sock is just a piece of yarn transformed through a series of knots, you can determine that it's topologically equivalent to where you started and you don't need to knit the other sock.
My little boy has been crazy about cars ever since he was the littlest boy.
So when he was 2 years old I made him a little city, the size of a large coffee table, using all the stuff from model railroads. Grass, roads, houses, people. I drilled holes and pushed led lights through the bottom and into the insides of the buildings. I even put little monkeys in the trees and playing on the roofs of the buildings. The only thing it didn't have was railroads or trains.
Most toys, kids play with them for a while and stop and move on to something else.
He played on that little city non stop for at least 4 years if not 5. Every morning he got up and sat down next to it and started pushing his cars around it and parking them and lining them up and making vehicle noises.
I have to admit I had a huge amount of fun choosing all the parts and designing and making that little model city.
He's older now so the table lies in a corner much loved and worn and now unused but here it is:
As with the procedural puzzle generator, it takes a bit of sifting to find puzzles that are both possible and challenging to solve. But it gets you most of the way there!
A convinent source of information about this is going to be Simon Tatham's excellent puzzle suite. Most the puzzles are built to ensure a solution without guessing.
> Can we please try to stop talking about this specific language ecosystem as an awful deplorable hell hole or whatever?
Back in the second century BC, Cato the Elder ended his speeches with the phrase 'Carthago delenda est,' which is to say, 'Carthage must be destroyed.' It didn't matter what the ostensible topic of the speech was: above all, Carthage must be destroyed.
My opinion towards JavaScript is much like Cato's towards Carthage: it must be rooted out, eliminated and destroyed entirely. I don't know if I'd go quite so far as to say that the fundamental challenge of mass computing is the final destruction of JavaScript — but I want to say it, even though it's false.
JavaScript is a pox, a disaster, a shame. It is the most embarrassingly bad thing to become popular in computing since Windows 3.1. Its one virtue (that it's on every client device) is outshone by its plethora of flaws in much the same way that a matchstick is outshone by the sun, the stars and the primordial energy of the Big Bang added together.
JavaScript is the XML, the Yugo, the Therac-25 of programming languages. The sheer amount of human effort which has been expended working around its fundamental flaws instead of advancing the development of mankind is astounding. The fact that people would take this paragon of wasted opportunity and use it on the server side, where there are so many better alternatives (to a first approximation, every other programming language ever used), is utterly appalling.
Designers are ruining software in general. iTunes, the iOS music app, and Google Maps are just a few pieces of software that started out relatively usable (if not exactly stable in the case of iTunes), and have been iterated and stylized to the point where I routinely get enraged by them.
At least Google Maps has walked back that terrible accordion thing that literally drove me crazy.
I basically think design is like a cancer on the web anymore. You know what works? Craiglist, that's what works. Reddit works. Hacker News works. The old, pre-design-goober Google Apps interface worked.
I seriously want to punch a hipster every time I have to use an app that used to work and has now been designed to death.
It is stunning in every way; I highly recommend it for any Bach fans!