A mathematically ideal sheet of paper in a 3d-dimensional space can be addressed with both 2D coordinates, within the reference frame of the paper, and 3D coordinates, within the 3D space, but given that the paper has a location in space, 2D coordinates are sufficient to specify a point in 3D space.
You can do the same with geography. It's why generally only specify geographical coordinates with latitude and longitude, altitude is a given from those two, since you're as unlikely to be hovering in the air as you are to be immersed in bedrock.
Robots.txt is great if you're trying to run an above board operation. Much easier than trying to guess how a webmaster wishes the crawler to behave, and then getting angry emails when you guess wrong.
It's not great. It used to be very common that robots.txt would Disallow *, Allow GoogleBot which just entrenches the search engine monopoly. In response to this other search engines just used the rules for GoogleBot instead of the rules for their own crawlers.
Eh, not really my experience running an internet search engine and a crawler. It happens occasionally, but mostly people seem to focus on what they perceive as nuisance crawlers if they do disallow any specific UAs.
I tried to mix up a bit of all the popular genres and formats, though I think as LinkedIn has seen more AI-written content, this sort of Lynchian fever dream story has probably become more rare.
Yeah I think Reagan's reforms of the antitrust laws, and the subsequent fall of the Soviet union are probably some of the first dominoes toward the new gilded age.
The lack of competition from the Soviets is probably one of the bigger systemic causes. The cold war in no small part a war for hearts and minds in the democratic world. It was existentially important that the west believed in America, both the US itself and its allies. As long as the Soviets were around as existence proof for an alternate world order, the US needed at least visibly have its shit in order.
If today's clown fiesta had unfolded 50 years ago, well comrade, сегодня мы все говорили бы по-русски.
It is and has always been immensely helpful to understand what you are doing in any context.
There are some programmers who treat the job as just plumbing together what is to them completely incomprehensible black boxes, who treat the computer as a mystery machine that just does things "somehow", but these programmers will almost always be hacks that spend their entire career producing mediocre code.
There are things such a programmer can build, but they are very limited by their lack of in depth understanding, and it is only a tiny fraction of what a more competent programmer can put together.
To get beyond being a hack, you need to understand the entire stack, including the code that you didn't write, including both libraries, frameworks and the OS, and including the hardware, the networking layers, and so forth. You don't have to be an expert at these things by any means, but you do need to understand them and be comfortable treating them as transparent boxes that you may have to go in and fiddle with at some point to get where you need to go. Sometimes you need to vendor a dependency and change it. Sometimes you need to drop it entirely and replace it with something more fit for purpose you built yourself.
> To get beyond being a hack, you need to understand the entire stack, including the code that you didn't write, including both libraries, frameworks and the OS, and including the hardware, the networking layers, and so forth.
I think maybe you overestimate your own knowledge here. It's one thing to understand general principles and design or to understand a contextually-relevant vertical or whatever. It's another to demand comprehensive (even if not expert) familiarity in non-trivial projects, especially those created by many developers over long time spans. It's not just a question of intelligence or dedication or even just time spend working on a project.
The amount of software even your typical piece of code relies on is staggering and shifting, and it's only getting more complicated. A good chunk of software engineering and programming language research has been focused on making it practical to operate in such an complex environment - an environment that nobody fully understands - which is a major part of why modularity exists. Making software like "plumbing together [...] black boxes" is exactly what such research aspired to accomplish, because it allows different developers to focus on different scopes and focus on the domain they're working on. Software engineering is a practical field, and any system that requires full knowledge to operate, modify, and extend is either relatively small (maybe greenfield and written by a sole developer) or impractical to work with.
So I would say there's a wide gap between "lazy guy who doesn't give a shit" and "guy who thinks he can understand everything". Both lack the humility and wisdom needed to know the limits of their knowledge, to circumscribe what he needs to understand, and to operate within the space these afford. (Both extremes remind me of cocky junior devs. On the one hand, you have the junior dev who carelessly churns out "hot shit" garbage code by plumbing things together with no grasp or appreciation of sound design; on the other you have the dev who makes a big show about "rigor" completely detached from the actual realities and needs of the project. In each case, the dev is failing to engage intelligently with the subject matter.)
Well I mean I've built an internet search engine from scratch[1] and I'm making a living off this successfully enough to have completely left the wagie existence for the foreseeable future, so I think I at least kinda walk the talk.
I'm far from the best at anything and make no claims toward knowing everything, but I do think I have reasonable breadth in my experience and work, and I don't think I could have built something like this otherwise.
[1] ... which is something that does not decompose neatly into black boxes and must to a large degree be built from first principles as goddamn nothing off the shelves scales well enough to deal with multi-terabyte workloads at the even a fraction of the speed a bespoke solution can.
But that's sort of my point: you're not walking the walk of others. You are a solo dev. You are working on a project that can be developed by a solo dev, both in terms of size and time frames. It is a greenfield project, so you have been there since the beginning and therefore have a lot of context and knowledge of rationale, history, motives, etc. that rarely anyone has in industry, and certainly not early on.
ok, I kind of knew that already LOL, but I don't have any questions that are more specific so I can't really complain. just gotta get after it i guess.
Yeah I don't know if there is such a thing as good advice in this regard, except the stuff that everyone is saying.
I guess "build something you want", the Temu-bought knockoff of the previous advice. It's not quite as bad advice as it sounds, as it's at least some validation of an idea, and much easier than playing 17D chess trying to predict the zeitgeist.
The luck surface area[1] also isn't quite as talked about as it should, but a good mental model if you're seeking serendipitous life-changing outcomes that I can get behind.
I think the fear narrative is a bit of a thought terminating cliche.
Most people who aren't in AI sees plain as day how everything AI touches is turning into the digital equivalent of flimsy IKEA furniture. The main selling point of AI so far is that it makes things cheaper to produce while still looking good at a glance.
"The thing I used to like costs the same or more but is now cheaper quality and worse and they think I'm dumb enough not to notice" really isn't a selling point, but pretty much the universal western post-2008 experience, and nothing quite embodies this transformation like AI.
But yeah, you also have all the AI CEOs chewing the scenery like Jeremy Irons in the DnD movie which really hasn't done the image of AI any favors either.
There are at least some redeeming features of AI, but I think it's become this scapegoat for a lot of things that it touches that are also larger unsolved problems with the economy, and it's even used that way, e.g. to motivate layoffs that would otherwise signal to investors that a company isn't doing as well as they'd like you to think.
The other recurring theme is a mantra along the lines of "ends justify the means" when it comes to building data centers and all the consequences of that in the present, for some promise that AI will somehow have a net benefit to all eventually while hand-waving the details.
> Most people who aren't in AI sees plain as day how everything AI touches is turning into the digital equivalent of flimsy IKEA furniture.
I really love this comparison. Everyone bitches about Ikea, but at the end of the day unless you're rich as fuck then "buying new furniture" means either Ikea or some other shop that adopted exactly the same business model, because we all know that the price/quality ratio is unbeatable. Ikea furniture can easily outlive you as long as you pick the correct product for your use case. "I put my fat ass on a dining table that's explicitly marketed for light distributed load and it broke in half, boo-hoo Ikea bad" like no shit, if you need a table you can stand on then choose one with extra support beams, Ikea has these too. "But if you disassemble and reassemble Ikea it falls apart" okay cool but the cost of transporting old furniture to your new house is often higher than just buying new furniture anyway. Not to mention that the chances that your old furniture will match your new house are pretty much zero.
This translates to engineers not being able to grasp the concept of "good enough" where end user doesn't care about quality improvements beyond certain threshold. Cue the audiophiles remaining perplexed to this day why nobody uses 24-bit FLAC.
I feel this is written from the mindset, "all objects within a set must be obtained at once." Or, perhapse, "nothing lasts anyway, so there's no reason to bother."
Quality has its cost. A quality dining table could only have the potential to be sold to every room one might place a dining table, exactly one time. IKEA might sell that same dining table to the same room every year. IKEA is destined for the landfill; quality can outlive a bloodline. Sales of quality must sustain all those employed for the process accordingly. - Sure, some TLC is required, but IKEA can't even get wet.
Quality also provides additional benefits. They are not only a functional object, but a wealth of sentiment and memories for the home. They are also a symbol to the pride one takes in their craft, and a silhouette of their creator's experience and deserved reputation. IKEA is for parties and showrooms/staging. Quality is for comfort and places of importance.
My heart aches, that the notion of buying prefabricated trash to use in the interim of its journey, is better than searching individually for items that will bring character and meaning—as well as, functional superiority—over the course of a lifetime.
This equates to software bragging about how great its algorythm adjusted the color of a Submit button to improve deliverability on a website masquerading as a web app that could have been written in HTML and CSS without the button at all.
Cool, if you're rich you can do that. Mere mortals have to make a decision "do I buy a luxury dining table or do I send my child to college" and it's understandable that choosing between these two isn't exactly straightforward.
Thing is that quality furniture can be bought second hand, since they last so long. At least you used to be able to, when they still made that stuff.
Going the IKEA route you'll end up re-buying the same furniture over and over in ever crappier quality. Once you add that to the equation, it suddenly isn't quite as cheap anymore.
I tried. It's a major PITA, and transport costs alone make the whole endeavor not economically viable, so I backed off.
A friend of mine bought some renovated old wardrobe and I helped him move it from the hall to the bedroom and this resulted in me for the first time ever seeing him have a heated, emotional argument with his wife.
Finally, your pink bathroom from 50's just isn't fashionable. Trust me on this one. Give your cabinets to someone who can skillfully paint them (which costs money obviously).
> Going the IKEA route you'll end up re-buying the same furniture over and over in ever crappier quality.
I've never had Ikea furniture randomly fail on me, and I haven't heard of this happening in my social circle. Again, don't sit on a god damn Linnmon table. It's for everyday use items only. If you need something sturdier, choose a different product.
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