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I find it amusing to jump straight to the "because some species lack watches." It isn't like humans started with them. Kids aren't even really able to use a clock for quite a few years.

Article is still neat, mind. I am curious why it is not more compelling to think in terms of reserves and duty cycles. Build up enough energy to get you through periods of needed energy and you will settle on a cycle that matches when energy is available. At least, if you want to minimize complete depletion. Which is about the only thing I would expect evolution to fully avoid. Or, at least, the ones that didn't will have died off.


This same logic can be used to argue against the "keep all functions at 10 or so lines of code" mantra that a lot of folks try and push.

Which is not to say it isn't valid.


Oddly, I would say that this often exposes complexity? Not that that is a valid reason to go all in on it. But some things, like updating service contracts, are complicated. Indeed, anything that makes it look like many services all deployed in unison is almost certainly hiding one hell of a failure case.

While I can kind of see what you are aiming at, a basic button down and clean pants go a long way. Keep it ironed and clean, and you go even further. No need for the anything that looks like a uniform.

I tried going for just a button down and clean pants and was stopped by the police.

Can you elaborate?

This reminds me of the amusing tendency of people to use the full double for recording lat/long of locations.

It depends on your use case. Storing WGS84 coordinates as 32-bit floats can incur on errors of several meters. It might be good for your fitness tracking application, but not for serious GIS usage.

Case in point: many years ago I was working on some software to generate 3D models from drone pictures. The first step of the pipeline was to convert from WGS84 to ECEF (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth-centered,_Earth-fixed_co...), an absolute Cartesian coordinate system. Well, it turns out that at the scales involved, 6.371 million meters, 32-bit floats have a precision of half a meter, so the resulting models were totally broken.

Moving to 64-bit floats fixed this issue.


Isn't that more of using a float to represent the number? Would be akin to trying to represent .5. Which, if your goal is to represent decimals, you are best off not using floats.

Granted, just storing it as a 32 bit integer is probably difficult for most uses. BCD just isn't common for most programmers. (Or fixed point, in general.)


If your goal is just to store the coordinates in a database, sure, use fixed point or whatever.

But any kind of calculation will involve a great deal of trigonometry, square roots, and the like. It is just easier to use floating point. Examples:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geographic_coordinate_conversi...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vincenty%27s_formulae

https://gist.github.com/govert/1b373696c9a27ff4c72a


You should be able to do the calculations in fixed point, easily enough? Indeed, it used to be that most embedded systems would use fixed point due to lack of float hardware.

I would actually think fixed point would be beneficial for its accuracy being a bit more controlled than floating point is. Yes, you lose the range of floating point. But I just don't see how that is relevant for numbers that are constrained to +/- 180 by definition.

That all said, I cannot and do not argue against that it is faster to get going with basic float/doubles, due to how commonly those are supported in base libraries.



"You're pointing to waldo on a page" ... There's always an xkcd.

I challenge the idea that first request latency is bottle necked by language choice. I can see how that is plausible, mind. Is it a concern for the vast majority of developers?

Nevermind the collapse of salaries flowing into the area which is destroying what the market demand is willing to pay for the existing stock? This crowd, of any, should be familiar with how many jobs flowed into that area and the promise of how many more it would be. Only for that to basically evaporate overnight.

Like, yes. At a base level, you need enough supply to keep prices down. But, the entire point of supply and demand is that it is two curves that intersect. And the demand curve, if pushed up, will also increase prices. Could you over supply such that you drive down the unit costs in a way that keeps prices down? Of course it is plausible. It is not typical market behavior, though. For that, you need excessive spending by someone.


A lot of the increase in bills people are seeing come from necessary upgrades to the distribution infrastructure. Something that was going to be happening anyway.

For extra amusement, try living near a farm or a school. Public parks can also be a surprise if you don't like the sound of people playing. Add a court, and things get fun.

Public parks can also be a surprise if you don't like the sound of people playing. Add a court, and things get fun.

I once lived across the street from a public park with a court. One day the judge burned her thighs on the hot metal slide, and now it's a parking lot.


It reminds me of Google Plus. I think you could make parallels to how heavily some of the tech companies were pushing ML?

Yes! And now Meta is chasing that too and failing. It's not clear to me what advantage developing its own LLMs affords Meta. Google and the other platform companies, I get it, but it's not like Meta is using what's unique about their social data to train something interesting.

I think the general strategy for a long time in the tech world was to have as many of the programmers as you could under your umbrella. You don't necessarily know what you are racing towards, but the general feel was you knew that programmers were going to get there.

It also deprives your competition of their product, and/or bids up their cost.

So that they can push those stupid AI questions at the bottom of Facebook posts

Zuck seriously seems to have no clue how to do anything. His entire existence is stealing other people's stuff


Meta is just paying engineers not to work at any other faang company.

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