Cameron Laird

My lord, to be able to write science this well. This is like the opening of an econ or law paper. From Donald Hoffman's "The Interface Theory of Perception", sites.socsci.uci.edu/~ddhoff/interf…

"We’re filing this story as an interesting trip down the rabbit hole that’s Christine’s mind": How AlmaLinux Came to Be Fixing Bugs Ahead of a Content Creation-Focused Open-Source Event - FOSS Force fossforce.com/2024/07/how-al…

datacenterknowledge.com/sustainability… As global attention turns to Paris with the official start of the Summer 2024 Olympics the focus is rightfully placed on the athletes. As it turns out, there is a role that data centers – specifically data center heat – is playing as well @Equinix

Neerja Bhanot was a 22-year-old flight attendant working on Pan Am Flight 73 when it was hijacked by terrorists during a layover in 1986. Soon after taking control, the terrorists killed an Indian-American traveler and discarded his body outside the plane. They ordered Bhanot to gather the passengers' passports to single out Americans. However, she concealed the identities of the 43 Americans on the flight by stashing their passports under seats and discarding others. After a tense 17-hour standoff, the hijackers began shooting and setting off explosives. Bhanot bravely opened the plane's doors, and rather than escaping herself, she helped passengers evacuate. Tragically, she lost her life while shielding three American children from gunfire. One of the kids she safeguarded grew up to become an airline captain, crediting Bhanot as his inspiration.

@taviso A thread worth reading, as are several of the comments which follow. Actual facts are such a comfort.

This strange tweet got >25k retweets. The author sounds confident, and he uses lots of hex and jargon. There are red flags though... like what's up with the DEI stuff, and who says "stack trace dump"? Let's take a closer look... 🧵1/n

The European Commission’s draft of projects for next year fails to mention the NGI Zero Commons Fund, an important funding source for FOSS projects: Is the European Commission Dropping Support for Important Open-Source Funding? buff.ly/3YdZnYC

@sjvn If he'd promised also to explain OSS ... well, I'm already speechless. Good Monday to you, SJVN.

many of you are mourning the Z80 CPU (recently discontinued after a nearly 50 year run). all is not lost--i bet Rochester will take up the torch. as according to the prophecy, Rochester will soon be the last remaining US semiconductor company.

@sjvn Thank you, Steven, for sharing this.

@sophiebushwick @newscientist Congratulations, Sophie.

I have some exciting career news: In January, I'm going to begin a new job as senior news editor at @newscientist. I'm looking forward to joining the team and working with the talented journalists at the New York bureau!

I am recruiting PhD students for Fall '24! Please apply to Cornell CS if you are interested in ML, data science, health, or inequality. Feel free to retweet! We are based in NYC - here's the view from our island campus (taken during Pride - note the rainbow lights!)

@sleepyasfaboner github.com/tsoding/todo.a…

Textual passed 100 contributors! github.com/Textualize/tex…

If I want to build a small cross platform C with C++ library (don't judge me), what is the build system I want to use. Is it still cmake?

Wow: @WestVirginiaU is eliminating "... all foreign language programs ..." (among others), according to slate.com/human-interest… (among others). That stuns me. I have nothing constructive to say at the moment.

Blocking is important for a social network to function, otherwise a small number of trolls ruin online communities for everyone else On Reddit, 0.1% of all communities generate 38% of attacks on other reddits! (1% accounts for 74%!) Only 3% of Reddit users ever post toxic stuff

@t_sketh @mitsuhiko Good point. ... and this is probably an opportune moment to note that some situations--especially when both Mypy and Pyright are in play--call for `# mypy: ignore ...` as an alternative to `# type: ignore ...`

@mitsuhiko You can solve this by using mypy flags too, in fairness: `mypy --strict --disallow-any-explicit` will block code like this. You can use 'Any' where you truly need it with a # type: ignore.

On the topic of Python typing: One of my biggest qualms with the system is that once you are past having everything typed, it lets you do stuff like this and does not even complain.

@cqfdee @mitsuhiko I agree with PSLV: `object`-for-`Any` is a quick remedy for many common situations. While a bit fragile, it's often a step in the right direction.

@mitsuhiko Fwiw, one thing you can do here is use `value: object` instead of `value: Any` in Aggregator; mypy will then complain about subsequently trying to use `value: float` and `value: str` in the subclasses (breaks liskov substitution).

@mitsuhiko @al_ak_sa Truly, the best help to the working developer in this matter is, "regard Any as a code smell. Work to simplify and tighten your implementations to _eliminate_ all Any-s." I recognize how limited that is.

@al_ak_sa Because the type system is full of bad footguns and the lack of expressiveness makes many people go to any. And the holes in the type system it causes are significant and there is no help to steer the developer to the right place.

@swardley Faster than I expected. Yes: the grifters are already taking over AI. While plenty of good, healthy work remains to be done, it's become apparent that, just as with IoT, the fraudulent will dominate.

You now how all the marketing people said IoT was going to be really fantastic but it all turned out to be mostly Internet of Shit with nothing quite working. Is this where we're heading with AI?