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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • Yeah, I have mixed feelings about this. People grieve in their own way. Some people throw themselves into work to avoid thinking about tragedy. Some people get drunk or high. Some people perform grief in an outlandish, over-the-top way because they want to be the main character.

    We don’t know if maybe she was happy and excited at this moment, and then once she was off the conference call the reality hit her again and she was sobbing uncontrollably.

    But, here’s the thing. Most people don’t try to monetize the death of a loved one, and as a result they’re not in the spotlight during their period of grief. Most people step back from the world and grieve in private, where there aren’t as many people judging them for how well or poorly they’re dealing with the loss of a loved one.

    Erika Kirk brought this spotlight on herself by trying to monetize the death of her husband. And if people’s harsh criticism of what she’s doing means that the next person doesn’t try to monetize the death of a loved one, that’s probably a good thing.


  • Investors had a general idea of what was going on at Tesla and thought their profits might be down to 20% of what they were last year, so prices went down before Tesla announced their results. Then the results came out. The results were terrible, but not as terrible as the rumours made it sound. So, share prices went back up a bit.

    That makes perfect sense. Stocks are like gambling, where a lot of the bets make sense. This is like the odds on a sports game being very long before an injury report is released, and the odds getting slightly better after the injury report is released and it’s not as bad as feared.

    Where TSLA stock makes absolutely no sense is the P/E ratio. That’s the price investors are paying for the shares compared to the earnings per share. An old, reliable company that probably won’t grow very much but that has reliably made a steady profit year after year might have a P/E ratio of 5. Tech stocks that might grow a lot in the future might have a P/E ratio of 20 because the expectation is that they have a lot of room to grow, and that in 5 years their revenues and profits might have tripled.

    For a typical car company that’s well run, a P/E ratio of about 5-10 is normal. Volkswagen is at about 8, Toyota is at about 10, Ford is at about 12.

    Tesla’s P/E ratio is currently 283.38, and its market cap is $1.386 trillion. So, Tesla investors somehow think that Tesla is going to grow to become hundreds of times its current size and/or massively profitable.

    So, the day-to-day movements of Tesla’s stock price make sense in the abstract. Investors assuming bad news sell shares, when the news isn’t as bad as feared, investors buy shares. Where they make no sense at all is that the investors are somehow deluding themselves into thinking this tiny car company is about to do something to juice its share price to the moon, like inventing nuclear fusion, or perfecting a time machine.


  • It’s a tiny amount, but it sets an important precedent. Not only Air Canada, but every company in Canada is now going to have to follow that precedent. It means that if a chatbot in Canada says something, the presumption is that the chatbot is speaking for the company.

    It would have been a disaster to have any other ruling. It would have meant that the chatbot was now an accountability sink. No matter what the chatbot said, it would have been the chatbot’s fault. With this ruling, it’s the other way around. People can assume that the chatbot speaks for the company (the same way they would with a human rep) and sue the company for damages if they’re misled by the chatbot. That’s excellent for users, and also excellent to slow down chatbot adoption, because the company is now on the hook for its hallucinations, not the end-user.


  • Google became crap shortly after their company name became a synonym for online searches. When you don’t have competitors, you don’t have to work as hard to provide search results – especially if you’re actively paying Apple not to come up with their own search engine, Firefox to maintain Google as their default search engine, etc. IMO AI has been the shiny new thing they’re interested in as they continue to neglect search quality, but it wasn’t responsible for the decline of search quality.




  • I hope they realize that if the US survives Trump, having “ICE: 2025-?” on your resume will make you completely unemployable in the future. It will be like having “groundskeeper at Epstein Island” under your experience. You’ll be radioactive. Even if you leave it off, if you look suspiciously like a thumb and have a blank spot on your resume during this period, people will just assume that you worked at ICE and kick you out of their office.

    It’s already too late to just quit. If you were a member of ICE and didn’t quit after Good was murdered, people will rightfully assume that you were OK with that murder. The only hope current ICE employees have is to turn whistleblower. Record in detail all the crimes your cow-orkers are confessing to, and then get that evidence to AOC or Elizabeth Warren, or another competent democrat with a backbone.







  • Not every big change is necessarily something you can meaningfully break up into small changes. Sometimes when you could break it up into small changes, you have to change its structure in a meaningful way to half-implement it and test out that half-version. It takes experience to know when it’s best to get the whole structure expressed it code, then to go back and tweak it based on any compiler errors. Most of the time the compiler errors are very minor things like a typo, so you don’t lose any meaningful time fixing them.





  • merc@sh.itjust.workstolinuxmemes@lemmy.worldSpy
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    4 days ago

    The mail (a web service), the calendar (a web service), YouTube (web videos), YouTube Music (web music), Google Maps (a web based mapping service)…

    You get the picture.

    Android spies on you when you’re doing things locally on the device. But, the rest of these are web-based services.


  • Most programmers I know compile a program when they have fully expressed an idea they have in their heads. It might just be the first outline of the idea. But, it’s a solid first sketch that contains all the key details. Unfortunately, often that’s a complex idea so it can be somewhere on the order of an hour before they stop coding and try compiling. One reason for that is that compiling the program is a context switch, and when they context switch they can’t keep all of their thoughts about the program in their head, instead they have to think about compiling. And, if compiling takes more than a few seconds their attention also starts to drift to other things.

    Coding for something like an hour without making a single typo or braino is difficult. This is especially true if the programmer is attempting to express a creative idea. Their focus won’t be on getting every single detail correct, it will be in sketching the shape of the idea as completely as possible. 99% of the time, those mistakes are entirely obvious and take no time to fix. But the compiler is (luckily) unforgiving of errors, even if the fix is obvious. But, that’s why it’s suspicious if the code compiles perfectly the first time.

    It’s possible that some people have different workflows. Maybe they write out the entire program in comments and pseudocode before using an actual programming language. If you do that, then you can probably afford to take a break from the actual coding more often and compile what you have so far. Maybe you’re compiling every 5 minutes instead of every 30, in which case it’s pretty normal not to have any compiler errors. Maybe some people use a super advanced IDE that effectively compiles the code in the background all the time and flags errors that will become compiler errors. I think a lot of people who became programmers before that kind of thing was popular find that sort of thing to be distracting. If they’re trying to write something on line 50 and the IDE flags something from line 45, they might have already shifted their context a bit, and having to go back and fix that will distract them from the thing they’re currently trying to express.

    Personally, I’ve often had no compiler errors when writing tests. Tests are often very small, self-contained bits of code that don’t take long to write, and aren’t very complex, so it’s pretty normal to have a test compile and run perfectly the first time.

    The point is, programmers who have been programming for a long time are the ones who are more likely to be surprised if their code compiles perfectly the first time.