If a country has the capability to "lock down ports", they're probably shipping ports - do you think Australia is just suddenly going to (or has the capability to) block all IP traffic on certain ports? A notable exception is China.
Thanks for making this! I’ve found that as a pedestrian in Sydney, up to half my walking time is spent waiting for traffic lights, and have always wondered what could be done about it.
The compare-how-big-a-lookup-table-is argument is a bit of a red herring for comparing how complex things are. For example, a 3x3 matrix implements a map from 3 floats to another three floats, a huge space of possibilities (if we have 4-byte floats, this function space has (2^96)^(2^96) elements). From this perspective, representing that map as 9 numbers is an amazing compression ratio. But surely one cannot argue that matrices “have more going on” than arbitrary functions.
I would interpret this as showing that matrix multiplication code is carefully engineered to correctly implement... well, matrix multiplication. Stumbling on that specific mapping of 96 input bits to 96 output bits would be hard to pick out of a hat by chance, from the set of all possible mappings. Learning that precise mapping, starting from a uniform prior and only given a finite set of examples, could be seen as an impressive task, although less impressive than sorting. If a model learns the correct mapping -- and better yet, needs only 9 parameters to implement it -- then I think it's fairer to say the model does matrix multiplication, rather than that the model convincingly imitates the statistics of matrix multiplication.
The Mazda software works ok with the wheel, but using something like CarPlay with it is almost impossible without taking your eyes off the road for a long time. It’s worse than touch-screens in that respect: what will the spinning knob select next on a screen which has three separate panes?
Yes, it's terrible, CarPlay was designed to with touch in mind. You spend more time looking at the screen to figure out where your "cursor" is. I found the Tesla touch screen to be much safer to use.
SQLite is so modular that someone could write a replacement for the filesystem layer that ended up sending requests across HTTP to query a database on another server [1]. Without touching any other layer of the code. How much more modular do you want a database to be, without making other compromises?
The IntelliJ git interface makes a lot of sense, and makes many helpful operations easy, like “compare what I have now to this particular commit”. The VSCode git interface, even with plugins like GitLens, seems to make these operations hard to get to, and how VSCode manages diffs with the staging area involved is totally bananas.
Aside from that, PyCharm has a slightly better debugging interface but otherwise it’s quite close to VSCode for Python development. Sane version control is a bit aside though.
I hope they also worked on removing the many UI bugs from PyCharm remote: laggy scrolling while in the diff view, some editor settings like rulers at 100/120 chars not working properly, some settings panes lagging out until the editor is restarted, etc etc. I need to develop on a remote VM and I’m using VSCode at the moment because it’s remote story is less buggy, but would much rather be using PyCharm.
The remote feature (Jetbrains Gateway) is so buggy that it made me completely stop using PyCharm, since I’m mostly developing remotely now. Whereas the VScode remote feature works beautifully. I also found their Copilot plug-in to be buggy, and that’s also a must have. It’s a shame because, aside from those things, I really like PyCharm. But those things are absolute deal killers for me.
There a lots of tiny issues: some UI settings like rulers (or whatever PyCharm calls them, vertical guides that tell you when you’re at 100 chars or something) just don’t work, and don’t show up in the main editor (but they show up in the diffs!). Some editor settings, like the main Python settings pane, just doesn’t load its settings page, and requires restarting the editor. Scrolling diffs with the scroll wheel is so janky and laggy to be unusable, but the main editor scrolls fine. Reconnecting after a short disconnect (open and close laptop lid) takes too long. The git client gets itself into a weird state sometimes where it will create the same 5 files no matter which branch I switch to, and the only way I’ve found to reset that is to delete every trace of IntelliJ off the remote and reconnect.
At LAN parties we used to share our SteamApps folders so that others could copy games across. Interestingly (perhaps due to Windows networking handling copy-many-small-files poorly?) it was often faster to make an uncompressed ZIP of the files, copy that over the network, and unzip it on the other side.
Great to see that the steam client now does all this transparently.
All file transfer protocols that copy files one by one suffer work poorly with many small files. The more latency you have, the worst the slowdown. rsync is great for this purpose because it can do batch transfer efficiently, including compressing the data on the fly.
