My mom’s childhood was partly spent in a war-torn country where they had no choice but to eat crickets for protein. Years later, I showed her an article about how some gourmet restaurants are experimenting with cricket preparations. She looked pensive, and said “They should harvest them from the rice fields. I think the rice-fed ones taste best?”
I’m not familiar with how Netflix’s ad tier works and am almost afraid to ask, but could someone ELI5?
If a company wanted to push an ad on Netflix, wouldn’t it be up to them to decide whether to use AI make the thing? Or is this sort of the equivalent of a small business sending a script to the local radio station to have the DJ read it (i.e. rather than producing their own ad), except they add some AI-generated visuals?
Yeah, I suppose they could also be useful for translation when travelling someplace where you can’t read the language, provided it’s reasonably accurate and not too laggy?
In terms of occasional use, I was thinking they could be good for loading speeches or music/lyrics when you’re up on a stage. But while that seems like it ought to be a fairly trivial feature to implement, as both a software developer and performer, I could see this being more challenging than you think to get a good experience out of that sort of app.
This seems like a tech that would be hard to get right? There are a lot of trade-offs involving cost, weight, resolution, processing, battery life, etc.
For my part, I would probably use AR features rather sparingly to maintain my sanity, but they could be very useful in certain narrow applications. Whether these would be sufficient to justify the price tag is uncertain. I also tend to be rough on glasses, so that would be a worry.
That’s cute!
My daughter has a chinchilla who likes to hold up signs like this.
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I can play a spontaneous and convincing harmony on my violin to any song I hear. Sometimes I can even do this as I’m hearing a new song for the first time and trying to join in. I also suck at reading sheet music, so this could be a survival adaptation?
For me, I think it’s whatever face I make when I’m in the zone. I’m not really aware of what I look like or contrive to look a certain way. But if I crack a smile, that’s a pretty good tell that I goofed up somewhere.
One time I was playing a Robbie Burns event where we were all encouraged to wear kilts. I made the mistake of putting my phone in the sporran (a kind of purse that hangs right over your crotch) and it started vibrating incessantly. I can’t even imagine the faces I was making that night!
I think it was in the late 90s when a vicious ice storm took out power lines everywhere and the whole downtown core was plunged into darkness for the better part of a month. Fortunately, out where we lived in the suburbs, the power mostly ran underground and was restored pretty quick.
But then my wife got a panicked call from a distant relative who said she couldn’t reach her daughter studying at the university and could we look in on her? So we found her and offered her the guest bedroom for as long as she needed it.
At first, it seemed to be working out? Then it began to emerge that she was some sort of evangelical Christian who was frustrated that we were not eager to convert. I sort of thought taking in a refugee was a fairly Christian thing to do, but whatever.
Eventually, she demanded I take her back to the dorm. I told her downtown is still dark and cold, but she said “I don’t care. You guys are so boring!” So I carefully drove her back around downed trees and power lines and dropped her off.
I felt pretty bad about it and we prayed she’d be ok. A couple of weeks later, the relative called again and thanked us so much for taking care of her daughter and that we went way beyond the call despite how things turned out.
Lately, I’ve been listening to The Martian. I’m kind of a sucker for synthy orchestral compositions and that soundtrack is just so hauntingly beautiful.
Living in Ontario Canada, I immediately think of things our premier Doug Ford has done or is trying to do. Right out of the gate, he tore down a wind farm near me that was 90% complete and had to pay millions in legal fees for breaking the contract on the taxpayer’s dime. More recently, he’s on a rampage to tear out bike lane infrastructure and build some giant tunnel under an already huge highway to expand its capacity.
Reminds me of when I was up in Iqaluit (far north in Canada). The best way I could describe it is imagine Mos Eisley if it were on the planet Hoth.
I was actually in both the Bay Area and Portland last month and have to agree. Let Oregon have this one. Even the people in Portland had bigfoot energy. Big scruffy men with tons of facial hair, flannel, and those longshoreman beanies. And I actually picked up a Sasquatch field guide someplace that was the most amazingly detailed document on a cryptid I’d ever seen.
Ouch. Well if you wanna take your chances in Canada, definitely advertise your senior COBOL dev skills! ;)
Lol yeah she’s in insurance! I bet you could probably also infer from the fortran that I work for a science-y outfit.
My wife was telling me at her work they’re desperate for cobol programmers, as they’re all retiring boomers leaving behind a giant code base. At my work, it’s legacy fortran that’s all over the place, but we’re a much smaller company.
I guess my very first exposure was my brother letting me use his university account over dialup. You really had to know your way around in those days or know someone who did. He showed me how I could go to umich (U. of Michigan) and a few other places that ran public ftp servers full of games!
Then I landed a job at a small company which had accounts on CompuServe. Around this time at home, I was playing MUDs a lot on a free local BBS, and at some point, the people running the BBS decided to have a go at becoming the first commercial ISP in town. (They’re still around, in fact!)
So I approached work about opening an Internet account, arguing that it was way cheaper than CompuServe. They reluctantly agreed. I was over the Moon but my superiors were not super impressed at first. They complained that they couldn’t find anything while CompuServe was much better organized. I eventually found Yahoo which, at the time, had a sort of CompuServe-ish vibe of providing this directory that categorized most of the more popular sites by topic and that placated them. You have to remember this was long before search engines and even the www itself was still in its infancy.
I was having a blast, discovering something new every week. Usenet was so cool when I learned about that! And I found out about some sort of MIDI file format with embedded instrument samples you could play to get electronic music in a super compact format long before broadband made mp3s the way to go. What were they called again? Soundtrack files? Something like that. I played them all the time while I was coding.
That’s the point, when programming with immutable structures you always pass the mutability onto the enclosing structure.
I guess the point I was trying to make here was if the data type is already mutable, there is no point in sticking it in a list just so you can replace a reference with an identifier. You’re just adding an extra level of indirection. But sure yeah, if the type is inherently immutable, you have to do something.
A list is an antipattern here IMO. Just wrap it in some dedicated object (see e.g. Java’s StringBuilder).
Interesting. I’m not aware of anything like StringBuilder in the standard library for either Python or JavaScript. Looks like it wraps a list of characters and tries to behave as string-like as possible? You could presumably write your own class like that or download an implementation from someplace.
I guess in most cases in my own code, where I need a mutable string is usually as part of a larger data structure which is the thing that gets passed around by reference, so it’s easy enough to replace a field within that.
For building up a string, I would tend to use an io.StringIO in Python with file-writing calls, but those aren’t meant for sharing. What you don’t want to do is use the += operator a lot on strings. That gets expensive unless strings are mutable (like they are in say C++'s std::string).
Well, but then you’re basically just pushing the mutability onto the container, since you need to be able to replace elements within it.
It’s a good strategy at times though. Like say you’re working in a language where strings are immutable and you want a string you can change. You can wrap it in a list along the lines s=['foo'] and pass references to the list around instead. Then if you go s[0]='bar' at some point, all the references will now see ['bar'] instead.
As others have pointed out, there is the issue of breaking references to objects.
There can also be a lot of memory thrashing if you have to keep reallocating and copying objects all the time. To some extent, that may be mitigated using an internment scheme for common values. In Python, for example, integers are immutable but they intern something like the first 100 or so iirc? But that doesn’t work well for everything.
Any container you want to populate dynamically should probably be mutable to avoid O(N²) nastiness.
I upgraded from a 2018 Mac Mini to an M1 Macbook Air. It was quite noticeably faster. I had a big code project at the time that took over a minute to compile on the Mini, and on the Air, it zipped through it in <20s. I think even Intel programs emulating through Rosetta were faster, which is just crazy.
But now I’m thinking about going back to a Mini again. That M4 model sounds like it’s an absolute beast!