I'm an Engineering Manager. I print out certificates for people on (and beyond) my teams, referencing something they accomplished (big or small), add one of the "boy scout badges" I bought in bulk from AliExpress (and then retroactively created & reference a set of values based on the iconography) and mail out "Engineering Merit Badges" to our remote employees. Maybe a few think it's dumb but the vast majority love it. The collector-types try to earn the entire set (I made one of the badges really hard to get because of this), while physically getting mail really seems to resonate with anyone under 35. A few people more distant from my teams (i.e. different departments) DID seems supsicious at first when I asked for their home address, and my boss wondered how I spent several hundred dollars in postage last year, but I try and send out at least a dozen a month while still keeping them meaningful. It's actually a bit of work (of course I wrote software to help manage and create everything) but I love it too.
It is a solved problem, Assimil or Michel Thomas (in person) have been making people conversational within a week of dedicated study. Plenty of language learners have reached C2 in 6+ languages including me. But it's not fun and certainly not appable (and these apps never offer anything beyond flashcards)"appable".
My day job is all about doing presentations, so I obviously wrote my own slide software. It is a pure expression of my workflow, my requirements, and my idiosyncrasies and the way all of the above changed over ~10 years. It is a great performance booster if you can basically brain dump your thoughts straight into slides, and if you can just implement breaking changes (or choose to keep supporting an objectively bad feature for all eternity). I don't need to care about any other users, or the bus factor.
The only part of that software that ever became public was the animated syntax highlighter[0], but I don't believe any other part would help anyone else accomplish anything.
I have some background is combinatorial optimization. I did consider writing some software in this area or something similar, like school time table planning. But I think the problem is that each business will have different constraints (have to have at least 1 first aider on a shift, Alice doesn't get on with Bob, you can't work 2 saturday in a row, shifts change every 2 weeks, you have to have at least 12 hours between shifts etc). Anything flexible enough to be used by a sizeable percentage of organizations will be too complex for them to use.
> The real solution to fast compilation is to have modules.
I don't agree. The real solution for fast compilation times is to not have to recompile things. This means onboarding tools like ccache, organize your project around independent subprojects which eliminate/minimize compile-time dependencies, and leverage incremental builds.
There's a C++ book somewhere that describes how the subprojects approach helps lower build times to a residual length which if my memory doesn't fail me was dubbed horizontal architecture. It consists of designing every single subprojects to be stand-alone and leave any integration to the linking stage. I've used it in the past on a legacy C++ project that took slightly over 1h to pull off an end-to-end build, and peeling out 4 or 5 subprojects following the horizontal architecture approach allowed me to cut down full end-to-end build times to slightly over 8 minutes and incremental builds down to less than a minute, without bothering with compiler caches. I'm sure that if I bothered onboarding ccache I could drive incremental build times to just a few seconds.
If you know what you are doing, you can do a lot without begging for magic.
If you’re ever in need to geek out, hit up someone who posted something interesting and ask them if they’re up for chatting. It’s not the most comfortable thing to do, but I’ve had a some great conversations with random people from HN. You’d be surprised how often it works out.
For me it has ! I have way more sex (I try to have it everyday) than my parents seem to have but a lot less children :D At 35, I feel I'm peaking to a point it's almost too much.
What really seem to work to have sex a lot is to have lots of money (to get partners you wouldnt otherwise get), look exotic by emigrating (I live in Asia but was born in France), immediately ditch low libido partners (it's not always their fault, maybe you re just not attractive enough to them and that's totally okay), and be ready to really go the extra mile in bed to make it a bit new and exciting even with a long term partner: for instance I think it's important both climax each time and if it's hard then you buy tools and use them, no shame in that. My friends find it shameful to need a vibrator, but do they understand how exciting it is for a girl to climax while making love absolutely each time no matter what, and quickly, and how boring it is when it's a struggle and frustration instead ?
I m a straight male, and Im into straight females, and I find many of them have submissive fantasies they have trouble to express and materializing them makes the sex absolutely addictive to them. My current gf is 19, likes to be roughed a little bit, have rape fantasies even I have trouble to play fully and her peak excitement is when I make her cry: this is not even rare, if you dare to ask. I even found it quite common but they are very shy to express it if you're too goody goody.
If you dont have enough sex and it matters to you, then spend more money on it, look more exotic (or find foreign girls locally who will find you exotic), and be ready to be a bit mean, in a playful way. I dont have abs but I never met a girl who didnt fantasize on it: sounds like a cheap way to move up a few ranks, for instance.
and quite a lot of work on Stable Diffusion techniques.
I'm quite comfortable sharing the space. They are not the same thing as each other but neither is it necessary to be dismissive of the approach. People are creating stuff for the sake of creating stuff, that doesn't need to be gatekept
As the comment by holoduke mentions. Quality imagery from image generation models is not as simple as giving a prompt to a black box. This https://fingswotidun.com/AITalk/images/DuckRun/FullAnim.gif took me a lot of work and it is still far from ideal, (the waistcoat jitter, the collar, the beak, the hair).
http://blog.moertel.com/ does a decent job of explaining some practical aspects for de-recursivying, but I'll give you a basic explanation of that plus a more theoretical answer showing that any computatble function can be written using only while loops and a stack.
Practical:
If we right all of are programs and tail-recursive (returning a recursive call or constant at the end of the prgram) programs they are easy to transform into simple while loops with no stack. The idea is instead of calling another function just restart the current one with the updated arguments.
EX:
f(n,x)=f(n-1,x+1)
f(0,x)=x
goes to
while(n > 0){
n--;
x++
}
Other techniques such as trampolining and continuation passing style also help translate recursive functions into iterative ones.
Theorectical:
Think about Brainfuck or Turing machines, these computing frameworks can compute any computable function using only what amounts to while loops and infinite memory.
Given then that we can produce arbitrary control flow using only while loops, we can reproduce how recursive calls are computed in computers with stack frames (provided by our stack).
> And if you need to support older databases (prior to SQL Server 2005), it gets worse: [some bad SQL]
If you're stuck using a database version that first came out a decade ago, you've got bigger problems than legacy syntax for pagination.
> Not only is this complicated and messy, but it violates the DRY principle (Don't Repeat Yourself). Here's same query in LINQ. The gain in simplicity is clear: var thirdPage = query.Skip(20).Take(10);
Contract Economy: There is still a significant opportunity for a Freelancer/Upwork group to exist. Something that better vets quality while not pushing for Toptal prices. I suspect you'd need to set up physical presence in the likely countries properly vet and control quality but this could easily be covered by a premium for a know quantity vs going to western rates.
Crytpo Currency: There is room for more disruption here. I suspect a currency that is both trackable and backed by a pool of commodities/currencies could be quite popular. Traceable would make theft risk reduced as money could effectively be returned if it is stolen and being backed/hedged by currencies/commodities would help with confidence.
Cargo: I'm surprised we haven't seen electric cargo ships. Even combine solar with sail as winds are favorable. This combined with auto-navigation (at least between ports) seems more easily achievable than cars yet technology is further behind.
Dockable Phone to PC (physical or even better if wireless dock): Surprised no-one has done this well yet. I can image whoever does this with really take ownership of the OS space. I always felt this could be the best route for Microsoft to re-enter the mobile space with force.
A few recommendations on this, since at where I work a talk is organized on this very topic today.
1. A great book that covers multiple paradigms of programming is Roy and Haridi's "Concepts, Techniques and Models of Computer Programming" https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/concepts-techniques-and-model... . This stands hand in hand with the better known SICP.
2. Folks in the CS and programming world seem to ignore bleeding edge work being done in the arts space. To get a broader view of languages than "characters that go into a plain text file", expose yourself to the live-ness of the following -
2.ø Smalltalk - one of the first fully available language and runtime that is still usable today.
2.a Max/MSP/Jitter - by David Zicrelli and Millet Pickette's - Visual data flow programming language with decades of dominance in the Computer Music scene.
2.b SuperCollider - for architecture lessons as well as another multi-paradigm language.
2.c Impromptu - a Scheme based live coding environment for music and visuals by Andrew Sorenson. Normal REPLs will bow in front of most "live coding" languages used for music.
2.d Ixilang by Thor Magnusson - another live coding language, where the language is in a sense inseparable from its run time environment. The current running behaviour of a textual program could also depend on how the program evolved.
In short, break out of normal modes of thinking and attain Turing nature, at which point you can proclaim that all languages have Turing nature and yet retain your discriminating view.
