Great work, I haven't updated my public site in years while I waited for the LLM stuff to play out, but you've inspired me to put it back out there and submit.
We get these ads emphasizing the luxuriousness, the status, the high-tech, the exclusivity of EVs. Meanwhile... BYD.
Surely it can't be entirely conspiracy to bludgeon the public with messaging that EVs are premium goods and ICEVs are for the mass market.
Could it be that the maxim should really be something like "bullshit too often and too greedily and you forget how to sell something that sells itself"...?
That's not just marketing; that's a reality of the market. A corolla is cheaper than any EV on the market, so why would I even consider them? They might as well be luxury cars.
Perhaps you're just not used to US car advertising? Even the cheapest cars are always advertised as though they're cool luxurious status symbols. The Bolt and Leaf match the price point of the RAV4 they're competing with. (Genuinely budget-conscious buyers don't buy new cars at all in the US.)
Agree, but there was something special about SBCs being so cheap they were the default recommendation for new hobbyists and I'm sad to see that go.
I would not have fallen in love with microcontrollers without Raspberry Pi and PocketCHIP as stepping stones.
The messaging of "it's a tiny computer, make whatever you want with it" is so much more approachable than anything I've found on the microcontroller side. Even Arduino. I dismissed it for a long time because I misunderstood it. I thought I had to buy Arduino devices, then Arduino shields, then program them in the Arduino language using the Arduino IDE.
I do a similar thing for books. A lone dot on the spine means I read it carefully enough to take notes on it.
I like to write commentary in the margins, so the dots help me know which books are "devalued" and which are fine to donate or loan out to others.
Multiple dots are an indication I return to a book often. Each time I re-read I take notes in a different ink color and try to record the date in that ink color in the front matter.
Oh man, tangent into one of my favorite library book experiences. I checked out a sci-fi book at the library. It was good I was enjoying it. Then a few chapters in, I found a previous library patron had written nit-picky notes in the margin, poking holes in the author's fictional science tech explanations. And these weren't little one-word exclamations, they were whole sentences written in perfectly legible, almost impossibly-tiny pencil handwriting. Some of them even had little drawn diagrams! It went through the whole book, every hundred pages or so some little margin notes about how such-and-such sci-fi babble didn't reflect how space-time actually works or whatever. It was a hoot, a little bonus on top of the book itself.
I had a similar experience with a second-hand copy of House of Leaves [0].
This was a special treat because the book itself already uses copious footnotes and cross-references from fictional characters to create a maze. And now a real person added to the effect by trying to make sense of it themselves.
> It feels like piling on ever more complexity to a language which has already surpassed its complexity budget, and given that the feature comes with its own set of footguns I'm not sure that it is justified.
This is a common sentiment about C++, but I find it very interesting that everyone seems to have a different feature in mind when they say it.
I think that's a clear and unambiguous point in favor of the argument. There are so many hellishly complex things in C++ that the community can't settle on even a small subset to be the worst contender.
Half Life 3 rules apply. Every time someone complains about complexity in C++, the committee adds a new overly complex feature. It remains a problem because complexity keeps getting shoveled on top of the already complex language.
The year is 2050. Desktop operating systems are a relic of the past.
Windows collapsed inwards on itself in 2031 when MS realized telemetry data was 10X as profitable when sold directly to nosy exes, neighbors, priests, and so on instead of advertising agencies. This practice was highly illegal, but the MS legal team unanimously ruled that SCOTUS's ruling on it was unconstitutional. Nevertheless, society barely survived.
Windows XP lives on quietly powering ATMs. We also still have Surface Tablets. They don't function anymore, but they hide the paunch of aging sports commentators well and NFL players and coaches greatly enjoy using them to bludgeon each other on the sidelines.
I am still trying to recover from whatever Witcher season 3 broke in my brain by its audaciously low quality.
I was kicked out of the suspension of disbelief so hard I can't unsee things about the production process now, like makeup, continuity, costuming, sound design.
It was like the whole crew from script to editor just gave up, totally bizarre for headliner content.
> Clutter is the disease of American writing. We are a society strangling in unnecessary words, circular constructions, pompous frills and meaningless jargon.
> Look for the clutter in your writing and prune it ruthlessly. Be grateful for everything you can throw away. Reexamine each sentence you put on paper. Is every word doing new work? Can any thought be expressed with more economy?
Hardware-level async makes sense to me. I can scope it. I can read the data sheet.
Software async in contrast seems difficult to characterize and reason about so I've been intimidated.
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