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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • Not running any LLMs, but I do a lot of mathematical modelling, and my 32 GB RAM, M1 Pro MacBook is compiling code and crunching numbers like an absolute champ! After about a year, most of my colleagues ditched their old laptops for a MacBook themselves after just noticing that my machine out-performed theirs every day, and that it saved me a bunch of time day-to-day.

    Of course, be a bit careful when buying one: Apple cranks up the price like hell if you start specing out the machine a lot. Especially for RAM.


  • I’m just waiting for the moment when a country exposed to “accidental” cable cutting, or attacks using water jets from the Chinese coast guard or similar, just responds by shooting first and asking questions later.

    Like: You cut our cables/blocked our atoll from getting resupply, etc… put a 50mm in their face and carry on. Let them do the responding.

    “Oh no, they were conducting acts of war and were in our way, so we sank them. What are you gonna do about it? Maybe stop doing that?”




  • True, I did a quick calculation and the probability of knowing someone killed or severely injured is

    • 12.5% if you know 10 people
    • 23.5% if you know 20 people
    • 33.5% if you know 30 people
    • 41.5% if you know 40 people
    • 49% if you know 50 people

    So around ⅓ Russians know at least one person that’s been killed or wounded, and around 10-20% of Russians have someone in their inner circle of friends and family (10-20 closest) that have been killed for wounded.

    For this last number to reach 50%, the number of killed+wounded needs to reach about 5% of the fighting age population (≈2.5 million).

    Of course, the above assumes that casualties are randomly distributed in the population. In reality it’s likely that fewer people know someone killed or wounded, and that those that know someone likely know more, because of the casualties being disproportionately effecting more rural regions of the country.







  • cmake comes to mind: I can find the docs for whatever function I want to use, but I honestly have such a hard time comprehending what they mean. It’s especially frustrating because I can tell that all the information is there, and it’s just me not being able to understand it, so I don’t want to ask others for help, cause then I’m just bothering people with a problem that I’ve in principle already found the answer to, I’m just not able to apply the answer.

    Then again, I’ve heard plenty of other people complain that the cmake docs are hard to understand…



  • I have to be honest in that, while I think duck typing should be embraced, I have a hard time seeing how people are actually able to deal with large-scale pure Python projects, just because of the dynamic typing. To me, it makes reading code so much more difficult when I can’t just look at a function and immediately see the types involved.

    Because of this, I also have a small hangup with examples in some C++ libraries that use auto. Like sure, I’m happy to use auto when writing code, but when reading an example I would very much like to immediately be able to know what the return type of a function is. In general, I think the use of auto should be restricted to cases where it increases readability, and not used as a lazy way out of writing out the types, which I think is one of the benefits of C++ vs. Python in large projects.




  • I definitely think the ramping up is going far too slowly, and as such it isn’t strange that there are shortages.

    This is a huge war- the largest land war since WWII. All of NATO is still operating on a peace-time economy, so ramping up production to the levels required to support a 500 k - 1 mill. strong army like the Ukrainians is taking far too long.

    However, as far as I can tell, production in Europe is only heading one way: Up. Not only that, Russia is operating in a war economy, which is, more or less by definition, unsustainable in the long run. Europe has the economic capacity to double its production, and maintain it indefinitely. I just think we should prioritise more heavily, and scale up more quickly.


  • The amount of people I’ve been helping out that have copied some code from somewhere and say “it doesn’t work”, and who are dumbfounded when I ask them to read the surrounding text aloud for me…

    Along the same line: When something crashes, and all I have to do is tell people to read the error message aloud, and ask them what that means. It’s like so many people expect to be spoon-fed solutions, to the point where they don’t even stop to think about the problem if something doesn’t immediately work.



  • While I do agree with most of what is said here, I have a hangup on one of the points: Thinking that “docstrings and variable names” are a trustworthy way to indicate types. Python is not a statically typed language - never will be. You can have as much type hinting as you want, but you will never have a guarantee that some variable holds the type you think it does, short of checking the type at runtime. Also, code logic can change over time, and there is no guarantee that comments, docstrings and variable names will always be up to date.

    By all means, having good docstrings, variable names, and type hinting is important, but none of them should be treated as some kind of silver bullet that gets you around the fact that I can access __globals__ at any time and change any variable to whatever I want if I’m so inclined.

    This doesn’t have to be a bad thing though. I use both Python and C++ daily, and think that the proper way to use Python is to fully embrace duck typing. However that also means my code should be written in such a way that it will work as long as whatever input to it conforms loosely to whatever type I’m expecting to receive.


  • There have been major investments in the European military industry the past years. Europe is ramping up its production. With new factories in place, it makes no sense for Europe to start cutting down on production- that would mean huge sums have been spent to build factories that aren’t used.

    Also, a bunch of countries have already paid for huge orders of equipment that will keep flowing for the next several years. Even if no new investments are made, there will be a substantial flow of weapons from European manufacturers.

    That’s not even mentioning that Europe has finally understood that we need to be able to stand on our own feet militarily, because we can’t trust that the US will actually honor the NATO pact if shit hits the fan.

    Accounting for purchasing power parity, the US economy is about 1.1x the size of the EU, and the population of the EU is about 1.5x that of the US. So it’s not like Europe doesn’t have the capacity to massively scale up its military power.

    Remember that up until 80 years ago, the European militaries were by far the most powerful in the world.