I lived a pretty “safe” childhood, and was basically addicted to video games from 5 years old (when the Nintendo Gameboy was released), but notably I still experienced plenty of boredom and unstructured play.

I had a friend 10 minute walk down the street whose parents enforced a certain number of hours outside per day. So he would call me on the phone, we would meet halfway, and then we would wander around the sidewalk and talk about video games or make pretend imaginary things.

I can only imagine in todays technology landscape I would have preferred to stay home glued to YouTube on my iPad instead of seeing my friend; beating Pokémon Red for the 100th time didn’t quite have the draw by comparison

In a pre-internet society I think universities rightfully earned reputations as being the closest place to a true bastion of inquiry and free speech. There were conflicts and exceptions over the years, but generally universities would lead the way on introducing, refining, and testing the radical discourse that might later go mainstream (or not!)

On the contrary, in the 21st century I don’t think universities own this privilege nor should we pretend that they do. Radical discourse is now almost exclusively introduced, refined, and tested on the internet, then later brought to other venues (including universities). And this is for good reason - the internet is simply more efficient and with less barriers.

To that end, as someone who is not a university professor, I frankly could not give a crap about the state of universities wrt free speech. Every student carries a phone in their pocket with a cellular connection that offers all the free speech and inquiry they could want.

I really like this idea. There’s obviously a point where an idea crosses the membrane between individual human and human collective for the first time. And that is obviously not in universities anymore.

I live in Boston and my car’s HUD displays this information (speed limit and such). Sometimes it gets it wrong despite living in a major city center. Once my car even alerted me when I was going the wrong way on a one-way — except that I wasn’t. I can only imagine in deep suburbs / rural it is even less reliable.

Boston can really confuse a GPS. While driving in the underground freeway, the GPS was giving me turn-by-turn instructions for the city streets above.

It sounds like you're describing a system based on GPS and map data, not one of the systems that read the actual signs posted as you drive by them. The only problems I've had with the speed limit sign reader in my car are conditional speed limits (e.g. school zones during certain hours, truck-specific limits). Otherwise, they're just limited by the prevalence of the physical signs.

Even reading the signs is non-trivial, I drive several stretches of road where an access road runs parallel to a highway, and the 20mph lower speed limit signs for the access road are clearly visible from the highway and only slightly farther off the shoulder than the correct signs.

This seems like a useful service for cities to provide: street maps and traffic rules for each segment in a standard format.

I’ve worked on a product where half the backend (basically, the control plane but not the data plane) was completely serverless: lambda, DDB, step functions, api gateway

I think it was generally convenient as being very low maintenance. The only availability canary alarms are when the underlying services go down, which is almost never.

Debugging and running locally are the weak points. Eliminating an entire class of things to think about (container health, scale in and out, and so on) is very nice. Since it’s a control plane, tps and costs were low.

My understanding is that this tends to be difficult because certain really-dynamic-stuff that Ruby offers (effectively metaprogramming) are not supported by Crystal, but are heavily used by Rails.

On the other hand, Amber offers a look of what a Crystal rewrite of Rails would look like

> or maybe just dialed back the "how many gas stations are in the US" type questions, after realizing this wasn't the best predictor of good performance.

These problems (known as fermi problems) have been out of vogue for over a decade now. Google is one of the companies that pioneered algorithm-centric leetcode problems as a replacement for fermi problems.

Leetcode problems are not hugely useful outside of the data given by solving a fizzbuzz. Rather, it’s just another excuse so interviewers can convince themself a person is smart, call it signal, and justify a hire.

The last time Google gave me a job offer, one of my interviews was literally a souped up fizzbuzz - straightforward imperative code with no trick, no complicated algorithms, and no fancy data structures. I suppose that may be the reason I got an offer, that I didn’t need fancy algorithms that I hadn’t prepared.

Ultimately it’s impossible to know if someone will be a good hire from an interview. Being a good engineer requires a bunch of traits that simply can’t be tested. The leetcode interview, as I see it, acknowledges this weakness and instead chooses to filter out low-effort candidates, as anyone persistent can practice leetcoding and interviewing (in theory).

This is pretty consistent with my experience. I had one hardcore algorithms question that I bombed, but the other ones hinged on things like "when should you use a map vs a list" that should be second nature to anyone who has been writing code long enough.

> a bunch of traits that simply can’t be tested

I think there's a lot more that could be tested that what current implementation-centric interviews measure. At my company for example, I feel like we've gotten a lot of use out of our debugging interviews.

Over Christmas I flew to another city and rented a car for week. Hertz had great deals on EVs but not so great for ICE so I specifically avoided hertz and went with Avis instead.

I like EVs and have a charger at home for my own car, but maybe due to that I also understand the difficulty of finding a reliable charging situation in a new place. On top of that I was visiting and parking at my parents house, and they don’t have a charger installed.

> On top of that I was visiting and parking at my parents house, and they don’t have a charger installed.

Yeah, and hertz doesn't tend to give you a mobile charger. I can't blame them, they are a separate cost and they tend to "get lost" with rentals, but it makes the EV option a lot less practical.

> The American Academy of Pediatrics recommended 8:30 AM as a minimum start time, that's not the same as "the science" definitely saying one thing or another.

This is a nitpick at best. From outside a given field, one generally has no option but to pick one or some sources as authoritative and refer to them (or to declare no source is authoritative).

In other words, if I say “the science says XYZ” this is shorthand for “my preferred authoritative sources of information on the relevant field assert XYZ”

Can this be incorrect? Yes. Is this often used as a bludgeon? Yes, and reasonably so: without piercing the research veil, what discussion could exist besides disagreeing on a sources’ authority?

If I say “the science says kids shouldn’t wake before 8 am”, and you respond with some neuroscience argument that childrens brain can adapt to waking up before 8 am, you are essentially making an off topic argument: I am referencing an authoritative position, not arguing why that position is correct. In that sense, yes, I am applying a bludgeon; and I right well should, because I can’t have a meaningful engagement with your scientific position anyways.

I see your sentiment often and even though I agree that usage of “the science says” is a poor description of how science works, nonetheless language is an evolving construct and “the science says ___” is a mainstream construct in English language dialogue at this point

There’s nothing wrong with appealing to authority. Often times it’s the best we can do. Sometimes authority is not sufficiently convincing and in such situations it’s fine to point out that whatever “the science” refers to needs more evidence supporting their claims

It's appealing to authority without having to even do the absolute bare minimum of mentioning what the authority you're appealing to is. Is the authority some person's blogpost? Is the authority the FDA? Who knows. "The science" is the authority, whoever that might be, which doesn't mean squat.

Yes it’s laziness. It’s essentially equivalent to hearsay without proper citations. However it opens the door to less lazy conversation for those who care to ask for sources, and most importantly it sets the baseline expectations that those sources will be grounded by science and not like, my reiki teacher told me kids should wake up after 8 am

There’s something to be said by beginning a conversation with a shared understanding of what is considered a reasonable ground truth.

While you’re correct that GNSS is not 100% accurate (like everything in the physical world, it comes with error bars), I think the point stands that the error is unrelated to the movement of continents.

Ultimately GNSS is just measuring your position relative to some celestial objects using the time it takes for signals to propagate space (and some other info: their ephemerides, and a shared-ish clock). The fact that land exists, and where it exists, are not relevant

Your error corrections might be thrown off when the base station moves, but that’s not an issue of GNSS that’s an issue of RTK

GNSS satellites talk to base stations on earth to get correction data using the measurements they obtain (including measurements obtained by tracking satellites from the ground). I believe this is what the poster above is reffering to.

RTK is a whole another beast and the meaning of an RTK base station is something else.

RTK is exactly what I was referring to.