Viewing profile — oddthink

> Although it turned out in the end that C++ developers actually wanted to use C++. Oof, I don't think so. It's just ridiculous how many things Google uses C++ for where something …

> E.g. If I ever see a monetary value stored in something else than integers I'm going to run away screaming (thank you Rust decimals represented as JSON floats). It's always integ…

I've found differential forms to be more useful than GA, but that might just be that I was brought up in the MTW tradition and don't quite get GA. Whenever I look at GA, I try to f…

VSCode binds a lot of basic commands to function keys, so I'm always doing Fn-F12. That seems like a weird choice, and if it really bothered me, I could remap it, but so far I have…

I loved that thing. I don't know how many hours I spent on that. I wish I could my kids interested in anything half as creative.

The current version is at https://github.com/jsoftware/jsource

I'm sorry, it's a really inefficient format. I don't want to sit and listen for two hours to what's most likely half an hour of content by reading. Just write down what you have to…

Does the "standard office" even exist? I have never seen one in my working years. I don't even know what to imagine. The closest I got was a shared office in grad school in the lat…

I tried fountain pens for a bit back in grad school, but they honestly weren't great. They were imprecise, blobby, scritchy on the paper. Subscripts and superscripts would smear ou…

Yes. For like a simple naive Bayes, you can say we start at 0, a user vote is worth +3, a merchant vote is +5, we decay by 0.1 every month, publish if we hit +13 (95%), un-publish …

I've been using decibels as a scale for log-odds for a while when reporting results. It works pretty well, since the relevant part of the scale is wide, unlike using nepers, which …

It's internal. But it's basically hooking up SQL code generation to the docs and schema of most of the tables in the data warehouse. I don't know the details, but probably also som…

There was a 1-5 Likert scale self-rating on "leveraging AI" and a free-text box. I rambled about using claude code to help summarize my daily notes, cursor for implementation, usin…

Yes, but the message from Shopify leadership is "it's part of your job to mess around with this stuff and see what works". Not "use AI at all costs". The general feeling I'm gettin…

I mean, I could walk down to a bar at 10pm, if I wanted to. I live in a city. But if I'm getting up at 6:30, I don't think I want a pint let alone three that late. Plus, I'd still …

I don't really get where people with kids found these 6.5 hrs / wk to spend on friendships, or even the quoted current averages of 4 hrs / wk. On a workday, there isn't much time. …

It's probably just a notation/definition issue. I'm not sure if "grad f" is 100% consistently defined I'm a simple-minded physicist. I just know if you apply the same coordinate tr…

I'd say a gradient is usually a covector / one-form. It's a map from vector directions to a scalar change. ie. df = f_x dx + f_y dy is what you can actually compute without a metri…

There's just so much C++ at Google that really has no business being C++ and falls into the "networked server" category. At least large swaths of the Search and Maps codebase, larg…

Looks interesting, but it's not at all responsive. I can't view it without making my window larger than my screen and manually sliding it back and forth. Even basic TUIs know their…

It goes way too far, IMHO. It ends up sounding like a smarmy Sunday-morning talk show conversation, with over-exaggerated affect and no content. So far I've just fed it technical p…

I always come back to Schutz's Geometrical Methods of Mathematical Physics as my reference for notation, but I agree. I came to this by way of General Relativity, so that colors my…

Elizabeth Bishop was there first: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47537/the-man-moth

I know at least one team is at work is using the Assistants API, and I'm talking with another team that is leaning pretty heavily towards using it over building a custom RAG soluti…

Interesting! Just over the past month, I've reduced my emacs usage a lot. I'd switched to VSCode for most coding a while ago, but I still kept my daily journal notes in org-mode, b…