It's extremely well-known and documented that the War on Drugs was racially motivated, and hence drugs used by certain minority groups more than the majority white population were made illegal.
GP's comment isn't suggesting alcoholics are desirable, but that people who preferred alcohol over other drugs were historically part of the "desirable" group. That's my reading of GP's intent, anyway.
are you acknowledging that alcohol was made illegal in the US for white people and only re-legalized after those laws proved unenforceable and fed the growth of white organized crime?
there was a lot of racism in US legal history, but don't try to make drugs and white people who wanted to do drugs the victims, it was non-white people who were the victims directly.
> For deciding if a user is in Texas you could create a simple polygon completely inside Texas and one in Oklahoma.
This seems like the obvious optimized v1: create extremely compressed (simplified) polygons wholly within the proper geopolitical borders. You get 100% true positives for a significant fraction of queries, and any negatives you can still kick to GMaps. I understand wholly-local is the goal here, but as others have pointed out, even small error rates can be unacceptable in some scenarios.
Yes, just paying for the between spots is exactly what I thought later in the day. Then check every month which areas cause costs and add those to the in-house polygons.
> thanks to broadcast updates on social media, your friends already know what have you've been up to, so they can delude themselves into thinking that they've maintained a relationship because they know superficial details.
This is a huge reason (possibly the top reason) why I quit Facebook. I wasn't getting value from my "connections", and I figured everyone knew, more or less, what I was doing (& I knew what they were doing), so we didn't actually interact. I figured if I was no longer going to be friends with these people, I didn't want a facade. So I quit it, and I don't use the other usual suspects (Instagram, Snapchat, tiktok, etc.)
It's great. I actually have some honest to goodness friends IRL that I hug, with whom I talk about real things, etc.
Lots of responses to your first two points, and I immediately jumped to your last one:
> Third, I was surprised the author felt bad. A sign that there is unfortunately some stigma in re-using things.
Ever since my wife and I got married 20+ years ago, we've had a clothesline, and we are constantly line-drying our clothes, weather permitting. I've had plenty of weird looks and probably even a few comments. I definitely have had the impression that people look down on me for doing so, but weird stigma be damned.
I've heard so much praise for The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, but why, I'll never know. I bought it after hearing someone rave about it, and I'll be damned if I didn't hate every page of the book. It felt like a rebuff to The Design of Everyday Things.
The former is currently sitting in my car, and I'll be trying to offload it to someone who actually wants it.
VDQI explains why chartjunk is bad, and if it reduces the amount of chartjunk in the world, that is good. Many maintain a soft spot for VDQI probably because it's their first a-ha moment in terms of appreciating graphic communication. Certainly there are other directions one could go but most people are not designers. Although, I don't see the same contradiction between DOET and VDQI, I'm curious what you mean about that.
I'm curious. Why do you feel like Tufte's book is a "rebuff" of Norman's book? I've read both and find them complementary in many senses. The one criticism that I have found by Norman of Tufte's work is that Tufte preferred high "data density" but Norman argues that this is not always appropriate.
Norman talks a good deal about cognitive load and that good design is intuitive. Ideally, you shouldn't notice good design because it's near invisible.
OTOH, I recall Tufte going on and on about cutting the "data-ink ratio" to the point of making graphs that we generally understand at a glance suddenly very unintuitive. I can dig into the book again if necessary, but I recall he essentially argued that box-and-whisker plots became just a few dots. There's meaning conveyed by the boxes and the whiskers, and changing that convention - even if it uses more ink than absolutely necessary - adds significant cognitive load.
Thank you. You raise an interesting point that I had not considered before. Norman does talk about how good design just works intuitively without users needing to be told how use something (especially in regards to door knobs and light switches as examples if I recall correctly!).
That said, intuition is heavily influenced by existing practices and culture. My understanding is that Tufte wrote his first book as a reaction to existing practices and hence the notion was that what was considered intuitive was different than what we both imagine and also suboptimal.
There is a book called Graphis Diagrams released a few years before Tufte's The Visual Display of Quantitative Information that compiled what people previously considered "good" data visualizations pre-Tufte. I'd call Graphis Diagrams more of a collection of art pieces than a collection of good data visualizations, but that was the field before Tufte's work. Some of the visualizations are interesting, but many seem incredibly dated and make heavy use of "chartjunk" (Tufte's term). I'd argue that we wouldn't consider those supposed "good" examples very readable and useful by modern standards, and that just goes to show that intuition can change (for better or for worse).
I do also agree that Tufte tends towards a certain kind of performative minimalism that seems excessive at times to me. Often times the better solution is to present the data in a different way --- transform it using mathematics, use a different visualization, or something else --- rather than just reduce the amount of ink you are using. Box plots and pie charts are just useless to me as media since they simply cannot account for complexity, and no amount of minimalism is going to solve that. The answer is to use another kind of visualization (or perhaps use parallelism/small multiples to build up those kind of simple visualizations into something more meaningful).
I personally find Tufte's book Visual Explanations to be his best book. It focuses much more on how good visualizations can help you explore data more readily (see what otherwise could not be seen), especially in regards to cause and effect. The Visual Display of Quantitative Information is certainly more famous but it focuses on much more low-level implementation details like the "data-ink ratio", etc. and not bigger picture things, in my opinion. I recommend giving Visual Explanations a read if you are interested.
> If it's possible to control your environment through your thoughts or steer your perceptions (or soul if you prefer) through other universes, I'll bet the secret to doing that is a process called "affirmations."
> I first heard of this technique from a friend who had read a book on the topic. I don't recall the name of the book, so I apologize to the author for not mentioning it. My information came to me secondhand. I only mention it here because it formed my personal experience.
> The process as it was described to me involved visualizing what you want and writing it down fifteen times in a row, once a day, until you obtain the thing you visualized.
> The suggested form would be something like this:
> "I, Scott Adams, will win a Pulitzer Prize."
> The thing that caught my attention is that the process doesn't require any faith or positive thinking to work. Even more interesting was the suggestion that this technique would influence your environment directly and not just make you more focused on your goal. It was alleged that you would experience what seemed to be amazing coincidences when using the technique. These coincidences would be things seemingly beyond your control and totally independent of your efforts (at least from a visual view of reality).
He then goes on to discuss stock, him taking the GMAT, etc. He later continues:
> I used the affirmations again many times, each time with unlikely success. So much so that by 1988, when I decided I wanted to become a famous syndicated cartoonist, it actually felt like a modest goal.
Then he talks about syndicating Dilbert.
He doesn't say, "I can influence the stock market with affirmations," but if you read what he wrote, he is very clearly arguing that you can change reality with your thoughts.
> He doesn't say, "I can influence the stock market with affirmations," but if you read what he wrote, he is very clearly arguing that you can change reality with your thoughts.
Earlier today I was reading your comment on mobile and thinking about the reply I would make. Now I am on a desktop making that reply. I'm pretty sure, therefore, that I can change reality with my thoughts, at least to some degree.
> I've been trying rust for the past 2 months fulltime,
> recently lost an afternoon on something that could very well be a known compiler bug
With respect, at two months, you're still in the throes of the learning curve, and it seems highly unlikely you've found a compiler bug. Most folks (myself included) struggled for a few months before we hit the 'joyful' part of Rust.
Rust is genuinely novel, so for most of us its going to be less familiar, so it will take longer to learn. It's not like learning Python if you already know Ruby, for example. The upside is that it offers some pretty great guarantees you can't (yet) find elsewhere. If you want those guarantees it will be worth it, if those guarantees don't matter to you, it may feel like a slog.
The banner one is memory safety without garbage collection. This enables is a terrific degree of library composition. Unlike C/C++, you can generally expect that libraries you pull in will also be memory safe.
The other one is thread safety, due to the compiler-enforced ownership semantics that prevent threads from accessing shared data unless they do so in a well-defined way.
I hope the same, and TBH it's the only reason i'm keeping up developing that backend in rust. I hope that in the end, it's going to improve my style.
Go felt the same way (but with a much lower order of magnitude) : you feel like bumping into language limitations, but once you learn to do it "simply" in go, your style will have changed into something much more elegant.
As for the bug in question, it has been quite "popular" for about 5 years now, and is actively tracked : https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/110338. Nothing really weird. Just async hitting the limits of the current rust design.
Simply using axum with code using multiple layers of async was enough.
But then again, it looked like this bug (the error message is the same), however at this point i'm really unsure if it's exactly the same. The error message and the method signature was so atrocious that i just gave up and found a simpler design using macros that dodged the bullet.
I don't remember where, but I once heard someone talk about "error-message-driven-development" in Rust -- that is, using the error messages provided by rustc to guide you in your development process by way of fixing bugs in naively-written code. I even did a talk to several dozen engineers in my previous group about how fantastic it is: a newbie can write what they think is reasonable code, the compiler will reject the program but provide useful information, and the user can iteratively apply changes to the point where you can almost get things exactly as you want it. A lot of people who knew nothing about Rust were super impressed by the messages reported.
Many thanks to you and others that have toiled at this incredible UX!
When an error happens it's the best time to teach the user something. If you can figure it what they were trying to do something, you can tell them why what they tried to do doesn't work, and what to try instead.
With LLM's And Reason-Act agents on the table, this is more higher stakes than ever, AI has no issues on reading stack traces or verbose error logs where a human might have overlooked before, and it creates a really nice loop if the AI can reason with new context provider by the error messages
> The teachings of Jesus supersede the stuff from the Old testament (the one with all not very nice things) however they are rather vague and undefined.
Except Jesus said that he didn't come to abolish the law but to fulfill it, and not one stroke of a letter of the law will pass away. So he didn't change anything about slavery, mistreatment of women, etc.
He also said 'Love your neighbor as yourself' and a bunch of similar things. Which kind of makes it complicated. I guess selling other people to slavery is fine as long as you also sell yourself (just like mistreating others).
> didn't change anything about slavery, mistreatment of women, etc.
The "fulfill" bit is rather ambiguous. AFAIK the most popular interpretation (certainly when it comes to ceremonial rules like not eating pork/shellfish/etc.) is that his intention was to "bring the law to its intended goal/purpose" rather than to maintain it in perpetuity.
But none of that ever applied to gentiles. Not before Christ, not after. Jews today do not claim that non-Jews are obliged to, or even ought to, perform any Mitzvot whatsoever -- and that's despite generally acknowledging that there are universal moral laws which bind all "children of Noah".
So if the remaining Jews continue following the Old Covenant, but others choose to rather follow Jesus' 'New and Eternal Covenant', then where would this obligation towards Old Testament law come from?
To be fair modern Jews don't really follow the laws from the book of Deuteronomy (the one with rape -> marriage thing..) either due to other (but in a way kind of similar) reasons
It depends on where you're coming from. For me, Rust has replaced a lot of Python code and a lot of C# code, so yes, the Rust compilation is slow by comparison. However, it really hasn't adversely affected (AFAICT) my/our iteration speed on projects, and there are aspects of Rust that have significantly sped things up (eg, compilation failures help detect bugs before they make it into code that we're testing/running).
GP's comment isn't suggesting alcoholics are desirable, but that people who preferred alcohol over other drugs were historically part of the "desirable" group. That's my reading of GP's intent, anyway.