Expert developer, Buddhist

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  • 110 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 21st, 2023

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  • The thing is that you have to break the law to be an effective and even safe driver. Going way under the limit or refusing to go into the opposite lane for a moment means that you cause traffic congestion and piss people off. Waymos definitely break laws at times, I’ve seen it personally. And other times waymos get too “safe” and end up locked in place for 30 min at a time. The real world is a chaotic place and there’s always been a discrepancy between what the laws are and how people actually drive. Lidar helps see things humans cant, but the main problem is the intelligence required, which may improve over time



  • That’s so cool, maybe the first time in the history of humanity that we see open source tax software, that’s guaranteed to be accurate to the law. For one year at least

    It runs Scala / Java, and has docker configs, decent documentation. And an ominous message explaining that some parts were too secret to open source so they had to rewrite chunks of it. Overall, it seems like it was a big project just to get this published, and I am impressed they managed it, given the software team was comprised of 3 different agencies and several contractor firms




  • Lung@lemmy.worldtoFediverse@lemmy.world*Permanently Deleted*
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    2 months ago

    Well…

    If you follow the link to fedidb, refer to the “mau” monthly active users. Do some brief math and realize that lemmy.world accounts for about 50% of all active users

    Email market share is harder, but many estimate that Gmail accounts for over 40%. Many many orgs use Google apps to make custom branded gmails with their own domains too

    This is the typical “business power law” that states that the top player should control about 50%, the second player about 25%, etc. This is just kinda how the world works



  • Lung@lemmy.worldtoNews@lemmy.world*Permanently Deleted*
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    3 months ago

    I genuinely don’t understand why people here are railing him. All the article said was he wanted to research environmental causes for an increasingly common condition. That seems totally reasonable. Look at car pollution reducing avg brain capacity. Look at plastics pollution. Look at toxins in ultraproceassed food, many of which are banned in EU but not USA. Look at our water quality and lead pipes problem

    Look, I know he has talked about vaccines before, but literally didn’t mention it here. It’s totally reasonable and good for all of us to tackle pollutants, toxins, environmental quality. Yes, it’s likely that many health problems would be resolved if we understood this better; that’s a valid theory to pursue. But yes, I know, I know “maga bad”









  • Well, I took the time to read the whitepaper, and it’s yeah, pretty dumb sounding. The gist is that it’s p2p post sharing with lots of captchas & a crypto edge that it probably doesn’t need https://img1.wsimg.com/blobby/go/eb02f20b-e787-4a02-b188-d0fcbc250ba1/pleb.tex-6d2e1bf.pdf

    The similarities to Lemmy are substantial, it’s just not on activitypub, but rather its own pubsub thing. If you want to host data, you still have to keep a node running at all times, it’s not the case that “there are no instances”. Those instances can moderate the content, so it’s not the case that “there’s no moderation.” The whitepaper mentions that “its possible to delegate running a client to a centralized server…” rather than having to have a fat syncing client running on your own machine … in lemmy, it’s more like “its possible to run your own node if you want”. Plebbit doesn’t care about maintaining history of posts, it expects that servers will go down over time, and the data will be lost. Lemmy is pretty similar in that regard too, if all instances hosting the data go down, then it’s lost. The expected outcome is that there’s a handful of big nodes, as is the typical result of this form of “decentralization” - same as Lemmy, Email

    Ultimately, I don’t see Plebbit doing anything particularly smarter/better, and having private/public key cryptography involved doesn’t really matter. They talk about blockchains and using coins as anti-spam mechanisms, but I don’t see why that’s relevant to the implementation


  • Honestly, I don’t recommend it. It’s a stressful lifestyle, you have to do a lot, and it’s rare that you make more than just switching jobs. Seeking jobs, doing negotiations / signing contracts, and dealing with the kind of bosses that don’t understand software well — are all really annoying. I’ve been a contractor for 5 years now, and I’m genuinely not sure what the good part of it is

    Ok, so how to do it / get started. Imo you need a well known public project and speciality. Being the lead dev of a popular open source project is a good way. People will reach out to you for help integrating it, or making something similar, or adding features they need & will pay for. A specialty is something like being really good at WebRTC, financial regulations law, graphics drivers, crypto smart contracts, etc — with a proven record. You need a brand for yourself, and it needs to be way stronger than just a resume. You need to spend part of your time networking & job hunting, always

    An important part is either getting paid very well, or taking ownership stake in the projects you build to roll the dice that way. Otherwise, you would be better off doing a job. Why? Because a contracting firm, which I had, isn’t worth anything in a sale, aside from the talent it has. Compare this with something like a SAAS startup where the value is a multiple of revenue and user count. Having a flat value for just the employees isn’t as valuable as a 10x multiplier on a steady business. It’s volatile. I’ve heard construction contractors complain the same way, “I just take a salary to build a house someone else flips for double, I wish I owned my own house”

    Honestly, software jobs are lucrative and easy. Contracting is stressful and complicated. The freedom isn’t much different