Using an LLM to do schoolwork is like taking a forklift to a gym where you're told the goal is to be healthy and strong, but they can't really stop you from using a forklift, and jobs and compensation are given out according to how much you lifted irrespective of forklift use.
Just an app dev, not a geospatial expert, but reprojection always seemed like something a library should handle under the hood unless one has specific needs. I'm used to the ergonomics / moron-proofing of something like Postgis' `ST_Distance(geography point1, geography point2)` and it gives you the the right answer in meters. You can easily switch to spherical or Cartesian distances if you need distance calculations to go faster. `ST_Area(geography geog)` and it gives you the size of your shape in square meters wherever on the planet.
What the "right answer" is will vary widely on application and analyst. That's one reason there are so many coordinate ref systems. If you keep everything in 3857, you'll get answers in ~meters, but whether that's "right" depends on where and how large the distance or geom is and what your precision threshold is. So, really, everyone's needs are necessarily "specific."
At my last startup, I think our board and observers liked hanging out more than they liked talking about the company. It wasn't perfect, but it's their money so I wasn't going to complain.
Beyond Rails and 37signals, I'm most familiar with him as a car racer, photography enthusiast, and his recent "buy once"/post-subscription software advocacy.
I understand the sentiment, but disregarding the nuance does the situation a disservice. HTML/CSS serves two separate but related use cases: a document layout and display language, and as a display layer for applications. I remember Pete Hunt's talk "React: Rethinking best practices" [1] explaining in 2013 why the styling separation of concerns for document display doesn't make sense for applications. Has opinion on best practice se-sawed back and forth? No, we've merely gone from web content being document centered to being massively application centered, and the discourse on best practices follows that proportional shift.
Would it be better if there was a different web application display technology, not retrofitted on top of HTML/CSS? Like maybe, but HTML/CSS is... fine. Even separated from the success of Javascript, it's an archetypal example of "worse is better" [2] leading to market success.
I agree with your point, but it is funny to think about true consumer workloads: I... mostly JIT and run Javascript, layout algorithms, and whatever compositing cannot be offloaded to the GPU.
Event sourcing is an expensive solution and I don't mean from a storage perspective — it burns engineering cognitive horsepower quickly on things that don't matter. Do it if you're in finance or whatever. Having been burned by my own "let's event source" impulse on data change tracking systems, I now prefer less sophisticated solutions. Figuring out how to deal with slow projections, watching a projection rebuild go from minutes to hours to a few days as a system I expected to handle a few events/minute go to 20 events/second. Fancy caches can't save you if you want to use that vaunted ability to reconstruct from scratch. Event schema evolution also presents difficult tradeoffs: when old events stop having meaning or evolve in meaning you either end up adding on new event subtypes and variants leaving old cruft to accumulate, or you do migrations and edit history on really large tables.
I'd counsel anyone considering event sourcing to use more "low power" solutions like audit logs or soft deletes (if really necessary) first if possible.
Appreciate your perspective, and it makes me wish there was some kind of online 'engineers learning from their mistakes' forum (rare to see "I burned myself"). To hear hard won knowledge distilled like this is a nice reminder to spend ones complexity budget wisely.
it's not clear that there is anything better to do than buy and hold low-cost index funds.
Sure, 100%. The growth of this strategy has limitations though. Check out Mike Green's interviews on Youtube about the growth of passive investments post 2008 as a source of systemic volatility.
Though I can't tell if this project supports it, how do you feel about non-stock price indicators? Things like housing starts, gas prices, or various constructions of a "Walmart indicator"?
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