bbayles

Looking past the editorializing, here's the actual quote from the CFO: > For a decade, in streaming, an enormously valuable amount of quality content has been given away well below fair market…

WHATWG rejects ".://", yeah? It's not the most readable spec, but there's a tester here: https://jsdom.github.io/whatwg-url/ I recently published bi…

For a contrary perspective, see Stuart Ritchie's and Tom Chivers's episode on UPFs: https://www.thestudiesshowpod.com/p/episode-6-ultra-processe... …

Is the idea that they believed it was plausible before writing the paper, became convinced it was implausible during the writing, and then later switched back to plausible?

> It should matter, a lot, that even a group of scientists who believed a lab leak idea was plausible couldn't muster up an argument that would hold up under peer review I think Nate would say…

Let's check this empirically. Which cartel-like brands are publicly traded and publish financial reports? We can look at their profit margins next quarter.

For a contrary perspective, see https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=13367 …

Here's something to think about: suppose you buy an assortment of candy from the grocery store and distribute a uniform collection of pieces to a room full of middle school students. Some student…

I don't really doubt that he's right about this, but doesn't he have a pretty big incentive to play up how bad the mess is? If he successfully unwinds it then he looks like a genius. If…

FWIW, I also maintain a "critical" package, and I'm happy that the index is requiring 2FA for it.

The first is better also because you can do things with loggers other than print out their contents. For example, suppose you had a statement like: logger.debug('Database error: %s', e…

Something to consider: there hasn't been a great way to get Python 3 on RHEL / CentOS until this year. The IUS repo is an option, but it makes distributing a Python 3 package difficult: you …

See also more-itertools for lots of other things in this vein.

Legacy video-on-demand systems (the sort your cable box can access) get full copies of movies with no DRM that could easily be uploaded to YouTube. They're often sent as part of a package that in…

You're absolutely right about this. This is almost certainly just there to block people who mistakenly paste in an example configuration somewhere. Back in 2010 there were problems that came up …

I had fun a little while back abusing decorators to alter the return value of generator functions: https://sites.google.com/site/bbayles/index/decorator_factor... …

This is a bit scrambled. Both IPv4 and IPv6 have a spot in their headers to tell what type of traffic is being carried. This is a 1-byte integer called a protocol number. The TCP protocol is protocol …

I think it makes plenty of sense to criticize the consistency of the DOJ. What I'm saying is that "Trump doesn't like CNN" is a silly explanation for DOJ wanting either AT&T to…

This is nonsense. The DOJ is asking for either DirecTV or Turner Broadcasting be excluded from the deal, because being under the same roof would be a huge boost to DirectTV over its competitors - cabl…

Love LibreOffice - I've used it and OpenOffice for over 15 years. I've been heartbroken by recent releases, however - the keyboard shortcuts in Calc (and other components) have changed. This…

The article states that: "At $3 billion for 13,000 jobs, the Wisconsin deal would cost $231,000 per job." By comparison, economists have estimated $125K/job-year to $202K/job-year …

Likewise!

Conflating market cap and total worth is a pet peeve of mine. Market cap is "price of one share" multiplied by the total number of shares outstanding. If you want to buy a small number of …

Excellent! Pleased to see VPC Flow Logs included; they are underrated as a security tool and one big advantage AWS has over other providers. At work I co-develop an open source Python library for read…

I admire your charitable interpretation. I'd be fine with the rating system using automation to reduce the number of subjective decisions to be made - I thought the LVM approach was a good one wh…

I recently got entangled with some "big data" and "machine learning" B.S. in the form of the U.S. health care system. CMS, the federal agency that administers Medicare, introduced …

I really enjoyed The Pale King, and felt that had it been finished it would have been one of my favorite books. The chapters with the David Wallace section in the IRS are _really_ funny.

Infinite Jest is worth getting through. It's not easy or pleasant, but it's something I'll always remember vividly.

Yes, it can. The purpose of the project is to figure out how to do that while minimizing the number of APIs that have to break.

This video isn't my cup of tea, but Roberts' EconTalk podcast has been educational and illuminating for over 10 years now - highly recommended.