Yeah but its also quite trivial to give them credit

https://xkcd.com/2347/

The author's casual mention of 52! at the opening of the article triggered an OLD webpage that I saw many years ago

https://czep.net/weblog/52cards.html

Anyone know how to determine the age of this page (it's got be at least 20yrs old)

52 cards is the first thing I think of when I think factorials. It's such a great and relatable way to convey the subject to people, plus it usually ends up blowing their minds like it did mine when I first learned of it. Not from this page, but from a YT vid many moons ago.

The main.css file it imports dates itself to March 9 of 2005, and is housed in an "ancient history" section of the website that covers everything before October 26, 2010, so: "sometime between those two years" =P

Its first appearance on the WayBack Machine is October 13, 2009, which narrows the range somewhat.

It was made during the brief XHTML craze. (And it's also invalid XHTML)

I still kind of have a soft spot for XHTML, semantic web and progressive enhancement.

To me it feels like a smuggled exponentation. If I take half of 52 and raise it to itself and add a base unit to it like grams or meters, that's an incomprehensibly large amount.

Great read.

I like how the author uses the analogy of scrabble word creation to describe LLM training but unfortunately the analogy didn't continue to inference and I got lost trying to keep up.

The analogy is flawed - in Scrabble you get rewarded for unlikely word combos. Also causal attention attends to prior tokens (tiles already placed).

Impressive level of engineering for modern fabs

I believe they have a more in-depth posting that talks about it

https://shopify.engineering/shop-app-migration

The blog post doesn't mention the personnel-related challenges with having two native platform teams working on the app.

The post DOES give more information as to why they looked at switching from React Native to native Platform APIs.

React Native is forcing a major refactor of React Native apps in switching to the React Native "New Architecture" (see https://reactnative.dev/architecture/landing-page).

So if Shopify had to do major refactors of all their React Native apps, maybe they could look at what it would take to go back to native Platform APIs.

from https://shopify.engineering/shop-app-migration

  For the Shop App, this coincided with our next major React Native investment: adopting the New Architecture. That work would have required us to revisit native module integrations, rendering, and the boundaries between shared and platform-specific code. Before committing to this investment, we tested whether coding agents could help us build directly in SwiftUI and Jetpack Compose while keeping product behavior aligned across platforms.

The result of that native platform APIs side project involving six devs converting the app's major user workflows?

- startup time reduced: iOS by 23%, Android by 50%

- crashes - 10x reduction

- app size - iOS increased by 1MB (67MB -> 68MB), Android reduced by 109MB (37.2%)

- build time - Android release build time fell ~75%.

- runtime perf - Android builds could draw at 120fps while scrolling feed and switching screens

> A boring application that stores records in a database and lets people edit

> them doesn't sound especially impressive, while a distributed event-driven

> platform with a service mesh and realtime synchronization layer sounds like

> you're building NORAD.

Very well put

You might have to google it because it's not standardized across the country

https://www.google.com/search?q=police+non+emergency+number+...

Here's the deep link on xcancel.com

https://xcancel.com/sharifshameem/status/2097213330507403711

Not sure what to do here.

How do I move the fly around

The fly has most of its motor functions cut in order to better enjoy the sugar

To make the fly happy we only had to cut most of the motor… hang on…

A new twist on the torment nexus, oh sweet suffering.

agree with this. i don't see the point of the terrarium if the fly never moves or really changes at all, other than seeing to twitch faster when sugar is on.

Using a vest is probably more fashionable than the cone of shame that other pets get

Pets get a cone of shame in order to help wounds heal faster? I thought the cone of shame was to prevent biting/picking at the wound.

The article says penguins have long necks and are quite flexible so they can bendy around and bite peck at their wounds too. No mention of a cone of shame but the vests do look adorable too and have added microbial benefits.

If there was a vest covering the wound so the pet couldn't pick at it, would the pet need the cone of shame to not pick at the wound?