asg's comments

On: Move over Wordle, the New York Times might have fo...

[asg]

Strange that neither the journalist or the Times folks reference the BBC show "Only Connect"[1] which has had this game for years. That show, BTW, is highly recommended if you haven't seen it. Their pitch is that it is "Deliciously devious and maddeningly abstract"!

[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00lskhg

[TRiG_Ireland → asg]

There's also Puzzgrid, if you want to play (or create) puzzles yourself.

https://puzzgrid.com/

On: Mousetrap.jl: a GUI library for Julia and C++ that...

[asg]

Yes, the Julia ecosystem provides cross compiled binaries for many platforms

https://docs.juliahub.com/GTK4_jll/XRLGj/4.10.5+0/#Platforms

On: JuliaCon 2020 Goes Online

[asg]

Direct link to Juliacon event page: https://juliacon.org

On: Six Months with Julia: Parse-Time Transpilation in...

[asg]

It can also show you assembly at the function level:

   julia> a=1+2im; b=2+4im; @code_native a+b
           .text
   ; ┌ @ complex.jl:271 within `+'
           pushq   %rbp
           movq    %rsp, %rbp
   ; │ @ complex.jl:271 within `+' @ int.jl:53
           vmovdqu (%r8), %xmm0
           vpaddq  (%rdx), %xmm0, %xmm0
   ; │ @ complex.jl:271 within `+'
           vmovdqu %xmm0, (%rcx)
           movq    %rcx, %rax
           popq    %rbp
           retq
           nopw    %cs:(%rax,%rax)
   ; └

On: Sweden's cashless society is no longer a utopia

[asg]

There a great Asimov story on these lines. Its called 'The fun they had'. Highly recommended. I read it aeons ago as a kid, and its stuck with me ever since.

On: FanDuel founders to receive no cash from sale to P...

[asg]

That's not the founding team, that's the current executive team -- who are getting a "retention bonus". All the founding team seem to have left the company (but presumably still hold shares)

[forkLding → asg]

True so basically founding team didn't get anything after 10 yrs?

On: Mandrill’s Betrayal

[asg]

Couldn't agree more. I was sending a couple of thousand emails a month with mandrill for free. Would have happily paid 9.95 a month. But when I got their email, and read their blogpost, it was completely unclear what I had to pay. The message I got from them was, "sorry, don't want your business."

With this, and Kimono, in one week, I am moving to amamzon ses, though it has very few reporting features. Sorry Sendgrid/Mailgun, but TWICE burnt, and all that...

[troels → asg]

Sendgrid has been in the game for a long time and has it as their core business (unlike mandrill). So I wouldn't be too afraid of them closing down overnight.

[jimmypesto → asg]

100% agree. I'm in the exact same boat. I'm moving to SES as well for the same reasons.

On: Palantir acquires Kimono

[asg]

This is really bad news for us, and the tone of the announcement grated. Two weeks notice is very bad form, I'm having to come back from vacation to fix this.

When we evaluated options a year ago, kimono was the best fit. We'd happily have paid, and did ask. I don't understand what happened... Did they run out of funding?

[scrapehero → asg]

Here is a statement that can give you some insight "Kimono Labs explained that in the two years since launching, it wasn’t able to have the impact that it wanted, and that the acquisition by Palantir will give the team “unmatched support, resources, and the ability to work on things we could not tackle alone as a small startup.”" from http://venturebeat.com/2016/02/15/palantir-acquires-kimono-l...

On: Living with and building for the Amazon Echo

[asg]

I've wanted something like this for years, I can easily see why this is awsome. I considered the Echo seriously when it came out. However, even as an Amazon Prime member, I'm hesitant to have amazon in my living room. I don't want to tie that deeply into a single ecosystem. Therefore, I am eagerly waiting for my Mycroft[1]... One for every room! If your are willing to muck about with hardware, the Jasper project does a lot of this already.

[1] https://mycroft.ai/

On: BBC gives children mini-computers in Make it Digit...

[asg]

We played around with what I believe was a prototype version of this at the BBC stall at last summer's Edinburgh festival. The kid loved it.

This is of course nothing like the RPi. You board has a grid of LEDs that you can control by uploading a program which you write on a regular PC. When we tried it, we were coding in a Scratch like environment.