This does bring up something, though: Waymo has a "pull over" feature, but it's hidden behind a couple of touch screen actions involving small virtual buttons and it does not pull over immediately. Instead, it "finds a spot to pull over". I would very much like a big red STOP IMMEDIATELY button in these vehicles.

Human drivers routinely do worse than Waymo, which I take 2 or 3 times a week. Is it perfect? No. Does it handle the situation better than most Lyft or Uber drivers? Yes.

As a bonus: unlike some of those drivers the Waymo doesn't get palpably angry at me for driving the route.

If you're in SF you should pay them a visit and buy a coffee at The Interval; I think you'll find it worth the trip.

I would encourage fellow like-minded Aggies to do the same.

Drs Austin and McDermott are surely spinning in their graves right now.

If it’s a low effort copy pasta post I think downvotes are sufficient unless it starts to obliterate the signal vs noise ratio on the site.

- Eskil Steenberg’s “How I program C” (https://youtu.be/443UNeGrFoM). Long and definitely a bit controversial in parts, but I find myself agreeing with most of it.

- CoreFoundation’s create rule (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5718415/corefoundation-o...). I’m definitely biased but I strongly prefer this to OP’s “you declare it you free it” rule.

Those of us who really vibe with the place seem to share a desire to get behind the city’s strange magic and discover the past souls and events that make San Francisco what it is - that make it feel this particular way that it does.

To the author and everyone else who has arrived here recently: welcome to San Francisco!

I hope you all have a Happy Thanksgiving; here's to the next 18 years! :)

(I honestly don't know. If there's any phenomenal consciousness there it would have to be during inference, but I doubt it.)

Magic! (i.e. not purely part of the thought experiment, unless I'm missing something interesting)

> What if I miss?

Panpsychism better be true :)

> Can I target the wand with itself?

John Malkovich? Is that you?!

While you're in there I have a few favors to ask...

The genie says "you can flick this wand at anything in the universe and - for 30 seconds - you will swap places with what you point it at."

"You mean that if I flick it at my partner then I will 'be' her for 30 seconds and experience exactly how she feels and what she thinks??"

"Yes", the genie responds.

"And when I go back to my own body I will remember what it felt like?"

"Absolutely."

"Awesome! I'm going to try it on my dog first. It won't hurt her, will it?"

"No, but I'd be careful if I were you", the genie replies solemnly.

"Why?"

"Because if you flick the magic wand at anything that isn't sentient, you will vanish."

"Vanish?! Where?" you reply incredulously.

"I'm not sure. Probably nowhere. Where do you vanish to when you die? You'll go wherever that is. So yeah. You probably die."

So: what - if anything - do you point the wand at?

A fly? Your best friend? A chair? Literally anyone? (If no, congratulations! You're a genuine solipsist.) Everything and anything? (Whoa... a genuine panpsychist!)

Probably your dog, though. Surely she IS a good girl and feels like one.

Whatever property you've decided that some things in the universe have and other things do not such that you "know" what you can flick your magic wand at and still live...

That's phenomenal consciousness. That's the hard problem.

Everything else? "Mere" engineering.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_It_Like_to_Be_a_Bat%3F

One of the primary issues with Nagel's approach is that "what is it like" is - for reasons I have never been able to fathom - a phrase that imports the very ambiguity that Nagel is attempting to dispel.

The question of what it would feel like to awake one day to find that - instead of lying in your bed - you are hanging upside down as a bat is nearly the complete dual of the Turing test. And even then, the Turing test only asks whether your interlocutor is convincing you that it can perform the particulars of human behavior.

- People simply disagree with you, especially this line: “Who cares if you’re still replying to emails at 7pm if you can do this, right?”

That might work for you but I imagine it left a sour note for some because emailing involves entangling other people into your personal hustle. This can perpetuate “work for show” (especially if you have any power or influence). If you want to silently code into the night and save all the evidence of this for the next morning, that’s one thing. Visible evidence of constant work can be very stressful and draining to others, however.

- HN leans left, weekend HN even more so. This whole thing can feel like “shit you do because we live in a ruthless society that only cares about money”. I don’t agree with the modern left on many things, but I’m definitely coming around to this one. It was - though perhaps in a slightly different context - the original Leftist-owned meaning of “woke”. It’s the idea that you suddenly wake up to the shitty sewer water you’ve been swimming in all your life and look around astonished at everyone else, who all seem to think it’s a perfectly clean and clear place to swim. I suspect some of your downvotes are because of this.

So, in short: you’re entitled to your opinion but it’s phrased as a bit of a lightning rod for those whose values deeply conflict with your own.

Unfortunately our national attitude around population growth would need to change.

Adding on to existing cities in any direction other than “up” is frequently denigrated as “sprawl”.

New cities seem to be the sole purview of idealistic libertarian billionaires… which would be fine except they’re the only ones who even talk about it. Not that these ever get built.

Getting citizens and then the government comfortable with the idea of building nice new places would really help - in addition to all the heroics already being done in existing cities around zoning, transit, and housing regulations.

The difference is easily discernible. Online, though, I do interpret it more generously.

Occasionally someone (usually at work) will ask “why do you know that?” or “how did you learn how to do that?” (where “that” is typically something outside of my direct job responsibilities).

I’ve been programming for so long and have dabbled or seriously worked with so many parts of the computing landscape - mostly out of simple curiosity and love of craft - that I admit to being somewhat annoyed at questions like this. I have trouble connecting with the premise.

But I don’t want to offend, and it’s not my place to judge when it feels like my interlocutor works in my field simply because the money is there. So I came up with a succinct way to answer those questions.

“I like computers.”

Learning assembly with a really good visualizer or debugger in hand is highly underrated; just watching numbers move around as you run your code is more fun than it has any right to be.

I really like Justine Tunney’s blinkenlights program. (https://justine.lol/blinkenlights/)

A version of that for AArch64 / RISC-V would be really cool.

You could try writing a game (perhaps using Raylib) or a pixel art editor. Or maybe a little web application for your Homelab.

Simple C libraries (Raylib, libcurl, early win32 APIs) tend to be dead simple to use from assembly.

Most asm tutorials are either bare metal / OS or “we will talk directly to the kernel”, but there’s no reason you can’t interface with higher level libraries and make real apps and games. It’s simpler than it sounds because a whole lot of your code will just be moving things around between registers and memory in order to make function calls and bookkeep your program state.