assaultpotato

New account pushing a confirmed-to-be-false narrative only backed by Russian orgs and far-right politicians? It's more likely than you think!

Unironically somewhere in the north eastern Midwest. Either just south or north of the great lakes. Our winters are vastly more mild than they were when I moved here 10 years ago and there's tons of fresh water and arable land. We aren't immune to heat waves and wacky growing season changes, but we don't get the drought and wildfires they do out west or south, nor any of the extreme storms from the Atlantic.

Biggest threat is flooding, but river flooding is more easily mitigated than other extreme weather. My ass is staying in the boring part of the continent.

I cannot recommend the book "Escaping the Housing Trap" highly enough. It talks a lot about the funding and financial products around housing and some of the fundamental flaws in the system. It's quite easy to blame institutional owners and they're certainly partly at fault, but it's vastly more complex than that. It's a really great scary read that genuinely had my mouth hanging open at times.

Tech people tend to be very black-and-white when discussing ideology. Reality is more forgiving.

If you can get your hands on it, the opening chapters of "Practical Event Driven Microservices Architecture" by Hugo Rocha gives a reasonable high level view of when you might decide to break a domain out of a monolith. I wouldn't exactly consider it the holy grail of technical reading, but he does a good job explaining the pros and cons of monolith v microservices and a bit of exploration on those middle grounds.

The reality is, as always, "it depends".

If you're a smaller team that needs to do shit real fast, a monolith is probably your best bet.

Do you have hundreds of devs working on the same platform? Maybe intelligently breaking out your domains into distinct services makes sense so your team doesn't get bogged down.

And in the middle of the spectrum you have modular domain centric monoliths, monorepo multi-service stuff, etc.

It's a game of tradeoffs and what fits best for your situation depends on your needs and challenges. Often going with an imperfect shared technical vision is better than a disjointed but "state of the art" approach.

Yeah that's what allows me to afford to live here, lol

Only thing I'd say (as a cyclist) is that "skill issue" is not a great reply for all cases. My city swings from +40 to -40 and it's not uncommon to see wind chills down below -50. Winter cycling is not always viable, which is why a robust transit network needs to include a variety of options.

Otherwise, this is a good comment.

If you're going moderate or short distances in a city, odds are it will literally be faster to bike, even at a no sweat/leisurely pace.

Average speed of commuter traffic in cities is sub 20 kph.

I wish I could take credit, but those quotes are all directly from the linked article! I felt the comment I was replying to was incorrect about the content of the article and wanted to clarify. Truly they did write a good piece worthy of recognition, though.

Not really, if you read the article in full.

In our analysis, only three per cent of the over 200 explanations for food price changes point to grocer actions or other agency in the private sector as driving price increases. This reflects a tendency to portray food prices as erratic and overwhelmingly opaque.

Other issues — such as the over-reliance on fossil fuels across the supply chain — also go unmentioned.

It's really shitty wording, but they're basically saying "of the 200 proposed causes, only 3% of those proposed are about grocer decisions" rather than "grocer decisions make up 3% of the cause in rising costs".

In the rest of the article announcing the report (it isn't released yet), they pretty clearly call out anticompetitive behaviors and price fixing:

These reports also rarely consider the decisions that grocers and other private sector entities have on food prices. Increased consolidation and concentration in the grocery sector is a structural issue that deserves scrutiny.

The bread price-fixing scandal a few years ago showed how a lack of competition enables price manipulation and hurts consumers. Canada’s Competition Bureau recently announced they are launching an investigation into the owners of Loblaws and Sobeys for alleged anti-competitive conduct.

In the United States, there is also strong evidence that the private sector has been profiteering on supply chain issues and inflation. The U.S. Federal Trade Commission likewise recently found that big grocers used the pandemic as a smokescreen to pad their profits at the public’s expense.

The underlying thesis of the article is basically "people keep asking why food is expensive but all these reports are unscientific and all but 3% of them neglect things like price fixing and monopolies".

What we need is a new approach. Food is a human right, but a unique one in that we rely on the private sector to provision it. We should expect a higher standard than with other consumer goods, and the private sector has arguably not earned the benefit of the doubt given their history of price fixing.

One positive step towards generating trustworthy evidence about food prices would be to incorporate transparency measures into the code of conduct the Canadian government is developing with grocers. This could include third-party audits, open data-sharing and a clear breakdown of what’s driving price changes — from the farm to the shelf.

The article authors (and report authors) are very based.

Yeah, it's kind of a measure of randomness for LLM responses. A low temperature makes the LLM more consistent and more reliable, a higher temperature makes it more "creative". Same prompt on low temperature is more likely to be repeatable, high temperature introduces a higher risk of hallucinations, etc.

Presumably Google's "search suggestions" are done on a very low temperature, but that doesn't prevent hallucinations, just makes it less likely.

Depends on the temperature in the LLM/context, which I'm assuming google will have set quite low for this.