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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 24th, 2023

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  • It always annoys me when I see something that boils down to ‘nth order derivative flips sign’ where it’s unclear what order derivative the article is even talking about.

    To be clear this is a change in the direction of the trend of the month over month inflation index. So we’re talking about some third order derivative changing sign. Which frankly is about to be expected, at that point any signal is going to be noisy.

    The more down to earth statement is that the month over month inflation was very high and has now stabilized somewhat at around 4.5%ish which is still high (works out to about 70% yearly). It needs to be about a tenth of that.

    Note that the decrease in the month over month inflation is not a sign of things improving. It is a sign of things getting worse at a slightly lower rate than earlier. That’s what annoys me about using such high order derivatives, it obscures the real problem.

    Roughly speaking this article is discussing how far someone has pressed the gas pedal while heading towards a cliff, while the real problem is that they’re pressing the gas pedal (or more urgently they’re heading towards a cliff). Of course that last fact hasn’t changed so they manufacture a news story out of it by finding a derivative that did.









  • I think /r/science is misunderstood. The moderators had quite a clear vision on the kind of discussion they wanted and the kind they did not. This caused some friction every time a post reached /r/all but I don’t see that as a bad thing.

    If anything that’s an ideal situation. People encounter a new community they’re interested in, break some rules in ignorance, the mods interfere and the violations are rolled back, the new users then either follow the rules or leave.

    Not sure how they’re doing with the API changes, pretty sure they had some automation going. Don’t think they’re compatible with reddit’s new view on making communities as interchangeable as possible to stop friction from interfering with ad revenue.






  • The images can get big, but they’re fairly clever about it so it is manageable. Performance wise they don’t take up more CPU and RAM than a regular application.

    There’s an (unofficial) image running nodemon on dockerhub about 250MB in size. The official NodeJS image is about 300MB (presumably they’ve preinstalled a bunch of stuff). You could start with the official image and install nodemon on it, that would probably be most future proof (no way of knowing if the unofficial image keeps getting updates, if any).


  • To understand it you’ll need to know roughly what an OS is. Very roughly speaking an OS provides a program with a way to access files, connect to the internet and launch other programs.

    What docker does is make something a bit like a ‘virtual’ OS with its own filesystem, network and task manager, and then start running programs in it (which then may launch other programs).

    Since you’re not making a VM which must simulate all of the hardware, this is a lot cheaper. However since a docker container gets its own filesystem, network etc. it can do whatever it wants without any other programs getting in the way.

    Among other things docker containers make installation a lot easier since a program will only ever see its own files (unless you explicitly add your own files to the docker container). To a large extent you also don’t need to worry about installing any prerequisites, since those can just be put into the container.

    Making a docker container is a bit (a lot) like installing a fresh OS, just putting the stuff you need in it and then copying the whole OS whenever you want to run the thing again. Except it’s been optimized such that it takes about as much effort as launching a program, as opposed to a VM which needs dedicated resources and are generally slower than the machine that hosts them.