PBOT has 5 of its new snowplows and have asked the public to help them name them. You have until Jan 22nd to submit your votes.
[02/03/2025 Results are in!]
The Big Leplowski, Beverly Clear-y, Brrrrnside, Salt and Thaw, Plowy McPlowface
Colin Haley only has 6 videos on his channel, but they capture the essence of alpine climbing like no other. Definitely not the spit and polished videos you see from Red Bull or the perfect climbs you see from Hollywood style productions.
These are very real videos that capture the beauty and beasts that are alpine climbing – and why I fell in love with this. I could only hope to visit one of these amazing places in my life and have the skills he has.
Going on a vacation is one thing, but how about an adventure? There’s been a rise in adventure travel companies that can help you adventure through some of the most amazing places in the world in a way you’d never experience in a tour bus.
The market is definitely delivering some amazing, affordable deals – and it’s been driving some of the more overpriced companies like REI Experiences out of business. Companies like Much Better Adventures and Explore! are setting the pace by offering 5-15 day adventures for under $1500. You need to get yourself there and handle an amount of the logistics yourself but once there they cover most accommodations, transport, food, and activities with a distinctive local flair – often giving you time to explore on your own.
To be clear, you’re not getting a curated western experience at the Hilton and air conditioned bus transport. It’s probably not for families with younger kids. You’ll likely be working with local guides and staying at affordable, but safe local places. This almost exactly what I would have loved in my 20’s and 30’s – let me save money by doing the parts I can do, then let them handle the local stuff that would be difficult. Instead of a carefully packaged experience, you get to see how people live in the country you’re visiting.
I’m definitely looking into this for my next sabbatical.
Silicon Valley loves to disrupt and innovation – mostly to make a lot of money. One of the more innovative ideas I’ve seen involves changing things for those with disabilities. Counter to modern thinking that illnesses and limitations are purely something to be blotted out, some brave innovative folks are tackling the problem and making everyone’s lives better. Not just those with disabilities.
One example is the success of OXO/Good Grips kitchen utensils that were created when his wife’s arthritis made them hurt her hands. Now they are popular with everyone for being easier to use.
Another is a set of restaurants called Dans Le Noir. I went to the one in Paris and have recommended it widely. At Dans, people have dinner completely in the dark – and the servers are blind people who are completely at home in the dark. They even teach you some of the techniques blind people use for dining.
Japan just recently had this restaurants called Dawn Avatar Robot Cafe (〒103-0023 Tokyo, Chuo City, Nihonbashihonchō, 3-chōme−8−3, Nihonbashi Lifescience Building, ３ １). The servers are all robots – but they are all controlled by people who have disabilities (often ALS). It allows them to have jobs, talk, and interact with people even if they cannot leave their homes.
These kinds of innovations are not just great for those with disabilities – but as in the case of OXO – improve the lives of able-bodied people as well.
This is why there is no such thing as a life is not worth living. We simply must value it higher than productivity and inconvenience.
citiesbydiana does some hilarious parodies of various city stereotypes. Here’s the one for Portland and it’s pretty accurate.
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As Nike and Apple learned the hard way, outsourcing your work overseas can have serious ethical concerns.
Sadly, workplace abuse (both mental and physical) is a reality in many low-cost countries. People Make Games reveals some highly disturbing cases of abuse and punishments that are subjected to game dev workers at these outsourced locations. In one case, a young developer is told to record slapping herself in the face 100 times as punishment.
It’s disturbing, but definitely something people should be aware is happening when companies outsource to low cost geos.
Boy, this video didn’t hold back on his opinions of Back4Blood’s Turtle Rock Studios compared to Left4dead.
Google published a report on it’s effort to migrate code to the latest dependencies – an often thankless task fraught with risk. Google’s code migrations involved: changing 32-bit IDs in the 500-plus-million-line codebase for Google Ads to 64-bit IDs; converting its old JUnit3 testing library to JUnit4; and replacing the Joda time library with Java’s standard java.time package. The 32-bit ID’s were particularly rough because they were often generically defined types that were not easily searchable.
They used a collection of AI tools as well as manual code reviews and touch-ups to achieve their goal. They emphasize that LLMs should be viewed as complementary to traditional migration techniques that rely on Abstract Syntax Trees (ASTs), grep-like searches, Kythe, and custom scripts because LLMs can be very expensive.
The results?
With LLM assistance, it took just three months to migrate 5,359 files and modify 149,000 lines of code to complete the JUnit3-JUnit4 transition. Approximately 87 percent of the code generated by AI ended up being committed with no changes. For the Joda-Java time framework switch, the authors estimate a time saving of 89 percent compared to the projected manual change time.
Links:
I already had a more in-depth article, but here’s a bit faster one.
Other methods: https://medium.com/@amdadAI/4-methods-how-to-run-flux-locally-onwindows-mac-and-linux-544f4f11eab7
I have written about the difficulty AI had in generating gymnastic videos. It appears AI (Sora) hasn’t gotten any better.