A more simpler realization after playing around with the music player on the home page -- being able to skip tracks and sample a large variety of music tracks without any ads in between -- was pleasantly surprising!
Everytime I clicked next I was subsconsciously cringing and expecting an unwelcome and jarring ad to blast through my speakers - and each time releived to actually be greeted by the next music track.
What have we done to ourselves.
It only feels like yesterday that the default was hoarding all your favourite tracks and playing them at will through winamp.
What about the bandwidth burned needlessly for thousands of users on their data plans.
At some scale such careless mistakes are going to create real effects for all users of internet through congestion as well.
If this was not a $8000 mistake but was somehow covered by a free tier or other plan from Google Cloud, would they still have considered it a serious bug and fixed it as promptly?
How many such poor designs are out there generating traffic and draining common resources.
In a larger system we are building we need a text-to-sql capability for some structured data retrieval.
Is there a way one could utilize this library (sqlglot) to build a multi-dialect sql generator -- that is not currently solved by directly relying on a LLM that is better at code generation in general?
And then it will render dialect-specific SQL. It has very advanced emulation functionality for things like JSON aggregations and working around quirks of dialects.
Alternatively, you can ask an LLM to generate a specific dialect of SQL, and then use jOOQ to parse it to an AST, and then render it as a different dialect, like:
val parser= DSL.using(SQLDialect.POSTGRES).parser()
val parsedQuery = parser.parseQuery(postgresQuery)
val renderedMySQL = DSL.using(SQLDialect.MYSQL).renderInlined(parsedQuery)
println(renderedMySQL)
Unsure if functionality like this exists in other Query Builder libraries for other languages.
is there a video/audio of this talk available somewhere?
PS: I couldnt find it in a quick search. I was tempted to see if I an "recreate" the audio of the talk using the full transcript and other information available about the two experts who spoke. Google's NotebookLM podcast feature should probablybe the nearest fit for this?
Additionally for past year or so they have always consistently charged me higher than what they quote originally.
I jump through the hoops to get a "refund" of the difference through automated support workflow. Ofcourse never real money -- just a credit applied to account or so they say.
That credit can never be seen or verified because wallet screen is always down for maintenance or whatever.
There is no email trail or anything else where you can prove you are owed an x amount of credit.
That credit never gets applied to a future ride.
Excellent "growth hack" I guess.
I have done screen recordings of this support workflow shenanigans a few times. Never had the energy to fight it till closure. I know the kind of duplicitous run around the support is going to give me the first five times I raise this.
Additionally, it will probably be confusing that it is called a t-string but it is actually a constructor for a Template object and not string at all. I would rather see a new special term `template` than this.
Gmail started scraping all emails a decade ago. Amazon responded by removing all product and pricedetails from Order confirmation and Order shipping emails. We consumers lost out -- we dont have our own copy and archive of what we ordered. If Amazon links perish to link rot and we lose access to Amazon login, our past order and spend information is gone.
FWIW, as far as I'm aware, it wasn't gmail scraping that was the cause of Amazon pulling that information. It was third-party plugins that read people's inboxes to provide them with coupons, discounts, etc., and those companies would sometimes sell the pricing data. I assume Amazon wasn't thrilled about that, but there wasn't anything they (or gmail) could do about it as long as the user was granting them access to their inbox.
But also - I just ordered something off of amazon and I noticed that the confirmation had the item that I ordered in it, albeit in a shortened/summarized way? So maybe they brought it back, figuring that with just part of the name, there's not much someone can do with the pricing information? Or maybe they just don't care anymore?
(disclosure: I work at google, but not on this, but worked adjacent to the gmail team for a few years and am going off of my memory. I'll also tap the sign that Google doesn't mine your gmail for ads, for both consumer AND paying customers).
When reconciling my budget (with YNAB) I often use gmail as my way to connect items to transactions [0]. I've found that I can just search for the amount that my card was charged in my email and find the Amazon email that relates to that order. Then, normally from the body, there is just barely enough information for me to know what I bought.
That got annoying enough that I just wrote a chrome extension to scrape Amazon orders/transactions and auto-match and update my YNAB memo line with a summary of the items.
That's a bit of a tangent just to say: yes, they nerfed their emails but not completely.
[0] Yes, YNAB recommends that you enter transactions right as you make them, but that's not how I use it.
I once picked up my memory foam mattress and stood it up against one of the walls ... for cleaning the bed or whatever.
As I walked past the mattress I instantly noticed that the mattress is such a good absorber of audio waves that I could immediately notice a dip in ambient sound in the ear facing the mattress.
The room was already "silent" and this newly discovered lower limit of silence was pretty surprising to me physiologically.
If you are handy to an R&D lab that has a combo Faraday Cage/anechoic chamber you can have a nice experience free of RF and audio noise and stimulus. Even better if it is dimly lit in near-infrared. Even better-better if it has a tank of warm water with lots of epsom salts, although I've never been in a lab that had such a thing as a requirement.
The goal is not to prove or disprove any affects on one's physiology, but simply to have the experience of being free of RF and audio for the sake of it.
I think the point is that even saying the "experience" of being free of RF implies a perception which does not exist.
Plus it's well-known that you don't really get the full experience of this unless you manage to shield yourself from neutrinos by surrounding yourself with sufficiently-dense proto-neutron stars.
Those requirements were not specified, so were not designed or built. If you can increase the budget, we can write-up a proposal to wrangle some sufficiently-dense proto-neutron stars.
RF anechoic chambers are, as a side effect of their construction, pretty low echo also when it comes to audible frequencies.
I have spent a bit of time in one (EMC testing a product), and it was the quietest room I have been in by far.
Don‘t know if this is the same but I went to Death Valley on the Devil‘s Golf Course during summer. There was no wind no nothing. It was so damn silent. Wonder how that compares to an anechoic chamber now.
Edit to add: I've been in an anechoic chamber and also the black rock desert, which is dead flat and thus has very little surface area oriented to reflect sound back at the listener, which makes it similar in that you don't experience environmental reflections.
Devil's Golf Course has more "texture" to it but if you were quiet on a windless day I think the effect would be similar.
Probably similar to whatever its normal frequencies are for you, but perceptually louder. That seems to be my experience when I'm in a ___location with minimal background noise...
Everytime I clicked next I was subsconsciously cringing and expecting an unwelcome and jarring ad to blast through my speakers - and each time releived to actually be greeted by the next music track.
What have we done to ourselves.
It only feels like yesterday that the default was hoarding all your favourite tracks and playing them at will through winamp.
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