Also somewhat surprised. DuckDB traction is impressive and on par with vector databases in their early phases. I think there's a good chance it will earn an honorable mention next year if adoption holds and becomes more mainstream. But my impression is that it's still early in its adoption curve where only those "in the know" are using it as a niche tool. It also still has some quirks and foot-guns that need moderately knowledgeable systems people to operate (e.g. it will happily OOM your DB)
Yes, I started learning drawing as an adult with zero natural talent. For me, it wasn't about becoming exceptionally good but about exploring and finding pleasure in the process. I took drawing classes following the "Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain" method, which I highly recommend.
Another vote for this book. Took me from objectively terrible at drawing, to objectively mediocre. I think if I'd put more time into practice it could have got me to the point of good. While this doesn't exactly sound like a ringing endorsement, it's literally the only thing that moved the needle for me.
I never made it through the book (I know, bad habit of mine) but she said _one_ thing in that book that opened my eyes; paraphrased "you're not drawing the object; you're drawing lines". The first time I drew a crumpled-up blanket blew my mind.
Since then, I just find techniques[1] and ideas[2] that I implement for fun. The reaction from people is joyous.
Yes. Yet, in my mind, for some peoples and/or subjects (drawing buildings, interiors where perspective is important, etc.), it may be easier to do the exact opposite. Meaning, to learn instead¹ how to construct an accurate perspective view from descriptive geometry, until it becomes second nature and one can then skip the geometric construction (or at least make it less exact and time consuming, closer to what's described in Robertson's "How to Draw" for instance).
¹: I wrote "instead", but of course both ways complement each other.
Even if we are close to peaking emissions, we must consider the phenomenon of accumulation. Given that CO2 has an effective lifespan of around 100 years and methane about 10 years in the atmosphere, reductions in emissions now will still result in these gases accumulating and impacting the climate for decades to come.
No, even if you emit less, you are still 'accumulating', but at a slower rate. And previously released methane is still converting to co2 in the atmosphere, for decades to come.
No they won't. Only the first derivative of greenhouse gases ('emissions') will peak. Greenhouse gases itself will only peak after the world achieves net-zero.
Since you're being pedantic, greenhouse gases don't have an infinite lifetime in the atmosphere so they will start going down slightly before we hit net-zero.
I hope most understood that I meant to say peak greenhouse gas emissions.
And ironically decreasing coal and fuel pollution decreases albedo causing faster warming which will persist for a few decades until things balance out. Less pollution is good, particularly when it comes to reductions in sulphur dioxide from bunker fuel and PM2.5 from coal emissions, but it does have side effects amounting to a couple of degrees Celsius of warming according to recent papers. Hanson's "Global Warming in the Pipeline" is a sobering read.
I think this approach has advantages. Not least is it fits into what others have done, you won't have to spend time explaining how your licensing is different and so on.
Many companies offer discounted or free licenses to organizations as a form of support. Very vanilla, well understood.
The legal right to say "I cannot serve you as a customer because of moral / ethical conflicts" is being argued still in the USA but seems to still be fairly well understood.
I've been gradually removing all use of Jinja macros from our projects as they make debugging so much more painful. Everything now goes in template globals, which lets you debug them the same as anything else, gives far clearer stack traces and lets you do clever things with caching.
Now that we have a consensus, let's address the discourses justifying inaction or inadequate efforts. I just submitted a resource that I like on this topic. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28941473
