• 1 Post
  • 39 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: July 3rd, 2023

help-circle
  • The CPI is a key economic indicator. It’s unlikely that banks and markets would tolerate that kind of meddling.

    But, if the CPI was changed for political reasons, there are other similar stats.

    In plain language: Wall Street can make or lose billions of dollars based on correctly/incorrectly forecasting this stat, so you can bet your ass they have accurate data. Some of it is private; some is available to paying customers. Even if the data is not public, it is often publicly characterized, for example, in economic forecasts and in publications like The Economist.

    Some examples of alternative CPI sources are: PriceStats and The Economist’s Intelligence Unit. Both require paid access.

    Be aware that freely-available stats may be published with political agendas, by Fox News conspiracy theorists, etc.












  • Ad-based apps on your phone.

    It’s been done already, you say? Not like this: the front-facing camera is used to detect eye gaze. A counter on the screen starts at 30 seconds and only counts down while you are looking at the screen. If you look away, the counter, and the ad, pauses. The app doesn’t continue until you’ve watched the entire ad.








  • Is it a blunder? Tell that to Apple, Jetbrains, or Microsoft, each of whom have proprietary code editors that net billions of dollars of revenue.

    It’s true, VS Code is open source, but it is developed almost entirely by Microsoft, by a large team of paid full-time programmers, designers, and PMs. It may be the most-used text editor in the world, but it isn’t developed by a team of volunteers who materialized around it because it was open source.

    Instead, consider that making something open source is often just a marketing strategy — or a soft way to sunset a project.


  • This is a nice editor. I don’t like the comparisons to Atom since some of us remember that as “the really bloated and slow predecessor to VS Code”. Whereas Zed is quite small and fast. Opening a shell panel is instant and makes VS Code feel slow.

    Its strength is multi-user (their term: multiplayer) shared editing spaces. It also has quite good AI integration and supports Github Copilot too.

    I am a little concerned that they started off commercial and then went open source. Open source is great! But this path sometimes means that the original developers no longer have the time/money/interest to keep developing it. I hope that’s not the case here because they’ve got the start of something good.