Greg Gates

Of all the verbal tics the kids these days have adopted, the one that annoys me most is "hear me out", especially before a bare assertion offered without justification.

3yo old coined "yesbody" last night at bedtime. So proud!

Row Zero Inc. Row Zero is a secure cloud spreadsheet that connects bi-directionally to Snowflake, processes billion row datasets, and eliminates the security risk of CSV exports and...

Row Zero is also now a Snowflake partner!

AWS Rolls Out Row Zero to Expand Self-Serve Analytics See how AWS rolled out Row Zero to expand self-service analytics.

It's been great seeing how AWS uses Row Zero for data analytics. rowzero.com/case-studies...

It's not quite the same thing but there was a real sense that "good at math" was a thing but every other subject had no real standards and everybody was basically the same. Like you could be in "advanced" English and just never actually read the assigned books!

I went to a tiny Catholic high school with no AP classes or "gifted" track, but it still struck me that calculus had 6 people in it, chemistry II had 4, but the "advanced" English I took the same year had 26ish, over half my class, including plenty of people uninterested in reading.

happy to explain to 3yo that the Patriots are the bad guys

There's an even simpler explanation than "people stopped reading Harry Potter because the author is a bigot". What if people stopped reading Harry Potter because it's not actually that good and the zeitgeist moment/marketing campaign has passed?

Row Zero is also mostly written in #rustlang

This is true! Many of the engineers who designed and led the rewrite of the S3 filesystem are now at rowzero.com

tfw you thought of something to post but the Trump regime has just murdered another Minnesotan

You're on a bus that's not going to DC. The bus company does nothing but shout into phones and promise to pick you up in another bus whenever the driver finishes doing whatever he's doing.

hypothesis: the difference between interesting people and non- is that the former, when someone says a thing, wonder, "hmm, is that true?" and have some idea how they might find out. the latter just add it to their ledger of "things I have heard people say" that they use to decide what to believe.

27 Million Fewer Car Trips could also be the title of the autobiography of any American who moved to the city for the first time after college.*

*offer void in Texas

Diminish a band

They Probably Aren't Giants

"and a loose community of hyper-intellectually curious posters on X"

what a polite way to say "likely marks"

At a certain point the whole construct of a lie breaks down because they don't understand the truth enough to misrepresent it.

I have a different reading of this. Miller is implicitly — in a way that's hard to see without the benefit of hindsight — saying "Trump will only invade countries in the western hemisphere, abandoning the rest of the world to Russia and China" and everyone just read it as "We're anti-war".

hacker news is consistently awful on politics. in today's thread on Venezuela, really striking how "America bad because imperialism" is wielded both as a reason to vote against Dems and as exculpatory for Trump when he does "the same".

Seems like a good time to repost the Trumpiest Baby Names gregat.es/baby-names-t...

Moorean Trump

I guess 17 years have passed since s1

Ok Stranger Things s5e4, sorcerers weren't introduced until 3e, in 2000.

"Navarro’s mother gave the book four stars, but not five, on Amazon."

Something I think about is how anything with the appearance of systematic rigor can easily seem true and authoritative to an uncritical mind. Like the virtue system from Ultima IV.

gregat.es

And a look at which baby names were more popular in red/blue states in 2024:

gregat.es/baby-names-t...

gregat.es

Then there's my perennial favorite example of a question you can't google, updated for the AI era:

gregat.es/how-do-whale...

gregat.es

I didn't write as much on my blog this year, but here's a thread of a few posts, starting with an explanation of how Excel orders numeric options in its filter control (riveting stuff!)

gregat.es/excel-numeri...

This is even less interesting than that, because it's a banal point one could have just as easily made 5 years ago — if your code is correct and maintainable it doesn't matter if it's "elegant". Only now you can make it again with a healthy dash of "AI is changing everything!" for easy clicks.

The Expanse is just GoT in space. Even written by the same guy!*

(*This is the one conspiracy theory I indulge in, which also happens to be at least partially true. And maybe isn't a proper conspiracy theory because I think I am the only one who believes it.)