I’ve never ever heard while described as a smell, or even slightly smelly.

Care to explain?

I assume OP refers to the cases where "while" is used to re-implement existing operations... imagine finding code like this:

     i = 0
     while i != len(todo):
         process(todo[i])
         i = i + 1

sure, there may be a good reason to implement things this way (maybe "todo" grows during iteration?), but maybe not, and then the loop should be instead simplified to:

     for value in todo:
         process(value)

(as an aside, this is exactly the case where the comments are required: "# not using for loop because todo might grow" will make it clear it's an intentional decision and not hallucination or something written from ignorance)

You can use iterators in a while loop like your for example, making it look as clean as the for.

I feel like this is a case of personal preference over actual issue.

If you can smell it, there's something fishy in the neighborhood

May as well house them in Westminster. They don’t actually do anything useful there.

I like roundabouts over lights at small intersections. I still prefer simple give way/stop that changes the next intersection over roundabouts.

Lights suck unless there’s sufficient traffic.

I've lived some places where 4-way stops were just abused, like Sugarland, TX. England and Ireland are full of roundabouts, some of which are incredibly small, just a painted dot, and some are giant multi-lane white-knuckle nightmares. There are places with good traffic light setups, but traffic lights generally suffer from the same problems of sometimes stopping traffic for no good reason while also encouraging excess speed.

In my current city, I can identify at least 3 intersections that would be better as a roundabout, but I don't have my hopes up.

Yeah, I know what you mean by abusing 4 way stops being abused. Thankfully I moved from there a long time ago.

Also where I moved from recently, they changed a roundabout intersection into a traffic lights intersection. And the traffic used to flow. Now it’s a stand still.

There’s always so many little insights when you use the road daily that a planner will never have unless they do the same.

Melbourne where I am kind of close to now, has an absolute clusterf*ck of overpasses, underpasses, toll ways, free ways, tunnels all coming & going out of a neatly planned grid. They probably think it’s planning perfection while driving it as a non-resident is an absolute nightmare. Sydney which is famously poo poo’d for not being planned in Australia is 10x more straight forward to drive.

> Lights suck unless there’s sufficient traffic.

This is basically it.

Roundabouts make sense for low/moderate traffic, but you get to a point where the traffic gets so heavy that a roundabout just clogs things up, especially when traffic is primarily coming from one direction.

I will die on one hill though: 4-way Stop intersections should absolutely never exist, and any situation where you think a 4-way Stop is appropriate should be replaced with a roundabout.

They replaced a intersection near me that would get backed up very badly during rush hour with a roundabout that has a much higher capacity and never seems to get backed up.

White or grey are grossly over represented in Australia.

It’s like people visit the remains of the forum in Rome and picture the colours being as they are today instead of the ridiculously bright/strong colours they would have been when erected/used.

I painted my house blue and orange in protest at the boring colour choices most people make.

No one else on my street has followed my lead though.

I think some of it is because people are obsessed with treating housing as an investment, and so anything outside the norm is a financial risk.

This is the grey car theory of real estate.

It’s easy to sell grey, white, and black cars. So it’s what you buy.

This assumes no purchase is longterm. Which is its own indictment.

I should add: I love that you broke this idea. Can you (safely for the internet) share any photos?

I grew up near a house that was painted an odd combination of purple with pink trim (shutters, etc). Nobody else followed suit because all anybody thought of it was "the ugly house".

Standing out doesn't really help if it isn't more desirable than the boring normal.

What I personally dislike is the recent trend of all black siding and trim. I have no idea why people are doing this on new construction near me, other than perhaps cooling is cheaper than heating in our climate. It's certainly (IMHO) hideous though.

I wanted to paint my house in Razzle Dazzle, but orange and green. My wife threatened to leave me, so the idea was abandoned.

Don't get me started on our houses. For some reason we build the same houses in Queensland as we do in Melbourne: no eaves or awnings. I guess the idea is you just turn your AC up even higher in summer.

If I lived in Australia, I would have the exterior of my house to be very white (except solar panels), so as to reflect most of the visible and IR light, and stay cooler.

Problem is most newer places are built of concrete or brick. I mean sure slap some white paint on but the that thermal material is going to take a lot of cooling/heating.

A similar design trend of using terracotta everywhere in the 1990s permeated Australian housing design that was similarly ugly and monotonous. I'm only slowly undoing the damage to mine now.

That really makes absolutely no sense. Derivatives whole purpose is to allow people to hedge their exposure to the underlying, in this case oil prices. Many parties active on these markets have such exposure but are unable or unwilling to take delivery as part of that hedging contract..

The people who take delivery hate that. They want someone else to pay for the oil that isn't in their possession yet. There is a lot of money worth of oil sitting in transport and the people who trade oil are the only ones who want that much money sitting around. (often people play the same market, but they like the separation anyway)

You speak to refiners do you?

Many different people in several unrelated industries. They all don't like money tied up in product. They are happy to take the typical loss of selling the contract to deliver later because they want the cash to pay bills and otherwise invest now.

This is often called diversification in finance. When you have a lot of money tied into one thing it is good to sell some now for that reason even though everybody knows you won't deliver for months.

Diversification is different to derivatives, and also cashflow.

I’ve known plenty of farmers & co-ops. Big, medium, small, family. None used derivatives, at least not after trying them. A lot tried but never worked out like the finance people sold it to them.

It’s always finance people selling them, talking about the need.

It’s great there’s a market for it. You don’t need finance people mucking things up when actual delivery is the problem.

Why?

You don’t need people trying to pick up pennies in front of a gigantic steam roller.

I think the idea is that oil is expensive primarily because of speculators. That seems nuts to me. Oil might (just hypothetically) be expensive due to some kind of supply-demand imbalance.

The big commodity traders have no problem with taking delivery. They use storage and shipping as a part of their strategy. They make many billions each year, even more so when there is disruption.

Checks out.

Who cares. Add another commit is the answer.

Yes, Sam definitely doesn’t want to be holding this bag.

Sam still doesn't have any equity.

People absolutely refuse to engage with this fact with even a modicum of substance.

Altman owns significant personal stakes in core technology, chip, and energy infrastructure sectors. His job is to hype AI so that the companies that supply the infrastructure behind it increase in value. When OAI becomes insolvent because their business model doesn't work, he can jump ship with no losses or liabilities.

This is a ludicrous theory for why he would turn down equity in OpenAI.

In the "volatile and unstable" scenario that you're replying to, the $BILLIONS from cashing out while it's a hot market is a more sure way to have long-term influence on things.

"the power"

The internet isn’t the web/social media.

People don’t complain about roads & gutters because there’s idiots on them that drive. Idiots that drive get the deserved blame.

Words matter. The internet rocks but social media sucks, apps suck, elected representatives suck.

The internet that people miss was deeply interrelated with the real world. Blogs were read widely enough, even by an elderly non-techie audience, that in real-life meetings with people in a shared community (music-band fandom, a religious denomination, a literary scene) you could feel common ground with other people by following the same web content that was a locus for the community. You might even meet new IRL friends through forums, IRC channels, or blog comment sections.

That is all gone now. Followers of the indie web now are a tiny demographic, and indie-web fans are unlikely to know people in real life who read anything they read. Everyone else is on the big social-media platforms (and, for some communities, dedicated phone apps, like Komoot and PolarSteps for travel).

I think that's why people feel so nostalgic. The world and society has changed even if the HTTP protocol and webhosting at your own domain are still there.

I see where you're coming from but I don't think the analogy really works because most peoples experience of the internet is entirely 100% mediated by facebook, google, ticktok etc. It's would be like the road network if you needed to rely on a drunk driver to deliver you to your destination.

> People don’t complain about roads & gutters because there’s idiots on that drive.

We do complain about roads and infrastructure, and try to improve them so the inevitable idiot's impact is lessened.

I have to insert a quick joke: "guns don't kill people - people kill people."