Notes
Atom FeedDebian and Ubuntu Releases
Debian Releases
| Version | Name | Release | End of Standard Support |
|---|---|---|---|
| 11 | Bullseye | TBA | TBA |
| 10 | Buster | 2019-07-06 | 2022 |
| 9 | Stretch | 2017-06-17 | 2020-07-18 |
| 8 | Jessie | 2015-04-25 | 2018-06-17 |
| 7 | Wheezy | 2013-05-04 | 2016-06-04 |
| 6 | Squeeze | 2011-02-06 | 2014-07-19 |
Ubuntu Releases
| Version | Name | Release | End of Standard Support |
|---|---|---|---|
| 20.10 | Groovy Gorilla | 2020-10-22 | 2021-07 |
| 20.04 | Focal Fossa | 2020-08-06 | 2025-04 |
| 18.04 | Bionic Beaver | 2018-04-26 | 2023-04 |
| 16.04 | Xenial Xerus | 2016-04-21 | 2021-04 |
| 14.04 | Trusty Tahr | 2014-04-17 | 2019-04 |
| 12-04 | Precise Pangolin | 2012-04-26 | 2017-04-28 |
| 10.04 | Lucid Lynx | 2010-04-29 | 2015-04-30 |
| 8.04 | Hardy Heron | 2008-04-24 | 2013-05-09 |
Setting Up FastAI Fastbook on a Fresh Ubuntu Instance
This is how to set up the fastai environment on a fresh Ubuntu instance, for those of us who have a computer with a good Nvidia graphics card and Ubuntu and don’t want to use a cloud-based platform.
- Install nvidia CUDA drivers. So far, the most dependable guide that I’ve found has been this askubuntu post.
- Verify that the CUDA drivers have been installed correctly following this guide.
- Download fastbook with
git clone [email protected]:fastai/fastbook.git && cd fastbook. - Install the latest version of python -
sudo apt update && sudo apt install python3.9 python3.9-venv python3-setuptools - Create a virtual environment:
python3.9 -m venv env - Activate the virtual environment:
source env/bin/activate - Install a build requisite:
pip install wheel - Install packages:
pip install -r requirements.txt - Launch the notebook with
jupyter notebook
Tip for Developer Tools Startups
I recently had a really annoying experience with a startup in the developer tools space. I’ve been looking for a better CI platform for a while now (I’ve used Codeship, CircleCI, Travis, and Jenkins) and I found a promising CI platform that relied significantly on open source repositories as plugins to run its build pipelines. Many of these repositories are owned under the company’s own Github organization. Onboarding a few repositories of mine during an initial trial period, I found that there was a major missing feature in one of these plugins which would block me as well as other users from using this CI system effectively. I even found an open Github issue from another user a year earlier that reported the same missing feature. I then went into the plugin, learned the architecture, wrote a patch, added tests and documentation, and submitted five pull requests to fix this missing feature.
I’ve been waiting for three weeks for the company to merge or at least comment on these pull requests. In the meantime, my two week trial period ended which means I can’t even test changes to my pull requests. I therefore have significant doubts whether I should be using this company’s products.
Here’s a tip for dev tools startups: your customers and yourself are likely Github users, and if your customers contribute free feedback or features to your company through Github, you had better be responsive.
PermalinkA Better Go Defer
Go has a defer statement built into the language which allows a function to be executed at the end of another function. This is pretty useful in particular for cleanup (e.g. closing a file handle) or for recovering from errors (because Go code usually contains a lot of if err != nil { return err } and scattering cleanup code everywhere can be visually distracting).
// Real working go code
// Prints out "Start\nmain\nClose
// https://repl.it/@varsnap/Go-Defer-Example
package main
import "fmt"
type Instrumenter struct {}
func (i *Instrumenter) Start() *Instrumenter {
fmt.Println("Start")
return i
}
func (i *Instrumenter) Close() {
fmt.Println("Close")
}
func main() {
i := Instrumenter{}
defer i.Start().Close()
fmt.Println("main")
}
The funny thing is, although Go has first-class support for functions, defer statements take a a function call as an argument, not just a function declaration or function name - i.e. defer run() and not defer Run. While this may be a minor annoyance while programming, it can be pretty unintuitive when combined with a factory pattern that might use defer with a double function call.
I humbly propose (with heavy doubt it’ll be implemented) that the defer syntax be changed so that defer accepts a function rather than a function call as an argument, thereby making defer accept a continuation that can be invoked at the end of a function call (this does cause some problems with variable mutations that may happen later on, which become even more complicated when exception handling is introduced, but hopefully it can be worked out). I also propose that defer be changed from a built-in statement into a function that can accept a continuation as a parameter.
Covid-19 Economy Predictions
(Software-Engineering) Office culture
- Informal mentorship (whiteboard sessions, (useful) code reviews) will become rare as remote works adds friction to the process.
- Lack of organic mentorship will make companies not as efficiently extract value from junior employees who require more guidance. Many companies will move to a more Netflix-style model and value senior employees. This will make senior employees more valuable (i.e. paid more) but increase operational risk for those companies as knowledge and leadership will become more concentrated. Junior and new-grads will have an even harder time finding their first few jobs.
- The risk of people being interpretted incorrectly will increase. This will result in unfocused teams at best and gossip at worst. This hasn’t happened yet because newly remote companies still have teams who know each other from before becoming remote.
- Impressions (and biases) will form a more significant part of how people work with each other because of limited alternative information.
- Management has a long way to go in building best practices and tools for remote management. Many management philosophies are still predicated on strong social interactions which break down when working remotely. There is a billion dollar company in building a tool to bridge this gap (and this company will make Zoom look like Cisco).
Macro-economic effects
- There will be a mass migration of workers from high cost of living to low cost of living areas. While this will create burdens on the real estate market, the more interesting burdens will come from secondary effects like cities and states rebalancing their budgets.
- Many companies are using Covid-19 as an excuse for layoffs. Smart companies are using the current “employers market” to headhunt future employees.
- Many companies will use this as an opportunity to shed office-related expenses. This will further accelerate the distribution of employees.
Medicine
- A vaccine won’t be developed anytime soon that will be very effective (on the order of a smallpox vaccine). General antiviral and experimental therapies will continue to be researched and used until interest wanes.
- At some point, the medical establishment is going to come looking for their paycheck. How the insurance and pharmaceutical industry will react will be interesting.
- There are long-term effects from Covid-19. These effects are so far not well-known but at worst could cause slightly increased morbidity for years among those who have been infected by the virus in the past.
- There’s going to be an interesting “freakonomics” study in 5 years around the health effects of those who partook in quarantine (e.g. increase in BMI, heart disease, mental stress). Most places didn’t quarantine for long enough for any long term effects to build up though.
- There’s going to be an interesting “freakonomics” study in 10 years around the health effects from dampened employment rates from Covid. It will be hard to find signal in this noisy data though.