The code is correct. That's a Lisp thing called `quote`. https://docs.racket-lang.org/guide/Pairs__Lists__and_Racket_...

The bigger, of course also more distant and vague, announcement is that "by 2050 Microsoft will remove from the environment all the carbon the company has emitted either directly or by electrical consumption since it was founded in 1975."

Begs the question does this include the inefficiencies in its products over the years, which due to their breadth of their adoption, effected hundreds of millions of computers?

I'm thinking the carbon footprint of Windows update's endless (seemingly needless?) grinding and rebooting alone ends up being more than they ever emitted manufacturing and building software.

How would they decide that some computation was "needless"? If it was the best they could do at the time I'd argue it wasn't needless. If they were intentionally wasting CPU/energy for no reason it would be a different story.

In feed lots they're fed grain, but that's only the last few months of their life. That's why it's called grain-finished rather than grain-fed.

I'm a German engineer in the US. The thing with these stories is that they won't happen to you. If you're employed by a tech company you have great health insurance.

Of course, it still sucks that it can happen to someone at all and you might not want to live in such a society. That's a separate issue.

Speaking of SV, I think the cost of living and the social problems there have made it increasingly unattractive. Seattle is nice.

>The thing with these stories is that they won't happen to you.

> If you're employed by a tech company you have great health insurance.

So it will happen to you if you are laid off and happen to become sick after that?

On your layoff papers you check the "sign up for COBRA insurance" box and go on with your life

You can get 1.35% currently with the free online account at Ally (no affiliation). Still below inflation but much better than 0.02%.

Reliable access to a computer or smartphone can be an issue for the really poor but most should be fine.

The actual title on microsoft.com, "MariaDB, PostgreSQL, and MySQL: more choices on Microsoft Azure", has actually less marketing spin and more information.

This looks pretty cool!

What's the business model going to be? The ToU are quite far-reaching regarding user content: "By submitting User Content through the Services, you hereby do and shall grant us a worldwide, non-exclusive, perpetual, royalty-free, fully paid, sublicensable and transferable license to use, edit, modify, truncate, aggregate, reproduce, distribute, prepare derivative works of, display, perform, and otherwise fully exploit the User Content".

Also, are there other ways to browse, search, etc., the highlights in addition to the daily email?

Good question! We modelled our TOS off others around the web, and I believe that term was somewhat standard. I agree it's quite aggressive though -- we're going to look into modifying it.

For our business model, in the short term, we currently recommend one highlight from a book you _don't_ own in each daily email. The recommendation is based on not just what books you read, but how much you engaged with each book, which has lead it to be surprisingly prescient. We could potentially pursue affiliate links with that.

In the medium term, we expect to offer some premium features (such as Export your highlights to Evernote), which we'll likely charge for.

The product is still nascent when it comes to the web app and browsing through your highlights, but you can check out readwise.io/library to browse all of your books, or readwise.io/dashboard more broadly :)

I currently manually copy highlights and notes to Evernote (one note per book). It's way painful. I'd be willing to pay a reasonable fee for that functionality. Will sign up when I get to a real computer.

Do you have a recommendation for a soil-based probiotic? I've been looking recently and found them somewhat hard to research among all the lacto ones.

My research led me to Prescript-Assist: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0049NRWHS. Here's a study validating it for IBS patients: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16117982.

I also recommend a gut bacteria test like uBiome to see how it alters your composition. Do a before test, then another one after a month or two of use.

I would recommend against spending your money doing a uBiome tests. The research is showing that where you sample in the stool highly affects the results.

Right. You could always define a new type with an existing underlying type, like Celsius with the underlying type int in your example. See the spec here: https://golang.org/ref/spec#Types

This would define a new, non-interchangeable type, even though it's just an int behind the scenes. The new type alias on the other hand define a new name for an existing type; you still have just one type. In the user ID example above that's not what you want, it would allow using an int where a UserID is required.

As I understand it, there have been a couple of compiler-blessed aliases for a long time (byte -> uint8 and rune -> int32), making this a similar thing but now at user level.

The Go standard library is very well written and depending on which parts you read you can learn about lots of things like file operations, HTTP, crypto, etc.

It's easy to read it all on the web, the docs are here: https://golang.org/pkg/ and clicking on a function name shows the source.

I totally agree with you. The Go standard library's is fun to read. I end up opening multiple tabs of different packages. Lots of fun.