Another HN user recently offered a term for this: Glossification.
It's not just the internet that has gone through this, any endeavor that involves an audience will undergo a commercialization optimization process which will erode the essence of what was enjoyable to uncover what is functional. Many meaningful questions can be asked about this, all beginning with 'why'.
You can still find pieces of amateur enthusiasm in various niches hidden in corners unsearchable, almost a self-protective mechanism naturally evolved to keep what little remains for people to enjoy from the eroding process.
> I think California also has a lot more homeless than Finland ever did.
Finland had a massive homelessness problem after WW2. Many homes were destroyed in the war, and many people from lost territories had to be resettled. Most working age men were veterans, and mental issues were common.
The problem persisted even after the "deserving" homeless had been housed due to popular attitudes. Vagrancy laws were still in force, making homelessness effectively a crime if you didn't behave. It wasn't until the 80s that the society started seeing homelessness as a problem that should be solved.
Nobody wants to bet 50% of their stuff that they will love someone forever, while paying the government more tax money yearly for the privilege? I do wonder why…
I cut down a few invasive trees recently (Norway Maples). If you inoculate the branches and logs with spores of a mushroom that you want (in my case, shiitake) during the first few weeks after cutting, it will fruit with that for a few years. It's a fun DIY project, and a way to reuse trees.
To prevent unwanted mushrooms from the environment from colonizing, you seal the holes you drill, as well as the end the ends of the logs, with cheese wax - which I had heated in a crock pot, hence the need for cleaning that up.
I want a town built from scratch where me and other millenial parents who want our kids to be able to run around and ride bikes and go to corner shops can actually do so.
A billion is three groups of three zeroes. So for visualizing I would think of a cubic meter compared to a cubic millimeter.
A grain of sand serves for a cubic millimeter. For the cubic meter you can either visualize a cube that size, or four oil drums, or a small hot tub.
Now for the 30 out front, That’s about 27 which is 3^3 so let’s just size a smaller grain of sand which is only 1/3mm on a side. Maybe table salt would be good.
So a grain of table salt in a small hot tub.
If you perform this thought experiment with actual solar masses, use sufficiently long tongs and wear eye protection.
I really want augmented reality in a google glasses like format for in-person shopping. Lookup the nutrition facts and put X's over the items my configuration says I don't want.
Over the summer I got into genealogy — my partner tasked me with finding her biological parents. I did, and afterward, I took a DNA test of my own only to discover that my mom failed to tell me something (she passed away a few years ago): who my biological father is.
This was a surprise to me, my dad, and many others. Some of her girlfriends knew this situation existed, but never got a name.
And so I spent my summer in what I call "old lady Facebook groups" and learned the tricks and the trades to investigative genetic genealogy. One of the useful tips you can apply to your DNA matches called DNA color clustering — it's incredibly useful: https://www.danaleeds.com/dna-color-clustering-the-leeds-met...
Of course, I didn't want to do this by hand. There were some tools out there that existed but they were "old school" software packages: you know, you install it on your own device! "Worse" yet, I'd have to give it my raw password — no thanks! It started there, and morphed into a lot more, and now it's used by "search genies" and consumers alike: https://sherlockdna.com
There's a lot more that can be done in this realm by both providers and hackers. There's a niche for these "pro tools" that exist but the typical DNA test taker is not after any sort of genealogical exploration that requires substantial effort. There is a very sizable group of people who do, though, and those people, I have found, are very pleasant, kind, and nice to be around. I like surrounding myself with good people, so I'm happy to help them while I scratch my own itch.
All this, and I am yet to find the guy I'm looking for despite having invested over 1,000 hours into finding him. I have, though, found over two dozen "wanted" individuals (not in the criminal sense) and united them with their searcher — at least that part is satisfying.
I am a hiker and a ham and I disagree with this advice. I carried a ham radio while hiking for years and they were never a useful safety device. Here in the PNW, anywhere I was prominent enough to reach a repeater or another ham on the calling frequency, I also had plenty of cell signal. Whenever I was off the ridgelines and down in valleys, I wouldn’t be able to reach anyone with either method. Both cell phones and handheld ham radios are roughly line of sight, and when you are down in an uninhabited valley without cell coverage, it also quite doubtful there is another ham listening.
I swapped carrying a ham radio for a Garmin inReach a few years ago and it has been far more useful. I pay an annual service charge, but in return I can let my partner know I’m safe a few times a day, and I can use it to arrange for rides, neither of which I could do via ham. I have never had a problem getting reception, and it’s a much smaller, lighter device, and it recharges via USB so I never worry about spare batteries.
There are some ham specific activities for carrying a radio on the trail, like summits on the air, but if you are just trying to go hiking, get an inreach.
Anytime one finds oneself in a society which lies near the centre of an extensive trade network, one can find oneself treated to many dinners by the simple expedient of concocting a little story about how it is (not their geographical-economic situation but) their culture which is responsible for their affluence.
So I asked this same question to ChatGPT, here's its response. This thing really does have the potential to be a good recommendation tool for books/resources.
"Here are a few books that may be helpful for improving your skills as a software engineer:
"The Pragmatic Programmer" by Andrew Hunt and David Thomas: This book offers practical advice on a wide range of topics, including how to write clean and maintainable code, how to work effectively with others, and how to manage your time and priorities.
"Clean Code" by Robert C. Martin: This book focuses on the importance of writing code that is easy to read and understand, and provides specific guidance on how to write clean and maintainable code.
"Peopleware" by Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister: This book discusses the human side of software development, including how to create effective teams and work environments, and how to avoid common pitfalls such as overwork and burnout.
"Agile Software Development" by Alistair Cockburn: This book provides an introduction to agile software development methodologies, which are designed to help teams deliver high-quality software quickly and efficiently.
In addition to these books, there are many excellent blog posts and online resources on these topics. Some websites that may be helpful include the Pragmatic Programmer blog, the Agile Alliance website, and the ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes journal.
Another helpful resource may be attending conferences and workshops on software engineering and related topics. These can provide opportunities to learn from experts in the field, network with other professionals, and stay up to date on the latest trends and best practices. Many conferences and workshops also offer certification programs, which can be a valuable way to demonstrate your knowledge and expertise to potential employers. Some well-known conferences in the software engineering field include the ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE), the ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human-Computer Interaction (CHI), and the International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE).
"
You can protect a small area (like a patio) reasonably well by stretching a mesh bag over the front of a box fan (the mosquitos get blown into the bag and can't escape).
I've noticed as I've gotten older that I lean more on remembering pointers to information rather than the specific information. I know something exists and can find it quickly, but may not know it off the top of my head.
For example, how to get the length of an iterable in a given language. I may not remember the function name (or if it's a top-level function vs a method) but I know I can search "string length in $LANGUAGE" and find it. This scales better than memorizing every language feature I'll ever use.
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PS: Dash is a great mac app, highly recommend. Your job will likely cover it if it's something you think you'll use.
>>that they could notice a 1.5cm indentation difference - and not at eye level!
Yes, their trained eye can most likely see far more than any of us.
One thing I learned in neuroscience courses about perception is that one of the measures they take is the lower bound sensitivity of the perceptual system. One of the units is the JND = Just Noticeable Difference, which is well self-descriptive; find the smallest difference between two things that can be noticed. E.g., what is the smallest difference in pressure that is noticeable on a fingertip, tone or volume difference between two sounds, or the smallest size difference noticeable between two objects, etc.?
It turns out that top experts in any skill can have a JND that is about 10x finer than the average person. Moreover, they can not even know it!
I weirdly experienced this myself when I was one of the subjects in a test of discrimination of light brightness levels on a field with subtle differences. As they turned down the brightness in each round (and randomly moved the darker/lighter zones), the dark/light areas were completely obvious to me when everyone else swore that it was absolutely flat/even. I could only chalk it up to a decade of alpine ski racing training that had gotten me to top international racing levels — much of it was racing/training in flat light of cloudy days in snowfields — where we need to discern at high speed even the subtlest variations in shades of white to get critical information about snow conditions or contours. Until that test, I literally had no idea that anything was exceptional about my perceptual ability in this regard (my experience was generally that I wanted to see better), but training obviously drove changes down to the level of tuning the nervous system, even without specific intent to do so.
Science is so cool, and so are those Bedouin trackers!
But not really: time is an upward spiral, which just looks like a flat circle from the wrong perspective. Sometimes the distance between coils is so small as to vanish. Our job is to shove the coil up as much as we can while we are here.
A winemaker in the Bourgogne told me that one other good reason is the tartaric acid in the grapes. This acid is not decomposed by the bacteria and stabilizes the wine. Not that many fruits have this acid.
Something like this happened at my university a number of years ago. There was a side entrance that was ostensibly for usage by people with bikes (as it was part of the bike storage area), but it was much more convenient than the main entrance and all you had to do to get access was ask at the security desk. So anyway basically everyone on this campus with 10k+ students and more staff had access to the side entrance.
What everyone didn't know was that when you were granted access to this entrance, you were also added to the "bike storage mailing list". Long story short, at some point someone accidentally sent a message to the entire mailing list of ~100k people, which kicked off a long string off people reply-all'ing asking to be taken off said mailing list ("I don't even own a bike why am I on this mailing list"), which caused even more people to reply ("stop reply-all'ing for the love of god!"). I think there were 500 emails in my inbox from that by the end of the day.
I worked (in the US), with a French guy, who had lived in the US for many years (as an adult).
He had very little accent. He had obviously worked very hard to remove the accent (big job), but he still understood English as a secondary language, and sometimes had difficulty comprehending dialogue (especially in New York, where we talk quickly).
People didn’t cut him slack for the lack of comprehension, where I think they would have, if he had a stronger accent.
I also knew an Italian, who had a strong accent, but a better command of English than most native speakers. I think he deliberately played his accent up.
Anyone have a really old copy of Sneakers (like on laserdisc)? I noticed in the background of the bluray transfer https://files.catbox.moe/nnywzq.jpg there is this asiacrypt poster and I wondered if it was composited in later transfers over something else, as I think the conference would have been too late for the movie production.
I think sneakers still holds the record for the best number theory jargon in movie history:
"While the number-field sieve is the best method currently known, there exists an intriguing possibility for a far more elegant approach. Here we would find a composition of extensions, each Abelian over the rationals, and hence contained in a single cyclotomic field. Using the Artin map, we might induce homomorphisms from the principal orders in each of these fields that z by f z. These maps could then be used to combine splitting information from all the fields... this in turn would require the standard Kummer extensions that nontorsion form of the Jacobians of the Fermat curves gives rise to. It would be a breakthrough of Gaussian proportions and allow us to acquire the solution in a dramatically more efficient manner. Now, I should emphasize that such an approach is purely theoretical. So far, no one has been able to accomplish such constructions, yet."
My sister works in an assisted living home and she tells me the residents pay over $7,000 a month. If you can get a cruise cabin for under $200 a day then it's a bargain.
So I'm going to be the german who is going to chime in.
The german system works like this:
The frist 4 years of education you'll got to Grundschule where you learn the basics.
Then you'll get sorted in the 3 different "high school" types.
- Hauptschule
- This type of school is the least academically demanding and has a lot more
hands on classes like woodworking/cooking and the likes.
- This take usualy 5 years to complete.
- Realschule
- This is the middle ground school it offers a bit of both worlds
- this takes 6 years to complete.
- Gymnasium
- This is the more acadamiclly focus type of school, with stuff like AP
classes.
- have to learn a thrid language
- takes 8 or 9 years
But after you complete Hauptschule or Realschule you can go do an apprenticeship or add on some more school years to get the better school diploma.
Appranticeships can be in trades, manufacturing, IT or office jobs.
There is also Duales Studium where you go to collage but also work half time at a company.
As an example take my school journy:
I was sorted into the Hauptschule.
After I completet that school, I added 2 more years school time so i get a Realschul depolma, as a bonus the school I went to also touth me the frist year of electricians apprenticeship.
After that I got a apprianticeship to become a software developer which took me 3 years to complete.
social standing is even less zero sum than capital. if I choose to respect you, that doesn't mean I have to kick the next person I see in the groin.
edit: sorry, now I see. how can you lord your wealth over the peasants if they are as rich as you? why should we as a society care how much you get you put yourself above others for no good reason?
I don’t listen to a three hour interview to listen to the interviewer! I want to hear what the guest has to say.
Until now, this format basically didn’t exist. The host was the star, the guest was just a prop to be wheeled out for a ten second soundbite.
Nowhere else in the world do you get to hear thought leaders talk unscripted for hours about the things that excite them the most.
Lex enables that.
He’s like David Attenborough, who’s also worn the exact same khakis and blue shirt for decades. He’s not the star either: the wildlife is.