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Ariarule

4,284 karma · joined October 26, 2011

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Ariarule··on A society without a counterculture?
The top grossing films of the 1970s? The original Star Wars, Jaws, The Exorcist, Alien, The Godfather? Rocky 2 and Jaws 2 are also on the list so it's not like there weren't any sequels at all, but that group of films really _wasn't_ dominated by remakes and franchise films:

https://www.imdb.com/list/ls026560159/

By comparison, entries for the 2010s include MCU franchise films, Star Wars Sequels, Jurassic World (a sequel), The Lion King (Remake), etc:

https://www.imdb.com/list/ls026040906/

Going year-by-year doesn't really change things very much: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest-grossing_films...

Ariarule··on A society without a counterculture?
This is reminiscent a bit of Ross Douthat's _The Decadent Society_, especially (but not only) in the discussion of the continuous stream of movie remakes.
Ariarule··on Should we put lithium in the water? (2011)
Maybe not, it _might_ cause obesity: https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2021/10/11/a-chemical-hunger-i...

It's interesting that this downside wasn't even on the radar of this article in 2011, and indeed no serious consideration of possible downsides was presented at all, just a snide dismissal that "anyone who has tangled with the anti-fluoride campaign will realise that lithium lobbyists will have a long, hard road to travel."

Ariarule··on Taskwarrior
I use Taskwarrior daily, but have a love-hate relationship with it after running into sharp edges and quirks several times. Hopefully this doesn't come across as too harsh as Taskwarrior is good as a command line utility for tracking one-off personal tasks -- maybe the best and I recommend it for that limited case -- but it has some warts that anyone newly looking into it should be aware of:

The recurrence system is listed as an "advanced topic" in the documentation. I gave up on trying to make heads or tails of recurrence in TimeWarrior after fighting with it for years and having way too many times where I had meant to make a change to just a particular single task, and then having unexpected changes to several tasks in a series, or to the template task, or having just that particular instance changed but then the recurrence ends up creating new tasks in a funny way, etc. I once had a particular edit to a reoccurring task create hundreds of instances the next time I looked at the task list.

Continuing on with recurring tasks, The Taskwarrior documentation notes "you never directly interact with... the template task. It is hidden for a reason. Instead, you interact with the recurring task instances" Hope you don't want make a change to future instances without changing any current instances. You can do it, but it's unnecessarily cumbersome.

Ultimately, I've actually found it easier to run a script outside of TW on an hourly basis that checks for the last completed task with a particular user defined field for each task that I want to recur, then creates a new instance if needed. This works nicely as there's no longer any linkage within TW between individual tasks in a "series", preventing a change from copying from from one to the others, and it's impossible to accidentally make a change to the "template" since the template is no longer a record within TW at all. I do note that the facts that there are python (and other) libraries that make this trivial and that it's possible to define fields on a task this way are notable strengths of TaskWarrior. Nonetheless, the fantastic CLI ergonomics for one-time tasks are just missing for things that happen more than once. That a template for a task is itself a task record seems like some really bad conceptual confusion in the design, and extremely kludgy.

A quick look at sibling comments or a general web search for discussion about TaskWarrior recurrence issues will show problems with recurrence are not uncommon.

The units used for the length of time in the urgency calculation for things like task age, due date are unintuitive and there is no explanation of this rather important point in the documentation (https://taskwarrior.org/docs/urgency.html for reference). As a specific example, I have a task entered 5 weeks ago which task info tells me is an age of 0.107, while a task entered 23 hours ago has an age of 0.003. This kind-of looks like 1 per year, but why? Also, time to due date is definitely not 1 per year. It also looks like age has a ceiling of 1 since this value appears for very old tasks, and that time to due date is similarly limited, but again, not documented.

The built-in reports are kind of nice, and the fact that you can define your own "reports" (really task lists with custom columns) is also nice, but it'd be even better to be able to be able to just throw SQL directly at it. There's a TaskWarrior-inspired utility "Tasklite" that does just this by storing tasks in SQLite, although I haven't tried it myself yet. The Tasklite criticism of TaskWarrior is also worth considering: https://tasklite.org/differences_taskwarrior.html

You can get tasks out of Taskwarrior in JSON format with "task export" and there are scripts to further transform this into other formats, but you need to do an extra step to import this into another tool for any analysis you might want to do.

Reports like ghistory.daily and ghistory.weekly can get long and unwieldy. There are ways to deal with this, but it's annoying, and makes me question if the developers themselves are using these reports on a list of completed tasks going back several years or not.

Taskserver is another area that seems poorly thought-out and over-engineered, similar to recurrence, and I'd caution anyone considering using Taskwarrior on more than one computer to look over the Taskserver Setup guide at https://gothenburgbitfactory.github.io/taskserver-setup/ while noting the following:

* Just copying the files around between Taskwarrior instances e.g. with Syncthing or something like that mostly works, but a lot of tools/attempts at mobile apps for TaskWarrior rely on having TaskServer. The sync issues noted in various places by using a file-level sync like this are definitely possible, but the practical implication for a task list that most likely belongs to a single individual is questionable.

* Per the guide, "There are two 'D's in TASKDDATA, and omitting one is a common mistake" in reference to an environmental variable defined, as far as I can tell, entirely within this document. Naming things is hard and this is admittedly a small detail, but why not remove the pitfall rather than just warning about it?

* You will need a CA certificate to "to sign and verify the other certs" -- "The command below will generate all the certs and keys for the server, but this uses self-signed certificates, and this is not recommended for production use. This is for personal use, and this may be acceptable for you, but if not, you will need to purchase a proper certificate and key, backed by a certificate authority."

* "Certificates coming from Let's encrypt have not been successfully used by anyone. Please remember that Let's encrypt only generates servers, but we need a client certificate as well."

* This is rather a lot of work just to be able to _add tasks on your phone_ while you're away from your desk or even just to sync tasks between what might be two or three desktops, and it's pretty clear they had more of an "enterprise environment" or a hosting service like InThe.AM in mind when they wrote it. Regarding that particular service, it is open-source but "Setting this up locally as a clone of Inthe.AM is, unfortunately, not supported" - https://intheam.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

By contrast, there's another project dstack which is also Taskwarrior-inspired but "uses git to synchronize instead of a special protocol" at https://github.com/naggie/dstask -- this is also something I haven't tried it myself yet but it looks interesting, although doesn't itself help with getting tasks on/off a phone as far as I know.

Ariarule··on 867-5309 in All US and Canadian Area Codes
Having not even heard of them before seeing this page, I think it's interesting that "Totally 80s Pizza" both has a phone number supporting their marketing, while simultaneously using an 867-5309 number for a purpose that has something to do with the song.
Ariarule··on Yahoo Acquires Del.icio.us (2005)
From millions of dollars to $35000 by 2017: https://thenextweb.com/news/its-the-end-of-an-era-as-pinboar...
Ariarule··on Why aren’t there more dogs at the doctor’s office?
The article gives _good_ sensitivity and specificity numbers for dogs, under appropriate conditions.
Ariarule··on The Next 10 Days Will Decide This War
While the change in who was favored to win the 2016 election was indeed large, it didn't change that dramatically and didn't change in seconds. The NYT 2016 prediction chart is still available on their site: https://www.nytimes.com/elections/2016/forecast/president

The labeling on the horizontal axis on the chart is terrible, but roughly this is a change from 20% to 95% in about 2 or 3 hours. It doesn't look like they ever had it at less than 15% (again, give or take a few points due to bad infographic-esque picture).

Ariarule··on Regrets of the Dying (2010)
Robin Hanson expressed some doubts about this list back in 2010: https://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/11/deathbed-regret-is-fa...
Ariarule··on Crazy Theorizing About Hair Loss
That dramatically misses the context within the article; this is being used by the author as reasonable consideration of potential problem with the theory rather than as support for it:

"The main reason I don't like this theory is kind of an efficient-markets reason: there are literally billions of men who are concerned about hair loss. The most popular preventative treatment for hair loss carries the risk of nasty side effects, like depression or erectile disfunction. If we could prevent hair loss and even regrow hair by breaking the causal chain "upstream" of hormones, why isn't this totally common knowledge? Why aren't anti-hair-loss subreddits like /r/tressless constantly advocating for botox injections as a supplement or replacement for hormonal treatments?"

Ariarule··on CFIREsim 3.0 – Retirement Simulator
It even says so:

"Retirement End Year - Time to get real grim here… this is when you’re expecting to not need your retirement fund anymore. Put in a different way, it is when you expect to die. There are a number of factors that play into this, but I would suggest looking at the Social Security Administrations chart here. As of the date that I wrote this post, I am a 39 year old female, and that chart tells me that on average I can expect to live 43.41 more years. So, I personally would set the Retirement End Year to 2072 (2021 + 43.41 = 2062.41 + 10 years of padding just to be sure)." -- https://www.cfiresim.com/tutorials/

Ariarule··on Google rewrites history when you search for the 1984 film cast
Is John Hurt controversial in some way that's not obvious from looking over his Wikipedia page for a minute that he'd be intentionally omitted?
Ariarule··on Wisconsin Judge Prevents Nurses from Going to New Employer
The original article has so little information about what that case is actually about, it's stiking by its absence. There's discussion about motivations, but no real discussion about any relevant laws. It's like it's from a parallel universe where the entire concept of a legal system doesn't exist.
Ariarule··on Ask HN: One feature that you wish Mozilla didn't remove from Firefox?
There's "Open Image in a New Tab" so "View Image" is not "really" gone: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1690030
Ariarule··on Safest mushrooms to forage and eat
There was a post about a month ago about recent-ish advances in cultivated morels: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29480357
Ariarule··on Draco: Killing Sickness [video]
From 2016, notably and somewhat unfortunately. Kimer Med said more recently that they "signed an exclusive license agreement for US patent 7566694, 'Anti-Pathogen Treatments,' which is the one and only remaining active patent related to Todd Rider’s original DRACO work" - https://www.kimermed.co.nz/whats-new/
Ariarule··on $1T flowed into stocks in 2021, greater than last 20 years combined
This misses that the share is an asset _with a monetary value_ even though it's not money itself. It's true but not relevant that various measures of the money supply, M0, M1, etc. are unchanged.

The chart in the original article is of Annual Equity Fund flows, which are net values _considering both sides since it includes negative values_ -- a measurement of this supposedly nonexistant flow. While money remains constant from a trade, the stock of equity (in both senses of the term "stock") changes.

Ariarule··on $1T flowed into stocks in 2021, greater than last 20 years combined
Right, every _share_ purchased is also a share sold (in principle), but that price will not usually be the same price that the current seller originally purchased the share at themselves. As a result, you can have inflow/outflows in dollar amounts. For individuals stocks, with increasing/decreasing market caps, but of course there can be more money in the market overall.
Ariarule··on FDA approves drug to treat smallpox
Meta-humor, maybe? "A factoid is either an invented or assumed statement presented as a fact, or a true but brief or trivial item of news or information" -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factoid
Ariarule··on NYT publishes then deletes article claiming fields of watermelons found on Mars
Besides the laugh-factor, it does make you wonder a bit about what sort of controls are in place to stop random unvetted articles, like this placeholder, from going onto the site. Although the ridiculousness of the story may have been intentional so it'd be immediately obvious.
Ariarule··on Why you should read Master and Margarita creator Bulgakov
The link isn't working because of the slash at the very end -- not sure if that may have been autocorrected in.
Ariarule··on Oklahoma woman charged with felony for not returning VHS tape 21 years ago
I'm surprised no one else in response has brought up notification requirements for background checks:

"...if the employer thinks it might not hire or retain you because of something in the report, it must give you a copy of the report and a 'notice of rights' that tells you how to contact the company that made the report." -- https://www.eeoc.gov/laws/guidance/background-checks-what-jo...

Ariarule··on Stripe have suspended the Flipper One campaign
Why do you think so? The link posted says the 30-day rule applies when "no shipment statement" is made.
Ariarule··on BitClout, a social network with big backers and vocal critics
I am surprised given both the similarity even in _name_ and using the a similar practice of creating profiles with an assigned value from public profiles on social media sites that this is not drawing more comparisons with Klout. Has Klout been dead _that_ long? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klout
Ariarule··on How libraries decide which books to keep (2014)
For what it's worth, and just from a quick search, "CREW: A Weeding Manual for Modern Libraries" is pretty unambiguous about the subject of local history and mentions that items like that should be kept as a specific exception to any other metrics or guidelines several times: "Retain local history except when the item is shabby and beyond repair." -- https://www.tsl.texas.gov/ld/pubs/crew/

So, what you've described is a textbook example of what a library should not do.

Ariarule··on How libraries decide which books to keep (2014)
There is slightly tongue-in-cheek blog "reviewing" removed titles from libraries at https://awfullibrarybooks.net/ -- the "Why We Weed" section has some additional links with more serious information on the topic.
Ariarule··on The Great Filter – Are We Almost Past It? (1998)
For anyone noting the 1998 date and not already aware, Robin Hason is still writing on the topic off and on at the _Overcoming Bias_ blog, and has had a few posts on the topic just this month: "Why We Can’t See Grabby Aliens" -- more generally about life in the universe at https://www.overcomingbias.com/2021/01/why-we-cant-see-grabb... and "Try-Menu-Combo Filter Steps" explicitly talking about the Great Filter idea some more at https://www.overcomingbias.com/2021/01/try-menu-combo-filter...
Ariarule··on Parler has been compromised. DM's as well as SSN's and other ID leaked
Snopes has this listed as false, and the linked Tweet has been deleted: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/was-parler-hacked/
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