MarkLowenstein

You know how maddening it is when you try to break apart styrofoam packaging supports to fit it in a garbage bag, and all those bits cling to you and refuse to go in the bag? This is that, only writ large over the entire Earth.

Anyone looking over my comment history knows that I am nobody's fool for overblown environmental crises. But just look at that video of them piling up the blocks. Those little clingy granules are going everywhere already, and that's before anybody tries to chop up some infrastructure they've built with this.

Pickups, SUVs, and minivans are wider on average than other cars. Could they just be simply hitting more people per car, because they're sweeping more area? (Can't access full paper.)

The replies to this thread highlight how there are two different camps of computer user.

One camp, full of very able computer users, responds immediately with techniques and suggestions for how to do something, because (1) that's what they'd want to hear, and (2) they're generous with their advice.

The second camp says "Why shouldn't the UI do what my intuition clearly craves? I'm not interested in learning alternate ways to bend my mind just to do something that Apple could have provided with minimal effort."

I'll bet you wish "New Text Document" would be the first choice by now too, using most-recently-used order. Has anyone ever right-clicked and said "Yeah I want to make a new Microsoft Access Database here"?

One time I encountered a gradient splotch near the top of my screen. It persisted no matter what application was in the foreground there, so I thought for sure my monitor had gone bad. Turned off and on, same thing. But then I thought, there's no low to where software construction can go, so even this might be a bug. Rebooted, and presto! No more gradient, monitor was fine. Must have been some Win 7 compositor bug. As I said, there's never a low.

My theory, and I don't know why this is never mentioned: all societies eventually retreat into inhabiting a purely simulated universe (Matrix/Holodeck), where EM emissions and space exploration become a thing of the past, and the society just "goes dark".

The dynamic that guarantees it is that great stuff is almost always cheaper/easier to experience via simulation than in reality. We already know that TV plots and video game situations are endlessly more entertaining than our real-world lives. Arranging computing power that can fool our eyes and ears is way easier than mustering the materials to get ourselves into space.

I get the same feeling as dublin. Theory: vertical is one-handed, definitely never two. Pushing is therefore weak. And to push it means you're going to increasingly wedge your own hand in between the handle and door as you go. Ouch!

Horizontal: two hands is invited and you know viscerally that you're stronger that way so you don't even consider using one. Pulling this backwards would be strange since you'd have to walk yourself backwards even though you want to go forward. Plus you can't go straight backwards or you'd have to let go with one hand, so you'd have to go at an arc and end up having to run around the door you just pulled out to go through.

I think our bodies understand those things subconsciously in about 300 ms.

I'm always waiting for something to happen so I can take my card out finally. Then the message changes, so I take my card out. But it was only changing to yet another phrasing of "Do not remove your card". Like when you're a kid about to start a race, and the starter says "Ready, set, STOP! Ha ha ha"

That sounds good - you'll probably find that it's better than my bottom two. The Bravus is like 3/4 quite-good stout mixed with 1/4 Russian "kvass" if you've ever had that malt beverage.

How timely. I like good beer and crave one most every day. About four weeks ago I found a store selling a good variety of NA craft beer. I switched to NA beer as my norm. It was a great choice. I sleep less but feel better, and my daily craving is totally satisfied. I've only had two regular beers since then.

Nothing is as tasty yet as the best regular beers, so each one involves a bit of sacrifice, but I've found these to be good choices:

Bravus Oatmeal Stout

Surreal 17 Mile Porter

Wellbeing Hell-Raiser dark amber

I was thinking plant species: kudzu, Scotch broom, etc.

Hard to believe that the most important effect of humans on plant health wouldn't be invasive species. The article doesn't acknowledge that at all.

Designers and programmers seem to have a blind spot for the "I'm not interested" idea. I've pushed this for 15 years whenever I can in products we make, and literally no one gets it (I call it the "Sucks" button). What would make Netflix browsing, or any search result list, way better? Getting to go down the list and quickly say "Sucks. Sucks. Sucks."

The usual counter-point is "What will people do if they change their minds later?", which makes me tear my hair out.

Echos and Homes are natural-language understanders that remain on in people's rooms. I know I didn't cite Google except via YouTube. Google Fi, Google Voice are...who knows, but I'm pretty sure your call contents are available to them. But by "more" I didn't necessarily mean a superset; I meant a greater amount of stuff: your email, your postings, your messages to your friends, when you do stuff, where you've been, etc.

Picture the scenes from the Man in the High Castle, where rows of listeners are monitoring people's phone conversations to make sure they can identify people who oppose their rule. That is Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, and YouTube, right now.

Except they can now monitor a lot more than just phone calls. And they have the infinite memory of data storage so they can look you up later instead of wasting live listeners on you now. And they have real-time automated tools to pop up messages in your face to influence you, or let you report other people for wrongthink.

Employees of these organizations should be raising Cain about it. If they saw it on TV they'd be aghast. But hmmm, in real life they don't seem to mind.

After reading as much of the article as I could, I concluded that the best way to avoid malaise is to quit being so introspective; quit acting like my gratification is so dang important; and just go do something.

This is the only post that I see so far that touches on the real innovation and unique value of jQuery: operating on groups. Everybody can go ahead and tell me that using a forEach every time is trivial, or that I can just insert some transpiler step in my build pipeline to take advantage of X language's convenient syntax, but the bottom line is that people use jQuery because it continues to be easier. Thank you for your insight and great design sense John Resig! Still not bested after 15 years.

I have another in middle school, same district. It's only about 5-10% as pronounced there as in the high schools.

You casting doubt on the poster's assertions makes me incredibly angry. You clearly don't know anything about what's going on in public schools yet you pretend to be wiser than the poster about it.

I have a kid in a public high school. He has shared pictures, video, links, and schedules. Also I have visited local high schools and seen the messaging being delivered on the walls. These schools have one mission right now, above anything else: crank out social-justice warriors; get some reliable street troops on the ground for leftist causes.

Do NOT dare to tell me it is not like I describe.

1. Special presentations carved out from academic class time every day for black history month, with presentations about white privilege and other fodder to cultivate racial grievance.

2. A week devoted to BLM during that month, with similar time carved out each day from many classes for a presentation that included justifications for hate against white people and exhortations about how you should become an "Ally". Including a black poet that read that she was justified in calling white people "the devil" and lumped all white people who didn't jump to BLM action into the category of aggressors that deserve the violence of BLM protests.

3. "Open" class discussions after such presentations where everyone is called on to share their thoughts, but of course only certain thoughts are permissible and discipline is doled out to those who disagree.

4. A school-wide presentation by the "equity association" that re-enacted all the horrible things white people do to black people, such as saying they like fried chicken and watermelon, to demonstrate just how bad white people are all the time.

5. Gay pride month where they devoted more class time to special presentations and discussions, like Bill Nye saying that in addition to that little "sex" thing, there's also all these other more important dimensions like "gender" that need to be dwelled on.

6. Time off granted if you join a walk-out for preferred causes like global warming activism.

7. Posters around school lauding the actions of "world-changing" demonstrators. All leftist demonstrators of course.

8. Lots and lots of "No human is illegal" signs all over.

9. In my kid's school, at least one classroom decorated from top to bottom with Black Panther publicity and aggressive black-defiance messages.

10. In my spouse's teacher training, 100% of the time has been spent on "anti-bias" and "equity" training. Where no problem existed in the least.

11. School district hiring 6-figure "diversity consultants" by the dozen, all of whom will do nothing except arrange presentations such as I cited above. And then they claim to need a new tax levy to hire enough teachers or pay them decently.

So whatever you've seen in terms of CRT quizzes and stereotype pyramids, what you don't understand is that it's way worse than that. It's not just obnoxiously flooding kids with racial stereotypes. It's not just that that is a topic that is 100% unrelated to education. It's that they are cultivating racial grievance. And they are pitting student against student to get it done as completely as possible.

I'm a mild-mannered guy. And I've never been so pissed off in my life.

The classic Onion News Network videos are proof of your point. They're hilarious because while the content is ridiculous, the rhythm and theatrics are so clearly shared with every other newscast.

Thank you! I'm always saying "English is the Lingua Franca of the tech world"...and no one ever gets the joke.

I'm an obsessive idealist and I blame OO programming for my unfathomable (to most people) lack of productivity. With OO I always see, for instance, that code organization B is better than code organization A for very good reason. And C is better than B. But then A is better than C, also for good reason. After that nothing gets done.

I feel like I got more done writing assembly when I was 13 than I do today.

For you youngins out there, here's a phrase you may have never heard: "Please allow 6-8 weeks for delivery". Keep in mind that Amazon singlehandedly made that a cliche of the past. They're still that good, even if they disappoint in some ways.

Important considerations. Also regarding the power of scale, I think people are happy to go straight to Amazon instead of shopping around because they're confident the price they get is going to be at least as good as anyone else.

So consider my proposal to add to the lexicon of common market regulations: Same Price for All. You can't charge one customer any different unit price than another. (You can add a flat transaction/processing cost and maybe price-proportional fraud-insurance fee.) Volume, customer non grata, negotiated deals...nothing changes the advertised price.

Believe me, I'm one of the most laissez-faire people you're going to meet. But I think this ends up being healthy for all for the same reasons that other anti-monopoly laws do.

I liked your suggested mitigations. Well-designed to accommodate human motivation, and simple enough to be practical.

Not Russian but my wife is - grew up there until college age. She was saying this exact thing a couple weeks ago (which is why I took interest in this article): that smiling at a stranger will cause them to dismiss you as stupid. So I'd say Yes.

I guess we've decided that temperatures in 1850 were the perfect temperatures, and we're going to stick with them. If humans continue to live in a peaceful and technological world over thousands or millions of years, the natural climate ups and downs will seem to be suddenly forced into an unnaturally straight line, starting somewhere around now, due to everyone being unwilling to allow change.

Warning: this ScienceAlert article misunderstands the original paper and claims that non-replicated studies are 153 times as likely to be cited as replicated ones. This outrageous figure is not what the authors claimed.

Authors claim "cited 153 times less": ambiguous language, where they really meant "cited 153 fewer times". ScienceAlert writer turned that into "153 times more likely".

The Missing Piece is such a great metaphor for the dynamics of relationships that it continues to predict reality beyond even what Silverstein imagined.

You've got the wedge and incomplete circle, that when fitting together just right, roll along perfectly. That becomes unstable once one piece changes.

Then you've got the end-state: two self-sufficient circles which roll in parallel, just because they choose to.

The first two stay together via a strong need, like a dipole-dipole bond between molecules of a solid. The second stay together with a much weaker, Van der Waals force, and are easily separated.

It very aptly predicts the rise in divorces in the West once women had more opportunities to be self-sufficient. I won't address if that's good or bad; I just want to compliment Silverstein on a very successful metaphor.

Ha, your technique worked! It didn't taste like anything - one of those characteristics of non-reactive chemicals. It did get stuck in my throat on the first try, so I got it down with water like a pill. (It was one of those short/round/1-studded pieces.)