Tallain

The streaming service Shudder has it and it's one of my favorite features on any streaming platform.

> Maybe the fix for Craigslist would be to split into verticals

Feels like the time is ripe for something like that, too. I think you're right, that would really up Craigslist's game.

It's a very common scam to send a cashier's check for an amount + some extra, where you are expected to cash the check, keep the change, and return the amount. Later, the check will reverse, having been caught as a fraudulent check, and you're left on the hook for the entire original amount of the check.

Maybe interestingly, my experience has been the exact reverse of this. Craigslist is the only place I get legitimate responses to my listings, and Facebook Marketplace is where I get people who try to pull of these scams, or people who want to pay half of the price I list. I wonder if it has to do with the types of items being sold?

I've been meaning to, but can't pull myself away from Scrivener / Manuskript / just plain text files. Has anyone tries out WordTsar lately? It does look really neat. I'm just not sure if I'm ready to trust it with my text yet.

Adding to the list:

Puzzmo - collection of daily puzzles, including crossword, really bad chess, and more (https://www.puzzmo.com/)

I don't have a ton of experience in this realm but from what I've seen it does happen a lot -- looking good is often better than being right. A great example of this is the way they tilted the models for Zelda's A Link Between Worlds[0]. Basically everything in the world is tilted back so it looks better for the camera angle, which is designed to mimic the feel of A Link to the Past.

[0]: https://www.gameinformer.com/b/news/archive/2013/11/20/the-t...

They do have one feature that I love and wish other services implemented: the x-ray (or whatever it's called), which lets you pause and it will show you info on the actors in this scene, trivia, etc.. This is great for when you see someone and you're like "wait I know that actor... what's their name again?" -- or if you're just a weird trivia junkie. It kind of reminded me of Pop-Up Video like that.

Oh yeah. Perfect for people who want content instead of art.

> DACA is an exception for people who were already in violation of the law, no? So even if that subsystem is inconsistent, unreliable, or totally nonfunctional, it wouldn't be a reason to say the system as a whole is broken.

Let me make sure I understand the point I think you're trying to make. Because people with DACA status were in violation of the law at some point in their lives, it's acceptable to thrust upon them a broken system? So, they deserve it? I just want to be sure because it sounds like you're saying it's acceptable for this system to mistreat or otherwise neglect a subset of people because reasons.

Setting aside the fact that DACA status is Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, namely, people brought to this country as children at a time in their lives when they could not have known what was happening let alone had the agency to say, "hey wait, have you tried the normal way to immigrate into this country, mom and / or dad?"

The point I was trying to make with DACA is that the system is broken, not because of long wait times for paperwork, but because at any point the entire thing can be taken away. DACA status has been threatened multiple times. Imagine living a life you didn't ask for, not native to the land in which you live, and not native to the one you were forcibly taken from, and living under the shadow of the threat of being forcibly taken back to a strange country. That's one part of the system that is fundamentally broken, and because these people are "in violation of the law", they deserve it?

The machine doesn't work unless the parts do. Or to quote Solomon Burke, if "one of us are chained, none of us are free."

It's easy to dismiss a single piece that doesn't impact your life directly. "Great! The illegals have a hard time with immigration. Maybe they should not have broken the law, then!"

But to many it is their entire lives, and through no fault of their own. It's this contentment with injustice elsewhere that's utterly infuriating and really shines a light on the privilege of some on this forum.

Not even going to touch the "economic migrant" bit. Sounds a little too close to a dog whistle to me. Not even sure why I felt the need to engage this much.

When I read "the immigration system is broken," I don't think of the arduous process of filing paperwork. I highly doubt GP was whining about the difficult and time-consuming process of filling out reams of paperwork, especially considering the context of the rest of their post where they talked about exploiting loopholes and the letter of the law to abuse the system. Context is important! No matter how high your horse is.

In any case, the instant you fall just a little outside the prescribed lines is when things start to get hairy. Have a talk with any DACA recipient and you will quickly learn how broken the system can be. Or someone seeking refugee status around the time the annual ceiling is being reached.

I will say, I don't think I've ever faced a performance issue that was caused by poor architecture. Maybe I've been exceedingly lucky. But pretty much all of the performance issues I've encountered that I can remember are in individual queries or functions / methods (or sometimes, a group of functions / methods); discrete units of code that could be tested, changed, and fixed without any sort of re-architecture or major rewrite. Or maybe we're using different definitions of "architecture" here.

That is super interesting. Do you happen to have a link still? I'd love to learn more. I wonder how applicable it is to learning new languages as opposed to new words in a native / near-native language.

I see Make It Fast as a discrete step after Make It Right, because if it's made Right, then you can swap out the parts where optimizations need to be made. While you can't always know where slowness will occur, you do know that it will happen one day, and design the system so that swapping the "slow part" for a "fast part" is relatively trivial. That's the Make It Right part.

An well-designed API should behave so that you can fudge up whatever is happening behind the scenes, so long as the outputs remain the same based on the inputs. Design for consistency and idempotency. Implementation (read: behind the scenes) details are just that, details, and subject to change. If your implementation is tied to your interface, there are bigger problems and you skipped the Make It Right part.

I can anecdotally support the criticism of Anki / SRS for language learning, at least as far as rote word definition memorization goes.

While learning Thai -- which is a difficult language already -- I continually struggled with word definitions that should have been easy. How hard is it to remember the words for the various parts of your head and body? With just word definitions, apparently, it's really, really hard.

But then I supplemented this with other tools. One teaches a few words, then throw those words into full phrases in little quizlets. You pick out the written phrase which you think matches the spoken phrase. It always includes one or some of the words you've learned. It puts the words in context, cementing the definition, teaching you grammar, and "foreshadowing" new words. It's skyrocketed my retention and comprehension.

Pictures also help. Children's books with audio narrating are huge.

I guess my point is, Anki with word definitions alone is definitely garbage, or less than ideal at best. Which is why most language learning resources stress that it alone isn't enough - and most learning resources who push Anki (or SRS in general) don't say "do only this." It's part of a balanced breakfast, so to speak. Incorporate it into your workflow, but don't make it the workflow.

> Perhaps it doesn't work as well with large playlists? Me and my friends tend toward 1000+ songs in a playlist, but most other playlists I've found are rarely over 250 songs.

I think you're right. Recently I spent a bit of time writing about and playing with various shuffling algorithms, trying to see if I could find something that works better for me than the built-in shuffle.

The answer is: it's hard! An algorithm that works for a well-distributed set won't work so well for something with large clusters of similar stuff (think a mixtape vs a playlist consisted of a dozen albums from six different artists). And even when you think you've come up with a good solution, it works well six times, and then the seventh you start to find something that doesn't work quite how you like. It's a process of tweaking.

My final test case was a large playlist like you describe, since I have a few of these, too.

This is what I found worked best for me:

- (Optionally) Fisher-Yates shuffle the whole thing, then - Slice the playlist into X chunks - Shuffle the order of the chunks using Fisher-Yates - Analyze the contents of the chunks - Pick a suitable shuffling algorithm based on the contents - Shuffle the contents of each chunk

There are lots of details around things like, how recently was this artist/album/compilation played? What's the relative tempo or genre of the most recent X songs, and how "harshly" are we willing to change it up? Is this a playlist with a lot of disparate songs (by artist/album/compilation) or is it a collection of like-minded albums and artists? Is the playlist just someone's discography? etc.

It takes a lot of passes and a lot of listening to find and tweak these things to find something that works and feels good. And in the end, I don't think the people who can do this are incentivized to actually do this. Especially considering the linked Spotify article is an entire decade old by now, and the Every Noise at Once guy was let go seemingly at random by Spotify. They care about "good enough for now" more than Actual Quality.

SQL Server Central has a "Stairway to T-SQL" series that starts off with some light history and then has two fairly decent chapters diving into the mathematics of SQL. It's not intensive by any means, but more than most other resources (and even some textbooks I've read).

[0]: https://www.sqlservercentral.com/stairways/stairway-to-t-sql...

> So many, yourself included, have this perverted view of the world where there's no way it could exsist without our current monetary system

I don't appreciate this assumption; lumping me into a group of characters based on nothing I've said / something you have assumed, based on no evidence, is quite counterproductive to a healthy conversation. If you're going to try to make an argument at least base it on the content of my post and not some inference you've made based on nothing I've provided.

I'm sympathetic to your situation, and do wish you the best in staying on your feet. And I am quite, quite far from a capitalist / capitalist-apologist / what-have-you.

It sounds like you're talking toward using AI tools to effectively "duplicate" yourself, to reduce the scarcity of your own time. I hope I'm interpreting that correctly. I'm 100% on-board with letting the computers do the work so we can all go off and enjoy our lives. It's dismaying that "productivity increase" means "do more in the same amount of time" instead of "do the same in less time and then go live."

This is still a far cry from duplicating the creative work of others (cloning a performer's ability, potentially for profit), and it's still got nothing to do with actual "artificial scarcity." Again, this is real scarcity. There are only so many hours in a day. You only have so much brain power to expend within those hours. These aren't pro-capitalist statements and I'm not insinuating that anything follows from them. I'm only being pedantic here. :)

>Sure, their creation is held behind legal walls in order to create, by definition, an artifical scarcity from which it derives its monetary value. If it was not protected by such a wall, and was not scarce, it would have no monetary value.

That's... not artificial scarcity. By definition (and using your own words) it is actual scarcity.

A person's performance -- which is more than just their voice reading lines -- is not held back behind some imaginary wall. It's literally limited by the hours in the day, the person's ability to get from place A to place B, etc.; it's not like David Attenborough is a Santa Claus figure and can be in California narrating a documentary and in New York providing some random dude a personal voiceover for his life simultaneously.

> I ask: are we stuck as a monoculture, not making new, interesting things, but simply replicating older ones?

Probably, but I hope not (or at least not for long).

I think it's normal for people to want to retell stories (see the way we pass jokes around like viruses, or the oral tradition, or the million "re-imaginings" of classics). I also think that inclination has been weaponized and turned against us. Producers -- movie, music, or other -- push or are pushed to maximize gain while minimizing risk. And what feels better than nostalgia? What feels better than a story that doesn't challenge you, doesn't prompt any sort of introspection, or hell, any inspection at all?

I think it's a symptom of the push for profit over all else. I do think we ache for new things, but the ship of monoculture is a big one and takes a long time to steer. A lot of momentum is behind where we're at and it's going to take a lot to get away.

Not just technological advancements; we have a history of comparing ourselves to that which surrounds us, is relatively ubiquitous, and easily comprehended by others when using the metaphor. Today it's this steady march of technological advancement, but read any older work of philosophy and you will see our selves (particularly, our minods) compared to monarchs, cities, aqueducts.[1]

I point this out because I think the idea of comparing ourselves to recent tech is more about using the technology as a metaphor for self, and it's worth incorporating the other ways we have done so historically for context.

[1]: https://online.ucpress.edu/SLA/article/2/4/542/83344/The-Bra...

Do you have a few favorites in this genre?

For Netflix, it's not just about new shows driving subscriber count. I'm probably summarizing incorrectly, but it also has to do with their royalty structure. Canceling a show after two seasons allows them to save a ton of money by short-changing their creators and stars, while still getting headlines about signing huge-figure deals with those same people.

[source]: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/general-news/tvs-new-...

Hey just a heads up, the page you're taken to when you click "Apply Now" appears to have some messed up formatting: https://i.imgur.com/wQjFTZf.png

This is in Firefox; I haven't looked with Chrome.

If you're looking specifically for roguelike tutorials, the roguesharp link provided above is good. Also, SadConsole[0] is a great library and has a friendly and helpful Discord community.

If it's general gamedev resources for C#, then I would suggest Cynthia McMahon's Eyes of the Dragon series[1], for C# / Monogame. It goes through topics like input handling, drawing, tooling, etc. A thing I like about this as well is that it's not "perfect" off the bat -- an entry later will return to code written previously and talk about its benefits and drawbacks, and then refactor that code for a new goal or sometimes to just make it better. If you're new to C#, development, or game development, it offers a good perspective into what doing this "for real" looks like.

[0]: http://sadconsole.com/v8/articles/tutorials/get-started/draw...

[1]: https://cynthiamcmahon.ca/blog/category/eyes-of-the-dragon/

Just a heads up, your direct links are all broken.

I will add my anecdote to the pile. It seems like there are a good number of positions out there, but it also seems like most of them are asking for senior level folks. Then, the ones I interview stall out because I either have too much experience, or not enough experience - I'm square in the middle ground where it seems nothing is quite right for me.

I believe the price is similar, but Deezer[0] has a decent music library plus podcasts. Its recommendation engine also works a little differently. The "Flow" engine lets you listen as a radio station with known and unknown tracks thrown in with actually decent recommendations.

Much better than Spotify, which only ever "recommended" artists I've already listened to, or artists I didn't like, or genres I didn't. If you listen to a wide variety of music, it doesn't know how to handle this apparently.

[0]: https://www.deezer.com/us/

Have you heard of Manuskript[0]? It's an open source editor with a lot of features similar to Scrivener, runs on Linux/Windows/Mac, and has a few features that Scrivener doesn't have that have helped me plan things more fully in the past. It's not perfect, but it's a solid tool. Also, it's backed by Markdown text files.

[0]: https://www.theologeek.ch/manuskript/

Location: California

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: C#, SQL + SQL administration + db design, Javascript, VueJS, Python

Résumé/CV: Real thing on request; summary: two years of professional development experience with several years prior of informal experience (writing code as QA), a few years of analyst and IT work, and before that, some more years in freelance web development & design (nearly 10 years ago).

Email: tallain@gmail.com