ThJ

Paywalled. Tried outline.com on it, but it's not supported. Anybody got an un-paywalled link?

I'm from Norway and the Norwegian ideal of wealth is that you're not supposed to show it off.

The richest man in Norway is real estate mogul Olav Thon, and he basically dresses like a tramp.

It was originally meant as satire of small-town Scandinavia. But... You're definitely not encouraged make a big deal out of yourself over here. Maturity means to do your part to help the people around you. Taking up space is somewhat frowned upon and people are generally uncomfortable with accepting compliments. The mindset is collective. But there's a social class of business people and professional athletes who don't think that way. I think you basically have to be in small circles, have special abilities or be born into a family of business people to get exposed to an individualist mindset like that.

This is going to be hard to explain without outlining a whole recording setup, but basically, a lot of the time, in a given musician's studio, the program numbers are going to refer to different things depending on how he chose to configure the patches (presets) on his synthesisers. In some cases, patches aren't even used, such as when an old Minimoog is retrofitted with MIDI and the notion of "Flute" or "Piano" becomes meaningless. In other cases, the synthesiser is a sampler and the samples were programmed by the musician at custom program numbers. In the case of software instruments in a DAW, patches are usually chosen by the DAW itself and no program message is sent to the synth, just note on/off, modulation, pitch bend and other controller messages, and if a switch of instruments is needed during a song, you just add a new track for that.

Basically, MIDI began as a protocol used between hardware devices. General MIDI is a product of the ROMpler era, a ROMpler being a sampler that can't be reprogrammed, i.e. what most people know as a "keyboard", and it's far from universal.

Musicians often don't care about standardising. They're hooking up all sorts of wonky instruments to their rig and reconfiguring it for one-off projects. There is often no need to recall specific patches after you've recorded the part you wanted.

My city (Oslo, Norway) also has buildings that are centuries old, but they are kept clean. When I went to Stockholm a couple of years back, their old buildings looked dirty because no one seemed to be cleaning them.

Cool tech. Not so cool CEO.

I suspect this is a matter of ideologies. A constellation of tangential policies derived from various ideological values widely held in Europe conspire to make it difficult for tech giants to exist.

You can't build a boat if you don't recognise the existence of the sea, are opposed to things that float and require all boats to have holes in them.

It's obvious when stated like that, but now replace the boat with attitudes and policies that indirectly affect the viability of tech startups.

As I've mentioned elsewhere in this thread, Scandinavians are big on DIY and minimalism, and not big on service. This is a common complaint from foreigners who visit, but it's the working culture here. You, the customer, a a big boy and can take care of yourself.

The Nordic countries are not big on service, because you're a big boy and can take care of yourself. The reason IKEA came from Sweden is because that's the attitude here. Shop clerks aren't there to be your servants. They are your equals. Foreigners often complain of the awful service they get here, but it's a deliberate part of the working culture.

It helps if you just imagine that every large brick and mortar chain in the Nordic countries operates kind of like IKEA. Lots of self service, spartan shop interior, and also, since labour is expensive here and you can't fuck your employees over with low wages like you can elsewhere, store owners tend to want to cut down on the number of staff.

Most of the stuff they're doing seems to be entirely commonplace for the supermarket chains we have here in Norway.

The coins for the carts.

Stacking crates instead of individual items.

Training every employee for everything (it's not uncommon to see a store manager operating the cash register).

Expecting customers to fill their own bags and charging for those bags.

Smaller selection.

The only unique part seems to be the tendency to promote the shop's own brand over name brands.

On a related note: Lidl tried and failed to get a foothold here in Norway with similar tactics. It didn't work. Perhaps because our mainstream store chains are already so similar to Lidl, except our domestic chains offer actual name brand products and the Lidl stores didn't, and I think that's why they failed. Also, people who are really desperate to save money can just go to Sweden to shop. It's not a very long drive.

The constant pressure to produce makes me feel like I'm a horse who has accidentally been hooked up to a milking machine, and they were actually looking for something with udders.

TL;DR: Some kind of tension, stress or resistance builds up over time, I procrastinate more and more until nothing gets done, and then I have to shake things up somehow.

Author here.

I'm deliberately leaving the explanation blank, because I've learned from experience that such explanations are often just something you make up after the fact.

What I can tell you is that I consistently reach a point where I simply can't find the will power to continue. I can only find the will to do something else, to go somewhere else. The underlying reason for a feeling is always difficult to pinpoint.

My feelings when I'm in the situation are a mix of stress, anger and hopelessness. I want anything but to perform the task that has been assigned to me. I want to get the hell out of there.

Whenever I attempt to address the problem with the people around me, their proposed solutions are always very plain: Take a walk. Take a vacation. Get some rest. Don't worry so much.

To some extent, taking a very long break does resolve it, but I can't take 3-6 months off from work every year. I have considered working half-time, but this leads me to ask why I want to work half-time in the first place? Why do I want to work less?

Possible answers:

1. I am doing something wrong.

2. I'm a fundamentally broken person who can never hold a job.

Option 2 isn't exactly what you call a constructive or positive attitude, so I'm betting on option 1.

Two perspectives on the recent grand entry of Microsoft into the Linux space:

1. Linux won in the embedded (ARM devices), mobile (Android) and server spaces, and this is Microsoft bowing to that.

2. This is Microsoft's embrace, extend and extinguish strategy from the 1990s in a new wrapper. They just had to do it to an operating system this time.

Not sure if these perspectives are correct, but I'm just throwing them out there as food for thought.

TL;DR: Snobbery.

The spire was rebuilt in the 19th century because the old one had fallen apart. As far as I can tell from Wikipedia, it was a replica of the original one.

As for why people are talking about redesigning it? I think this is down to Europe's rejection of classical art and craftsmanship, whereas in the United States, imitating classical art remains popular. That's what American 2D animation studios such as Disney did, for example. The only art school in Italy that teaches Renaissance painting techniques was set up by Americans. Go figure.

To a European who views himself as a cosmopolitan with sophisticated tastes, creating such pastiches is seen as vulgar and even grotesque. The past must be rejected. Post-modernism, abstract art and oddly shaped buildings, is where it's at now.

I'm from Europe myself and I reject this bizarre way of thinking and admire the old masters. Judging by all the hideous architecture being created, however, I am swimming against the current.

Absolutely nothing happens. Ligatures are a feature of fonts and font rendering engines. They do not affect the character codes. If you copy-paste from an editor configured with one of these fonts to an editor that isn't, you'll simply see the ordinary characters, because that's what was in memory the entire time.

For a moment there, I thought they meant Anki the flashcard software.

Is there some kind of website where you can find people who share your interests? I work full time as a developer but do electronics, PCB/industrial design on the side. I wouldn't mind having a partner in crime for this, especially if he/she does not suffer from the same shyness as me in terms of asking people for favours and opportunities.

This kind of perspective is pretty much the standard perspective of the European left. Saying these things is almost like saying nothing, because it's what you expect.

As other commenters have guessed: I was calling the narrative into question. Lard was once common in Europe (if not necessarily in the Nordic region) and now it isn't. Could it be that something other than this domestic narrative killed lard?

The same is true of other trends both in America and elsewhere. For example, in Norway, we perceive rural areas being abandoned in favour of urban areas as a problem to be solved. We pretend that this problem is domestic, and that we can solve it domestically, but we are actually looking at a global trend, yet no one points this out when it is discussed.

I think that 99% of the time when Europeans make what you perceive as annoying "Eurocentric" observations, they are actually calling cause and effect into question. If an effect occurs on both sides of the Atlantic, and the Americans are attributing it to domestic causes, that would seem to be the wrong conclusion, because what, then, caused it to simultaneously happen in Europe?

This reply exists only in your imagination.

There is one problem with the author's request: Putting in the extra work sucks, and management doesn't care, so why bother?

You often come across Matrox products when you look for video capture cards and the like. I was surprised the first time I saw a Matrox video capture card in the Amazon listings, because I thought Matrox was dead, and it was a name I hadn't seen since the mid-90s.

This story doesn't really explain what killed lard in Europe. They don't sell Crisco or any other kind of shortening here in Norway, for example. Norwegian recipes often call for butter, but rarely for lard. Few things are ever deep fried and in pie crusts, we use butter, not lard. The closest thing you can find to shortening in a Norwegian supermarket is coco fat. The only thing I know of that was traditionally cooked in lard is donuts, which are literally named lardrings (smultringer) in Norwegian.

What happened in Norway is that butter was rationed because of WWII and they introduced margarine (another product of hydrogenation) as a substitute, and after the war, it was promoted as a healthier alternative to butter.

Lard must've been around, especially in other parts of Europe than Norway, but I doubt these domestic American events killed it.

I often see Americans attempting to explain why things happen in their country by pointing to domestic events, with said events failing to account for an identical thing happening all over the world.

That site doesn't like my ad blocker.

I used to run one named ArtGrounds.com between 2005 and 2012. It was one of those small and cozy Internet communities. Three things killed it:

1. I kept twisting knobs to make it grow faster until people got fed up and left.

2. Internet art communities were dying in general.

3. Sketcher, the Java applet I had developed for multi-user real-time collaborative digital painting using pressure sensitive Wacom digitisers — the main draw of the site — was rapidly getting outdated as the Web began to reject Java. HTML5 was still a few years away, making it impossible to implement high-performance graphics apps in the browser. By the time WebGL made the kind of rendering I needed viable in a browser, the site was long gone.

That era of web development was a frustrating time for me. Java in the browser was abandoned without offering a full replacement for its number crunching, graphics and media capabilities. My strong suite was the kind of software you typically write in C/C++ and the web ecosystem just wasn't able to do that kind of thing at the time. I basically sat there and wanted WASM and WebGL and all these other rich web technologies to exist, but they just didn't.

I didn't understand half of the terms used in this article, but it actually did make me start thinking about certain things in a new light...

This reminds me so much of my own lost heritage.

My parents were Sami and Kven, but they didn't teach us, the children, their mother tongues. When they were growing up in the 50s and 60s, Norwegian schools would punish children who spoke their mother tongues instead of Norwegian. There was an explicit policy of assimilation and being Sami in particular carried shame.

Unlike the person in the article, I was aware of my background. However, I am as robbed as he is of any cultural heritage. Our parents raised us as Norwegian — a generic version of it with few local roots except for the accidental Sami influences that did slip through the cracks. It didn't help that I grew up in a central area mostly populated by people from the surrounding areas. The distinguishing trait of my home town is that it doesn't have one.

I feel mostly like a mutt. When I travel Norway, I see people with an actual culture, and I envy them a little. I don't have that kind of anchoring or rich tradition to draw on.