aaronbaugher

You don't need to have a lawyer on retainer, but you should probably at least have the name and phone number of one you could call in a pinch. Most law-abiding folks aren't going to see that moment coming, so having a phone number handy could make it a lot less stressful. And in a case like this, it will show the apparatchik at your door that you're not going to be an easy pushover.

Maybe virtual tasks need better organization or reminders than physical tasks. I rarely forget to wash my dishes because the dishes are right there. I don't forget to go gather the eggs because I have to shut up the chickens every night and check their food and water, or living creatures could die. There are physical consequences and reminders of those things.

The need to update a piece of software doesn't give me any physical cues, and if I have a couple dozen tasks like that waiting on me, I'm never going to remember them all unless they're all popping into my head throughout the day. That pretty much is how I used to try to do it, and it wasn't good.

AT&T used to be the default landline provider for my address, but they recently got the regulators to release them from that responsibility, so now there isn't one. So I can't buy a landline for my property, even though there's copper running right past it and a pedestal where all they'd have to do is reconnect the line to my house. If I call AT&T, they'll sell me a cell phone, but not a landline.

Fortunately I have fiber (from another company), so it's not a problem; but the concept of being able to get a landline anywhere is going away.

Also the scarecrow industry. I recall people hanging CDs in their garden, as the sun reflecting off them as they moved in the breeze would scare away crows.

Yep. When we started an ISP about 1994, we gave the users a floppy that installed Trumpet Winsock, Netscape, and a handful of other programs for things like IRC and Usenet. Trumpet Winsock provided the dialup and networking which Windows 3.1 didn't have. AOL would have had to provide something similar, though all custom for connecting to their network.

Agreed. I used to hate going to funerals and skipped some, telling myself it was because I didn't know what to say, might embarrass myself, etc. After being in the receiving line of a couple, I realized someone else's funeral isn't about me. The truth is no one notices exactly what you say because they're dealing with their own grief, and "I'm sorry for your loss" is perfectly acceptable. So now I just go, pay my respects, and feel better for doing it.

I'll be borrowing "tech bro reductionism." That's the perfect term for something that's a scourge these days.

Right. Some of my programming work is done sitting back in my chair, a movie going on the TV for background noise, probably daydreaming a little while I write code or documentation or do basic tasks. Then there's other "deep work" where I stand up at my desk, turn off anything in the background, and block everything else out of my mind until I've finished the task. It's possible that I'm 10x more valuable during the latter periods than the former (1000x is just silly).

If I could turn the first type of work over to an AI assistant so I could spend that time napping or working on a hobby or side interest, that would be cool. But that's not the goal of companies pushing AI. They figure if I don't have to do the "mindless" work anymore, I can do "deep work" for my full 40 hours. But maybe I'm not capable of working more hours at that level of focus. Maybe the hours spent doing "mindless" work are necessary for resting and recharging between the intense sessions. So if my company takes away the "mindless" work, they're probably not going to get the jump in productivity they're going for. They're more likely to burn me out and send me looking for a new job.

True. I built a web site for a local newspaper back in the late 90s. Their main concern was finding a way to charge for the content (difficult at that time) while making sure they didn't give anything away for free, so they did nothing useful with it for a long time.

That paper still survives, barely, ironically having cut back on home delivery and trying to push customers toward digital, while losing a lot of the content that made it worth getting in the first place.

Ditto. Being broke has always been existential, and pretty damn scary even if you had family and other resources you could lean on. Nothing's changed about that, though particular industries/regions may get better or worse.

Of course. But it gave a lot of people their outrage of the day, so that's good.

Because when people say "just make some lifestyle changes," "just" is doing a lot of heavy lifting there.

Being fat really, really sucks, so most fat people have tried to make lifestyle changes, but they've gotten a lot of bad advice over the past half-century. They've cut back on fat, especially healthy animal fats, because that's what the government/medical/nutritional complex said to do, replacing them with "healthy grains," and only gotten fatter. They've tried to trim calories or portion sizes, which is difficult and ineffective for a lot of reasons. They've tried so-called weight-loss products promoted by corporations with millions to spend pushing them. They've thrown themselves into exercise plans, and while exercise is great for a lot of reasons, it doesn't have much effect on weight loss.

Even when they go outside the mainstream and try something that can actually work, like cutting carbs or fasting, it's difficult because losing weight isn't just the reverse of gaining weight. Fat cells aren't just buckets that fat falls into and can fall out of. Once energy is stored in the form of fat, it has to be burned to be removed, which requires a different set of hormones and enzymes than storing it did. Maintaining that metabolic mix generally requires an enormous amount of willpower, not just some lifestyle tweaks. People who have plenty of willpower to succeed in other areas of life like career or relationships can be defeated by it.

I don't like big pharma either, and I'm losing weight (slowly) with fasting rather than trying these drugs. But it's hard to blame people for using them, if it's a temporary fix and they're going to maintain their new weight through diet. I'm skeptical that it'll go that way for many, but I suppose there's hope.

Yeah, I know several people who will turn on a streaming channel of old shows and watch whatever comes on, when they could just as easily pick their favorite episodes. I wonder if it's because we grew up with that, making it a comfort thing, or if there's really something more appealing about not knowing exactly what you're going to watch next.

Same thing with music: I have thousands of songs downloaded and can listen to my favorites anytime, but I kinda miss having a good radio station I can tune in and hear something I wasn't expecting, even if it's not as good.

Something I've noticed from living most of my life in rural areas but part of it in cities is that urbanites have very strange ideas of what rural life is like (at least in the US). Rural people usually have some idea of city life because they lived in a city for some time, perhaps while at college or pursuing a career in their youth before moving back to the country. But urbanites often have no personal experience of rural life at all, so their notions come from entertainment media created by other urbanites. They end up with a weird caricature that has more in common with Deliverance than it does reality.

I used to try to educate them, but then I realized that would just encourage them to move to the country, so I stopped.

It's a slam on how petty many of the internal grudge matches are. But of course they don't seem at all petty to those engaged in them.

I still use it in my job every day too. It's just become a meme, the whole "write-only language" thing. No one says that about shell scripting, despite the sigils and plenty of stuff that becomes incomprehensible to almost anyone if you do anything very complicated. I'd much rather diagnose some newbie's Perl script than some of the commercially-distributed bash installers I've had to deal with.

Especially when the position is filled by someone who couldn't earn half as much (in money, security, and prestige) if forced to compete on merit in the real world.

I use F2. Doesn't sound convenient, but it's just the right distance that when I reach out my middle finger hits it accurately.

Yep. I was doing Perl CGI scripts at the time, and you often ran into deployment issues somewhere along the line of uploading the scripts via FTP, making them executable, and setting the permissions on any files that needed to be written. Building PHP into the web server instead of external CGI scripts eliminated a lot of that, so it was more likely to just work without some back-and-forth with a web admin to get things setup right for CGI to work. It wasn't the language, but the way it was deployed.

The immigration issue has been a crown lying in the gutter waiting for someone to pick it up ever since the 90s when the Clinton "It's the economy, stupid" Democrats teamed up with the Bush neocon Republicans to make corporate profits and Wall Street numbers their driving basis for economic policy. All the approved economists said making goods cheaper would make everyone richer, no matter how it happened, so they yelled "Smoot-Hawley hur hur" at everyone who disagreed, and invited the world.

Looks like the last time I tried out Perl 6 was almost 10 years ago. Even wrote a few blog posts about it before giving up on it again. Might be time to take another look.

It's unfortunate that that wasn't clear to people who weren't closely involved with Perl at the time. So many people got the impression that Perl 5 was outdated as soon as 6 was in development, so they thought they had to move on from it. It's too bad Raku didn't have a different name from the start.

The main problem I have with ticketing (and project management) systems is that I can't get the people asking me to do things to use the system. I'll set it up and show them how to use it, and then they tell me about issues via email or text message or voice call. I end up entering the tickets/tasks myself, at which point I might as well be using my own org-mode setup.

Dropped out of college in 1988 after one semester. Never touched a computer there; they were still VAX systems reserved for certain programs at that point. Got my first computer (Commodore 128) soon after that, and started learning BASIC and 6502/Z80 assembly language. Got my first Internet account about 1993, and it came with a shell account, so I started learning Unix tools and a little C. In 1994-ish, a friend asked if I wanted to get in on a new ISP he was starting in my hometown, so I moved back and got a crash course in more Unix/Linux, networking, Perl, and more. Just been doing what comes along and learning enough to keep up ever since.

It didn't really even work on Star Trek. They could pretend it did as long as they were on a ship that flew away at the end of every episode. But on DS9, since they were stationary and had to deal with other economies, the issue of money came up fairly often.

The post-scarcity thing didn't hold up to scrutiny either, even fictionally: there was nearly a civil war on Bajor because the Federation couldn't come up with enough soil reclamators to prevent a possible famine at one point. Any time something needed to be scarce for the sake of the plot or drama, it was.

My electric bill already shows a fixed "facility" charge and a variable "energy" charge. If I didn't use any electricity one month, I would still owe the facility charge. I thought they all did it that way.

It's actually somewhat the same in cattle. There are beef breeds of cattle for meat and dairy breeds for milk. Dairy breeds tend to be skinnier and don't grow as efficiently, so the bulls don't make good beef steers. There's kind of a specialty market in them for people who think a dairy steer raised and fed over a longer time for meat is better than the beef breeds that have been focused on efficient growth. But some dairy bull calves are just killed. The heifer calves are far more valuable.

I think the factory egg industry has already stripped the resources/comfort down as far as possible, so I don't see how this could make that any worse.

I'm normally resistant to claims that a new technology is going to make an unpleasant situation better, but in this case, I'm sympathetic. I'd rather get rid of the egg factories and have eggs raised the way my grandma did (and I still do). But that's not going to happen as long as people live in large cities. So if there's a way to identify the male eggs so they can be used as food before the chicks start to develop, rather than letting them hatch and then grinding up living, breathing birds, I'd have to say that's an improvement.

Pretty much. Small-time chicken owner here. The best ratio of hens to roosters is about 10-to-1. Each rooster will have his "harem" of hens that keep him busy, and the hens will be content. Any more roosters than that and they'll fight a lot, and the roosters that don't have their own group of hens will hang around the others looking for a chance to rape them while their regular rooster is occupied or too far away. It can be pretty hard on the hens.

I've never had a rooster kill hens, though. Each other, sure, but not the hens. I don't really buy that.

Some context for this article that most people don't know: there are chicken breeds for meat (Cornish Cross, mostly) and breeds for eggs. The egg breeds are skinny and won't become a good meat bird no matter how much you feed them. I guess you can caponize them and they'll gain more weight, but that's a process that costs money. You could use them for soup, but that probably wouldn't be cost-effective either, so that's why the large-scale operations just kill them.

What's funny is that OP thinks anti-Trump posts being flagged suggests HN is pro-Trump, while not noticing that pro-Trump posts don't exist here at all. Unless they're deleted immediately (seems unlikely), people with that opinion have just learned to keep it to themselves (or go away) because it'll only destroy their karma here.

That suggests that HN leans heavily anti-Trump, but also doesn't want to talk about him all the time, so flags posts that drag the forum in that direction. Ditto Musk and "fascism," whatever that's supposed to mean nowadays when everyone to the right of Mao gets called a fascist sooner or later.