bambataa

Yet we have recently had the interesting experience of many low paid workers suddenly being deemed “essential workers”. I don’t think any agile coaches were essential workers.

There are many jobs that are low paid because they are low skilled and have low barriers to entry, but otherwise very useful to society e.g. refuse collectors.

When I first moved to a standing desk, I was shocked that I (fit and healthy) couldn’t stand straight at the desk for more than an hour or two.

Turns out I had what Dr YouTube said was an anterior pelvic twist (standing slouchy, belly out). Making myself stand upright was actually enough to give me an abs workout. I felt from standing the kind of “burn” you get after a load of crunches.

Even now, a year later, I still have to work up to doing more than ~3 hours standing if I don’t stand consistently.

So standing desks have a great for me. My one concern is that when tired or focused I subconsciously lean at weird angles and put pressure in the wrong places, but hopefully I move frequently enough.

*if you ever have time to

This is really useful, thank you (and the same to recommendations in sibling comments). I enjoy Matt Levine’s blog and feel like I follow what he’s writing about, though it’s been very crypto-heavy lately so maybe due to that. I don’t think I’ve worked before in an area with so many conventions and multiple meanings.

(Also if you ever have to expand on the technical layer, I’d be very interested.)

This looks really interesting! I am relatively new to a tech role in finance and am still learning all the terminology. Does anyone know of a book that teaches markets from a historical, narrative perspective? I have found textbooks explaining the main asset classes and so on, but I think it would be really interesting to see an explanation of eg the repo market, invoice swaps etc as the evolution of solutions to problems.

Stories like remind me so much of bizarre inefficiencies caused by targets etc in the Soviet Union. Thank goodness capitalism is efficient, right? /s

Dude, one gram of wax does for a year. I can’t imagine how awful doing half in one go would be.

It’s true though that concentrated sources like this make it technically possible to ingest amounts that weren’t feasible before, I suppose.

I think it needs to be clarified that this (and the financial statement on application mentioned in a grandparent comment) are only correct for postgraduate study.

There's no financial statement required for undergraduates because government loans are available to all UK students. This covers tuition and living costs (albeit scaled by parental income). No family needs to "cover tuition" for undergraduates.

People don't work during term time because they are very short (8 weeks) and intense. Plenty of people had work at home during the holidays.

I guess there are some people who have on paper wealthy parents who don't contribute as much as the government thinks they should, but in general lack of familial wealth is really not a barrier to undergraduate study at Oxbridge.

I did a GameBoy and similarly found the CPU enjoyable and the PPU a huge pain. Perhaps if I understood graphics better, I would have enjoyed it more, but like you say it just felt like a lot of steps.

Please tell me more about these roses, you’ve piqued my interest!

I've just tried it on macOS, built by this tool: https://github.com/jimeh/build-emacs-for-macos

Unfortunately it keeps locking up my entire computer so might not be a goer just yet.

Entirely anecdotally, a lot of younger people who grew up post-smartphones are adept at using tools they know but have a very poor understanding of how computers actually work.

Teacher friends say they see kids not knowing how to use a mouse and jabbing at the (non touch) screen instead, which is kind of what I’d expect my computer-phobe parents to do.

Knowing how to use a few apps is not digital literacy.

Yes, alarms are really fiddly.

My favourite bit of alarm related UX is that the “dismiss” button for alarms and timers are in opposite places.

I get frustrated on my iPhone SE by apps that have me fill in a field but then no “done” button to close the keyboard. Between the keyboard and the app’s overly large heading, there’s barely any space to click anything else to close the keyboard without triggering something else. Cronometer is bad for this.

I find the surface level of my programming dreams are exceptionally dull (`var a = b + c` for what feels like hours) but yes sometimes a solution to a problem occurs to me early the next day.

Complexity. A policeman taking a literal print of your body is far simpler and more direct than "big data" and so on.

Remember that most computer users are hazy at best about whether `natwest.my-account.co.uk` is a phishing scam. There isn't the necessary baseline of informed opinion to have a reasonable discussion about this kind of snooping.

When you say "good tradition", what did you have in mind? I realise you probably were trying to avoid a flame war, but as a Westerner interested in meditation I find it extremely hard to tell what's good and what's not. Or which teacher is reflecting a school's standard teaching and which is doing their own, idiosyncratic thing.

Is someone who only wants to write JavaScript really going to be coaxed to write kernel drivers in any language? Yes there is a dominant JS crowd, but I don’t really see why they should affect what developers in other areas choose.

People are apathetic and ill-informed.

It is far easier and more enjoyable to believe that Britain is peace- and freedom-loving, which is the continual message from the tabloids, than to keep track of these developments and their implications.

Yes, I hadn't thought of it like that. Travelling is also a time when it's considered normal to be alone and to chat to new people, reinvent yourself if you really want to. For many, that only happens a couple of times in their lives, if at all. (And again, that's why people stay local and don't move countries, because they don't want to do that).

Meetup.com is the closest I've got to what you describe, but not quite the same. It's a pity, I agree.

You are largely right. Western ideas of tourism feed off this idea "I'm a traveller, everyone else is a tourist sheep." Asian tourists generally don't seem to have the same pretensions and are happy getting coached around.

Walking around busy temples and stuff can be pretty hard because people don't want anyone else in their photo. It has to look like they just chanced upon this ancient temple in the jungle, rather than getting a minibus there with 20 other people.

Sometimes the more savvy local tour companies cotton on to this and market to "travellers", but I liked it when locals just called us all "tourists" because that's really what we are. Yes, it's another form of consumerism.

I spent a year backpacking and it was mostly seeing cool places. I don't think it really changed me, but then I have worked and studied abroad before (there I go, pointing out how I'm not like the others!!). Considering those experiences too, I think there are two main things you're missing:

1) People who genuinely find hostel slogans like "live at the edge of your existence" deeply inspirational are probably late teens/early 20s and so for them it's all wrapped up in being independent, moving out of their childhood home, experimenting etc. Possibly the first time they've been out of their home culture and so even standard, Western backpacker hostels is a big jump.

2) A lot of people really find scary and challenging things you might be more comfortable with. Lots of people live within a few miles of where they grew up. If they go abroad, it's a package holiday on a resort full of people from their home country. Maybe a city break to be adventurous. Even though backpacking in SE Asia etc is heavily commodified, it's still a pretty small fraction of people who would even consider it.

I think that attitude is itself nowadays quite popular and arguably commercialised. Probably has been since generation X.

Things have moved on from “let’s go to the shopping centre and get loads of designer stuff” but Instagram is still selling.

What’s odd is that the MOD does that and the rest of the civil service carries on using name-based emails, despite people moving round every year or two.

There is a huge problem in the civil service of information being local to teams. Important information sots in inboxes or a shared drive if you’re lucky.

Finding out who to contact in another department on a given topic can take days and usually requires asking your private office to check (because they at least have the other department’s private office contact details). Otherwise people just look for emails in published documents and email out in the hope that at least one of them still works in the right department.

This could all be so easily solved with permanent, shared mailboxes per team. I suspect the reluctance is in part due to how much easier it would make FOIs.

What Rails-equivalent framework does Golang have?

How did that work with games? Did you have to stop and look things up, or did you already have a rough idea and just the exposure increased your fluency?

I’ve tried putting my phone/computer into other languages, but within a few days I tend to phase out the changes and I don’t think I learned much.

I live in hope that, one day, TS will loosen its links to JS.

Things like `Object.keys` irritate me because they don’t compose well. What would go wrong if TS started supporting `Object.prototype.keys`? Could even be implemented as a rewrite using `Object.keys`.

Don't services that accept large amounts of user-generated content scan for illegal stuff against a database of known material? I find it odd that Discord wouldn't do that.

Are you saying Discord openly permits groups that share child porn? Or discusss how to find it? I could understand the latter if the discord itself has nothing illegal but that’s still pretty shocking.

Consider Phlebas was one of the few books I’ve given up on. Everything was just so damn corny. I had been lookig forward to it for a while so it was very disappointing.

Thanks for the other recommendations. My only gripe with The Three Body Problem was that the characters spoke in incredibly stilted exposition.

Does avoiding memory accesses for short strings really provide much performance improvement? Surely the adjacent characters, which need to be read at least once anyway, will be in cache. I can see the benefit when the searched-for string is long.