baroomba

I'm not sure the government failing, for whatever reason, to hold private organizations and individuals to account for their wrongdoing is quite a clear, blanket argument against government power, in favor of the power of private organizations and individuals.

> So what's the United State's excuse?

Massive, continual, and ongoing failure to capture any significant part of the outgoing and diminishing value of the ground under our feet for the future needs of citizens, thereby reducing the wealth of our country as a whole so a few people can capture all the benefit of that lost stored wealth, rather than merely almost all of it?

It's not just oil—anything non-renewable coming out of the ground ought to pay into a trust fund like Norway's. We had a huge amount of it—oil, coal, minerals—and still have quite a bit, but we can't even figure out how to have anything resembling an OECD-standard healthcare system so I reckon a fix for that's not gonna enter the public debate for decades yet, if ever, meanwhile the stored value in our physical country itself drops every day.

A lot of the time I'll see recipes call for heating non-stick on a medium- or medium-high flame with so little fat in ("one teaspoon of oil" or some similarly-way-under-enough quantity) them that it only covers like 1/4 or less of the pan surface, so most of the pan is heating dry, which AFAIK is a great way to turn the coating into a gas that's fairly bad for you. Though maybe that's folk-wisdom and it's actually fine to heat a nonstick pan empty? IDK.

- Most of the most-valuable parts aren't supported by 3rd party ads.

- We've seen what a Web with few/no ads or uselessly-low-paying ads looks like and it was totally fine.

If you try reading poetry and get something out of so reading, does it matter whether they "have meaning"? It's the practice, and its effect on you, that matters. Like Zen. You've missed the point if you think there's anything valuable to be found, something concrete you can dig up and take hold of, that when you find it you have it and someone gave it to you.

"Meaning" may be present but is irrelevant if the experience is the same—what evidence do you want? Getting something out of poetry? Many people clearly do, if that's the test.

Heh, I run into a lot of recipes where they have you cook in a tiny amount of oil and dump the pan out a couple times but you're still supposed to be "sautéing" whatever's in the last batch. Yeah, OK. Double the initial oil, add it again after each dump since there's still none left after the first time. Or else we're not doing what you claim we're doing, recipe. Which may also be fine, but still.

Or high-heat nonstick cooking with like one teaspoon of oil in the pan, heating it to nigh-smoke before adding anything else. LOL. Or steel or cast-iron temp + fat combos that make no sense and are guaranteed to give you a bad time. Either lots and lots of recipes are nonsense on this front, requiring modification of one form or another to be reasonable, or these people have magical pans that I do not.

I find it pretty hard to get cooking down to 30 minutes of actual clock time spent working, not counting cleanup (I do a decent job of cleaning as I go anyway). Most recipes with short nominal "hands-on time" achieve it by not accounting for the prep to have all the ingredients ready, as specified in the ingredients list (dicing vegetables, grinding & mixing spices, cutting up meat, that sort of thing) and usually the shorter the nominal time the more important it is to have all that stuff ready from the start, as there's little slack to do that as you're cooking.

I stopped using it about two years ago and started... oh, four or so years before that. If it's even slower now than it was then, whoa. It was already probably the generally worst-performing "web app" I knew of at the time, which is saying something.

Same, intuitive way I think of it since learning the school and pop-culture explanations are basically wrong—and for reasons that are unclear to me, because why make up some unintuitive BS when the intuitive and obvious explanation is closer to correct.

Stick hand out window, tilt hand, feel wind push hand up. Wind hits bottom of hand, pushes it up. That's the main thing, and everyone already gets that if they've ever, like, experienced wind. Play with it a little and you can feel your hand respond a bit differently based on the kind of "shadow" it's casting in the wind. That's the rest of it, more or less. There, airplanes explained, certainly way better and closer to correct than "well you see the top of the wing is longer than the bottom, so Bernoulli's principle is the reason airplanes can fly..."

The feature I most wanted out of Asana, back when I had to use it, was a way to open links to individual issues as some kind of basic, plain HTML page so I'd rarely have to load Asana itself. I dreaded opening it every time, couldn't just leave it open because it ate too much memory and too many cycles for something I only needed to look at a few times a day.

Same. It was incredibly slow and loved to eat most of a GB of memory if I left its tab open. I once had it pop up a "would you recommend this product to others?" form that managed to introduce ~3 seconds of input latency on each keystroke for its text feedback area. Which, as you'll recall, is a basic HTML element you shouldn't need Javascript intercepting input to in the first place without one hell of a good reason. I was... not kind.

IIRC they had a blog post up about their brilliant NIH Javascript UI framework and if you are familiar with that kind of thing you could read between the lines and generate some good guesses about what was wrong with it.

Not that Jira is a ton better, especially with each heavier-and-worse-than-the-last redesign. Friggin' "web apps".

[EDIT] and for all that the workflow wasn't any better than anything else as far as I could tell. Our PMs who lived in it loved the draggy-droppy interface and hotkey-heavy workflow, but again, everyone (of their competitors) has that too. To me it always felt like working on someone else's messy desktop shared over VNC. I was afraid to touch anything for fear of accidentally performing some kind of write operation without noticing, and fucking things up.

English includes a lot more words than most people use regularly. I imagine that's the same in any language. Just expanding one's working vocabulary in one's native language would probably be quite helpful for thinking and expressing oneself more fluently—not that learning another language isn't valuable.

I’m pretty sure CSS, JavaScript, and the way both interact with each other and with HTML are the main reasons writing a useful browser engine is rapidly becoming impossible—and we’ll end up replacing it with Wasm rendering to a canvas for most things while not cleaning up HTML to be something simpler and delightfully less-capable, sadly. I think you could significantly increase the richness of just HTML without making it, per se, 1/10 the challenge of implementing all of those together.

HTML clients & standards have stagnated badly because we know javascript and heavy-handed CSS can work around any problems—even if those solutions are almost always bad (usually: highly janky, at least).

Example: Table sorting. Hell, maybe table pagination, too.

This is part of why developing HTML-based UI still seems so weird and shitty compared to native, even with the aid of Javascript. Those native SDKs provide way more support for common, basic use cases. Even within the narrow scope of rich document format & display, HTML without Javascript is crippled (see again: super-basic and common table functionality). Plus you'll get a hell of a lot better performance letting C/C++/Rust handle those kinds of basics, rather than trying to re-create them in CSS and Javascript.

Another example: there's a clear, fairly common need for tiled dynamically-loading images, as in maps applications. That should be a tag, and... that's all. Just a tag. To get that whole thing. A couple properties to enable/disable things like zooming. Some sensible standard for how to request tiles by X/Y at a given total canvas size (so, just a convention for image URLs) so that just has to be implemented once per server-side language, and can easily be pre-generated and served from actual files. A way to drop other elements on the image at some X/Y value for pins or linking people's faces to wikipedia entries or whatever, kinda like old school imagemap elements. That's clearly useful even for document-centric usecases (aside from maps, consider, say, ultra-high-res images of painted church ceilings). The browser and HTML should include that.

Search. Complete- or hint-as-you-type search fields should be a built-in element, with results from local or remote (some convention for the URL) markup-based sources.

There's a ton of stuff like that which, in 2020, really ought not require Javascript. Lots of which are still basically rich-document UI elements that've been in demand for 15-25 years at this point, with the holes filled a thousand times over at great cost in person-hours by slow, janky, battery-eating JS and CSS. And that's not even considering overhauling HTML to better suit use in "applications", which could also be done and arguably should be done, since we've pretty much lost the battle to keep that from happening.

I'd love more of the Web to be Javascript-light or -free, but modern HTML standards & clients aren't really up to the task. Mostly because (I think) Javascript has freed them from having to worry about it. "Table sorting by column? Well yes of course everyone wants that basically everywhere all the time, but let Javascript handle it".

Earth after most disasters short of getting hit by a full-on planetoid that liquefies the entire crust is still much easier to live on than Mars, and hardened Earth-based bunkers are a lot cheaper and easier to make than a Martian colony.

Really, for most planet-wide disasters the thing they do is force us to live a little bit like we'd have to on non-disaster-stricken Mars.

[EDIT] for the record I'm not against Martian exploration or even a Martian colony—I'm susceptible both to the "because it was there" and the "we'll come up with some cool tech in the process" arguments—I'm just very unconvinced Martian colonization is a good path to better survivability for the human species.

There’s something to be said for the pedagogical value of furniture. A sense of literary chronology, at least, can be absorbed by way of a shelving order, just living life in a house with books so shelved. A selection of books can and almost must, given physical limitations, indicate importance—see the Project Gutenberg index for the opposite.

Supposedly Propeller Arena on the Dreamcast was cancelled over the 9/11 attacks, though I suspect the game was already struggling or being killed for other reasons. There's a leak of the fairly-complete game and it's a hell of a lot of fun. My friends and I have burned a few evenings over the years on it. One of a handful of multiplayer games that we've loved and have no newer replacements for[1] so we have to bust out older consoles or emulation to play them.

[1] some others: Bushido Blade 2 (Playstation), Hunter Hunted (PC), Return Fire (Playstation), Blur (Playstation 3), kind of Perfect Dark (N64) which in many ways remains unmatched though of course there are many modern shooters; and then there are other games that do have modern sequels but we much prefer the older ones and they're rapidly getting harder to play because they're from early-ish 3D consoles and don't get re-releases so they won't compete with their own sequels (Marvel Vs. Capcom 2, for instance)

I think the harm done by long, painful, dangerous releases and complex onboarding or different experiences and expectations for how to effectively test and get a good dev feedback loop going in various components of a system (usually these things occur together, because the same things that cause the latter also cause the painful, slow, dangerous releases) is badly under-accounted for. It murders agility yet companies wander their way into it in the name of agility then don't ever fix it because the fix is slow and dangerous since everything is slow and dangerous.

[EDIT] to be clear, quick painful dangerous releases are no better, and (pretty much necessarily) come with the same pain in onboarding, jumping between repos/projects, undocumented "oh sometimes you have to re-install that to get it going" works-on-my-machine bullshit, getting a good feedback loop going, et c.

Looks like grasshoppers generally live 50ish days as an adult. That's gonna put some serious limits on your max per-grasshopper-leg-rubber total accumulated grasshoppers.

A production rate of 32 locusts per person per 16-hour workday isn't enough to matter unless you have a small army of people rubbing grasshopper legs together all day, I'd think. Though it is a pretty funny image.

I didn't until some time in my childhood when one suddenly developed (I remember feeling puzzled when it happened, though I don't remember exactly when it happened). I still don't know if mine's "normal" or even how to find that out. I wouldn't say it's constantly active, exactly, if that's what normal is.

I think cloud's way harder than managing actual hardware (and/or your own VMs and such on actual hardware, or even traditional VMs on someone else's hardware) since once you're beyond the trivial it quickly becomes a superset of traditional admin knowledge, not a replacement—you end up having to know how to do things the old way to understand WTF the cloud is doing and troubleshoot issues, or to integrate or transition some older system, or whatever.

And then of course every "cloud" is full of about a billion hidden gotchas ("well the marketing page says that'll work, but on Tuesdays in February it won't, so use this instead, but only if you're writing your logic in JavaScript because the tools for the other allegedly-supported SDKs are broken in weird ways half the time, so instead use this other thing, unless you're a Libra, then...") none of which knowledge transfers between "clouds", and each has a pile of dumb names to memorize and a ton of other per se useless, but necessary, knowledge you've gotta pick up, just to rub salt in the wound.

Cross-reference with school quality and you’ve got a map I’ve wanted for some time. Difficulty: it’ll be less useful the more people have access to it :-/

Yes. Literally every other healthcare system in a state with an advanced economy. (I'd love to see a counter-example, I've gone looking and failed to find one)

[EDIT] to the downvoters: no, seriously, please post an example of, say, an OECD member state other than the US that doesn't use either explicit or implicit (single primary buyer setting prices, that is, monopsony) price controls as a major part of their healthcare policy. I assume you know of at least one, and I'd really like to know if I'm wrong about this.

You're aware that (AFAIK) every single other OECD state uses implicit (monopsony) or explicit price controls as a key part of controlling healthcare costs and maintaining access to healthcare, right? In fact it's maybe the one factor that pretty much every non-US healthcare system shares. Even friggin' Singapore, the usual "look, the market can work!" example for healthcare, does it.

They're much, much better, and extremely useful, for just about any work that involves building or fixing things in the real world, to pick one large category of work. I'd personally find a laptop maybe 1/10 as useful as an iPhone (or smartphone more generally), at best, when, say, working on my house or car. Watching construction contractors work, they seem to love their phones and use them constantly, too, and for a lot more than making calls and sending messages.

It's like carrying around a whole office's worth of office equipment in your pocket. It's a document scanner, you can use it to measure stuff, to get paperwork signed, to take pictures and look at them later, it's a level or flashlight in a pinch, you can load reference materials on it, and on and on, and that's without getting into really specialized software or peripherals that let you do all kinds of cools stuff.

Bricklayers may not use tablets for work, but I bet they use smartphones a ton, and not just as communication devices. I know I use mine constantly when doing "real world" work—my laptop's a much worse camera, flashlight, level, and measurement device than my phone, and that's just the things it's worse at without even factoring in portability (which would include almost everything else one might want to use an Internet-connected device for on a job site, which a laptop would do alright at except that it's huge compared to a phone).

[EDIT] "but why's a camera important to construction work?" want to get a usable estimate of how much tile you need for a room in about 5 seconds flat, recorded for later use? Snap a photo of the floor with the 4' by 8' plywood exposed. Done, you can walk away now. Ditto drywall if the studs are exposed and follow standard spacing, and so on.

The "i-devices are just consumption devices and toys LOL" viewpoint, which is shockingly still common in programmer circles, seems to rely on a bizarrely narrow idea of what "doing real work with a computer" looks like. Meanwhile iPads and in some cases even iPhones are wildly better devices for lots of work, creative and otherwise, than a "real" computer.

I went about seven years without ever getting more than my “annual cold”—about 12-36hrs of very light sniffles with no fever or sore throat, about once a year. I was was also trim and looked and felt awesome. It’s far and away the healthiest period of my life.

... for the whole time I took extremely long hot showers, lived on 3000+ calories of junk food per day, and probably averaged not more than 6hrs of sleep per night, with no regular schedule. What kept me super-healthy was “being a teenager”.

Nice. I’ve thought for a few years now that this is the next big thing I want out of an OS and software ecosystem—suspend work session, resume book research session and personal communication session, suspend research session leaving comm session active, open Christmas shopping session, suspend, suspend all open sessions and load gaming session, and so on. Huge bonus if the sessions can be moved from one device to another.