bcbrown

> Where are the nice people who are also influential?

I wouldn't recommend taking this article, and specifically this quote, as a suitable basis for saying Wittgenstein wasn't a good or nice person. He was a tremendously complicated person. The biography by Ray Monk paints a much fuller, more nuanced portrait.

It hasn't been updated in a while, but www.drinkboy.com is a nice site for learning cocktail recipes. The author also has a series of videos demonstrating how to mix various cocktails on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL87FA3F25BCD5B827

That's essentially the system I use. I have it set to turn the furnace on for an hour in the morning right before I wake up. Other than that, I manually set the temperature when I'm at home over the course of the day. It automatically resets at noon, 4pm, and 11pm back to 63 degrees, so if I don't turn it off before leaving, it'll still reset pretty soon.

For the bristlecone pines in California and Nevada, a primary cause of death for old trees is that erosion slowly exposes their root system over time until it kills them. So in a sense, they can outlive the mountains they grow upon.

> Probably going to install an incinerating toilet

That reminds me of one of my favorite sentences: "Yes, while some of you may think nothing of pooping into a mechanical box of fire, the prospect is a rather new idea for yours truly."

Seeing someone refer to any piece of software technology as a "trash fire" makes it harder for me to view them as credible. It's unnecessarily divisive and insulting, and it means it's unlikely they will have any appreciation of the tradeoffs present during initial design and implementation.

It's not scientific literature, but I got the inspiration from the book "Pragmatic Thinking and Learning".

Perhaps this explanation will help. When I hear the word 'Sahara' I think of a physical place, in northern Africa. When I hear the word 'desert' I think of an ecological system, characterized primarily by low rainfall and sandy soils. When I think of the physical place in northern Africa that is denoted (in my language) by the word 'Sahara', I think of it as being an exemplar of the ecological system denoted by the word 'desert'.

Near me, there's the Sonoran desert and the Great Basin desert. If I lived in eastern Asia I might think of the Gobi desert. There's many deserts. So while I take your point that 'Sahara', in a non-English language, denotes what I call in English 'desert', I would say that the phrase 'Sahara desert' could be interpreted to signify "the place on this planet, that could be characterized as having a desert ecosystem, that is described by the people who live nearby as 'Sahara'". For the people who do not know that 'Sahara' is used by some other people to denote what they think of when they say the word 'desert', the word 'desert' is not extraneous. But for you, who does, it is.

> Personally if my bank was also in the business of spying on financial transactions commercially... I wouldn't feel super secure about my choice of bank.

Are you aware that your (bank-issued) credit card purchase data is almost certainly sold commercially, linked to a unique identifier?

There's companies that buy mobile advertising data and crosslink it to credit card purchase data to track real-world conversions from online advertising.

I say this to reinforce your suspicions, not to discredit them.

My office used to be right by the local art museum, and I was a member. Whenever I felt stuck, I'd go take a half hour to look at art, and usually a solution would quickly come to mind.

To get to the moon, you first have to want to get to the moon. Literature excels at disseminating dreams and desires.

I still disagree, but I think I better understand the disagreement now. I find it easiest to learn a new language by starting with the canonical beginner's book, e.g. the Pickaxe book for Ruby. I find it hard to learn tooling like CI/CD, logging/metrics, etc by reading or through personal projects, I much prefer to learn those on-the-job as necessary. It seems like it might be the inverse for you.

Even if a new codebase isn't exactly 'Effective Java' quality, it's good to have that reference to better articulate to yourself exactly how the codebase is flawed.

I mostly disagree with this blog post. I think one of the most important things to do, if you're starting a job at a company that uses a language you don't have experience in, is to ask the hiring manager what recommendations they have for learning that language. If possible, ask them to ship you the recommended 1-2 books before you start.

It's true that there's languages so big that any company will use a somewhat-unique subset of the language, but that's not true of all languages. And if it is true, that's why it's important to ask someone at the company for the right resources to learn the right idioms in that language, for that company.

The part I do agree with is that there will be a lot of company-specific stuff like tooling, build process, frameworks, libraries, etc. It's a mistake to think you can "hit the ground running" with a language you haven't used before at a new company, and no amount of studying will change that. All you can do is gain enough familiarity with the language syntax and common idioms that your pattern-matching facilities are already primed, so that when you look at source code you see words and sentences, not characters, if that makes sense. Use the language books as a resource over the first few months as you ramp up on the combination of programming languages, business problems/solutions, infrastructure, build tools, dev tools, etc.

Don't treat pre-start book study as a silver bullet. And if your life circumstances don't give you time to do any pre-start study, don't sweat it; most good employers will give you plenty of leeway to learn on the job as long as you show increasing proficiency over a couple months. But if you have the time, resources, and inclination, absolutely do learn a new language used at a new job prior to your start date.

He, uh, says that he writes "with a pencil or a pen and a piece of paper". Not a typewriter. I'm not saying he's right, but I don't think he's fooling himself. I think his response at the bottom makes that clear:

> I did not say that I proposed to end forthwith all my involvement in harmful technology, for I do not know how to do that. I said merely that I want to limit such involvement, and to a certain extent I do know how to do that.

Everything about software and software employment is kinda odd. The most relevant college degree is fairly irrelevant to the actual experience and skills necessary to succeed in industry. The field is the result of a merger between rarified theory (computation as applied mathematics) and hands-on practice (organizing sand to conduct electricity in useful ways). There's a high proportion of practitioners without any formal training. The industry has existed for about a half-century, and now more than half of the top ten companies by market cap are software companies.

> Back when I was a student, there was a professor emeritus of communications who liked to say things like "communication usually fails, except by accident".

Are you talking about Osmo A. Wiio? https://jkorpela.fi/wiio.html

Ok, sounds like we agree. I phrase it as, people have their inherent political positions, and then they rationalize them post-hoc.

> a narrative machine that creates who we are using words.

That's a really interesting thought that I'll have to spend some more time with. It makes me think of an experiment I heard about[0] with people who had lobotomies. The split brain leads to one side having verbal facilities, and each side having one eyeball sensory perception. They showed the non-verbal eyeball a sign that said something like "stand up", and most patients did. When then asked why they stood up, they had unrelated answers, like "my legs were stiff". So the idea that we just create narratives as post-hoc explanations of our actions is pretty compelling.

[0] I really wish I could find the reference to the experiment, but my google-fu is failing me and I don't recall where I read about it.

> I sometimes think that persistence of experience is an illusion maintained by memory. That every time we lose consciousness then regain it, "it" is simply a new instance that is a clone of the old instance with the illusion it is the same person due to memories and being in the same body.

That makes me think about a saying I've heard about how memory isn't read-only, it's always read-write, and you write back the modified version of what you read. We're constantly changing our past to be more more like what wished it was, and you can see an example of that process in another of my replies in this thread.

I've had a similar experience, but only once, and only induced as an accidental side effect by months of mental and physical preparation. About ten years ago, I spent three months where I almost singularly (outside of my software job) thought about and prepared for a powerlifting competition (amateur, not crazy strong). This would be my second competition (and at the same location), and every night before falling asleep, I would visualize the entire day, from waking up, to driving to the location, weighing in, sitting in the stands, walking up to the platform, and completing the lifts. What I would be wearing, what I would eat, what books I would bring. What lifts I would attempt, and how I would warm up.

During the competition, while I was on the platform, I felt like my consciousness was ten feet above my head, and all my actions happened autonomously, without any conscious direction. I can hear, on the video someone recorded, my father yelling my name from the stands, but in the moment I had no conception of that. I bumped into the spotter while resetting my stance on one of the squats, and didn't even really register or respond to his presence.

It felt incredibly powerful, but that's probably because of all the purposeful preparation that led up to it. I can't imagine how terrifying that would be to have happen at random without any warning.

Do you lose muscle control? I imagine you'd still be walking around the grocery store, just without a sense of agency of which steps you take, right?

Somewhat unrelatedly, I've recently been toying with a philosophical idea: what is the inverse of solipsism? Solipsism is the belief that the Self is the only real thing, since it's the only thing that can think. Everything else, and everyone else, may all be false perceptions. So I am real, and everyone else is a figment of my imagination. The inverse of that would be that everyone else is real, and I their collective mass hallucination. Who am I to say that I exist? The best way to exist is to not believe in one's existence. I wouldn't say I exactly subscribe to it, but I do enjoy thinking about it.

I was a little bummed that a site called nerdfitness was full of memes and cliches. I was hoping for something more along the lines of defining a model of the world; defining a goal to achieve; explaining how to build a system that applies the model to solve the goal.

But the exercises do look useful.

Everything I said applies to resistive heating as well. Efficiency isn't the only relevant metric, and I was attempting to explain how another metric, responsiveness, is more important to me.

Learn the vocabulary. Look up things like 409a valuations, 83b elections, NSO and ISO stock options, the difference between long-term and short-term capital gains, strike price vs exercise price (plus how and when taxes on options are triggered and calculated), marginal tax rate vs effective tax rate. Probably also worthwhile to learn the basics of corporate finance, like annual recurring revenue (ARR), costs of goods sold (COGS), customer acquisition costs (CAC), differences between cashflow and profit, EBITDA (plus what each of those words mean), capital expenditure (capex) vs operational expenditure (opex). If you understand the vocabulary, it's a lot easier to evaluate whether a given source is authoritative or not.

Sign up for Matt Levine's newsletter. He's perhaps starting to be a little overexposed on HN, but he's informative and humorous, and his newsletter is a good way to get a little exposure to finance every day.

It's not not startup-equity specific, but check out Bogleheads for generic investing advice.

> My view is, accurate information should be the basis of all decision making, and the only way humans have found to come up with accurate information (about things like risks of global warming, causes of disease, etc.) is the rational scientific process, so that's what we should be spending our time and energy on developing, more than anything else.

While I agree in the importance of the scientific process, I disagree with the rationale. Accurate information should be the basis of decision making, but it can't make the decision. Deciding requires values, requires knowing "what is good". Science can tell us exactly where we are and how we got here, but it can't tell us why we're here. Science can tell us the range of outcomes if we do or do not stop carbon emissions, but it can't tell us whether or not we should. That's a moral decision.

And that's why (in my value system) it's important to have some people devoting themselves to the creation of art, literature, music, architecture, etc. By exploring the ranges of human emotion, and by learning how we emotionally respond to various tragic, comedic, or romantic scenarios, we can better understand our own values on which to found our decision making. Informed, of course, by scientifically accurate information.

> The only lens that works when viewing politics (and altruism is a form of politics) is to assume people are miscommunicating their intended outcome.

Could you explain what you mean by this? I'm intrigued.

You can't use copper or aluminum pans on induction stoves, so you're not going to be able to have a pan that has both high thermal conductivity and low thermal heat capacity. This is important for cooking things that need to go quickly from high temperature to off, for example hollandaise/bearnaise, caramel, roux. Even deglazing a pan to make a sauce benefits from being able to quickly stop heat transfer before whisking in the finishing butter for an emulsion. You can take your steel-clad pan off the induction coil, but there's still a lot of heat capacity in the pan that will continue transferring to the food.

I mean, I think you're mostly right, in that I wouldn't have to make that many sacrifices in switching from a gas stove to an induction stove, other than having to replace the majority of my pots and pans and learning some new techniques. But there's certainly a non-trivial amount of recipes and techniques that rely on the characteristics of a high-conductivity low-capacity pan over a gas stove.

You think saying "a really amazing case of a business [that executed] better than everyone else" is dismissive and diminishing?

> [One super cool thing the man page mentions is that if you create a link named z<programname> eg. zsed, with zrun as the link target, then when you run `zsed XYZ`, zrun will read its own program name, and execute 'zrun sed XYZ' automatically.]

That's a brilliant way to improve the ergonomics.

> May I ask if anyone has a technique for introducing new CL tools into their everyday workflow?

Pick one tool a year. Write it on a sticky note on your monitor. Every time you're doing something on the command line, ask yourself "would $TOOL be useful here?".

You're not going to have high throughput on learning new tools this way, but it'll be pretty effective for the tools you do learn.

It's not quite yak shaving, but it certainly is... something:

> I mean, we are running Access in Wine in X11 on Linux in an isolated user account on our server slice that revision controls your Access database in git, and we're displaying it using VNC in your web browser in flash. People can't possibly want that. But they need it.

https://apenwarr.ca/log/20120326

(Not mine, but seems relevant)