catherd

There seem to be a lot of supporting arguments (look at all these dead projects he deems to have been fast, elegant, and efficient, also, hey, my current toys are not made for me to play with like I used to be able to, and the battery life sucks). But what is the actual thesis?

It seems like he wants hacker toys and is unhappy that everything is built for consumers now. I can't get anything deeper out of it.

The EU vs. US/Asia thing just seems like a weird proxy for saying real techies don't like extruded technology product but it's what the market asked for and now we have lots of it.

My experience matches this. You can move heaven and earth to teach everyone the exact right way to do things, or you can set some overarching guidelines and move people around or re-define their roles until it starts working. In an environment where the work is always changing the first method never ends and quickly descends into chaos if you ever let up.

Almost everyone loves to do work that other people value, but it's hard to predict how they internally calculate what is valued and what isn't.

See if you can learn why this person has this behavior. Perfectionism? Fear of looking bad in front of peers? Unclear goals?

With some creative thinking it may be that those internal motivations are compatible with tasks that need done. If not, a harder to implement solution would be to see if you can frame some higher level goals they can internalize. Particularly with people on the spectrum I've found that they have a hard time seeing the forest, but if you can explain things in a way they can process they will happily adopt those higher level goals into their value system.

Unless that person is driven to get straight A's on their report card, make it clear you value the right stuff is getting done, but try not to turn it into mechanical process.

What's the expected service life for that kind of network gear? Wouldn't most of it be gone or upgraded by then anyway?

Not sure about now, but 20 years ago all it took to get into the in-state university system was SAT scores and a GED.

Transferring from there to other schools in the US was pretty straightforward and there weren't any application essays until grad school.

It does work on air. Some commercial HVAC systems integrate UVC lamps. It needs relatively high power or a long straight run where the air flow and light are both pointed in the same direction.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultraviolet_germicidal_irradia...

In my opinion the best reason people are interested in this situation is Scott Alexander is considered to be NOT someone who will unquestioningly ride an empty wave of reactionary outrage if it's pointed in an advantageous direction:

People are hoping rational thought can be used to change norms when something bad happens.

That's why this is interesting and different than a thousand other sad situations involving people who likely don't have the tools to solve it in that way.

As I understand it:

Lincoln was anti-slavery in the sense that he thought it was morally wrong, he just didn't see any way of ending it that was constitutional.

At the time, there was a balance of power between free and slave states. Ending that balance meant effectively the game was over, it was just going to take a while to play out. The people of the time understood the implications and acted based on their understanding.

I like some older country, but at the risk of sounding like a curmudgeon... I can't get into most of the newer stuff so it's not really on my radar.

David Allan Coe seems to think it's the correct term:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OhEHB0a7Uyg

Well, you batted your eye...

I count myself in that group. I have no interest in turning this into any sort of argument about which group gets to be the martyrs because other people can or can't call them names they don't like at certain points in history. Monkeys gang up on other monkeys all the time, it's part of what they do, but it's not really interesting to play on either side of that game.

People call them/us that. It was meant to identify that group of people. That was the least interesting part of the whole comment. Let's talk about any of the other parts.

I don't think there is a single "Southern way of life" since the South is a pretty big place.

I'm not particularly interested in history, but from the little I paid attention, the part I grew up in was too steep, rocky, and poor to have (any?) slaves. What we did have was a large number of Scotch-Irish who have a strong tradition of:

- insularity

- contrarianism

- hardscrabble self-sufficiency

- anti-authority

- love nothing more than maintaining a good feud

- religion (protestant roots)

- loving "the land" (hunting, your farm, etc.)

Ignoring the morals of the situation, from an economic perspective the North could afford to give up slavery. They were richer and their more industrialized economy wasn't based on slavery. The Southern economy was (completely?) reliant on slavery, and when the Northerners legislated their economy away the rebellion was somewhat predictable. Painting anyone involved as a racist is easier and true to a large extent, but there were strong components of "don't tell me what to do" and just not having any viable economic alternatives that also contributed.

In my mind at least, a lot of modern day Southerners of a certain type (the poor white trash type, not the Gone With The Wind aristocratic plantation owner type that doesn't really exist any more) just love telling outsiders they can fuck off, and waving the rebel flag/preserving statues are pretty handy avenues for that.

When somebody uses borgbackup with you guys, is there any way you can include "hey you have a stale lock file" (that's probably keeping your backup from working) in the automated email that gets sent when disk usage doesn't change?

It's quite easy to let a VPS act as a central hub as long as your use case exactly matches "I want everyone to have full read-write access to everything and they understand things like being careful about simultaneous editing and not moving the shared folder wherever they please."

I found trying to manage anything like restricted access to be impossible from a practical standpoint.

Debugging what's going on when it doesn't want to sync is not fun. The logs are full of info that seems irrelevant and just finding the config file on Windows is a new adventure on each machine. Not sure why they can't at least show the path in the web UI somewhere.

I would have gone with Dropbox, but it's blocked in the country most of us work in. Syncthing mostly gets the job done, but I'd probably pay for Dropbox if I could eliminate the frequent inexplicable 15-30 minute delays from Syncthing. In it's defense, though, the network quality it has to work with is pretty terrible.

Not disagreeing, just adding more info:

I think a lot of people on the manufacturing side react in a confrontational way because it's disrespectful to a manufacturer when someone wants to use the infrastructure they've sunk years into as a playground with no hope of actually making it to production.

If a manufacturer takes on 10 projects in a year and none of them do anything but endless prototyping they will quickly go out of business. Unlike in software where you make your money in the design phase.

If someone has been trying to make a hardware project happen for years and they still don't understand this dynamic then there's not just an understanding issue, there's a track history of being a drain on other people's resources, or at least a willingness to be one. Establishing a relationship with everyone needed to make hardware has a much higher drain on partner resources than would happen if a consumer called a help line or a programmer read some API documents. Just making a quotation can take a week or more for a non-trivial hardware project, and prototyping is generally not that profitable either, if at all.

An analogy: If someone came in here and said they wanted to hire CS grad students to work on Blockchain (but no clear idea of a specific problem) during the shutdown and was hoping they could pay them half of what they make on their already lower than market rate research stipend but still take advantage of the research topics they are involved in, I think expressing a certain amount of "hey, those are real people you are hoping to screw over" would be appropriate.

I typically agree with your calls on being a jerk vs. not, but LeifCarrotson is being pretty factual here.

Hardware is incredibly expensive and time consuming to create from scratch in ways programmers usually don't appreciate. If the GP is asking those questions after thinking about the problem for years they do clearly need to be told they have no idea what the problem is.

In the hardware business we are constantly approached by people who have little more than a vague idea and a hobby-money budget. I've seen what happens when you encourage them, and it usually involves fucking up their retirement if you let them get too far.

Much more humane to see it for what it is and shoot the idea down as fast as possible, or at least help them understand they probably need VC level funding to get anywhere.

If someone has been simmering on an idea for years and can't even formulate a clear explanation of a problem he wants to solve (so that people can explain what's required past "it's really expensive, don't do it") it's clearly not sinking in and there's no product there, just a guy who wants to play with technology and waste manufacturer's time while doing it.

This is an informative link. Summary:

- of 4 coronavirus strains in one study (all the type that cause common colds), none gave long term immunity after exposure

- of those 4 strains, getting re-infected multiple times in the same year is common

- each person tends to have a consistent reaction (weak/strong symptoms the first time through predict a similar experience in any later infections)

- infection severity tends to run in families

- 6 years after SARS, doctors found T-cells, but no B-cells in humans . Mice re-infected with SARS were protected from the worst effects or SARS by memory T-cells.

Specifically related to covid-19:

- macaque monkeys were infected by covid-19 and exposed again 4 weeks after recovery. none developed symptoms or had detectable virus in their throats

- no reported cases of re-infection in Wuhan in the 5 months since the epidemic started

People keep saying that, but I haven't heard of any clear examples of actual sick people who got it again, just positive tests that seem to be within the error bands for the tests.

Not a doctor, this is not a rhetorical question: Shouldn't we have those 2nd-time sick people by now? Shouldn't the null hypothesis be that immunity works like most other colds?

Masks weren't "proven to be effective" until well after any reasonably thoughtful person was wishing they had one.

The only way to win at dotfiles is not to play.

Fresh out of college all my peers were using fancy 3D mice with programmable buttons for mechanical modeling and one older engineer was just dragging his finger around on the laptop trackpad. It was painful to watch.

Over 15 years later I realize that old guy knew what he was doing. Learning to deal with the defaults lets you drop into any standard install and go, whether that's for 3D modeling or Linux software. Unless you just love constant fiddling with custom config then having it all rot away in the next upgrade or hardware change there are much more productive uses of time.

I haven't seen N95 prices that cheap here in weeks. Anything I see is mostly around 30RMB right now (like a 3Q with NIOSH certification). KN95s are still lower.

We've talked with multiple vendors who simply can't get non-woven material stock at all and are having to turn away orders.

Probably because despite how the media is portraying things, people are concerned and can actually act out of altruism. Plus, individuals who are practicing social distancing probably don't need to go through PPE like you would in an intensive care ward.

I'm in China and have sold over 30,000 masks to the US (not for profit, but I don't have the cash to just donate them). We've sold to hundreds of different individuals at this point, and none of them are using the buying patterns you describe. The only people buying more than a hundred or so are buying for employees, hospitals, or doing a good job of lying about their intentions. Everyone is buying just a few and making them last.

So far I've personally taken one 10-pack of KN95s from our stock (of which I use 4 so far, on rotation. the other 6 are still in the pack), and about 5 surgical masks. There are strategies for extending the life if you do a little research.

The vast majority of regular people just aren't currently using PPE in the way you describe. After reading up on it, personally I think there's a useful middle ground between throwing away masks like you would in an ICU and completely doing without.

Sanitizer and gloves I know less about. But we do sell gloves and nobody is ordering more than a few boxes of those, either.

The FDA recently said they would not block import of KN95s, and also issued an EUA on April 3rd that allows approved KN95s to be used in medical applications.

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/kenbensinger/the-fda-no...

https://www.fda.gov/medical-devices/personal-protective-equi...

The mask situation in the US is truly fucked up right now. I've been finding and sending masks and other PPE to the US from China. Started out for friends and family then it expanded to friends-of-friends, then anybody. It has a really weird dynamic.

I've contacted over 100 hospitals. They don't want to help themselves. It's all about pushing people into a web form that fronts a bureaucratic system that supposedly allocates resources efficiently through a central clearing authority (never heard back from any of them), covering their ass in regards to regulatory requirements, and not allowing anyone to take advantage of them by charging money.

Individuals aren't much better. They've had so much conflicting information drilled into them that of the few who still think masks are needed by regular people, many feel so guilty about getting them that they can't bring themselves to do it. Or can't wear them in public because people will judge them for taking away from nurses even though the same hospitals the nurses work at have made it clear they would rather have their employees work unprotected than buy something not approved by the FDA or stoop so low as to work with someone who can't donate everything for free.

Have had way better success working with retired civic-minded business guys who can buy stuff through their local civic group and just get it done. It takes a surprising amount of almost outright harassment from these dudes to get the hospitals to either accept a donation or come up with a list of what they need and arrange funding, but so far getting hooked up with this type of person has been the only way I've found to get PPE (at least the kind that's still available) into a hospital.

I know some people in the Philippines who normally do office task outsourcing, call center work, or language instruction who would absolutely love to get a few dollars an hour to teach or babysit kids via teleconference. And by absolutely love, I mean they would be able to buy food to eat next week.

Not sure how well teleconferencing would keep a toddler distracted, but you'd probably have varying degrees of success with older kids.

Could put people in touch if there is interest.

If you look at China and South Korea, they both took about 11 days between crossing 100 cases to having a strong effect on their case# curve. (18 if you ignore the roughly 7 day incubation + getting tested period)

With incubation time removed:

Italy: 19 days from crossing 100, and counting

Iran: 15 days and counting

Spain: 11 days and counting

France: 12 days and counting

US: 9 days and counting

...but you can make machines in machine shops, as pointed out above. or machines to make machines, if needed.

or in the simpler case you might fall back to scraped and oiled ways and bushings

Not sure "working fine in PRC" is really something you can say about anything web related.

I do occasional web dev from within China and had to eliminate external references to get manageable page load times. At least from where I work pulling in practically anything from outside the Great Firewall will have a high probability of killing page load time. Anything hosted by Google in particular will often have you staring at your screen for 30 seconds.

I set up a Shopify store from China (where a VPN is mandatory), and eventually had to tell Shopify to delete the site because I literally couldn't complete the captchas any more to access it. Couldn't even back up anything before bailing.

Before the complete lockout it was taking around 20 minutes of busses, bikes, sidewalks, and stoplights each login. Nasty feeling when you come back and you realize you have to log back in for some reason.

On top of decision fatigue and needing to know the market, losing auctions gets expensive fast if you value your time.

Losing 30 minutes, eating in a noisy environment, and not being able to control how the restaurant manages a schedule the GP doesn't have insight into is awful?

Getting pissed off over an experience like that is probably an appropriate response. Or bringing the 10 year history of being a loyal client to the management's attention. But going to war against them for a once in 10 years event sounds like first world entitlement.

The overall point about the lengths needed to maintain an experience that keeps customers happy is real, though. You don't make money by trying to profit on every transaction or treating entitled people like you know they're acting like an ass.

In my experience, just avoiding the things listed as distractions doesn't have the desired outcome (which I read as the ability to really lose yourself in the experiences of being wherever you are).

Even if it's only used for utilitarian purposes, the care and feeding necessary if you land in a different country with a mobile phone is pretty high:

- find a SIM card shop

- research which card/plan meets your needs

- pay, screw around with it until you understand how to activate it

- in countries with weak infrastructure, spend lots of unplanned time finding a signal and waiting on slow data

- a quick internet search for bus routes or whatever often turns into standing on the corner for 45 minutes oblivious to everything around you.

- making sure to keep it charged, bring a backup power bank, etc.

- deal with reloading it with more money once the data runs out, which can often sink a few hours or more in remote places.

All that said, I'm still not giving up my phone the next time I travel but I do often resent the amount of time it takes to deal with one.