corrral

IIRC mine had a chat with my wife and one of the first things he did was ask me how many kids I had. If he'd gotten answers he didn't like, I assume it would have been a lot harder to convince him to do the procedure.

> - The slow motion pass of the Mustang in Empire Of The Sun, that is for planes nuts like me ...

"P-51! Cadillac of the skies!"

God, that's a powerful scene. So much tension of themes and emotions and situation.

I've more than once seen a new database company grow from nothing to a serious business by being 2-5x for one narrow set of users and 0.1x-0.5x for the rest, but being sold as 2-10x for everyone. Most of their market doesn't end up coming from the people for whom they're actually a decent choice, because capturing even a small amount of the larger market is more valuable than 100% of that tiny market segment. Trying to deprogram people who've fallen for the marketing can be really frustrating, if you're trying not to be saddled with subpar crap that's going to make your life harder.

Mongo and Neo4j come to mind as examples of this.

It is perhaps a relevant observation that "free market" and "capitalism" don't share a Wikipedia page.

> Now, most people spend a majority of their time in a locked down environment (phones and tablets) consuming locked down content (subscription only, on approved devices). The default 15 years ago was open, now it is default closed.

I love having the choice. Most of the time I want the locked-down thing. A bunch of extra "freedom" I'm not actually using is just a hassle and liability when all I wanna do is take and crop some photos, or do some writing, or whatever.

Now we have that option, and then also general-purpose computers are so cheap and widely available that you can easily score decent ones for free.

Far from being some computing apocalypse, the situation now is excellent. Computers were a barely-tolerated near-failure for most normal use cases, but now there are options that don't suck for normal people wanting to do normal things. And general-purpose computing is more accessible than ever.

Maybe some Dark Age of Computing still lurks, but it's not happened yet, and things have only gotten better so far.

IMO the worst thing about the current computing era are the handful of Web monopolies and the way "AI"/machine-learning has mostly enabled systems working against us rather than creating agents working entirely on our behalf.

People use "upper middle" to mean different things. Some use it to mean the upper portion of the middle class, by income. Others use it to mean a distinct (and much smaller) class between the middle and upper, with distinct tendencies and preferences, comprising people who live something close to a "rich" lifestyle but are distinguished from the actually-rich by having to work to maintain it, rather than being able to live a very nice life off investment income alone. Doctors, lawyers, other very-well-paid white-collar types, constituting perhaps a single-digit percentage of the population. I'm not sure which, if any, definition has a credible claim to being, in some sense, most-correct.

Soft buttons and software-mediated knobs replacing real buttons and real knobs that actually do things.

Best microwave I've ever used was made in, I think, the late 70s. Didn't even have a turntable, and worked just fine without it, somehow. No clock at all. The "UI" was two heavy-feeling knobs, one for power and one for time. Turn the time knob, and it starts cooking at your selected power until the time runs down, with the knob itself tick-tocking down to zero and setting off a physical(!) buzzer. Want to add more time? Turn the knob while it's still running, no problem. Realize you added too much time? Ditto, but in reverse. Exactly as you'd expect. Simply pull the door open, no button for that, even.

Intuitive, simple, felt great to use, and did 100% of what I want out of a microwave.

Basically anything that used to have real buttons and knobs that have been replaced by shitty-feeling rubber-covered buttons and knobs that merely communicate suggestions, hooked up to an embedded computer, has a worse UI than what it replaced. And don't get me started on touch-sensitive buttons. At least touch screens have some excuse, some purpose. Dedicated touch-sensitive buttons are like some kind of practical joke, and have been central to several of my worst experiences with products.

I'd class smartphones and in fact the entire Internet as largely negative, for me. But there are a handful of uses of both that are so damn valuable that they're hard to get rid of.

I used to dream about getting rid of both completely when I retire, but the way society and tech are going I expect that means I'd almost never see or hear from my kids or future grandkids or whoever. So, stuck with the crap still, I guess.

I know for a fact that a lot of people who build real things take pride in seeing them in use and still around many years later. I think they'd absolutely be demoralized if the typical case saw their work torn up and discarded without ever being used.

10%? Holy shit, I'd say a solid 90% of my output never brought enough value to justify doing it in the first place. Much of it without ever seeing a real user. Software development feels like digging holes and filling them back up again, over and over, to me.

Definitions for this are all over the place. Fussell's "upper middle class" lifestyle couldn't be stably maintained by households under the top quintile (probably not under the top 10%, even), nor could the upper-middle (also upper, but largely upper-middle) described in the jokey-but-fairly-accurate Official Preppy Handbook, and those books are ~40 years old now. For one thing, both paint decent-or-better private prep school as key for that class, and that's never really been within the reach of the lower four quintiles, to say nothing of the other things you'll need to spend money on to stay in that class.

Current minivan market is batshit crazy. We've had dealerships call us up offering thousands more than we paid for our (used) minivan three or four years ago, with 1/3 the mileage it has now. It's basically gone up in value by about as much as it should have dropped in value, in a normal market. I assume they expect to make a profit, so must be pretty sure they can sell it for even more than that. WTF.

My last (used) car shopping experience saw me struggling to get over paying more than $10k for a car, because we really wanted a minivan and they're (IMO) damned expensive. That was a few years ago.

I am... concerned about how painful the next one's going to be, in 3-5 more years. I hate spending money on cars.

EVs don't seem to be helping the price any—quite the opposite, as far as I can tell—even if they're good for TCO. Concerned about what that market's looking like for poor people, these days. No more $2k cars that'll semi-reliably get you to work for the next five years, or to the 50-miles-away grocery store or Wal-Mart for your "big shopping" once every couple weeks, for the rural poor.

Can they not use other kinds of tires, and/or are those a cheap kind of tire? Because otherwise I expect that most that are on the road longer than a tire change, won't be using that kind, and that'll get more true the more accessible they get—there are a not small number of people who buy used tires because they can't afford new ones, not even shitty new ones, and worn tread is better than the totally-bald tires they're replacing.

"I think" can usually be inferred from context and isn't needed, but bad or adversarial (hard to tell the difference) reading & online forums have encouraged everyone to write worse, in order to defend against flames from poor readers and assholes. You have to try to cover every stupid way your words could be read if you don't want other posters to pounce on you, like by throwing "I think" in front of things that are obviously opinion or otherwise not being advanced as absolute, indisputable truth.

[EDIT] Point is, yes, making that assumption is a normal part of ordinary communication outside the "well akshually" Web.

I think it falls naturally out of trying to recommend greats to people—at some point you need an, "OK but if you are only going to watch one of these, it should be this one...."

Not objective, sure, and not authoritative. On a ranked list of, say, 500 great films, what's the difference between 100 and 101? Probably not much and the ordering of them's basically arbitrary... but if you're only going to watch 100 of those 500, it likely is a better idea to watch 1-100 than 401-500. Some truth does fall out of the rankings, especially if you factor in more than one person's opinions. Keep seeing the same few movies near the tops of lists, then they're probably damn good.

> Conversely, living on top of a hill, the wind absolutely screams in winter. After two or three days of constant howling wind, sometimes I feel like I'm going nuts.

Indeed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wind_(novel)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wind_(1928_film)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wind_(2018_film)

Novel, film based on the novel (starring Lillian Gish!), and a much newer re-make.

If a marketplace lets itself get so dodgy that this kind of thing's normal, that's absolutely the marketplace's fault.

There's a big, shady flea market in a bad part of my city. Barbed-wire protecting the roof. Heavy bars on all the windows. Armed guards. Half or more of the vendors are plainly fences, or have a close relationship with one or more. Tons of stuff that "fell of the back of the truck". Entire booths carrying counterfeits of luxury goods, sold under the luxury brand name. It's kinda crazy it's allowed to exist.

You don't go there with the same expectations you do when you go to Wal-Mart or Costco.

Amazon tries to look like, and even started out as, a place like Wal-Mart or Costco. Now they're the "how have the cops not shut this place down?" shady flea market. It's 100% their fault that they're like that, and to the degree that they present themselves as anything else, that's deception.

I'd watch the various Great Plains aquifers. I think the main outcome of drying isn't going to be thirst, but hunger, and that's the area to keep your eye on for when that'll really kick into high gear. Those aquifers were on track to dry up absent climate change, AFAIK, from severe overuse by agriculture.

Short answer: no.

Long answer, according to Garner:

Cummings, E.E.

The poet Edward Estlin Cummings (1894-1962), a shy man, early in his career used the lowercase i for the first-person singular pronoun. (This habit, now commonplace in Internet exchanges, was highly unusual.) Cummings's critics then began referring to him sarcastically in print as e.e. cummings. The practice stuck, and that was how his name appeared on book covers. Does this mean we should all use lower-case letters in spelling his name? Those most familiar with the man think not, and they use ordinary capitalization. Norman Friedman, the founder and then president of the E.E. Cummings Society, summed up the poet's "philosophy of typography" this way: "that he could use caps and lowercase as he wished, but that when others referred to him by name they ought to use caps." [....] Nor is it true that Cummings legally changed his name to lowercase letters. After that story appeared in the preface to a biography about Cummings, his widow angrily denied it.

(copied, by typing, from Garner's Modern English Usage—any errors probably introduced by me, the typist)

How many exchanges building on this before we reach a particularly helpless flavor of solipsism, you think? I'd say about three more posts.

> Spreadsheets like 123 started becoming mainstream in the late 80s, then slow slide to "High Level" started. Then the trend greatly accelerated when presentation software became mainstream. Before that, it was easier to talk details then to create a slide deck for an overhead viewer.

I think that in some cases the absence of limits or costs can make things worse. Suddenly gets way cheaper to collect a bunch of numbers and analyze them? We'll no longer be careful and thoughtful about what we subject to that kind of analysis, because it's so cheap.

My go-to example of this is kanban boards and similar tools. They clearly lose something if you translate them from a physical board with physical limitations to a computerized "board" with practically no limitations. The computerized version is better from some points of view (who likes limitations?) but also so different that it's arguably worse in some ways, depending on what you want the board to accomplish.

> If I was going to be disparaging, I'd say that their closest Christian analogue is the nakedly revisionist evangelical Christianity of the the American 1970s and forwards.

I think the current strain, as far as Biblical interpretation is concerned, goes back to Darby's crappy-but-popular 1909 Bible, incorporating extensive same-page notes from Darby:

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

The 70s are just when the GOP's plan to sell itself to evangelicals, on social issues, as a deliberate ploy to capture them as a constituency to support the rest of the GOP agenda, really started to take off.

They're very prone, in my experience, to believing that their explanations are ultra-rational, though, reality be damned. And to falling for arguments with the trappings of rationality, but deeply flawed premises or early steps slyly skipped so the castle's built on sand but looks like a perfect castle with all these crazy-tall minarets reaching for the sky (ahem, like a certain popular-online political & economic philosophy) and then treating everyone who doesn't agree that the castle's beautiful as irrational, probably-emotion-driven morons.

If you're considering maintaining homes on two continents, I'm gonna go out on a limb and guess the local job market in at least one of those two places doesn't affect you at all.

Heh, at least it's their own money in those cases.

A boss-type one time: "When I was with X, I built four datacenters"

Me, with a career that overlaps a time when one or two people building a datacenter with a little help from contractors for e.g. the electrical work and hvac, wasn't unheard of, for about three seconds, in my head: "Damn, that's pretty impressive"

Me, by the end of the three seconds: "Oh, he means he told other people to build four datacenters and that was very likely the extent of his involvement."

I was always told the ones in Kansas were going to/from Mexico on this migration, but I gather from Wikipedia that that was all actually happening much farther West, and ours weren't the migratory kind.

> 1. "Wow, have you read all these books?" means "I never read books."

There's a short story, I think in one of my New Hugo Winners volumes, in which a character responds to that question with something like, "who the hell wants a library full of books they've already read?!"

But yes, that's definitely the kind of question only someone who doesn't read much would ask. A great tell.

[EDIT] Or, I guess, maybe a kid from a certain kind of background, reader or not, which I think might have been the case in that story, but from an adult? Yeah, pretty good signal.

> Soft skills I don’t mind; grown up interviews I don’t mind.

BINGO.

I'm good at the job and good at normal interviews. I more-or-less enjoy both, even. I like talking to clients, and I'm good at it. I can sell myself. And I can do the work.

Specifically software developer interviews practically make me hyperventilate and break out in hives. Fuck that. A pop quiz over a huge potential space, probably over something I will never in my life actually use on the job, to be solved live while people watch and judge me? Oh my god, no. No. Why the shit that's considered acceptable in a world where we're so touchy-feely that projects are supposed to have Codes of Conduct is beyond me. It's straight-up abuse.