dlevine

The important thing is that the vaccines are having a large effect on Covid-related deaths. Despite the current number of reported cases in Israel being equal to (or even a bit over) the January peak, the number of deaths is much lower.

According to Google's numbers, their current 7-day average number of deaths is 23, while in January they had a 7-day average of about 65. And it looks like the deaths peaked in the past week.

https://www.google.com/search?q=israel+covid+cases&rlz=1C1CH...

For reference, the numbers in Florida (where vaccination rates are significantly lower) look a lot different. You have many more cases and more deaths than the January peak.

https://www.google.com/search?q=florida+covid+cases&rlz=1C1C...

Interesting! Thanks for sharing.

I have done just about everything over the years to lose weight. I tend to exercise a ton naturally, so it has been more about eating less than exercising more. I would say that my natural weight is slightly overweight but not obese.

I've tried various brands of keto (Atkins/4 Hour Body), Weight Watchers, eating slowly, cutting out sugar and wheat, juice fasts. Everything has worked for a time, but the weight has eventually crept back. I have really good willpower, but I've read the research on willpower being a resource that you use up, and definitely agree with it.

For the past couple of months I have been on Noom. I have stuck to it, and I'm now thinner than I have been in a long time, but I'm a little bit skeptical that it's going to last long-term. But I'm getting married in less than 2 months, so I only need to stay where I am until the wedding, and then I can gain a few pounds.

This kind of stuff is super helpful.

My dad was a surgeon who treated kids with scoliosis. He also happened to make teddy bears as a hobby. So he made a teddy bear with an artificial spine in it that he put scoliosis hardware on.

When he was meeting with a kid for a pre-op consult, he would let the kid hug the teddy bear, and then he would show them the teddy bear's X-Ray. It really helped them understand what was going to happen to them, and put them at ease.

It seems like these changes have good intentions (i.e. improved security), but introduce a lot of complexity that can have unintended consequences for end-users. This reminds me somewhat of my process setting up UEFI Secure Boot on my Windows PC that wasn't originally configured for it. Not in the exact steps, but in that there is a ton going on behind the scenes and the UX is horrendously bad.

Unfortunately, vendors haven't really thought about how to explain these changes to end-users. They are trying to make them fairly transparent, which probably works at least 95% of the time, but for a small percentage of people, becomes a big PITA.

My first computer was a 286 (desktop) back in 1989, with 1MB of RAM and a 40MB hard drive. And an NEC VGA monitor, which cost quite a lot back then. It was originally the family computer, but eventually became a hand-me-down when my parents upgraded. I managed to get Windows 3.1 running on it, and it actually wasn't so slow. The first computer I ran Linux on was a 486.

I have a Ryzen 5000-series PC that I built about 6 months ago using mostly new parts. Yesterday I was curious whether my PC was compatible out of the box, so I downloaded Microsoft's compatibility checker. It told me that my PC didn't have Secure Boot enabled. I figured that I would just enabled that in my BIOS (haha).

I went into the BIOS (sorry, UEFI setup) and enabled TPM, which I had read about as being one of the major issues. That wasn't enough, and I was informed that my PC still isn't compatible. I tried enabling Secure Boot, and got an error message that there was something else I had to do first (generate a security key). I figured out how to do that, and I still couldn't enable Secure Boot because my PC was in CSM mode. CSM mode is my B450 motherboard's default mode.

I tried disabling CSM mode, and then I was able to turn on Secure Boot. However, when I rebooted, my computer couldn't find my SSD, and kicked me back to the BIOS, with no message other than a beep. I turned everything off and gave up for the evening.

Then this morning I Googled some of the messages I got and realized that the problem might be that my SSD doesn't use GPT but MBR for the partition table (it was pulled from my previous PC). After thinking I was going to have to back up and recreate my hard drive, I realized that there is a command-line tool I could use, helpfully named mbr2gpt. I ran that with the appropriate options, ignoring some warnings. It ran successfully, although I got an error about my recovery image, which was spurious so far as I can tell.

Once I did all of this, I was able to switch on Secure Boot, and the compatibility checker informed me that my computer is compatible.

The point is that I'm pretty computer-savvy and have a pretty new PC. It still took me quite a while to figure this out, and a lot of people would have given up around the time they had to go mucking around in the BIOS. Unless you are have a recent store-bought PC that has Secure Boot and TPM enabled out of the box, you probably aren't going to be able to upgrade, even if your hardware is compatible.

I'm guessing that Microsoft walks back on this decision.

I worked all the way through Duolingo's Mandarin curriculum a couple of years back (after having basic knowledge from studying on another paid site). I can say that it was definitely fun, and it was easy to study every day. The downside was that I was still at a pretty basic level when I finished their curriculum. Logged on just now, and they haven't added any new content since I finished.

For people who just want to learn a few words of a foreign language and have fun while I'm doing it, Duolingo is great. And I'm sure that the market is huge.

This reminds me of Godel Escher Bach. “I Cannot Be Played on PC Speaker X.”

I recently rebuilt my gaming PC with a Ryzen 5000-series. Surprisingly, it has become my main work PC, and I haven't used it much for gaming. It's faster than my i9 Macbook pro, and another benefit is that I can only work when I'm sitting at my desk. With a laptop, I can do work pretty much anywhere. Which is a double-edged sword.

I worked at a company right out of college that used K for some things. They did some consulting work for the financial services industry early on, and I think that's how they started. I ran through some basic tutorials, but never worked on any of the projects that used it, so never became proficient. Only a special subset of blessed people got to use K.

The only things I remember are that a symbol could could do 3 things when used with a monad, dyad, or infix, and that it was very hard to read anyone else's code because it was so terse.

They also went through a phase of naming their Java classes things like com.a.b after getting used to K's terseness. Fortunately, that didn't last very long.

Yes, and I believe that's one of the reasons why there is so much hate for NFTs on this thread. People are selling tokens for huge amounts of money that confer no rights other than being able to say that you own the NFT.

Obviously you would need to actually own the asset to be able to hand over access control as part of the NFT sale. NFTs potentially have real use cases, but the technology and infrastructure isn't mature enough to support those use cases.

This is potentially the beginning of a very interesting trend, and something I have spent some time thinking about. My sense is that owning an NFT should allow you to control access to that content (even if your choice is just to make it publicly accessible). NFT doesn't have an ACL layer built in, so this would need to be added (has anyone already done this?)

One open question is whether it actually makes sense to have an ACL for an electronic asset, because once someone has access to it, they can easily make a perfect copy of the bits and give it to anyone they want. But I guess you could make the same argument about selling access to digital content that is available on a torrent somewhere.

I'm not sure whether most people just care about the 44% cut, but ticketed spaces does sound like a pretty interesting experiment.

I have been a bit skeptical about the whole Clubhouse craze, but this does seem like a reasonable starting point to build a business model around live chat.

Betamax was slightly technically superior, but the reason it lost was that Sony initially limited recording times to 1 hour. This meant that most movies required 2 Betamax tapes, vs 1 for VHS. Betamax players were also much more expensive.

The point is that a lot of "bad ideas" have something major going for them.

I have an AEK64 (https://i.redd.it/jqm5upnc1gfx.jpg) that I've been using for the past 4+ years.

It's a 60% keyboard that I built by harvesting the switches (dampened cream ALPS) and Keycaps (PBT Dye Sub) from an Apple Extended Keyboard II, and then using Hasu's PCB and a custom laser cut plate and wooden case.

It's comfortable to type on (those old ALPS switches are much better than the modern switches), quiet, the keycaps are mac specific, and it looks great. I find no real downsides to a 60% layout, especially since it's programmable so I can map the keys however I want.

I went through a ton of different keyboards (everything from a Model M to an ortholinear to an Ergodox to a Topre board), and haven't found anything that I like better. So much so that I built 2 of them (for home and work) and then sold most of my other boards.

I have been a Mac user for many years, and typically used Macs for development and a Windows PC for gaming. I recently setup WSL2 on my new Ryzen desktop, and it has been great for web development. Works pretty seamlessly, and not being able to run GUI apps was one of my few complaints (mostly because I wanted to run a graphical git difftool). Glad to see they have addressed this.

I never had an LG smartphone, but I have many fond memories of my old LG VX4400 dumbphone that I had from 2003-2007. It was built like a tank, easily fit in my pocket, and the battery lasted for 4 or 5 days. Sure it didn't have a web browser and the only available apps were BREW, but I didn't really need any of that stuff at the time.

I was always intrigued by AMD processors in the 90s, although pretty much stuck with Intel.

I built an Athlon 64 PC in 2004 - it was the first 64-bit consumer processor. Intel was going down the Itanium path, and AMD just added 64-bit extensions to X86, which ended up being the winning strategy. I remember writing an article about it for my job at the time.

That served me well until I upgraded to a Phenom II X6 in 2010. I was super excited by the prospect of having 6 cores, even though I had no real use for that many. That PC lasted me for over 10 years, although I did upgrade the RAM, added an SSD, and upgraded the GPU twice. Was still a competent PC at the end for both gaming and software development, and managed to part it out for a decent amount of money.

Late last year I finally succumbed the the Ryzen itch and upgraded to a Ryzen 5600x. It's a fantastic platform, and hopefully that PC will last me another 10 years with only minor upgrades.

I remember going to Fry's for the first time in the late 90s. Having grown up on the East Coast, I had only heard about this magical place where you could buy pretty much anything computer-related. It was truly an experience, especially when compared with from CompUSA and Best Buy.

When I moved to the Bay Area, I did enjoy going to Fry's and walking around ogling the hardware. Over time, I switched pretty much to buying things online. I guess everyone else did too.

I recently started allergy shots, and am also on Dupixent.

I asked my allergist about this when I started shots. He said that it might help with the Eczema, but nothing is guaranteed. There is at least anecdotal evidence indicating that allergy shots might be helpful for Eczema. https://acaai.org/news/your-severe-eczema-may-best-be-treate...

If you don't have insurance, Dupixent is like $2000 per month. Not sure whether their copay assist program will defray some of the cost. However, Dupixent has been life-changing for me. I went from having itchy flaky skin all over my body to being essentially normal.

This sort of reminds me of Airpair. Does anyone know what happened to them? Any learnings there?

Intel has whiffed their 10nm process node to the point where it may never launch in any scale. Their 7nm node is significantly behind schedule. Their only solution in the near-term is to keep increasing the TDP of their chips, which won't work for long.

This might be their only good option. Sure outsourcing manufacturing is a risk, but it's probably one they need to take. They will catch back up if they can get their 7nm node back on track, which isn't a given.

This reminds me strongly of the wait but why article on Overton windows. Highly recommended for anyone interested in this sort of stuff.

https://waitbutwhy.com/2019/09/american-brain.html

I have a late 2013 Macbook Pro. This update bricked it. I have a tendency to install most Apple releases when they are first available, even though there are often problems that are usually fixed with a few updates.

I'm sometimes able to boot into Internet Recovery mode (Command-Option-G). Unfortunately, it seems like the only option is to reinstall Big Sur, which doesn't fix the problem.

Hopefully once Apple fixes this issue, I will be able to install the updated version and get it working again. If not, this machine is 7 years old and more or less on its last legs, but I'm still somewhat disappointed.

I think part of the problem is that this "feature" masks the need to properly understand scroll behavior (at least if you only use platforms that auto-hide scrollbars).

Recently, we were doing a bug safari for a new product feature that was about to launch. I noticed that an element had a scrollbar when it shouldn't, and filed a bug. One of the developers picked it up, and first said "not a bug. I don't see it on my computer." I showed him the bug on my machine, and he looked at it for a few minutes before saying "I don't know how to fix it." I pointed out that the overflow-x was set to "scroll" in the CSS for that component, and he could just set it to "auto" to fix the behavior (since the scrollbar should never show up in normal usage of that feature). It turns out that he didn't even know "auto" existed.

I agree with you. Having lived in a number of great cities over the years, San Francisco is my favorite. It's not perfect, but there are a lot of things to love, and being able to work remotely wouldn't cause me to move.

Actually just got back from a very similar bike ride.

Have been thinking strongly about the ROG Zephyrus 14 (cheaper and better than the 13" MBP in almost every way). But don't think I can stomach not having the webcam built-in (do way too many Zoom calls).

I have been a PM for a few years (and an engineer for many years before that), and my experience is that you don't want your customers to decide your product roadmap, but you definitely allow them to influence it. Your job is to balance between features that will please existing customers and features that will move the business ahead to new customers.

In general, you should have an idea of the next projects you are going to work on. When customers give feedback, that can help to reorder the projects. If you are doing your job correctly, there won't be any huge surprises.

There will be occasional one-off customer requests. We call these "customer love" at my company. We reserve some percentage of our development time (maybe 10-20%) for doing these, because they do create a lot of goodwill with customers. But you have to be pretty disciplined about making sure that they are 1-2 days or less of work and not 1 or to months of work.

There will occasionally be things that customers demand as part of a deal cycle. In some cases you have to build these, but it is important to explicitly highlight what you are foregoing and to be conscious of this tradeoff. Note: hiring contractors doesn't really work well, because someone will have to support it (just went through this).

One time quite a while ago, I randomly hung out with the Kiip team one day when there were like 6 of them. Mitchell struck me as a super nice guy, and at some point he randomly dropped the fact at some point that he wrote Vagrant.

I'm glad that they have done so well.