dwc

There's a difference between bowing to practicality / trusting someone, and trusting everyone in the chain that gets the packets from the server to your device.

For an analogy, before there was anything like modern math notation people would write out the problem and solution in plain language. On one hand, that made it very accessible as long as you knew a few terms like "sum". On the other hand, the reader has to build a relatively small mental model out of a lot of words.

Is it better to concentrate hard on a system of equations taking 1/4 of a page (with lots of whitespace) until you grok it, or read five pages of prose at fairly normal speed and try to build a mental model of it? Which better confers the ability to quickly come to the realization of something like "that's a parabola" or "the minimum of that function is obviously seven" or whatever?

Analogies are only so useful, but I think there are enough parallels there to shed some light.

> Obviously they've found a loophole

Yes, Apple and any number of other companies have all cleverly discovered the sneaky loophole that was created unintentionally and has been left open purely by oversight for lo, these many years.

If the loophole wasn't created at the behest of lobbyists, it's been kept open and/or widened by lobbyists. Whether or not Apple itself had anything else to do with that, it's part of the playing field now and it would be corporate malpractice not to use it. The way for a company to help fix this problem is not to become less competitive on principle, but to use their lobbying power to adjust the whole playing field.

I was also wondering about the jargon angle. In my experience, jargon is also prominent on mailing lists. I don't understand what's problematic about jargon on IRC that it's true elsewhere.

I agree. The whole point of dumping all these things out of your brain and into the system is so that you can let go off all that because you know it's in the system and the system works. If you're still fretting over the list of stuff then you probably don't trust the system. The most likely causes of distrust are 1) you haven't had enough chance to see it working, or 2) you haven't implemented/adapted the system correctly for you and the system really, actually isn't working. Weekly review is a fine place to assess and tune what you're doing in the larger sense, I think.

FreeBSD on the desktop used be take a fair amount of fiddling. If that's no longer true then that's awesome! :)

Yes, I have. My experience was good. It's easy to install, configure, and maintain, and it's rock solid. But it's not the only tool in my toolbox.

Have you tried OpenBSD for desktop? FreeBSD on the desktop is, well, a pain. Hence PCBSD. But OpenBSD is actually pretty good at being a desktop, as long as you can live without some things like Flash and other things that will never be there.

You're implying that OpenBSD is a toy OS. It's not. There are people using it for real work under real load. Is it the fastest? Nope. If you're spec'ing out a server and cutting edge performance is your major concern then you should pick something else. But that's not the only criterion in real production environments. There are roles where OpenBSD is not only an acceptable choice, but the best choice. As always, it's about the best tool for the job. No tool is the best for every job.

> soon becomes a pain when you have hundreds of cards to review every day

If you have hundreds to review each day then you've gone nuts adding new items too fast. I know, because I've done exactly that and have seen tons of other people make the same mistake. Adding something like 5-10 new items per day (max) keeps things manageable in the long run. I would suggest that if you're spending more than 10-15 minutes in review that you stop adding new items until your review is under control.

Another problem I've had that seems in common with others is that using SRS is somewhat addictive, feels productive, and gives you nice concrete numbers to gauge your "progress". Many people, like me, fall into the trap of spending more and more time doing SRS, displacing other parts of the curriculum.

> However, the characters I learned while living in Japan, in context, are still fresh in my mind.

So much this. I haven't lived abroad, but I listen to podcasts and other media in my target languages. Things that I've heard and looked up and then heard again multiple times are pretty much permanent now. However memory works, this seems to trigger "this is important and useful, don't lose it!"

It's suboptimal that you get down votes for asking an honest question hoping to understand better. I think replies to your question will give a fair number of people a better understanding of the issues.

Often people also have trouble with breakfast foods. There's often no rationale for what makes an "appropriate for breakfast" food except for what you've grown up with.

I'm not sure what you mean by compatibility problems. Would you elaborate, please?

I pretty much stay away from all this stuff, but I keep a keen eye on it. The whole virtualization space is pretty interesting (potentially), but it seems like people aren't too clear about the different use cases. Rather, they promote whatever bit of tech they learned as The Solution, even though VMs, docker, unikernels, et al obviously have different characteristics.

Of course you could use awk or anything else, but for most tasks there are already transforms in the netpbm tools that work well. In addition to being in text format, the meta info always comes first, which facilitates streaming. That in turn means that if you pipe together four transforms you'll use four cores without even trying.

From articles and interviews about the health effects of vaping, I've gathered that there are basically two distinct groups of people: 1) ordinary people, who hold views ranging from skepticism to enthusiasm, and 2) anti-smoking activists who are sure that vaping is as bad as smoking, no matter what.

The extreme anti-tobacco people don't believe in harm reduction. They also battle snus, which is far healthier than smoking and is probably far less harmful than other forms of "chewing tobacco" due to the way it's processed. Rather than seeing fewer health problems from tobacco related products, these people would will stand on principle while people continue to smoke.

If you change "species" to "population" in the parent comment everything still works.

It's been known for a long time that much of evolution happens in spurts. When the environment is fairly stable evolution is a slow refinement toward local maxima. When the environment changes there's much more selection pressure and evolution happens much more quickly.

So, this one study doesn't tell us much new about the speed of evolution (because we already knew), and there's no reason to think this study will do any more to correct common misconceptions than previous science.

> RMS speaks to an older generation of hackers; even though he should be heeded by the young, I doubt he is.

I'm part of an older generation, and I view RMS largely as a crank. Yes, some of his ideas are valid and some of his warning seem almost prescient. But even way back when he wasn't the only person railing against injustice. I'd say that Stallman's effect has been net positive, but he's definitely not always on the right side of things.

We need not only new voices, but different voices coming from a different sensibility. We don't need an updated, modern Stallman. We need someone else, who shares Stallman's passion and commitment but not his off-kilter perspective.

I have not. I got interested in Light Table, but it quickly became obvious that their focus was too divergent from what I consider useful. I really have no interest in an editor built on web technologies. I find some things outright weird, such as on OS X you use ⌘ rather than Ctrl. Why, exactly? Dunno. Anyway, it's an interesting project. But it's something at an awkward angle to what I want in an editor. For other people it's probably the most awesome thing ever.

> upload to a website not youtube

I haven't dug into the details, but both the player[1] and the website[2] code are available so it should be possible to set up your own website if you like.

1. https://github.com/asciinema/asciinema-player 2. https://github.com/asciinema/asciinema.org

> you can do it on the dark side of the moon

Every time someone says dark side of the moon a lunar geologist kicks a kitten. Far side, please. It's only dark half the time, when the near side is lit. :)

Agreed. Me, too. I just wanted to point out that customization is pretty much required for success.

Like so many things, there is no single correct answer.

For myself, if I focus on diet and not worry about exercise I find that I have to eat very little if I want to lose more than a few pounds. So little that I'm miserable all the time. Forever. On the flip side, if I exercise[1] I not only burn calories but increase muscle mass which burns more calories. Other people seem to do well with a focus on diet and not so much exercise. Weight loss should be about losing weight in a healthy, sustainable way, however that works out for the individual. To continue doing something that's not working because it's supposed to be The Right Way is counterproductive and demotivating. I think most people can find some balance between eating healthier/less and exercising more, in a way they can keep up.

1. I've only had two effective exercise regimens: resistance training (weight lifting) and martial arts. If I try to jog, walk, or whatever I will become more and more irregular and eventually quit. Other people love to run. Whatever works.

Maybe it's going nowhere because nobody really wants to have all their things become agents working for someone else (best case) or be exploited and cause massive grief (worst case).

I'd much rather have an INTRAnet of things, where nothing depends on "the cloud".

> getting started guides are excellent

This is very true. I had just started playing with Elixir and had pre-ordered Dave Thomas' Programming Elixir and was going through the draft ebook, and I actually set that aside and worked through the Getting Started. It's normal the see such guides, but the material there is really, really good.

Takk

Etter å ha lært litt norsk det plager meg også.

Interesting observations. As a counterpoint, there are a couple of roundabouts between here (Phoenix) and Las Vegas, notable both because there's often fairly heavy traffic and that almost everyone on the road is from elsewhere (and therefore unfamiliar). They seem to operate quite smoothly, and are a welcome break from waiting for several cycles of traffic lights.

I'm curious... where have you seen these troubles? Perhaps the small radius is the real issue?

It does not have to be. Go ahead and use nice proportional fonts and never looks back. There are certainly no shortage of them that are high quality and easy on the eyes.

But for the rest of us, having a fixed width font is as important as any other consideration. And we're always on the lookout for a fixed width font that's as pleasing and readable as you proportional font people enjoy. Don't be jealous of us getting all the articles and blogs, because those only exist because we're jealous of you and trying to catch up.