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eszed

2,245 karma · joined March 17, 2015

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eszed··on Powerless F1 drivers frustrated by Bahrain F1 software glitch
The problem happened during the formation lap. They red-flagged the race and brought all the cars off the track. I don't know any more about the update mechanism than you do, but GP's theory is plausible.
eszed··on We want you to build the next Git platform on Cloudflare
Huge mistake! I loved Wave, and used it very successfully on one creative project. When I tried again, with some of the same people, we'd collectively burned all of our invite tokens and couldn't get any more, so we had to revert to emailing things back and forth so the new folks weren't kept out of the loop. That killed it, as far as any of us were concerned. I think I used it one more time, to plan a party or something with my sister, and never again. Integrating it into Gmail, as you suggest, would have been a better path, but hardly necessary. It was great as a stand-alone product, but destroyed itself because the damn invite system stopped the network effect cold.
eszed··on What is going on with ceiling fans
I have yet to replace any of the LED bulbs I bought at Costco in 2013. I dunno who manufactured them, or what kind of unobtainium they're made from, or whether I will jinx them by talking about it, but they just... Keep on going. Basic Edison screw-ins, from the first generation of bulbs that emitted warm light, that I've used exactly as I would any light-bulb. They weren't really expensive - maybe $2-3 apiece, though I really don't remember - and, I dunno. I hear everyone constantly complaining about their LED bulbs, and maybe they've been enshittified since, but I have absolutely no complaints.
eszed··on With most information hidden, the game Stratego had stumped AI until now
That's a fair point. Fortunately, most games are short enough that you don't lose a lot of time when that happens. Mostly, though, I see a way I could have tweaked my card mix a bit to have made it work, so I want to play the same board again.

But, sure, if you're looking for a game with a lot of player interaction then Dominion isn't for you.

eszed··on With most information hidden, the game Stratego had stumped AI until now
Yeah, but that's what makes it such a good game, in my opinion. Ten or so years ago I played a lot with / against two friends. With other "deep"(-ish) games someone who's never played before never has even a remote chance against experienced players - we had other games we'd never pull out with a n00b at the table - but with Dominion you can give them that strategy, plus a few tips, like "trashing cards is really helpful", and they know enough to hang. They'll lose, mostly, but they won't be immediately crushed, and they'll want to play again.

Anyway, the main fun is trying to get an approach working with unfamiliar card combinations - and yes, we owned all the expansions, thank you for asking. :-)

eszed··on macOS Golden Gate Is a Buggy Mess
Rename spaces + move to them by name. At one point I had a hacky buggy mess of a (Quicksilver, I think) addon that let me do this, and it was the best, even though it crashed my computer a couple of times a week.

Does anyone know how to do this, nowadays? I've lost hope that Apple will make it a native feature.

eszed··on California farmers are struggling to sell grapes as demand for wine drops
Raisin grapes are a whole different thing, too. Wine and eating grapes don't make good raisins.
eszed··on California farmers are struggling to sell grapes as demand for wine drops
One of the things I miss the most (on a daily basis the most) about the UK is the beer. What you're suggesting just doesn't exist in the USA. Really and truly doesn't.

(Though, as others in this thread point out, NA beers are more common, and better, than they used to be. They're not the same thing, though.)

eszed··on Sex, AI, and the Apocalypse
For those of you not familiar with the acronym, "AGW" stands for Anthropogenic Global Warming.

(Though, Istodd, please correct me if there is another meaning of which I am not aware. I would be embarrassed to have impugned your credibility in error.)

eszed··on How the U.S. economy can look pretty good but feel pretty bad
I was introduced to this by an HN discussion a few months back:

https://www.unitedforalice.org/essentials-index

It's the closest thing I've seen to a once-shot explanation of the "vibe-cession" phenomenon, because, I think, it's a better metric of most people's experience of the current economy than the official measures. What do you think of it?

eszed··on Chopping up books when they're physically too big
The few times I've had a chance to have something signed by an author I like, I've deliberately taken along with me an old and well-loved copy of one of their books. I've bought the new one, sure, but it's the old one I'll ask them to sign. I don't even know if I'll like the new one yet! No one has said anything about it, yet, but I kind of hope they notice and appreciate it.
eszed··on Every novel is boring until it isn't
I took a look at this over the weekend, and it's not really for me. Thanks for recommending it, though: I hope it hit with at least one other reader on here.
eszed··on Investing in mothers? The long-run impact of a universal child care
I do agree with you about that. It sucks that you had parents who weren't there for you in the way you needed. I'm doing my damndest not to repeat the mistakes my own parents made, and we'll see in twenty years or so how that goes.

But, that was part of my point above. My sister to this day feels like she never had the supportive and attentive relationship with our late mother that she needed. (For what it's worth, I agree with her.) In my imaginary reality, at least, if she'd been the only child at home for a few days a week, while I was at day-care and then school, maybe she'd have grown up feeling differently.

I see good parenting and good institutions - that's schools, but also parks and pools and little leagues and libraries, and, hell, even good policing - as mutually supportive. It's unfair to expect one side of the individual / community matrix to make up for all of the shortcomings of the other, but each can strengthen the other side.

eszed··on Fuck it, make it anyway
> what is artisanal code?

A slightly silly synonym for "hand-written code" - ie, not made with the assistance of AI. That's what I've been talking about all along.

> How do you define an "art market"?

In the preceding sentence:

> an aesthetics-driven pursuit, appreciated by its practioners and a small cognoscenti.

It's the cognoscenti who make the market, in case that sentence wasn't quite clear. I expanded that thought more thoroughly in the next paragraph, but I can see how the transition was a bit ambiguous.

> consider only backend code.

Sure, that's what I actually was thinking about. Where is the market for hand-written back-end code going to be? What will induce someone to pay more for it than for in-elegant but equally-functional AI code? Who's going to be able to make a living writing code by hand?

I'm not really a developer, but when I read good ones on this board lamenting the de-valuing of their craft, and the necessity to adapt to an AI-aided method of working, I hear echoes of the weavers forced from their looms and into the factories. Handweavers today are hobbyists or "textile artists", and the everyday fabrics we all wear are made by soul-less machines. That's where those developers believe they are headed, and I'm sympathetic to them, especially so because think they're more fucked than they even realise.

eszed··on Fuck it, make it anyway
Oh, you're not going to bait me into that one! "What is Art?" is the central 20th century aesthetic question, which no one ever answered to anyone else's satisfaction. Nowadays artists and critics have mostly stopped addressing it, because it's just exhausting, and everyone gets on with whatever it is they do. (But, yes: every profession can be Art is one of the answers some people propose! You can make your own mind up about that.)

What I observe, however, is that the people on this board who most mourn the end of hand-coding talk about code much like artists talk about art. It also, if it is to continue, looks like it will be an aesthetics-driven pursuit, appreciated by its practioners and a small cognoscenti. However you care to define the practice itself, economically speaking, that's an art market.

Probably, those folks are in an even worse position than that. Though I've written some software I'm proud of, I wouldn't describe myself as a particularly competent developer, and while I can appreciate clean code, and love 'the story of Mel', and all that, would I pay extra for an artisanal, organic, free-range, hand-coded app or whatever? No, I frankly wouldn't - and I'm to the right of probably 98% of the general population on the appreciates-software-aesthetics curve. The fine arts world depends on the money it generates from its own rightmost 2%, but are there enough wealthy patrons for whom hand-crafted software will be a prestige marker? That's difficult to imagine.

eszed··on Fuck it, make it anyway
Dude, I think it's worse. Some carpenters still make a living creating high-end furniture, or straight-up art pieces. I can't quite imagine a future where a hand-crafted app will ever be a status-symbol. The people who love coding for code's sake are (economically) screwed.
eszed··on Fuck it, make it anyway
I agree with all of that, but I think there's a bit of "ball-hiding" going on in most of these conversations. It isn't only that programmers crave(d) praise or social recognition (though maybe that's it for some), but they're also having to come to terms with the fact that their "art-form" suddenly has much, much less economic value. They were able, for a long time, to (and I say this absolutely non-pejoratively - in fact, just the opposite) have their cake and eat it too, by being virtually guaranteed to make a living (in practice, in the demographic most represented on this board, a very good one) doing a thing they love to do. It's gauche, in Anglo-Saxon countries, to talk openly about one's own financial circumstances, so that mostly doesn't get raised in these threads, but I can hear it in the background of most of them, like "whaddya mean no one's gonna pay me to solve interesting problems with code any more? Now I've gotta do that, if I'm ever going to do that at all, in my spare time, for free?"

And I so, so, so sympathize with that. I devoted 25 years of my life to the performing arts, from which - as a very unattached young man - I was able scrape an exceedingly frugal living. That, in the arts, is a success story - the vast majority make no living from doing it at all, in fact probably the reverse. Coders arguably have it worse: it's hard to see anyone making any money from "writing code", ever again. It's not surprising to me that they're confused and hurt right now: they have, quickly, sadly, and unexpectedly been pushed into the economic corner other artists always have occupied.

eszed··on Investing in mothers? The long-run impact of a universal child care
Oh, absolutely! But, so are most of the lessons we draw from life experience, instead of, like, science. That doesn't make them unimportant to talk about, so long as we approach them - and each other - with appropriate degrees of humility and good will.
eszed··on Claude, change the "Add to Cart" button to blue
Aye, and amid all of the (admittedly annoying) word salad, the "Claude" in this satire identified the reason the requested change was hard: someone(s) at some point had hijacked the button markup for other purposes. Un-doing all of that kind of mess is never a trivial change, and probably requires someone with more coding expertise / knowledge of the code than the given prompts reveal the putative user to be.

AI isn't magic, and it won't (or, at least, doesn't yet) enable anyone to do All The Things.

eszed··on Investing in mothers? The long-run impact of a universal child care
I'm deliberately not addressing the article as a whole, but I'd like to engage with your smaller point. My parents viewed all day care as "dumping [their] kid in an institution" and made massive sacrifices so that my mum could housewife for a decade+ with me and my younger sister. My wife and I have made a different choice with our son, and I honestly wish my parents had done the same - at least after we were two or three.

Admittedly, my wife and I are fortunate to be able to pay for him to go to an excellent pre-school (though the one local to my parents was similarly good), and I see him naturally acquiring a social fluency and confidence with his peers that I didn't have (if I even do!) until I was an adult. Furthermore, had I been cared for outside the home, my mum would have spent vastly more time with my sister when she was an infant and toddler, which I think would have been a lifelong benefit to her. I also think my mum would have been personally better off getting back to full-time work ~5 years earlier than she did: full-time parenting wore on her, and she and my dad would have been able to retire a few years sooner.

Those are all highly-dependent personal circumstances, so I'm not going to draw a universal rule - but I'm telling you this in order to caution you against doing the same. All families, and all individual circumstances, are different.

[Second thought] I am going to make one general point: the benefit my son draws is highly dependent upon attending a good school. Institutions absolutely exist where "dumping them" is an appropriate epithet to apply, but there is no reason why that has to be the case. I don't know where you live, but in my country the "pro-natalist" political party is also devoted to policies which make schools worse (cutting funding, lowering teacher pay, meddling with curricula, etc), which seems to me to be perverse.

eszed··on Every novel is boring until it isn't
Don't leave us hanging, brother! What's the book?
eszed··on Finder is so frustrating and has been since day one
Whoa! Twenty-year+ Mac user, and I never knew that trick. Thank you for that.
eszed··on Macbeth and His Problems
> the supernatural events described on stage are very difficult to pull off even with modern effects. But they were impossible with Jacobean setups

Speaking generally, as a former theatre professional, using onstage "effects" is less effective than firing the audience's imagination, and inviting them to do the work - which, of course, Jacobean artists were well able to do, and their audiences arguably more prepared to accept. The best plays - and I do think Maccers is among them, although the three productions of it I've been in were mediocre to dire - give huge scope for that.

This was a wonderful article, that nails what's wonderful - and frustrating - about the show.

eszed··on How the Disaster of "Forever Chemicals" Was Kept Secret
Corporate death penalty. I'm on board with that.
eszed··on Finder is so frustrating and has been since day one
Thanks for this. I'll give it a try, though I'm not someone who experiences much frustration with Finder, because I maintain a solid folder structure, and use Alfred (first) for virtually all file interactions.

The deciders for me, in case you're interested:

- Privacy. It doesn't look like you are trying to get my data. I'll be using network monitoring to verify.

- Automatically groups like files, regardless of file location. Yes, I know I can do this manually with tags, but I... don't.

- Polish. The screenshots make it look like a native interface. Bonus points if I can set it to hide until mouseover, like my dock bar.

I'm most curious about how it will function alongside Dropbox, particularly with cloud-stored files. I have several times my HDD in Dropbox (largely in folders shared with me); I know Keptor won't be able to read stub files, but if it greedily downloads and fills up my HDD it'll be an instant day-killer and uninstall. If it reads on-device files, and then stores a sparse representation so it can still present them in a list once they've been removed to the cloud it'll be great; I will manually sync and de-sync some folders to get them into the data. (If it incrementally syncs cloud files to my device, reads them, and then pushes them back up it'd be amazing, and I'll buy a lifetime license immediately - but I'm not sure those permissions exist.)

eszed··on .gitignore Everything by Default
I'm with you, though I do it differently. I have a git-status plug-in in my editor that shows me what directories -> files have been changed, and then which lines when I open them. Scanning the sidebar is the same as running "git status" first, but I prefer the visual representation.
eszed··on EFF to Governor Newsom: Veto California's AB 1709
I understand what you mean, but I do not, at this point, think "public pressure" is sufficient. I once did, but that was before ad companies (and they're all ad companies, at their root) unlocked the full potential (if they even have) of data-mining and algorithmic targeting. They know us better than we know ourselves, and make too much money hijacking our dopamine systems to respond to anything we say we want. Legislation is the only thing that will reign them in.

I'm not saying that social media can't be good, or shouldn't exist, or shouldn't be able to make money. Early-YouTube and early-Facebook and early-Twitter (and their fallen predecessors) were good communicative platforms. I used them, and by-and-large thought they made my life, and society at large, better.

It's the data-mining and algorithmic targeting / feeds that need to be regulated.

eszed··on I Want a Wife (1971) [pdf]
> your partner can abandon you at any time and leave you with the full burden and no financial support.

Yes, absolutely. Or that a financially-dependent partner (I'm deliberately not applying gender), even without kids (though children massively raise the stakes), can become trapped in an abusive relationship.

I'm going to wade into political waters, by pointing out that this is a wider problem that can be addressed at the societal level. When the full burden of all poor outcomes is placed upon unsupported individuals, then individuals in aggregate respond by making more-cautious decisions - whether that's to stay in an abusive relationship, avoid having children, have fewer children, or avoid relationships altogether. The same could be pointed out for the choice between, eg, choosing corporate employment vs trying entrepreneurship. A society that insulates its citizens against some downside risks allows individuals more agency over their own lives.

eszed··on EFF to Governor Newsom: Veto California's AB 1709
Yep. All I want is allow/deny permissions on particular channels. For my little guy I'd set up a blanket Deny rule, with a few channels allowed; for older kids parents might want to go the other way.

All of the "parent better" messages are useless (not to mention out of touch) when technical tools to do so are not made avaliable to us. And, of course, those tools are not given because YouTube wants to drop kids into the endless algorithmic feed of slop. The age verification laws are stupid, and will nowhere address the actual problem. YouTube (and the like) - not parents - will still have full control.

eszed··on Lawmakers added $1 to car insurance policies. That money paid for Flock cameras
I agree with much more in your comment than I don't, but

> It's astonishingly easy to not get shot: don't invade someone's home.

Is pat to the point of naiveté.

People get shot turning into the wrong driveway[1], or knocking on the wrong door[2]. If anything, it's astonishingly easy to get shot in the US of A.

But, you probably meant something like that when you said

> you don't want ordinary people shooting randomly at each other. The government / police should be able to handle this [but don't.

And I agree with that on both points.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Kaylin_Gillis [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Ralph_Yarl

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