fcatalan

I didn't know Sogno di Volare. It does work very well, quite intense.

I got me thinking... I've never taken any mind altering drugs, so I wonder how the experience compares. I guess that even if not in the same league, being "free" and without apparent side effects this is quite the "feelgood" bang for the buck.

I non-ironically got them chills just by hearing a few bars while checking your link.

I tend to go for this one https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qIhZbvlCjY0 because although I can´t read music I can kind of vibe-read the score by looking at the waves of notes following the music. For me it adds to the experience.

Also the almost organ-like effects of the two separate orchestras seem stronger in this recording than in any other I've tried.

I get chills from music here and there. The piece that most reliably will produce the strongest effect on me is "Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis" by Ralph Vaughan Williams.

Looking at the article there seems to be a genetic component, but no one in my family has ever mentioned them, I should go ask.

We are not a "musical" family. No one plays competently any instruments or goes to concerts. I have an ukulele that I use mostly as a noisy version of a fidget spinner.

From the article I see that the openmindedness trait fits, at least musically: I sometimes go on YouTube musical late night binges and they can easily range from Renaissance guitar pieces to KPop via Mozart, Slipknot or some obscure Latvian folklore.

Yes. I could get over the 1300 hump and at least make general sense of everything past there because I have read about half of Ōsweald Bera

Spanish ID cards have had an X. 509 cert inside them for more than 10 years, I use it all the time to sign documents and access government sites. There is already legislation and a push for an EU-wide digital identity wallet that should be up and running this year, look up eidas 2.0 and the EUDI wallet.

That looks like it should make things like privacy compatible age verification "trivial".

Approving commands you don't understand doesn't seem ideal

The message is that process is there to extract value from people with average skills and motivation. When you find someone very skilled and self motivated doing the right thing, don't let process hamper their way.

Apparently the weld that broke joined an old segment with a new one installed last year as the tracks are renovated piecemeal.

Still the media in question, "El Mundo", is a mouthpiece for the opposition parties, seeking to create indignation against the government and scoring the head of the Transport Minister in particular.

They also want to make a parallel with the situation of the former President of the Valencian Community, from their party, who had to finally resign one year after being unreachable for hours on a date while hundreds of valencians drowned as his administration waffled aimlessly.

Of course the government is ultimately responsible for the state of the infrastructure, so the Minister well might have to resign after all is said and done, but the innuendo in that piece is pure politicking, not serious journalism.

This has some crossover with ageism. In the last years in my org all the senior staff has been put to pasture doing either nothing or confined strictly to whatever they were already doing.

Some part of it is that we are perceived as lazy obstructionist naysayer dinosaurs when we point out any flaws in new projects as the article warns. But the rest is that because some of the elders were effectively semi-retired and doing little, anyone over 40 has been uncritically dumped with them.

So we keep the lights on while all the new shiny stuff is given to fresh juniors that don't ever push back and are happy to say yes, but also can't do it alone, and are lost at sea.

So they don't get anything shipped while we keep polishing our legacy turds and wince every time we accidentally get a glimpse of what they are doing.

I'm always somewhat uncomfortable with any solutions that can be summed up as "AI for me but not for thee".

I bought a expensive fancy pan for my wife's birthday a few years ago. We both cook, clean and do groceries and chores equally so it never occurred to me that it was inappropriate. We both like cooking. I'm more of a stewpot guy while she's better in general at "pan stuff" and had been complaining about the old pan. She chided me a bit for spending so much on a pan and there was that.

But when I mentioned it over coffee at work most of my female colleagues were aghast. I defended myself saying something like "It's the 21st century, we are way past the point that I can't gift a pan to my wife" and they said "Well that might be at YOUR home!", and I learned a thing.

Not as hugely generous as this story, but during his whole college professor career since the 70s, my father always took care that none of his students spent any major holidays alone and away from home, so we always ended up having 2 or 3 of them around for Christmas, the New Year, Easter... They were from everywhere around the country and the world, and it was so very enriching for me and my siblings. I had a huge postage stamp collection from the ever increasing well wishing mail that arrived. It's also kind of comforting to think that anywhere in the world you are not that far from someone that remembers you fondly.

I think the cars reflect pretty well the intended ethos and "vibes" of both competitions. Indycar still feels a bit like "dudes racing cars" while F1 has become a corporate hi-tech extravaganza.

Both have their appeal, but I feel Indy produces better actual racing for the spectator despite being slower and less refined technically. I do watch both.

AKA the real world, a place where you have older appliances, legacy servers, contractual constraints and better things to do than watch a nasty yearly ritual become a nasty monthly ritual. I need to make sure SSL is working in a bunch of very heterogeneous stuff but not in a position to replace it and/or pick an authority with better automation. I just suck it up and dread when a "cert day" looms closer.

Sometimes these kind of decisions seem to come from bodies that think the Internet exists solely for doing the thing they do.

Happens to me with the QA people at our org. They behave as if anything happens just for the purpose of having them measure it, creating a Heisenberg situation where their incessant narrow-minded meddling makes actually doing anything nearly imposible.

That tracks with how great it feels when you match the positions of the virtual and real wheels when simracing. Peeking under the lenses you see your own arms seamlessly continue into the virtual ones and feels like you are grabbing the virtual wheel.

In many occasions, if there's a proposal for something very stupid or pointless I've found it's better to just say "yes", knowing full well the thing will never get done. The manager didn't really want the thing. He wanted a good happy meeting and to hear "yes".

I have a Quest 3 and use it daily, but it's still a failure for Meta: I just click past their risible Horizons crap and use it exclusively for simracing, hooked to my PC.

When I get another headset it will be a PC-VR dedicated one, because my use case is clearly not what they intend. Their Link app is an abysmal experience and updates tend to break things and just make it worse. A third party app, Virtual Desktop, is plain better in every aspect, but still hampered by the general poor UX.

I'm Spanish. I make about 40k/yr. I wouldn't move to the US for, say, 200k.

I have excellent 0€ out of pocket 0 paperwork healthcare. I walk to my 35 hours per week job. I have about 50 days of vacation each year. I have a small second home down in the beach to enjoy them. In my 150k people hometown some years there is a murder or two, and most years there isn't one. When people rob a business they might threaten with a tiny Swiss Army knife, or maybe just yell very hard.

I'll stay thanks.

My grandfather lived to 102 and only the last few months were bad, nothing dramatic, just fading away at home, no hospital.

I'd sign up for the same

My org is always a decade behind, so I'm still just ignoring the official push for whatever Oracle low code crap is called.

Hiring is as haphazard and inadequate as it has been in the last 25 years, no change there.

AI usage is personal, widespread and on a don't ask don't tell basis.

I use it a lot to:

- Write bullshit reports that no one ever reads.

- Generate minimal documentation for decade old projects that had none.

- Small, low stakes, low complexity improvements, like when having to update this page that was ugly when someone created it in 1999, I'll plop it on aistudio to give it a basic bootstrap treatment.

- Simple automation that wasn't worth it before: Write me a bash script that does this thing that only comes up twice a year but I always hate.

- A couple times I have tried to come up with more complex greenfield stuff to do things that are needed but management doesn't ever acknowledge, but it always falls apart and starts needing actual work.

Morale is quite crappy, as ever, but since some of the above feels like secretly sticking it to The Man, there are these beautiful moments.

For example when the LLM almost nails your bimonthly performance self report from your chat history, and it takes 10 minutes instead of 2 hours, so you get to quietly look out of the window for a long while, feeling relaxed and smug about pocketing some of the gains from this awesome performance improvement.

That guy that doesn't even show up might be just playing videogames... Or maybe taking credit for your work over a coffee with the boss of your boss

I had more luck with a little experiment a few days ago: I took phone pics of one of the shorter BASIC listings from Tim Hartnell's "Giant Book of Computer Games" (I learned to program out of those back in the early 80s, so I treasure my copy) and asked Gemini to translate it to plain C. It compiled and played just fine on the first go.

He's a disingenuous troll, not even worth engaging. Let him bask in the glory of his Greater North Korea alone.

Just last Friday I was doing some cut&paste proof of concept of "Gemini plays Genesis MUD".

I gave Gemini a little prompt and just started pasting the game output into Gemini and the commands from Gemini back into the MUD. It managed to create a character, do the tutorial and started doing some initial skill training before I got tired of all the cut&paste.

Would be fun and interesting to let it completely loose in a similar environment.

I "saved" another two.

In late 1994 my only Internet access was a small room at Uni with 2 unattended ancient 286 PCs someone had set up for international students to check their emails but was always empty. Soon I joined a group of eager undergraduates that squatted unused email accounts, shared Slackware floppies, waited hours for a 700Kb NASA pic to download or frequented MUDs, telnet chats or places like Brinta BBS.

We quickly organized to share them fairly, until two big Math graduate students in full scary Heavy Metal rocker regalia showed up and started hogging them for 10 hours a day to play a MUD. No one to complain to, since our own usage was unsanctioned.

After a couple weeks of this, I made a little C trojan horse that replaced the telnet executable and logged the credentials if the target was the MUD in question. Then I would take the earliest chance available to delete their characters. They were gone after a week.

There was even some kind of brouhaha with people claiming EQ was literally graphics on top of an uncredited MUD codebase.

Think text-based World of Warcraft. In fact the heritage is the inverse: from MUDs we got MMORPGs

As a lifelong Tolkien fan I have always been fascinated by Old English. Not enough for any serious study, but when things like this pop up I always take a look.

Then I like to sound a bunch of verses, it feels epic even if you don't understand anything, but then suddenly you get to:

"þæt wæs god cyning"

or

"Hē hæfde gōd ġeþanc þā hwīle þe hē mid handum healdan mihte bord and brād swurd"

and it feels like you solved a fun riddle.

Also, I'm sorry but I must:

For þone andweardan mycelan lust þæs geworhtan wites on þisse stowe, ic sceal cyðan þæt þa niwostan miclan spræc-endebyrdnessa sind swiðe gōde tō awendanne fram and tō ealdum Englisce.

At that time I was developing with a friend what later was called a Learning Management System: It had content management, assignment uploads, event calendar, grade management, real time chat, forums... It was all plain C via CGI and it was hell to work with.

What almost brought us to tears the day we learned about PHP was how everything we had been painstakingly programming ourselves from scratch reading RFCs or reverse engineering HTTP was just a simple function call in PHP. No more debugging our scuffed urlencode implementation or losing a day to a stray carriage return in an HTTP header...

This resonates a lot with me. In fact it's a trait that has made me unhappy for as long as I can remember.

I'm seeing a therapist later this month because in a talk with my GP she saw strong enough hints of ADHD to send me there, and the kind of situations and some feelings talked about in the article came up a lot in the conversation.

I size up my oil paints against the old masters, not the old ladies in the atelier. I paint miniatures way better than average but hang around with Golden Demon winners so I always find myself wanting. Can play beautiful Renaissance pieces on my uke, but infuriatingly not at a professional performance level. Can win many sim races, but not against the top 0.1%, yet I size myself against their telemetry and laptimes. I dabble in Chess but being forever stuck around lowly 1300 ELO makes me feel dumb. My dead side projects cemetery has subdirectories approaching 3 figures. I go out and cycle with my brother but I huff and puff while he tops the Strava segments and wins the regional amateur championship again.

So too many days I just sit and do nothing, or just look for something else to enjoy for a few months until I become an unhappy promising beginner at yet another thing, adding to the overall problem.