hrunt

I'm not a musician and I'm a Rick Beato fan as well. I especially like his "What Makes This Song Great?" series of videos breaking down how well-known songs are put together.

I think he explains what he's saying in the video, but it takes about 3/4 of the video to get there. When he de-tunes his C-string and plays the chord, it very obviously sounds dissonant. Even to my untrained ear, it sounds bad. When people say, "I've never heard this song before?" what they really mean is that they don't know if the bad sound they are hearing is intentional or not. If you watch a lot of Rick's other videos, you know he has not only a trained ear but also an understanding of chord sequences. Even if he hadn't heard the song before, he would know that a chord sounded bad based on what notes were played before it.

To your last point, Rick's thought is that people /should/ be more sensitive to out-of-tune-with-themselves instruments given how perfectly tuned most commercial music is these days, and that's why he's surprised that people don't hear it (or think that it might be intentional).

Related to your unrelated, I also used Free Tax USA this year. I ended up having to use TurboTax to complete my taxes because FTUSA didn't handle calculations for a Schedule K-1 correctly and did not support all information provided by said K-1 (as confirmed by their support staff).

I thought it was a great product, but alas, I need it to handle those things properly if I want to dump TurboTax. I would actually be happy to pay for FTUSA if the features worked.

Why? They already used up all their luck escaping the accident.

Tsar Bomba was detonated in October 1961. That means that for any civilization to have seen it, that civilization must be within 63 light years of Earth. In addition, unlike the Pyramids, Tsar Bomba was a momentary flash, so if a civilization within that distance started looking today, they wouldn't see it. They probably wouldn't even see evidence of it, since here on Earth we can detect only traces that it specifically happened.

What the paper talks about is constantly visible evidence of human life. Civilizations up to 3000 light-years away can see evidence of the Pyramids because they were built 3000 years ago and have been visible from space ever since.

These make analogies make no sense. The author is a self-described expert in fraud and security. It's totally reasonable to ask why he didn't use base-standard advice like, "Don't accept incoming calls," and "Don't give an incoming caller information about your card." This is basic security stuff we tell our parents and grandparents.

The analogy is more like, "Why would a car mechanic put a part in his car that he didn't choose himself?" or "Why would a doctor take pills some rando on the street gave him?" Most people would look at that car mechanic or doctor and think, "How good a mechanic or doctor are you?"

Yes, the expert was "manipulated", but only in the sense that when his "CU" called him, he didn't heed the initial advice experts give everyone -- hang up and call the number of the CU directly.

That said, I'm not piling on him. His article provides a great lesson about how easy it is to ignore one's own advice and knowledge and what the consequences can be. In this case, he /knew/ the right thing to do, but he also knew so much about how the systems worked that he ignored the base knowledge because he thought he "knew" what was happening. In a way, he manipulated himself.

I don't understand. Is Boeing using a different anti-ice system on the engines for the MAX 7 compared to the other MAX variants? They use the same engines, no? Why would the MAX 7 need a safety exemption for a system that should be identical across the 4 variants?

I think it was because most people are used to Teams being an application with a poor experience, so a widespread degradation in service just looks like what people normally expect from Teams.

I know in the orgs that I work with, everyone today blamed any problems on Teams being a crappy application. No one thought twice about it being something more than that.

> Obviously, one solution to the problem is that DHCP leases on planes should be drastically shorter, like at 1 hour intervals. Secondly, the number of leases should be drastically increased.

Why isn't the solution as simple as, "Reset the Internet at every flight turnover"? Once the plane lands and (almost) everyone deplanes, hit the button as another step in crew handover.

They explain this in the article. It's to make the broadcast easier to watch for the European audience.

For me, two books that changed how I thought about software were (and I may date myself here):

1. Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment[0]

This changed writing software from being about the code I was writing to being about the underlying systems my code was interacting with. My favorite little feature I learned about was the ability to pass open filehandles between processes (not threads, but processes), which I later used for open connection caching in Usenet systems.

2. Object Oriented Perl[1]

The mind-bending part of this book for me was when Conway explains about using structures other than hashes (dicts) as Perl objects. Arrays were interesting, scalars slightly more so, but then functions ... as objects. This one chapter brought clarity to functional programming that I never got from any other explanation.

All the other books listed here are on the list two, but these were two books about specific mechanics of software development that were worth so much more outside of their respective languages.

(edited to add links)

[0] https://www.pearson.com/store/p/advanced-programming-in-the-... [1] https://www.manning.com/books/object-oriented-perl

In fact, there's a significant market right now for purchasing FTX claims precisely because of this Anthropic investment. The bet is that you can buy the FTX claim for 35 or 40 cents on the dollar, and get 75 or 80 cents on the dollar if the Anthropic value gets unlocked during the bankruptcy process.

YTTV does not really have the ability to not show ads. Those are put in the streams they are carrying. Could they negotiate with the channels to not show ads? Maybe, but no channel is going to allow that.

A different way to think of this is to consider how many ads you would see on TV if YTTV (and every other bundled TV provider) did not have to pay carriage fees to the channels. How many ads would they have to sell to make up that lost revenue?

As of September 5, it's Novo Nordisk, maker of Ozempic and Wegovny.

Architecture school is all about the fanciful. Whether or not the proposals will work in real life are secondary to the creative process that gets you to them (aside from purposeful courses like Structures or Materials). That something like this was proposed for an architecture final crit doesn't surprise me. The real accomplishment here is this student getting his way into a New Yorker featured article.

Every once in a while, you'll hear something in a final crit like, "Uh, do you realize all your structural loads are coming down on to that one point?" Always good for a chuckle when someone brings up the practical failings of a design.

Apparently, this will be an all-cash deal worth $28 billion[0].

[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2023/09/21/cisco-acquiring-splunk-for-1...

Having gone through /exactly/ what this article is about, I know the pain. But I will point those that don't read the article to the last paragraph:

> We considered implementing an off-the-shelf billing solution but there was nothing flexible enough and the switching costs were too high. Algolia also tried to migrate to Zuora before backing out and rebuilding their billing system for the fourth time.

Most (all? I have yet to find one) off-the-shelf systems are not geared towards everything businesses want to do with their billing. If you take the author's advice and choose one of these systems early on, you will have the exact same headaches. Either the system simply won't let you do what you want to do or the system /will/ let you do what you want to do with custom or hack-ish solutions that reproduce the custom-solution problem, but in someone else's system. Those that implement broad swathes of billing functionality are so complex, they make /everything/, even the most basic stuff, hard.

BTW, when I say I know exactly how the author feels, all of what they described we encountered and implemented. We even looked at a migration to Zuora and came away with the same conclusion (also: really freaking expensive). We even had a new product that we setup on a third-party billing system, and we ran into the flip-side of the problems; we were not able to implement some billing functions we needed and we had to migrate off.

I've had a Google Pixel phone since the Nexus 5. I switched to it from an iPhone 4 because my company was developing apps for our online service, we needed to improve our Android apps, and I wanted to immerse myself in the Android ecosystem to facilitate that. I've had a Nexus 5, Nexus 6, Pixel 2XL, and I currently have a Pixel 5. Because the Pixel 5 will be leaving Google's support window here this year, I'm looking for a new phone.

I will most likely switch to an iPhone 15 Pro. The reason for me is that my wife and kids are on iOS, and it's difficult to manage things like app approvals and family data sharing when my primary device is an Android phone. The Pixel 8 does not look like much of a jump from even my Pixel 5, so it's not compelling enough for me to stick with that line.

You're right that the two ecosystems are largely the same. There are some things I'll miss from my Android phone, though. I find the navigation on Android remarkably simpler than iOS. I find the quick-access and notification management better designed on Android. I'll miss a native Firefox app with uBlock Origin for ad-blocking. There are a few games I like that are Android-only. Specific to the Pixel 5, I'll miss the rear fingerprint sensor.

All those things are not super-compelling, though. The compelling "feature" that's causing me to switch is it's simply easier to use the same ecosystem as my family, and Android cannot provide that (and Apple won't let them).

Yes, all these stopped and immovable Cruise cars would certainly be safer for pedestrians than moving human-driven cars.

> The GFW blocks WireGuard, right?

The GFW is extremely sophisticated in what it blocks and how it blocks it. I have seen it block otherwise random traffic based on packet sizes, packet patterns, stream concurrency, stream duration. It will allow connections, then probe the remote endpoint and disconnect if the probe detects banned services. It will track relationships between endpoints (e.g. blocking one resulting in traffic to another). Traffic that looks off /looks off/ and the GFW will block it -- and looking off may not be the kind of encryption or protocol, but simply how many people are using it from where and for how long.

The toughest part about working around the GFW is its consistency. Its effectiveness can vary by hour, day, political wind, etc. It can vary by what network you are on or the route your traffic takes to leave the country. The GFW isn't perfect, but it is just good enough that you give up trying.

And then every once in a while you get a news report about some VPN user getting arrested, so you get that level of paranoia, too.

It is /exactly/ because the media company can promote its partnered VPN. A huge driver of user signups in the commodity personal VPN space is affiliate referrals, and usually those affiliate sites are "review" or "how-to" sites. While the affiliate relationship is usually stated, it implies that the site makes money off the referral. In a lot of cases, the site actually makes its money by preferred placement of the VPN provider on their site. A VPN company often even writes or edits the content for the site.

If you're a VPN company, it's actually cheaper for you to own the sites and populate them with your own product than it is to pay a site for placement, especially if you own four or five VPN brands. Heck, sometimes, they don't even acquire sites. They just start them and spend money to get them to rank well.

I don't trust review sites in general (even if they don't contain paid recommendations, they still rank by which affiliate will net them more money), but I /really/ don't trust sites that cover or rank VPN providers. Personal VPNs as they are pitched to consumers are just shy of snake-oil, and almost all the content written that touts them is revenue driven.

Background: I previously helped start and worked for a VPN provider.

Yet, when we send our spacecraft from one planet to another, we lose a surprisingly high percentage of them (~7% since 2000, not counting the ones we purposefully crashed).

Look, I'm beyond skeptical of the claims, but it's not because the spacecraft shouldn't crash. The most likely time to lose an airframe is on takeoff or landing, not in between, so why wouldn't the aliens have problems once they reach their destination?

Ha! That wizard brings back memories.

I remember in the late 90s Microsoft introducing text-to-speech recognition through those characters. I hooked that wizard up to the output from my IRC client. Anytime a message would come to the channel with my name, the wizard would speak the message. Of course, within a few minutes, the entire channel was flooded with people calling me dirty names. Good times.

My son just got an non-ebike, and we bought parts to convert it to an ebike (a better, a kit with a wheel/motor, control unit, screen, and pedal assist sensor). What I found is that the collection of parts was very much like building a PC. My friend just bought an ebike, and even though functionally it's basically the same, it's more like a Mac in that he can't really swap things out and tinker with it.

Also, not related, but your post sounds like someone who just discovered regular bikes after only having used an e-bike. For someone who only has a regular bike and has grown up with them, that view felt recognizably foreign to me. The world is a changing ...

Those who are familiar with US submarine operations would assume this from the start. For an excellent account of the development of US submarine capabilities (including listening and detection), I wholeheartedly recommend the book "Blind Man's Bluff".[0]

How that book hasn't been made into a mini-series is beyond me. The stories and characters are incredible.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Blind-Mans-Bluff-Submarine-Espionage/...

Cryptomator suggests WinFSP for its Windows installation, MacFUSE for Intel Macs, and FUSE-T (the NFS FUSE implementation) for Apple silicon Macs. I've used all of them, and I've also used Dokan with encfs.

Both OSes treat network filesystems differently from local disks. The FUSE-T implementation is very speedy, but it shows up in the finder as a connection to "localhost", not as a properly named mount. In addition, macOS creates .DS_Store files on network drives by default (there is a setting you can change from the CLI to prevent this). On Windows, the filesystems can be mounted as local drives or network drives. When mounted as network drives, they can have issues with indexing and trust. All-in-all, drives you expect to function as local drives work best when they're actually local device filesystems and not network mounts.

From the article:

> One time I heard someone praised as a good teacher. Not knowledgeable, but a good teacher. I objected that if someone is ignorant but a good teacher, does that mean they’re effective in conveying their ignorance? Wouldn’t that be a bad thing? No, all that mattered was that he was a good teacher.

I recently started volunteering with an organization that works to build CS programs in schools that don't have them[0]. The typical way that CS programs get started is a teacher of some other subject is given the CS curriculum and told to teach it. They typically don't know anything about CS, often have not taught a related subject (e.g. math), and yet they're expected to teach it effectively. Why? Because they are teachers. They are trained to teach, and the smart ones are smart /at that/. Note that for a new CS teacher, they typically use an existing curriculum developed by someone else (e.g. Code.org), so aside from the teacher's own internal biases, any ignorance comes from someone else.

I've always had respect for teachers as people who do something that try to build up other people, but seeing how a teacher goes from zero-to-teaching has opened my eyes to how and why great teachers are real multipliers.

[0] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/teals

Lately, these archive links have been broken for me. DNS is not resolving for them. Is anyone else seeing this issue? I've seen it in the past few days with both archive.is and archive.ph

I don't understand this thinking. JPM is in long-term arrangements with CRE landlords whether employees come into the office or not. If employees come in to the office, JPM actually pays MORE, because the buildings will need the lights on and the HVAC running to keep those employees comfortable. Worst case scenario is that JPM pays exactly the same amount for CRE in both the RTO and WFH scenarios. So how does CRE drive them to bring back in employees if, as WFH advocates say, people are as productive or more at home than at the office.

I suspect that JPM is telling the truth about their internal productivity numbers being better in the RTO scenario, but I also suspect that these numbers are based on "doing things the way they were always done" and don't take into account scenarios with a JPM that is structured differently for WFH scenarios (e.g. reducing middle management and its proclivity for in-person meetings).

> aren’t the inheritors gaining wealth they did not have before?

In terms of stocks and land, yes and no. They are receiving assets they did not have before, and those assets have a market value that is not realized until they sell them. They are receiving paper wealth, and while paper wealth can be beneficial (you can borrow against it), it is not the same as actual spendable cash. A government could tax them on the value of those assets at the time of transfer, but that may require the inheritor to dispose of some or all of the assets in order to pay the tax bill. Governments typically require their citizens to pay taxes in currency, not assets.

Note that governments do sometimes treat asset transfers this way (e.g. restricted stock awards), but they typically view unrealized gains as something to be taxed when they are realized (ie. converted to currency).

What's really beneficial with inheritance is the step-up basis. When assets get inherited, the cost basis is reset to the market value at the time of the transfer, which means taxes are never paid on any gains made between acquiring the asset and the death of the owner. So even if the inheritor sells them at a later date, they still pay substantially less in taxes than they would normally pay.

> I'm still surprised the police left without any fuzz because Mullvad surely must keep track of both transactions and the connected computers (to limit use). But maybe that data is stored somewhere else.

First, I'm not surprised because it sounds like the Swedes knew what the result was going to be from their history with Mullvad. It sounds like they performed the action because of the international nature of the request, but they expected the result.

Second, the only thing that Mullvad needs to keep track of to run their business is which accounts have paid and when they will need to pay again. They do not need to keep anything more than that. Based on their pricing model, they do not need to worry about who is connected where, when, etc.