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larrymyers

808 karma · joined March 26, 2012

https://www.larrymyers.com
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larrymyers··on The Offline Club
These places already exist, they're your local game stores! Show up, play games with other people. If you like competition most host official tournaments for various TCG's and table top war-games. These tournaments usually forbid devices while playing, since they can be used to gain unfair advantage, so you are forced to be offline by default. (Plus it's considered rude to be on your phone during a match.)
larrymyers··on ShotSpotter: listening in on the neighborhood
Chicago is letting the ShotSpotter contract expire instead renewing this year after the data revealed that it did not have any positive effect on crime reduction.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/chicago-not-renew-shotspotter-con...

larrymyers··on How Australia’s ‘Bluey’ conquered children’s entertainment
I had almost forgotten about Tumbleleaf. Such a gem of a show. The submarine episodes really stand out.
larrymyers··on How Australia’s ‘Bluey’ conquered children’s entertainment
Rain one of my favorite episodes. The amount of story packed into 8 minutes with just music and animation is so good.
larrymyers··on How Australia’s ‘Bluey’ conquered children’s entertainment
It's a great show that demonstrates how to play with your kids. Though I do appreciate the episodes where the parents are exhausted, or must do chores, instead of playing with their kids.
larrymyers··on Tesla Model Y range estimate reduced by 6%, becoming more realistic
Driving around the midwest in the winter time I find I get about 200 miles to the full charge. The cold weather, increased wind speeds, and need to run the heater all eat into the range substantially.

I hear you about wanting to drive up north for outdoor winter sports. It requires a lot more planning once north of Grand Rapids to make sure you won't end up stranded.

Many times I'll stop at a supercharger early just to take advantage of the battery heating the charging provides. That alone makes the rest of the trip more efficient, and I can get back below 300 wh/mi. The heated seats and steering wheel also make a big difference and allow the heat pump to not have to do so much work.

larrymyers··on Tesla Model Y range estimate reduced by 6%, becoming more realistic
I've owned a Model Y for about a year now, and range anxiety isn't a big deal on road trips as long as you're using the built in nav for your destination. The nav calculated estimations tend to be very accurate, within a few percent when it determines the battery remaining, and it'll add in supercharger stops as needed.

I definitely have to stop more in the winter time on road trips, but that's just the nature of how EVs work. On the upside Tesla puts superchargers in spots that make it easy to take a break for a rest stop anyway.

I do miss how quick gas station stops are with ICE cars when doing a road trip, especially if you're on a constrained schedule, but the benefits of having the EV have outweighed it so far, especially with most of my daily miles being in the city (where the EV really shines).

larrymyers··on Dating apps lose their luster with college students
I'm not even sure why college students would need dating apps. You are in a relatively dense environment surrounded by people your own age, in a similar phase of life. You have to actively work not to meet people you want to date.
larrymyers··on Why Tailwind CSS Won
I've encountered this situation in multiple projects where style lint was enabled, with only the defaults, and passed the linter without issue.

Tailwind is seeing steadily increasingly popularity (and the accompanying backlash) because it is straight forward and does not require something like stylelint to keep you from hurting yourself.

larrymyers··on Why Tailwind CSS Won
What causes me to constantly shudder is when I have to use project wide search to find the class name on an element so I can see what was caused the computed styles in the browser to occur.

  1. Find source file with class name. See the scss extension, dread rises a bit.
  2. See scss file has multiple @import directives and uses multiple custom functions.
  3. Open up 4 more scss files to see what those imports and functions do. See that those files also use @import directives. Find some Malort, take a shot.
  4. Repeat step 3 until arriving at root of style hierarchy or pass out.
That's why Tailwind works. It may result in a very long line of small classnames to represent all the styles across many breakpoints, but at least you don't have to deal with somebody else's own little hellish adventure into perfectly reusable scss.
larrymyers··on Sao Paulo: A city with no outdoor advertisements (2013)
Not in Chicago. The murals throughout the city are beautiful and are very welcome art installations.

https://www.chicago.gov/city/en/depts/dca/supp_info/mural_re...

larrymyers··on Moneyball for Software Teams: Quantifying Dev Performance
Oy. I read this exact same part of the post and my head tilted sideways as I tried to figure out if this was satire or not.

Velocity is useful as a team measure, for the team to take on the appropriate amount of work for sprint. It is a measure to assist them predictably delivering work requested by their stakeholders.

Using as a statistic to be improved by an individual? I don't even.

larrymyers··on Reddit's proposed API changes and the continued existence of RedReader
It looks like Apollo is going to have to go paid only as well:

https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/12ram0f/had_a_fe...

I think the post about RedReader brings up the critical point: Reddit is dependent on its users to create and moderate content for every subreddit.

It would not surprise me moving to only paid access to the API starts a real declining spiral for Reddit. To me this is an implicit admission from the Reddit team that they are incapable of providing a better first party experience than third party clients.

larrymyers··on The layoffs are here for those who chose to ‘learn to code’
This seems logical. The software engineers are likely going to be some of the highest paid employees, so laying off underperforming engineers is going to help reduce labor costs substantially.

Many of these engineers have been hired for new business units that didn't end up being profitable with cheap credit going away. Others might be in business unit that is purely a cost center.

Nothing has really changed over the past few decades. Regardless of your role strive to be part of the company that produces the company's profit. Try to avoid parts of the company that are viewed as cost centers and are constantly under the eye of finance as they manage costs. You will find how are you treated in good and bad times radically different.

larrymyers··on AOLserver is America Online's Open-Source web server (2010)
Before a rewrite in Java around 2009, MapQuest ran on AOLserver. Tcl was a bit of a surprise to me, and struck me as a very powerful dynamic language.

If AOL had open sourced it sooner it might have occupied the “A” in the LAMP stack.

larrymyers··on Why buying furniture is so miserable
At the end of the day most of the moderately priced furniture from IKEA is actually pretty good. When looking for some new living room chairs we visited 2-3 local furniture stores first, and gave up and went to IKEA after suffering through a miserable shopping experience.

Sure, IKEA may not have furniture that is going to last you 20+ years, but at least you know you'll get a fairly standard base level of quality for the price.

Who knows what you're going to get from Wayfair. It's all just random imports with no real way to figure out what level of quality you are paying for.

larrymyers··on Amazon doubling down on return to office
Employees who were hired remote and have no office within a reasonable distance should absolutely force Amazon to terminate their employment so they can collect unemployment. Amazon is the one forcing the significant change in employment terms, so employees shouldn't do them a favor and resign if they don't have another job lined up yet.
larrymyers··on GM offers buyouts to ‘majority’ of U.S. salaried workers
You're not missing the point, though maybe it won't go as badly for a older company like GM. I got to witness this failed strategy first hand at AOL around 2010.

The people who opted into the VSP were the ones who could easily find another job, and were happy to take the money. Some of them even came right back in a consulting role after a 2 month cooling off period. The people who never even considered the offer were the low performers who knew they were getting paid far more than they could hope to command on the open job market.

GM already has a list of employees they have considered laying off to cut costs. They're hopeful that the people who volunteer are mostly on this list. Now GM can refuse to accept volunteers who they consider critical to business operations. Those people should immediately demand large pay raises.

That being said, this is pretty shitty severance package, especially since it's only being offered to people with 5 years or more of service. Unless you know you can find another job quickly why would you take a 5-12 months of pay with no extra benefits? (COBRA is about the most expensive way I can imagine to pay for private health insurance for many people.)

I suspect the worst case scenario for GM is they are about to have a ton of experienced and competent employees with important institutional knowledge walk out the door, and find themselves left with a bunch of new hires that aren't really sure how to keep the business operating at corporate.

larrymyers··on Stop the Medicare “Advantage” Scam Before Medicare Is Dead
When talk about Medicare they are usually talking about Part A (hospital care) and Part B (provider coverage), and sometimes Part D (prescription drug coverage). You are on your own for everything else, including dental and vision care. Adding dental coverage to Medicare continues to die in committee every year in congress.

So if you know you'll need continued care from your dentist and eye doctor then Medicare Advantage can be a good thing, since most of the highly rated plans provide that coverage as part of their benefits.

You can also get benefits for things hearing aids, and transportation to and from your provider visits, etc.

Yes, if you sign up for Medicare Advantage you'll find yourself back in the world of the In-Network and Out-of-Network care model.

At the end of the day though it's disingenuous to just label Medicare Advantage as solely the privatization of Medicare. The only way insurance companies that provide Medicare Advantage stay in business is if they provide a high standard of care for their members. The payment model set by CMS incentivizes them to do so.

larrymyers··on The maze is in the mouse: what ails Google
tl;dr Acquihire founder is shocked when the giant behemoth that did the acquisition is motivated to protect its billions of quarterly profit at the expense of empowering all the brainpower it employs to do innovative and inherently risky things.

Really good piece of writing though, it never loses the plot despite being a longer read.

larrymyers··on Amazon Will Start Charging Prime Members for US Grocery Orders of Less Than $150
I did not renew my Prime membership this year after Amazon raised the annual price again. We have too many streaming services in our house as it is, and we don't order enough from Amazon to take advantage of the free shipping.

I've also found Amazon's prices getting less competitive, especially for things you'd usually buy at placed like Target (drive up pickup is amazing). Combined with the endless search results that are likely counterfeit and full of fake 5 star reviews, it's just too much work to buy things from Amazon for too little benefit.

As a consequence I've found myself ordering more from retailers directly, without any real downgrade in shipping.

larrymyers··on High-Earning Men Are Cutting Back on Their Working Hours
When you cut out 90 minutes of commuting a day it's pretty great to be able to do school drop-off, pickup, and help your kids with homework after school.

I think there's a lot of value in face to face interaction with coworkers, but it's hard to want to go into a office when the trade off is less time spend with my family.

larrymyers··on Quitting the rat race
That's kinda the whole point of being salaried though isn't it? (At least for those of us in the US.) You are an exempt employee as defined by US labor law. You aren't required to receive overtime pay, and you are evaluated on your expertise and the results you deliver.

So if you can get in daily rides and still meet the expectations of your employer, awesome, you're doing it right.

You're likely also doing right by your employer, since the daily exercise is giving you lots of health benefits and keeping you performing at a high level mentally.

larrymyers··on Paris mulls e-scooter ban in global test for micromobility industry
Cars stick to the rules? There were 42,915 automobile related deaths in the US in 2021. Annoyances over scooters is new, so we all notice it and complain. The sheer volume of damage inflicted by people using private cars for transit has just become accepted as normal.
larrymyers··on Paris mulls e-scooter ban in global test for micromobility industry
So in Chicago we have the infuriating practice of "dibs". People leave out all manner of large objects in street parking spaces they've dug out when we get lots of snow. You know what the city does every few weeks? Streets & Sanitation workers drive around and collect up all these abandoned chairs, couches, cones, etc because it's discarded stuff in a public space.

Why not do the same with e-scooters? If they aren't properly out of the public right of way and secured they should be collected up and treated as abandoned. Eventually scooter rental companies will need to start charging people significant fees for not properly parking scooters when they are finished with them.

I'm in favor of people learning how to use e-scooters correctly because they are a great mode of transportation in cities. We've all just become so accustomed to the impacts of cars that we don't complain any more. (Pollution, noise, collisions, fatalities, space required for parking .. all far worse than any annoyances caused by scooters.)

Just like anything new people need time to adjust and learn how to have scooters exist sanely in a community.

larrymyers··on Ask HN: Working less than 20h / week
Staying in academia is a decent idea (I'm not sure if this is different in Europe vs the US). Lots of parents I know at my kid's school work part time for universities due to the same requirements around schedule flexibility.

Working as a freelancer is a decent idea as well, due to the autonomy you'll retain, but the amount of time you'll spend on the business aspects of it could be substantial.

larrymyers··on Tech’s talent wars have come back to bite it
The feels like exceptionally lazy reporting in the NYT. What was the expectation, that tech companies would be up and to the right perpetually? That public tech companies are immune to general market downturns?

While a lot of tech companies are going through post-pandemic layoffs, most of them have headcounts that are still larger than where they were in Feb 2020, and have valuations that show steady growth.

My prediction is that over the next decade we're going to see a narrative in the media that hiring is still exceptionally difficult in the technology sector. There's a very real chance that this round of layoffs drives students and recent graduates into other industries if big tech is no longer seen as an easy path to outsized compensation. It was real side effect of the dotcom bust and the 2008 recession.

I'm excited to see what new companies are going to form in the next few years now that it's a tiny bit more difficult for the big tech companies to suck up all the oxygen in the room.

larrymyers··on Wells Fargo mortgage staff brace for layoffs as U.S. loan volumes collapse
There's been a lot of news coverage lately about how low inventory is going to continue to keep housing prices high, despite mortgages going up.

Basically people with 2%-3% mortgages are going to sit tight, because they can no longer afford a comparable house were they to move. Low inventory means prices won't drop as much as people hope with rising interest rates.

The only wild card here is what will happen with cash buyers, who aren't affected by mortgage rates.

larrymyers··on Programmers should plan for lower pay (2019)
All measured data points suggests developers should expect to continue high paying wages.

Wage growth continues to rise: https://www.atlantafed.org/chcs/wage-growth-tracker Unemployment is still low: https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/unemployment-rate

While it's true that many tech companies are doing layoffs right now or having some form of a hiring freeze in place, it is likely to be temporary as the excess hiring from the past two years unwinds a bit. Many public tech companies with high P/E ratios are just finally having to face the reality that profitable business models must emerge from high growth markets eventually.

In general the US economy is still doing well, despite persistent inflation, and historically high demand jobs that require a college education have weathered negative economic trends better than most professions.

If you are an experienced, competent software engineer I would expect there will be more jobs than candidates for quite some time, and as a career will continue to be a quite lucrative.

larrymyers··on Life after Heroku: What's a dev to do?
I hear you, it's nice to run on a platform that understands how to execute your entrypoint to start your program. Docker helps ensure more than that though.

How do your dependencies get installed? What happens if you depend on something in your package.json that isn't on the public npm repo? What happens if you need to compile some native code as part of one of your dependencies?

Do you need to depend on anything provided by the OS? Timezone data? Maybe you use sqlite as a storage backend and want to ship your database file as well. How do you include configuration data?

Docker drastically simplifies packaging and deployment, and gives you a ton of flexibility in where and how you run your code.

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