leonroy

My Economics A-Level helped me immeasurably in understanding the basics of macroeconomics, supply, demand, fiscal and monetary policy and the most valuable (for me at least) opportunity cost.

I've used Khan Academy to quickly get up to speed on totally unfamiliar topics. Seems they have a Macroeconomics course, probably a good place to start: https://www.khanacademy.org/economics-finance-domain/macroec...

Beyond that Investopedia is a fantastic resource for looking up the meaning behind financial terms.

Best book I've read on investing is A Random Walk Down Wall Street by Malkiel - if you're prepared to dive into Investopedia to explain the new concepts you'll inevitably encounter in books of this type you'll learn a lot: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Random_Walk_Down_Wall_Street

> This is so sad, really. We are NOT companies, we're not robots only driven by free will, we don't live in an economy. We are hardcore social animals with huge biological & affective needs, this is scientifically proven.

I think you're taking the OP's comments out of context. They did not say that we are not social animals, etc. they made an allegorical comparison likening a person and their value in the marketplace to a company. That does not mean a person does not have value as a human being, as a member of the community, as a friend, partner, parent etc.

I think the comparison is apt when weighing up our careers - which is what the actual article is about - that is of course my own humble opinion, but you're implying meaning which I don't see in the OP's comment.

I met my wife through Yahoo Groups back in 1999. My friend met his wife through Tinder in 2018 and just got married.

They're tiny data points, but I don't think there's a problem with the apps in that respect. You can still find like minded people online and over time form friendships - used to be the way to do it was newsgroups, then forums, now it's probably MeetUps and Discord.

I don't think things have changed, but as I've gotten older (I suspect you're getting older too ;) it has become harder to make friends - which by all accounts is normal.

I've been self hosting since the early 00s. I used to host:

* Email (for years rolled my own using Procmail, Postfix, Squirrelmail before finally using Zimbra Email Server - an all in one software package)

* FreeNAS/TrueNAS for storage (3x SC836 16 bay Supermicro servers)

* VMware vSphere for virtualization (clustered setup with vmotion running on 2x dual Xeon servers)

* Elastix IP Phone Server (Asterisk PBX hooked up to Aastra IP phones in every room in my house)

* Cisco Call Manager - proprietary IP phone server (helped with my job...)

* Plex + the usual accompanying VMs

* HomeBridge + HomeAssistant

* Openfire (because everyone needs their own chat server)

* ZoneMinder (CCTV server hooked up to cameras around the property)

* Zabbix (to monitor it all)

The whole family (about 20 folks) would use the above for their day to day personal and small businesses.

It got to the point where I was spending several hundred in licenses and close to £1k in electricity a year.

I'd get paid by some folks to maintain the above, but after a while the fun of building gets replaced by the chore of maintaining - and the few outages I've had (can count on one hand - proudly) were a royal PITA since I'd have to drop everything and try and get it back online again.

In the 2000s and 2010s the skills my homelab taught me were still relevant; Routing, VLANs, Firewalls, NAT, subnets. But having just studied for an AWS certification I was struck by how much less application those basic skills have in today's marketplace - the cloud has representations of those sure, but maintaining a homelab doesn't give you exposure to what a VPC or a Security Group is.

Also back in the day it was far cheaper to self host vs rent servers in the cloud - today (especially after energy price increases in the UK) self hosting my now much smaller homelab of 1x Intel NUC and two Synology boxes (250W total) is gonna cost about £640 a year in electricity alone. That'll buy me a lot of stuff in AWS/GCP and frankly I'd rather have the practise and experience with a more relevant tech stack.

I feel this living in London and seeing my parents having achieved a measure of success at a younger age far greater than my own. But not every country has seen this level of affluence for the generation before ours and indeed not every race.

Minorities in the US in particular might argue otherwise about whether the previous few decades were better than the current ones.

Whenever I feel tempted to look at the past with rose tinted glasses I only have to look at infant mortality rates which were horrifically high in even affluent countries like the US: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6487507/figure/...

We are indeed in troubling times, but the Cold War wasn't so long ago and I recall a commentator speaking about how they'd read the newspaper each morning with a knot in their stomach, wondering if a nuclear mishap had occurred somewhere in the world.

Is that using Docker on Beanstalk or Tomcat on Beanstalk?

Because oddly enough Beanstalk only supports Corretto 11: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/elasticbeanstalk/latest/platform...

The first time I even heard about caloric restriction I thought it was out there. I did eventually try intermittent fasting and after skipping breakfast and lunch I was rewarded with a pounding headache from the lack of my daily morning muffin and coffee.

I literally had to go home from work to recover. I didn't try again until I saw this programme here in the UK: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01lxyzc

Like a lot of difficult things it takes time and practise. I got better at doing it, but it's still really difficult, especially if the rest of your household don't practise it and you're seeing everyone else around you enjoying their usual meals and food treats.

I read the book after a recommendation on this site in fact. It was eye opening to say the least how conditions like ADHD, PTSD, childhood trauma, anxiety and depression have both psychological and physiological effects. Some of which are surmountable (trauma in adult hood) whereas early childhood trauma can leave long term physical changes to the brain and body making it something that has to be managed.

The first 2/3 of the book is very illuminating the last 1/3 a little polemic on healthcare policy and funding.

Enlightening book all in all.

It's alarming and irresponsible for any country to perform an anti-satellite missile test but there is a level of hypocrisy from the countries condemning - some of whom have also conducted such tests in the past; China as recently as 2007, the US has done so a number of times historically and as recently as 2008 and India most recently in 2019.

Sources:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-satellite_weapon

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_Chinese_anti-satellite_mi...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mission_Shakti

Been using Ubiquiti access points and their Amplifi consumer hardware.

Their product range itself is hit and miss. For example their first AC access points weren't well received, their second range (AC Pro onwards) were very well received.

Their routers are considered so-so, their UDM Pro in particular has had a range of issues. So really it depends on what product you buy rather than the product range as a whole.

I personally buy their AC Pro access points and their LR versions and run their controller app in Docker. You can buy a hardware version of their controller too for $100 or so.

It's rock solid and works well, although I am seeing access points failing 4-5 years in due to a manufacturing issue on some. They're replacing them out of warranty though. One other issue is that their software updates seem to have poor quality control so you will ocassionally get updates which perform poorly and have to be rolled back. I'd suggest keeping auto updates off and updating manually.

All in all, given the cost vs Ruckus, Aruba, Cisco you get pretty good bang for your back.

Their Amplifi range works well - one pack (router + 2 access points) covered a large brick house with full signal across the board. I've heard no complaints from the family member I set that up for.

I would hope in any future scenario we'd avoid burning a living world like the Earth and instead harvest resources from a dead planet like Mercury or Venus.

That said, seems the Earth was once inhospitable around the time Venus was 'alive'. Good documentary which lends weight to what you said: https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episodes/p07922lr/the-planets

> my G5 has not been my daily driver for a good couple years; my daily driver is the Raptor Talos II

So I looked up the Raptor Talos II. It's a $7k (starting price) workstation running IBM Power9 RISC based CPUs which are typically used in super computers.

OOC why would someone want to use such a niche architecture for their primary workstation vs say an AMD Epyc or Intel equivalent?

Companies usually give in to avoid bad press so we’d be unlikely to hear about it. In this case the leak is public knowledge now so CDPR have even less incentive to pay.

Alas the Great Suspender just fell prey to malware after its creator sold it off: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25846504

I think Apple have the right idea with app review on browser extensions for Safari.

Tested IBKR today - I was able to place a simple Limit order for GME stock which was good till close but when I refreshed to view my list of orders it shows as Cancelled.

Tried it twice, did the same thing each time.

Ack, still a bit too recent and bit too raw but here goes.

Last side project which ended up becoming a bit of a rollercoaster was Brring Conference, a conference calling app where you could schedule conference calls ahead of time and it'd send out calendar invites and then automatically dial everyone in when the call time arrived.

https://www.brring.com

At the time of inception I noticed that the UK had terrible conference calling providers. They'd bill ~£50 for a one hour international conference call with 10 people. I did my numbers and realized I could provide the same call for 1/10th the price using outbound dialing and least cost routing via Twilio/Plivo etc.

I thought I was off to the races but I made the cardinal mistake of making every startup mistake in the book.

It took a few months to build a basic prototype and then using lots of my own money (and some begged, borrowed and raised) it slowly grew to become quite the monster in my life.

I wasn't a complete idiot though, I ran the idea by whom I figured my target market would be, wrote up a business plan, projected costing/break even and looked up how much my competitors were making via their company filings - the market (at least in my eyes) was there.

By the time I launched it was too little too late - our big competitors in the UK (and US for that matter) had completely revamped their products in response to Microsoft Teams. As an example of how competitive things became Google Ad spend for the term 'conference calling' literally went up 10x when I launched in response to competition between Slack, Microsoft and our own local competitors.

We obtained 100+ users and two dozen paid within the first month but the pace didn't really pickup much beyond there so after several months of adding features and running ad campaigns instead of parking it I decided to pivot the whole thing and turn it into a lead generation widget - like Intercom or Drift but supporting phone and WebRTC calling via the browser to a sales agent.

Things did better this time, I signed up paid customers ahead of time to figure out what features to launch with and ensure there was a market there once our product arrived - I was pinging maybe 30+ business owners a day asking if they'd be interested and I managed to get hoteliers, estate agents, cruise ship companies and travel agents interested in using my product.

We built Brring Live Dialer in a few months and things were growing better. Then COVID hit and our customers just evaporated. I decided I'd had enough of this side project which had become my life and slowly wound things down and started interviewing.

I have to say the experience of the above was instrumental in leveling up my resume. I came from a background of XMPP and telephony - where our software was deployed on-prem. I'd allowed myself to become deskilled so building an app from scratch using the latest web technologies of the time meant I had zero issues interviewing and landing a job.

Still smarts though, making so many ruddy mistakes!

I think helping strangers vs helping family are different. Helping strangers is a very strong form of altruism. You come into their lives, you perform a service or deed and you leave. It could be a recurring thing, like assisting in a soup kitchen or a charity shop but it is both time bounded and emotionally bounded and when you choose to help a stranger the first time or a subsequent time the decision is voluntary.

With family though, (as I notice all your descriptions are from) it is neither time bounded nor emotionally constrained since family don't really leave - they're always there, sometimes physically and certainly emotionally. Your first act of kindness to assist might well be voluntary but the second act could well be more out of a sense of obligation than choice and creates an increasingly involuntary burden.

Wondering if divers can determine up from down in the absence of surface light?

I’m guessing they could use the direction bubbles from their air supply are travelling...

> This anxiety of pushing out at fix - at the risk of undoing other working functionality - ought to be addressed first.

It really depends on how urgent the fix is. Naturally you want the fix to be as isolated as possible so it does not regress other functionality. But even non-urgent fixes can sometimes benefit from getting pushed out following quick manual testing. For example we use Sentry.io for capturing errors in our applications and LogDNA for logging.

Occassionally we'll encounter some kind of edge case where we see a spike in logged errors which blows us past our Sentry and LogDNA quotas. Pushing a fix out before the test is written can be beneficial in cases like this although yes, it's worth avoiding if possible.

Mind weighing in on the pros and cons of your experiences in the UK vs France?

I imagine op is referring to 08-09 which was touted as the biggest economic crash since The Depression.

not the OP, but I find BIG by Matt Stoller and Notes on the Crises by Nathan Tankus a nice break from the mainstream press.

Insightful, well considered and non-dramatized writing on important subjects: https://nathantankus.substack.com/ https://mattstoller.substack.com/

You are right, Nespresso and especially Krups pods are ridiculously wasteful. To put something compostable in a vessel which will take 100s of years to biodegrade feels perverse.

That said if people started to make coffee in espresso machines that would if anything be even more wasteful.

One, most espresso machines sol are the cheap machines. And they are rickety, poorly made, unrepairable and low longevity. You see lots of them at the local household waste center piled up next to other consumer electronics junk. I could see a proliferation of them being a bigger environmental nuisance than pods.

Two, a proper espresso machine takes a fair bit of time to warm up and I wouldn't drink the first shot out of the machine, so they need to be run through a few times, wasting electricity and coffee.

I can see the appeal of Nespresso. I don't personally want one, but their convenience and ingenuity is undeniable. If anything Nestle should double down on ensuring the pods are either compostable or that recycling rates improve markedly.

The title of this blog post strikes a chord although whilst I love writing with a fountain pen, transcribing my notes to computer later is a royal pain.

It's also irritating to have bunches of notes in Apple's Notes app, in Confluence, in Notion, in Google Docs and goodness knows where else.

The movement to cloud has driven a coach and horses through the whole reasoning behind the EU/US push to get Microsoft to be more open and not hold institutions to ransom with data locked within a proprietary vendor's platform:

https://www.infoworld.com/article/2618153/how-microsoft-was-...

Now we've gone full tilt towards a world of proprietary clouds where we don't even have custody of our own data and instead entrust it to a MongoDB cluster somewhere managed by the latest hot, new note taking startup.

Where are the regulators when you need them to ensure we can get our data in and out of these platforms?

As for me, I find vim or Sublime and Markdown synced via Dropbox work tolerably well. I keep toying with the idea of writing an open source Markdown syncing solution with open source clients for note taking...

That aside the proprietary nature of the cloud and especially how it pertains to note taking (and todo apps) is a real step backwards. The regulators who forced Microsoft to submit in the past would be gnashing their teeth at the situation we have today.

Here’s a look at how and why Valve lost their way and hopefully an indication that they might be on the path back to making great games again (although I personally think their new focus has more to do with competition to Steam from Epic and GOG sharpening minds).

https://youtu.be/mHdrosltGJA

Why Intel did not buy ARM is something that puzzles me...

In 2016 ARM sold to SoftBank for $31B.

In 2016 Intel had a market cap of ~$170B and about $17B cash on hand. I'm no M&A analyst but surely given their fundamentals at the time Intel could have bought ARM without financial difficulty, no?

If even Facebook can look two steps ahead and pay an eye watering $19B for WhatsApp couldn't someone in the C-level at Intel could have seen that owning ARM would have been a jolly good strategic purchase - or am I missing something?

I see the vote so far is unanimous on iPad - any folks have opinions of the Surface lineup as well vs the iPad?

ebay is the easiest but if the item is going for less than £10 don’t bother.

Freecycle is also good as are forums like: https://forums.servethehome.com/

If you have a LOT of gear - ie. rooms full of the stuff as I found in a hoarder family home I had to clear recently you can pay £200 to have a professional IT recycling company to take it all and wipe all the disks on your behalf. They provided certificates for all wiped hard drives and recycled items.

I travel on the Northern line on the London Underground to get to work and the sound of the trains nowdays hits 100dBA or more of extremely loud screeching: https://i.imgur.com/04YwBHJ.png

I went as far as lodging an official complaint and was told that to deal with capacity trains are running more often and faster than they have in the past, hence the increased noise. Furthermore due to the Northern Line having been built before environmental noise regulations were passed, it's exempted so Transport for London aren't planning on doing much about it.

At the risk of sounding like a curmudgeon - between always on ear buds and mass transit noise we're risking a generation of kids suffering hearing loss well before their time.

I really don't get the Dyson hate for their vacuums, are the newer models rubbish or something?

My folks have old the DC02 (bought in 1996 or so and still running) and I own the DC25 (11 years on and still works great).