lifefeed

I've read that, but I disagree. Stack Overflow would be better for the community if it allowed repetition. Repetition isn't harmful, and it lets the next generation learn how to answer questions, which is a legitimately hard skill, and I'm arguing is more useful than creating a static repository of documentation.

I'm enjoying this. But a book is big time investment, I'd love to see short stories here.

It's not coffee shops, it's everything. I read an essay last year on this topic, "The age of average" by Alex Murrell ( https://www.alexmurrell.co.uk/articles/the-age-of-average ) and it's stayed in my mind ever since. Cars, home interiors, instagram photos, skylines, self help books, franchise movies. The design of everything in our lives has become so relentlessly optimized we have a global culture that's stuck a risk-free local maxima.

"My toilet pipes are broken and I have to get a plumber."

"Shitting in the woods is never broken."

Social media companies can get some of the people all of the time, or all of the people for some of the time. For a while Facebook and Twitter managed to be in the second group, which is an hugely profitable group to be in, and they both thought it would last forever.

I remember the exact moment that happened to me. I was sitting with an old friend, and we were looking at Facebook friend requests from my mom, and we looked at each other silently, and realized that everything was about to change.

I like to distinguish between Programming and Software Development, even though I don't have precise definitions for them. Programming is what you find in code samples and books and tutorials, where the code is clean is readable, and is what most of us fall in love with. Software Development is all about diverse and messy and malicious inputs and outputs, and the code is filled with the hairy edge cases[0], and it is not fun to read, but it is what most of us get paid for.

0 - e.g. the classic https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...

Remember that your goal is to have something to say, not to make the code better. No matter how good the code is, you need your fingerprints on it somehow.

"Prehistoric sea creature of the Cambrian period. Photo: Getty"

Even if you love his books you are still free to appreciate a good parody.

I enjoy Cormac McCarthy. I also enjoy the fake Cormac McCarthy twitter account https://twitter.com/CormacMcCrthy .

I love that tour. I recommend it to everyone for their second trip.

I never recommend Dhalgren to anyone.

When you are ready for Dhalgren, it will find you.

I don't find modern encyclopedias interesting, but the older encyclopedias (and textbooks) are fascinating. Specifically I love reading entries before major changes to a field. Like cells in 1950, right before the double helix structure of DNA was discovered. Or Germany in the inter war period, when everyone knew it was unstable, but no one was quite sure what that meant.

The four commas club.

Going to have to buy a car whose doors open in a new way.

Talking about pain tolerance using "Episode 13 of Survivor: Borneo" is (accidentally?) a great example, because underneath the game of pain was an incredible tactical decision by Richard which ultimately won him the game.

(The short version is there were three players left: Richard, Rudy, and Kelly. Rudy was popular, Kelly was a hard competitor, and Richard was sly. If Rudy made the final two, he would win against either of them. Richard and Rudy had long standing deal to help each other, and if Richard broke that then Rudy would vote against him from the final jury, and Richard had burned enough bridges that he needed every vote he could get. By Richard deciding to step down, he made the bet that Kelly would win the challenge and the immunity, and would vote off Rudy, because she would know she couldn't win against him. So Richard made the final two, against Kelly, without burning his friendship with Rudy. And he won.)

My old least-favorite-trope isn't on here, maybe writers have finally stopped writing it.

> (Somehow, a man and a women end up alone on a planet. This is the last dialog.)

> Man: I never caught your name.

> Women: I'm Eve.

> Man: Hi Eve, I'm Adam.

American worker rights are very low compared to Europe. But in certain industries, such as software, our benefits are in line with global averages.

And if you like to read papers physically https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262045308/ideas-that-created-th... is a book of important papers in the field, complete with historical context.

Hip hop also has a big history of guest spots, each getting their 16 bars, in a way you don't see with other popular genres.

That is really nice.

I would love to see something like this for jazz, which has musicians constantly moving through groups and albums as musicians and composers and writers.

Like take "Take Five", one of my favorites. It was written by Paul Desmond for the Dave Brubeck Quartet, with solos by Desmond on alto sax and Joe Morello on drums. Those are all fun pieces of information that I wish I could click through to see more of.

Just like classical music, it's not impossible to represent this with a generic interface, but it would benefit by something more geared to how jazz fans like to browse.

Does Wordle not allow plurals or past tense? DARES and CARES aren't in this visualization, neither are DARED or CARED.

I know those simple words don't come up often, but I don't know if they're actually not allowed.

You know, I love that book, but I completely forgot about the actual plot.

Sounds like getting directions in Boston.

"Keep going straight. At the third Dunkin's bang a left. Go by two Dunkin's and it'll be on your right."

"What's the road called?"

"I have no idea, I only ever walk, parking sucks."

Infinite Jest?

Of course, the first chapter is about one kid's final inability to communicate.

My time working at Bank of America was strange because of this. Everyone's title was either Analyst or VP.

Github once did brownouts on features they were removing. For 12 hours, then later for 24 hours, they turn off the feature temporarily. The idea was to cause alarm bells to start loudly ringing for anyone still using it.

https://github.blog/changelog/2021-04-19-sunsetting-api-auth...

I don't know if that concept would work in this case, compliance is it's own beast, but I love that idea in general.

At a certain shoe online retailer I worked at, we had a hard limit on the maximum discount, and it was built into the code. Not configurable, and not overridable. There were a lot of problems with that codebase, and some of those problems probably led to that particular solution, but I liked it.

My favorite floating point weirdness is that 0.1 can't be exactly represented in floating point.

Those hands have the right number of fingers.

So either 1) It's not AI-generated art, or 2) It is AI-generated art and the artist is a master at prompting.

Either way they should be celebrated.