macNchz

I think those are all fair and reasonable—ultimately I've chosen not to work in an office since late 2019, so I'm not exactly an in-person absolutist.

Personally, though, I do think that the higher-bandwidth effect is valuable to me. I think part of what makes me feel like video calls are tiring is that my brain is working overtime trying to extract some of that extra signal from the participants, while in-person I'm able to better gauge others' reactions intuitively and adjust my tone or approach without much conscious effort. People have told me for years that I have a "calming presence" in the workplace/meetings, which is not a way I'd describe myself unprompted, so I think I've silently benefited from nonverbal cues in that way.

Being in a comfortable environment is a huge one though for sure. So many modern offices are comically badly arranged, with people trying to do thinking work space shared with people having meetings who are overflowing from the insufficient number of conference rooms. It's kind of a joke.

A refrain I’ve heard from real life friends and people on the internet alike is that employees are being asked to come back to the office where they wind up just sitting on video calls much of the day. This seems like an absolute worst case for job satisfaction to me.

I’m lucky enough to work wherever I want and accept Zoom meetings as a prerequisite to that, but find them tiring and a poor simulacrum of real in-person conversation. If I were asked to come to an office every day and deal with the commute and the stupidity of most modern office designs and still had the majority of meetings happen over video, I’d be pretty dissatisfied with my job.

While there are all sorts of claims about honey, I do think that it's easy to eat considerably less sugar without going totally cold-turkey by buying unsweetened things and adding honey yourself. Most people, I think, will just naturally use less than is added to typical products. A long time ago I decided to try buying plain yogurt and no-sugar-added muesli/granola and add honey to taste, rather than buying the standard commercial sweetened versions. I estimated at the time that it was like a 75% reduction in sugar at breakfast without any real thought or effort, and I never went back.

> If you can write a Dockerfile to install something you can write a bash script.

Docker is great for making sure that magic bash script that brings the system up actually works again on someone else’s computer or after a big upgrade on your dev machine or whatever.

So many custom build scripts I’ve run into over the years have some kind of unstated dependency on the initial system they were written on, or explicit dependencies on something tricky to install, and as such are really annoying to diagnose later on, especially if they make significant system changes.

Docker is strictly better than a folder full of bash scripts and a Readme.txt. I would have loved having it when I had to operate servers like that with tons of websites running on them. So much nicer to be able to manage dependency upgrades per-site rather than server-wide, invariably causing something to quietly break on one of 200 sites.

The most fundamental difference 20 years ago was that online activity was diffused across many different sites, and there was no algorithmic content feed recommending an endless stream of new things. Finding a rabbithole or dark corner required some degree of chance or intentionality, whereas now they are formed around you automatically as one toe in the waters of a given topic prompts the machine to deliver it more frequently and more intensely to keep your attention and draw you deeper in. This is, I think, absolutely foundational to so many sociocultural issues of the present.

This assumes that mass social media is some kind of idealized “meeting of the minds” rather than like…the digital equivalent of a loud and raucous bar.

The ability to block obnoxious and hateful people is fundamentally far, far less of causative factor of information bubbles than the pervasive engagement-driven algorithmic feeds are.

Goes way, way back—I remember announcements nearly 20 years ago where they were basically removing/setting bad defaults on what primitive privacy controls they had at the time, but calling it making things "more social."

> Seems inane an institution would crack down on it.

Mad rushes to register requiring people to use automations like that sounds like a bad system to me, and something the university should be trying to address. That said, rather than a crackdown on tools, it’d make more sense to implement a harder-to-game system like spreading registration across a long period and assigning students to have their access unlock at a random time during the period. My college had time-slot (in person!) appointments like that 20 years ago.

With most software I am immediately concerned about what other unforeseen problems might happen as soon as it seems like the system has entered some kind of un- or semi-handled failure state.

I have been absolutely impressed with what's possible even in very-expensive NYC when the gates are opened to build housing—I live one neighborhood over from the Gowanus area of Brooklyn, which was rezoned in 2021 and has been absolutely transformed since. The pace and scale of the construction of 10-30 story apartment buildings has been kind of wild. Each time I pass through I find myself wondering where some big new building came from. It's encouraging, as much as it makes every other situation where a project of few dozen homes is trapped in years of negotiation and community meeting shouting matches all the more infuriating.

Soda really is something—I drank plenty as a kid, but I kind of soured on it after an interactive exercise in a college class, where we each guessed the amount of sugar in a can of soda, scooped the sugar into a glass, and then were shown the actual amount. In seeing that, I realized I would simply never put that much sugar in anything on my own, if I were sweetening a drink rather than buying something pre-sweetened.

> CNotes were extremely successful on X.

> reddit died

By all measures I can find, reddit continues to grow year over year, while X seems to have been flat or in decline, so I’m not sure this is a strong premise.

The finding that using a car occasionally but not being required to certainly resonates with me. I grew up in a fully car dependent rural place, have always been “into”cars, and love a spirited drive on country roads. Now, I’ve lived in Brooklyn for nearly 15 years now and still own a fun-to-drive car that I use once a week or less.

The combination of being able to do 95% of regular errands on foot and the rest via transit, plus having access to a car to go places outside of the city on a whim is really quite a privilege and a nice way to live. Whenever we spend significant time in places where you must use a car to do anything outside of the house (e.g. visiting family in both my wife’s and my own rural hometowns), I really appreciate not having to do that every day. It seems to me that car dependency has some kind of effect of making people angrier—even some of the kindest people display surprising hostility behind the wheel, and moving around in isolation cuts out a lot of micro/transient social interactions that can actually brighten a day.

At this point I think there are so few places in America where you can live like this, it means people have a limited frame of reference for what’s possible—lifestyles that don’t involve a car for almost every activity are so different, you get stuck on questions like “how will I get all of the groceries home when I shop once a week.” I wish we could build more variety into our cityscapes and provide viable alternatives rather than effectively mandating car dependency by law. The price of homes in what car-optional places do exist certainly suggests a lot of market demand.

I was casually into this stuff like twenty years ago–read the forums, tried various techniques etc. I did have a bit of real success with it, also having some lucid dreams that are memorable years later, however I didn't actually like the experience of consistently remembering lots of details from my dreams, which was, I think, most of why I stopped.

At the time, at least, the recommended starting point was dream journaling–writing down everything you can remember as soon as you wake up. Practicing that even for a few days has the effect of helping you retain quite a bit more detail from your dreams. It wasn't so much that I had unpleasant dreams as it was that remembering them made the night seem somehow less restful, as though I needed the relatively blank gap of sleep in the filmstrip of my memory to be able to wake up with a clear head.

> as long as it is food and stuff available at a normal grocery store (so not including alcohol).

Not to dive too far down the “is a burrito a sandwich” rabbit hole, but it is interesting to think about this—a bottle of soda and a bottle of wine really aren’t that far apart: caloric, low-nutrient beverages whose primary purpose is pleasure and that cause some subset of the population to be unable to moderate their intake. Not advocating for government sponsored wine so much as exploring the idea of “what is food?” Soda barely qualifies, in my view. Really beer or wine may actually be a bit more food-like.

That said I agree that strict lifestyle prescriptions for people getting assistance are more often a kind of moral high horse than a useful policy.

It has been surprising to me for years that people put up with this, I find it really terrible as a shopping experience. Like shopping in the worst dollar store you’ve ever been in that’s also the size of a city and loaded with ads, except you can’t actually touch the products or smell the pervasive scent of cheap plastic while you browse. And they want you to pay a subscription!

Shopping from retailers that employ actual buyers feels like a real upgrade.

Do you drug test? Sounds like a place that might. A fairly significant proportion (though definitely not all) of the best developers I've ever worked with would simply pass over places that seem like they would.

I don’t know, having had one in my home for four years I don’t think I’d really be able to tell if I bought some bad furniture or something, there’s just so much noise. The levels are all over the map hour to hour. Could be some banana peels in the kitchen garbage or a loosely capped bottle of shampoo or something? Noisy data with a shifting baseline telling you that you might be exposed to some kind of nasty stuff is more just anxiety provoking than actionable, in my opinion.

As the post discusses, being unable to differentiate between the specific VOCs being detected makes these sensors, IMO, a net negative in home air quality devices. Mine will spike for a long time from opening a single beer or a fart (lol), so it doesn’t provide much information about whether there are concerning chemicals present as well.

> What's the point of having it public then? The department of transportation is already using that data for monitoring traffic so there's zero need for anyone else to replicate their work.

Personally I do find it useful to be able to glance at the NYC traffic cams as a supplement to traffic maps, not only because having an actual visual on the traffic can help me decide on a driving route better than red or green map lines or a routing algorithm I know will take me on an inferior path to “avoid” perceived traffic, but also because the cameras pick up other nearby stuff. I like to go on runs over the Brooklyn Bridge, but it’s so swarmed with tourists most of the time that I’ll check the DOT cameras so I can see if the pedestrian path is clear enough to run on without being clotheslined by a selfie stick.

I also spend a lot of time north of the city, and the state highway traffic cams are great for checking the plowing status during/after winter storms before setting off for a trip.

I've been having good results having AI "color in" the areas that I might otherwise skimp on like that, at least in a first pass at a project: really robust fixtures and mocks in tests (that I'm no longer concerned will be dead weight as the system changes because they can pretty effectively be automatically updated), graceful error handling and messaging for edgier edge cases, admin views for things that might have only had a cli, etc.

As someone who reads poetry regularly and has played around a bit with AI-generated poems, AI poems can be quite impressive, but have a certain blandness to them. I can see them conforming very well to the average person's concept of what a poem is, whereas the human written poems might be less pleasingly perfect and average, more stylistically and structurally experimental etc. The LLM version is less likely to play with the rules and expectations for the medium, and more likely to produce something average and "correct", which makes some intuitive sense given the way it works.

Every PaaS and IaaS I’ve ever used has had some amount of downtime, often considerably more than 5 minutes, and I’ve run production services on many of them. Plenty of random issues on major cloud providers as well. Certainly plenty of situations with dozens of Twitter posts happening but never any acknowledgement on the AWS status page. Nothing’s perfect.

> the most useful goal is to make money fast in a way that doesn't drain your life energy. And most of the time, this means responding to opportunities, not sticking to your guns

This is a tightrope I think many people wind up struggling with—it’s easy to slip into doing something that pays well but does drain your energy, then struggle to wind things back once you’re used to the increased income.

I’ve definitely seen an undercurrent of “I don’t need the crutch of a debugger” sort of attitudes online over the years, never really made sense to me. It can be painful pairing with someone who keeps adding print statements one at a time and repeating the 15 step process to get to them when they could have put in a breakpoint right out of the gate.

I still print stuff plenty, but when the source of an issue is not immediately obvious I’m reaching for the debugger asap.

They claim the right to audit purchases through the edu store and charge you the difference if you don't qualify, but I've never read anyone online reporting they've been audited/charged.

https://www.apple.com/us-edu/shop/browse/open/salespolicies/....

That makes sense for Chinese citizens, but I was talking as a foreign citizen, since we were discussing the differences between having your own government vs a foreign government involved in what content you see.

It is a frustrating and often ineffectual system, but I simply cannot disagree more that I, as an American citizen, have equivalent powerlessness over the American government as I do over the Chinese government. There is a clear and storied history of people who cared about issues making real change to the American government and the lives of their fellow citizens. There are plenty of terrible things this country has done as well, but I’m not ready to give up on it yet and assume the Chinese government is equivalent.

I have plenty of beef with the American political system, but a loud group of motivated Americans absolutely has the ability to influence government decisions. If you, a citizen, decided you really cared about something, and gathered your like-minded fellow citizens to amplify your voice, you have a real chance at making an impact. That cannot be said in any way, shape, or form for a foreign power.

If you live in a democracy you have a vote and a voice to bring to the table. It’s wild to me that on this topic people seem to see their own governments as largely equivalent to an outwardly adversarial if not explicitly hostile foreign power.

I think it has been so long since the Pax-Americana West has dealt with an overtly hostile major power that we’ve collectively lost the concept that there can be real enemies with goals that run explicitly counter to our own.