pantaloony

It's funny how in 2020 PHP use is a sharply bimodal signal—it either means your tech leadership is clueless/absent/hopelessly-terrible, or they are among the few who've achieved true enlightenment.

As in sales clerk. Ring up sales, stock shelves, putter about and put things in order. Read a book or knock out some pushups if it's a really slow day, everything's in order, and the owner's not a dick. That kind of thing.

[EDIT] sense 5 in Webster's 1913. Apparently it is, or at least was, a US usage.

5. An assistant in a shop or store. [U. S.]

IDK about Gibson but back in the '00s I tried someone else's brand new First Act from Walmart (or wherever, but probably there) and it'd be fair to say it didn't work.

[EDIT] that is, I could play a large number of tunes such that they were recognizable and even pleasant-sounding on an ordinary cheap (say, $300-400 used or dent & ding) guitar, but was unable to do so at all on the First Act, which probably needed at least couple hundred dollars of work and parts replacement by a luthier to render it even minimally playable, let alone good-sounding. The neck definitely needed some adjustment, the frets probably needed attention (filing down, perhaps) and the tuners just needed to be replaced with ones that worked. I'm am quite certain almost no otherwise-well-motivated kid could have learned to play on that instrument. It simply did not work.

> Let us not kid each other. For most people their "work" is not a choice. The system is set up so that it is either you take whatever job you can to survive, or it is homelessness and no health benefits for you and your kids.

I'm not about to complain about my software development job in the US, but if not for job insecurity I'd rather clerk (not even own) at some small retail shop in Europe. And yes I've done "menial" jobs—take away the stresses of US healthcare and retirement systems and worries about your kids' ability to pay for school, add European amounts of time-off, and lots of those jobs are pretty damn great, actually, job-insecurity aside (which is not a trivial thing, I grant—point is about what's "fulfilling" or satisfying in a job).

I don't have a gripe with the term per se but in this case omitting who did it plainly renders the headline clickbait. If one tiny bit of info added to a headline would lose you most of your clicks, you're being deceptive to gain clicks. In this case the info is that the Nazis banned the book, because no one at all familiar with their book-banning criteria would find it surprising that math books were among the ones they banned, and so would shrug and move on without clicking. The implication of the headline is that the banning is novel or surprising or perhaps especially (and most provocatively) due to its content, but it's not.

Notably, a bad hit can result in multiple outs.

For me checking the mail when I’m not expecting something (so, 50 weeks out of the year) most closely resembles emptying a small trash bin every so often so it doesn’t overflow. I’m generally pro-USPS for other reasons but yeah, checking the mail is a kinda worthless chore. Do it so they don’t suspend delivery in case I need something. Not to read anything that showed up.

Sure, which is why I edited that “algorithms” is more accurate. When I read proofs I have to go through each step and figure out what every term on either side “does” to something “going through” it to make sense of it. I’d rather have my sandwich-making instructions as instructions than a series of statements about how the sandwich looks at each stage that I have to go back and turn into instructions to actually do anything with it, if that makes sense.

I get that other people don’t have this preference, but I strongly do. Test results indicate I should be incredibly well suited to mathematical work but I feel the way I imagine a dyslexic must when I try to read math or “mathy” programming languages. Give me something more-or-less procedural and I’m totally happy (though I gather I had a much easier time understanding and getting comfortable with recursion than many people do, which seems weird given I find the languages most heavily associated with it almost unreadable).

I map “natural” on the touchpad to moving the page. I map “natural” on the scroll wheel to moving the scrollbar. Both are “natural”, but opposite.

I’m legitimately not sure democracy will survive modern, sophisticated propaganda techniques, plus an open, international Web, plus losing the ability to more-or-less trust audio and video recordings that we’ve grown used to over the last hundredish years. Between state actors and, eventually if not already, transnational corporations waging info warfare, I kinda doubt the institution can take it. Too much info, too fast, from too many sources.

You’re not alone. My brain works in steps, not proofs. If all code looked like Haskell and friends I doubt I’d ever have gotten into it in the first place.

[edit] algos, over proofs, would probably be a better way to put it.

I'd imagine the (apparent) need to process, what, 12ish of these per weekday has something to do with it. How many can you manage in the "pipeline" at that rate? What's their staffing like? I bet they're staffed as if the police would at least kinda cooperate, so if they don't then there aren't enough personnel to follow up on any but the most clear-cut and serious cases with a bunch of public evidence already available so they know it might go somewhere if they put in the hours.

Mostly because it's a very effective way to ensure things get fixed, while gaining the "attacker" nothing. It's harmful, but so is finding 4000 insecure databases, sending 4000 notification emails, and having 3950 of them ignored (and that approach is probably more risky, so far as inviting legal trouble and expenses). It also neatly removes anyone else's ability to take the data.

Gnome is crashy, gobbles resources, incredibly laggy, and drops frames on my beast of a newish hex-core machine. I've switched to KDE in a VM on Win10 (some of the crashes were Linux graphics drivers, not entirely Gnome's fault, though some were Gnome—running in a VM makes them go away entirely, and also all my bluetooth stuff stays paired much better since Linux doesn't even know it's bluetooth) and it feels 4x as responsive on literally half the hardware, and under virtualization, as Gnome did.

I recently trialed a 2GB memory (!) dual-core Celeron minipc as a workstation, and if I could have solved all the 4k 2x scaling issues without spending hours (more) on it or resorting to a too-heavy-for-the-hardware DE, and gotten 60hz out of it rather than 30, I'd probably have upgraded the RAM to its max of 8GB and been totally happy on it. Void Linux with suckless tools made it feel blazing fast, as long as I avoided webshit (so, Sublime over VSCode, keep Slack the hell away from it, use a real email client rather than a webpage, that kind of thing). All browsers felt too slow to even launch except Surf and qute, and the latter was a tad slower and jankier than Surf so I settled on that, but it was fine as long as I avoided the kind of pages that eat a couple hundred MB and burn cycles for no clear reason (which is lots of them, sadly). I bet I could have made it work even better if I'd looked into adding a disable/enable JS toggle, defaulting to off, and maybe some kind of click-to-load-media thing, but it was surprisingly usable as it was. FF and Chromium were far too heavy to launch with no page loaded, of course. Man I miss pre-2.0 Firefox, when it was light and fast.

My blame scale for breaches, most to least:

1) the cultural and economic forces driving everything online way before that’s anything like a good idea,

2) companies storing more than they need to,

3) the people who left it unsecured (bigco, tech startups, and anything very sensitive),

4) the people stealing data,

5) the people who left it unsecured (Smaller shops that’ve been made to feel they must be online),

[large gap]

20) someone who simply deletes all the insecure data (assuming they didn’t also steal all of it)

Taking amusement in catching little social lies isn’t exactly gatekeeping. More like sport.

I don’t give a damn whether people call themselves Stoics or not and whether they’re sincere—whatever that means—or not, but I’m very sure, specifically, that there are a lot more fans of Meditations than people who’ve read it or even meaningfully read about it, which is funny in that “oh boy, aren’t we humans goofy” sort of way. It’s also an easy phenomenon to stumble on innocently while trying to discuss the book, though I think that goes for a lot of Very Important Books that more people claim to have read than actually have. IIRC someone wrote a whole tongue-partially-in-cheek guide to pretending at having read books, for the reason that it’s pretty common.

GameCube’s design wasn’t just intended to fit the use case of packing it up to take it to grandma’s or to your friend’s dorm room on another floor, it also communicated that that was something you could/should do with it. Great design.

I think almost all the interesting games on the X-Box either already being available for Windows or else having a just-as-good version available for another console is a lot of what kills interest for emulating it. You can play Halo and such just fine on a PC without an emulator.

It’s not clear to me that most of the drownings were related to inability to swim. If you dump a few hundred strong swimmers in water, unexpectedly and all very close together and panicking, then add that a bunch of them are kids (many of which may well hav been able to swim, ordinarily) then I’d expect a bunch of them to drown. Ever accidentally get in a little knot of people in the water? Makes it harder to swim. Now put some people under you and others trying to swim past you and wait where the hell is my ten-year-old and everyone’s screaming and tugging and pushing and your suit is wet and heavy... I don’t see how a large percentage of the passengers being unable to swim is necessary for a whole lot of them to drown.

[edit] more to the point, do you believe crowd-crush deaths occur because those crushed foolishly never learned to walk?

> The past is a pretty different place. These hundreds of passengers died when they couldn't swim the twenty feet to the shore. It makes you question why they wanted to have their party on a boat.

I’m not following this. Seems like a lot of people were trapped below decks, and a lot more were stuck in what amounts to a mosh pit in water while trying to look after vulnerable loved ones, which is a great way for even strong swimmers to drown in a hurry.

They don’t save me from having to go look at other files to learn things about the code I’m actually interested in; they can be misleading in ways that types aren’t—in particular, it’s very hard to know what sorts of things an all-green test suite guarantees versus a passing static type build, without a great deal more information; and they are, in practice, prone to rot and neglect in a way static types rarely are, and are harder to bring back into a useful state when that happens.

They serve very different purposes and generally are not first and foremost good communication tools the way static types are, for a bunch of reasons. That doesn’t mean tests aren’t very useful and welcome things to have, however.

> I would also say that there's a pretty big difference between "stiff upper lip/no emotions" that people imagine when using the the adjective "stoic" and the Stoic writings of Marcus Aurelius and the like.

A quick way to find out what sort of self-proclaimed lover of Meditations you’re dealing with is to ask what they think of its physics and metaphysics.

It doesn’t account for the communication value of static types. Personally, I consider static types primarily a communication tool, so IMO the review’s interesting but not very useful per se. Also the main point of it seems to be “research on this topic is mostly bad, so far, so who the hell knows what’s true”. It could be that the research has sucked, not that there’s little discernible difference between the two on the dimensions measured.

I don’t get the cost claims. The time it takes to note which type I intend something to be is mostly either so low that I recover it via improved hints and such very quickly, or larger but only because I’m documenting something complex enough that I should have documented it anyway, whether or not I was using static types, because it’ll be hell for other people or future-me to figure out otherwise. It seems like a large time savings to me—throw in faster and more confident refactoring and stuff like that, and it’s not even close.

I just don’t get how people are working that it represents a time cost rather than a large time savings. I don’t mean that as a dig, I just mean I genuinely don’t know what that must look like. And I’ve written a lot more code in dynamic languages, and got my start there, so it’s not like I “grew up” writing Java or something like that.

> You're going to have to learn that, as a laborer at a firm, the quality of work you do is, at best, loosely correlated to your monetary compensation.

This has been one of the most disorienting and most important realizations of my career. Hard work, or even effectiveness, are only loosely correlated with comp. Often it’s even inverted, and that sense you get that your higher-paid betters aren’t very good and are barely even working is actually true when you get there yourself. It’s very weird but you must not tie expectations of effort or difficulty to compensation. Remember, we’re operating in an economic system where some of the best-compensated and richest people do essentially no work at all. It’s a topsy-turvy world out there. Your hardest work, highest stress, and most abusive job can easily be the one you’re paid the worst for.

The NES and SNES classics come with excellent controllers (side-by-side then with the originals and it’s hard to tell the difference) and aren’t hard to “hack” to run an expanded library. Disk space is limited but you can fit about as many games as a person’s realistically likely to ever play on them.

There are adapters for the controllers but I’ve owned a couple over the years (to use the Wii Classic Controller over USB) and they barely work to begin with, then break after a bit, it seems. Dunno why.

The one thing I really miss using x86 boxes rather than Raspberries Pi is the dd-to-sdcard-and-boot workflow. Makes recovery easy, trivial to back up the exact software you’re running on one. If the whole thing goes up in a fire, buy another identical Pi, write a new sdcard, and you’re back in business.

But yeah, otherwise if you’re not using the io features you get a lot more bang-for-the-buck buying used low-end x86 gear.

I have a crappy model-or-two-old Asus Chromebox that runs Retroarch well and cost about as much as a Pi with trimmings back when I bought it new. Runs N64 just fine. 2GB RAM and a low-clocked dual-core Celeron. Actually with a RAM upgrade (doable) it’d make an Ok dev workstation if you avoid “webapps” and Electron and are comfortable with lighter editors rather than e.g. heavy Java IDEs, and can run your VMs and Dockers somewhere else. Admittedly a lot of caveats but would work for some people.

Unfortunately “adequate support to help people reintegrate so going back to crime isn’t their best option” looks a lot like “rewarding criminals” to a good portion of the electorate. Maybe in part because social services in general are so bad that anything at all looks like a lot of aid.

Dunno if it’s still the case but I at one point a tax guy asked me if I’d been convicted of (IIRC) any drug offenses because if I had I’d have been ineligible for certain education-related tax assistance. Dafuq? Yes let’s make it even harder for people to do something other than dealing drugs, when they get out. That makes a ton of sense.

IIRC they have a library you can drop in a mobile app to talk to their watches. At least they did a few years ago.