pool

I get the impression that Amy Fleming doesn't want to do what she's doing. There's so much bullshit picture-painting that my brain goes into skim mode and fails to find any of the actual information.

When my father was growing up, teenagers in the towns around were self-organizing and played baseball on their own, the guys from this town against the guys from that town. All summer.

When I was growing up, the grown-ups organized everything and decided who played when, and we had...maybe ten? games in a summer, with a few practice sessions before that. It's been a while, but I have the idea that if you were good enough to be in the lineup regularly, you'd get something like 25 chances to hit a baseball per year. Or wait, I think we had games that were more like seven innings. Maybe 25 was an overestimate.

PS Also, something about the death of the baseball card and how the major league strike of 1994 led a generation to move on.

PPS I remember it being fascinating to learn that teenagers were allowed -- or had the idea it was possible -- or something -- to do something so on their own.

Skimming the comments on that post, a lot of the people there seemed rather like dicks when talking about other people's unhappiness. I have to wonder how unhappy they themselves are, to what degree they recognize it, what brought them to that state...

I didn't grow up on Star Wars, even though I was the right age to have at least seen ads for the third one. I don't remember it being an unusually big deal where I grew up -- no more so than E.T., for instance, which we never hear about anymore. Or Close Encounters, which I think was big when it first came out but was a little before my time.

Anyway, since I didn't grow up on it, there's no nostalgic connection for me and I'm not into it at all.

(Whereas I'm at least somewhat aware of the Star Trek goings-on because I was exposed to TNG by television.)

How far are we from having the will and ability for it to be common to use safer languages than C/C++/Java/etc.?

A long time ago, it didn't seem pragmatic to write in, say, ocaml, because no one was going to feel like building or even installing the compiler in order to try your dumb software, but now that everything is about packages from distributions...

Today it feels strange to apply security updates for necessary software where the announcements list "Multiple memory safety errors, integer overflows, use-after-frees..."

Do you remember whether your epiphany seemed to stem from something, or just happened?

I guess we gain perspective. We have the stereotype of old people being cranky and stupid (like I come from the era of cd-rom cupholder jokes, faxing images of floppies, etc.), but probably there were intelligent old people out there telling us about missing context and we didn't listen or by its nature what they had to say couldn't get press or something.

I found it dismaying to know programmers who believed in creationism because they work with stuff that is so evolutionary.

Now I kind of get that you have to come to something with the right perspective to see 'properly', but... so dismaying initially. I felt a desire/need to be among some people who were similar to me -- had a lifetime worth of being different already -- and it wasn't happening.

For someone who follows HN somewhat, I really don't keep up on any current cool-and-hyped stuff. I'll just see websites become more and more useless with three-stripe icons for menus and then just random mysterious icons, and I'll tell myself that that no doubt these no-context meaningless icons must be derived from whatever iphones are doing this week.

I also didn't realize how much I was shaped by my awful upbringing. I just thought I'd get away and that I was a rational person and everything would be all right.

Even before selling the current pills, I've seen mentions from the mid-1800s of how something horrible would happen to someone and it would be lamented in mere economic terms, lost productivity.

When I need a reminder that I'm not like most people, I just need to look at how something in human psychology means that being the president / prime minister / dictator's son/brother/wife means that you get your turn as well.

Maybe it really is nothing more than "Oh, I've heard of pepsi, so I'd better buy a fucking ton of blue-labeled sugar water every week of my life", but there might be something else evolutionary about power and loyalty and reward.

I wonder what the various dreams even are for what to do about snow -- embedding something in the lane marker paint or who knows what.

I rather hope that individual vehicles for everyone just turns out no longer to make sense eventually and goes away.

I imagine there would be tickets given out for asshole behaviour.

It's very interesting to consider: What commonality, common interests, etc., in a group would be healthiest and best in some way for humans and maybe humanity?

It's interesting to see what someone's primary identification is -- member of a family, of a city, a religion, a nation, a species, lifeform of a particular planet, and so on.

Under species, he would write Founder. It sounds like, anyway.

To me that's harsh because I grew up rural, and was outside some, but...so isolated. There was only so much time you could stand outside trying to make up games by yourself in that rotten climate. Being forced outside sucked when I could at least read books to pass the time if I went in.

I'm pretty delighted, though, that people are finally getting a handle on the causes of myopia.

All of the beers-and-foosball culture definitely troubles me.

It feels so...frat boy to me, and I was never a frat boy.