quietplatypus

Fidget spinners are genuinely useful though---arguably even more useful than the other items on the list, for their ADHD/anxiety-reducing properties plus portability.

The only way you can do noticeably better is direct, hands-free brain stimulation. The fidget cube is also such an object, but it is MUCH more complex and hence vulnerable to be put down due to a competing distraction.

With depreciation and older m5 models, you could definitely fit the initial and maintenance costs of a m5 into a middle class budget.

The name is quite misleading for those not familiar with previous work.

How's this different from TCP Vegas and FAST TCP which also use delay to infer the bottleneck bandwidth?

Even 'catharsis' as a Western idea isn't actually that helpful in practice. For example, taking out your anger and feeling 'cathartic' is known to make your emotional problems worse, not better, because you've given it a physical outlet that affects everyone around you.

This is totally a cult-worshipping style setup where the name of the game isn't employee health but ever increasing amounts of company loyalty. Notice how one of the participants was quoted as wanting to "bring more passion" to their work. People who need this treatment need a bigger life change than some theatrics plus some what is most likely unenthusiastic if not totally coerced admission that the bullshit helped.

Finally, don't bring "eastern asian background" into this. You should be able to argue for or against something without using your background to appeal to idiots and racists.

I'm all for this. Especially in Bay Area traffic. It looks like about 95% of the time I get some tailgater because I leave enough room in front of my car to brake. If I dont' want to get tailgated, I end up tailgating. I seriously wish these people would either shape up or stop driving cars altogether.

Yeah back when I made 3D models of star trek spaceships (trekkie in your name significant?) that was one of the go-to methods for making the shuttles, smaller craft, borg (obviously), but stuff like Voyager and the Enterprise-E you would often resort to more advanced lofting/spline patch based techniques and work off of a sketch.

I think I know what you're talking about when you mention Authoritarian Followers---something like abused kids who only know how to deal with situations in which they are abused, even when they grow up.

The worse part is they want to have "followers" themselves as well, subconsciously, repeating the cycle.

I still have many properties of Authoritarian Followerism in myself, but I'm making progress.

One of the difficult parts is many people around me show blatant signs of that followerism and it's easy to get sucked back down with them.

E.g., a coworker protested my protestations against our company stack ranking employees based on "quantitative" metrics, and then many months later backpedaled on his words when someone who had a more important title said the same concerns.

Yep. And, philosophy's pretty much the playground for having cross-disciplinary insights. It's sad to see that the conventional wisdom is to deemphasize these fields, as if humans ran on nothing but purely rational logic lol.

Yeah that comment jumped out at me as sketchy the second I saw that...

"15 years" in operations and isn't even aware of this basic fact.

The idea of looking up particular sequences of documents to demonstrate actual behaviors is very compelling. Too often, documentation follows a precise but necessarily boring and unintuitive format. Having traces through documentation for common tasks would be very useful.

Would this include stuff like printing to stderr being slower on Windows? If they get to write kernel drivers, there could be a chance that they could replicate the file handling behaviors of Linux.

I guess the line is a bit blurry, especially when you factor in fast virtualization techniques that involve running emulated instructions directly :)

Gotcha. Thanks for the explanation! Which would you say was harder, Wine or this? It seems like Wine should have been harder since the NT kernel was designed with multiple userspaces in mind...

Great article!

I'm not too familiar with OS as a subject, but is the separation between user and kernel mode similar to high-level language versus assembly; i.e., the approach they took was to emulate the Linux kernel, which is sort of like a virtual machine. But I imagine emulating a kernel is harder, right? Because of all the stuff that goes on?

And in general, would kernel emulation be a performant approach for running userspace of any OS in any other OS?

That's an excellent point. I had heard of the Ben Franklin effect, but not this. Yeah when I try to give my help to most people, they get resentful.

Am I special/broken in that if someone does a favor for me with the implication I don't pay them back, my opinion of them goes up? Perhaps I'm just not used to the phenomenon lol...

Yeah pretty much this. Even though it seems OK from an "objective" standpoint to lend your aid when it seems obvious that you can do it and it is not too much cost to you, this doesn't really work in the making friends dept. Yes there are maybe 5% of people who will catch on to what you are doing and click but that is not good odds.

I would not be surprised if most friendships resulted from pressure to fit in. It's healthy to let those types of people go.

That may be true, but I've found that I grew up making mostly the wrong friends, each of whom was more irritating, status obsessed, narcissitic, etc as life went on. Only like 2 people made it through the filter, and I'm making healthier friends these days, but I say the ease of disconnection in modern society is a blessing, not a curse. Shitty people get left alone? Fine with me lol.

Obviously you're expectd to be a hardcore motorsport enthusiast who has a honed instinct for the current kph :p

Bravo. Saving this comment.

For substance: Consider how this is all part of the effort by management to make programmers feel as interchangeable and insignificant as possible.

And it's not even in the name of quality. Plenty of software out there breaks because of its multiple single points of failure in the form of dependencies.

I'm not even poor, and I still do my research on a workstation from 2009. It's fast enough for what I'm doing, and why waste new hardware on bloated software?

How is this different from defunctionalizing and converting to smt backend or prolog engine without higher-order capabilities?

they are also often bullshit deadlines that users dont care about but gets a few brownie points for management.

Pretty much this.

Problem: One person remaining on island, 2 people left.

Optimal solution: Kill yourself.

Sub-optimal solution: Both live.

Ah, got it. So it's able to take into account outside factors that more efficiently get you to the target temperature. Okay, I see the value now. Thanks for the explanation!

I guess I never will understand the reason for buying any tech gadget when the current solution is operating within parameters.

No one here has yet really considered the real elephant in the room:

Why does anyone need an "intelligent" thermostat, especially something as overhyped and over-engineered as Nest is?

I never even remotely bought into the Nest hype from the very beginning. Ditto on their smoke detectors.

At least, you stop being such a baby and turn the heat up or down by yourself. Controversial, I know.

At most, you put your thermostat on an automatic schedule, which can be done about a thousand different ways (timer circuit, dippy bird, microcontrollers that have already been manufactured and tested in a million different ways by more established companies).

So you only work on things purely under threats and external pressure? Let's hope no one ever has to work with you.

Granted, no one really does anything without considering the possibility of that thing causing them to go six feet under, but you've stated that the only motivation to do anything ever, to decrease the local entropy around yourself even one bit, is under the threat of death.

Are you not aware how unhealthy, conformist, tool-like of a life-philosophy this is?

(Also, you don't need to exactly buy into all this startup cult shit and work your ass off from the beginning, just do anything that makes you more money than you put in. I know this is obvious but judging from most people like you, you need that dose of reality)

Yeah, I'm an engineer now and if we were post-money I honestly would still be an engineer, because I take pleasure from finding out how things work and making new things that work. I think there are a lot of us like this.

No one really wants to sit on their ass all day, that's just something that's made up by rich people to stress us out so we continue working like dogs for them instead of on our real projects.

If you sat me down in front of the TV with no responsibilities forever everything provided I probably wouldn't last three days.