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stantaylor

81 karma · joined March 6, 2017

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stantaylor··on Picking berries is my meditation
I do long distance solo road cycling. The riding takes just enough of my cognitive capacity that the rest of my mind wanders lightly, usually not thinking about anything of substance. It feels like meditation to me.
stantaylor··on I Am Not a Reverse Centaur
Even if this guy were not anti-AI, as the primary maintainer of OS projects, it sounds like he's dealing with a genuine problem.

> My initial task when a new unexpected PR arrives is to determine if there is a person behind it or not, and luckily this is easy to figure out in just a few seconds.

OK. How? That would have been an interesting explanation to me.

stantaylor··on I want to live like Costco people
> They’re always in far-off places

That's yet another thinly disguised case of punching down: the author wants you to know that they are not the type of person who lives close to a Costco, typically in the suburbs. This author's attitude is so tiresome.

stantaylor··on I want to live like Costco people
I would agree. The implicit (or actually pretty explicit in a couple of sentences) class disdain is so tiring.
stantaylor··on US freezes visas for 75 nations
My son-in-law is from Brazil, came to the US for grad school, has an Ph.D. in ML and a good job in the US. He got his green card via marriage a couple of years ago and was planning on probably getting citizenship in the next year or two. He is very worried about what all this might mean for that plan.
stantaylor··on People who come off slimming jabs regain weight four times faster than dieters
My wife, age 60, has battled her weight her whole life, and my son-in-law is currently taking one of the GLP-1 drugs. When I listen to them discuss all this, the one thing that stands out to me is "The drug quiets the voices in my head about food." If there are sweets in the house, for instance, my wife can possibly resist eating them, but she cannot stop thinking about them. For them, and I think for many people, it's not just a matter of hunger but hunger and learned behaviors. My wife can tell you how those voices were activated by her mother when she was a child. It's really complicated.

If there are sweets in the house, I may eat more than I would like, but I don't really have those voices, and after being married to my wife for 40 years, I can't pretend to even understand what her thoughts are about food. I can get a brownie from the kitchen, eat it and forget about them until I come back into the kitchen again. I suspect you also don't have those voices.

(For reference, I've never been particularly overweight, but twice in my life my weight crept up, and I managed to lose and keep off for years 10-25 pounds through diet changes alone; yes, my weight did eventually creep up, but I think the number of years before that happened would qualify medically as a successful weight loss)

To get back to this discussion, my son-in-law has lost 50 pounds since he started taking the GLP-1 drug, but he has also changed his diet and he exercises regularly. He was trying to do those things with mixed success in terms of weight loss before he started taking the drug, so I would say he would probably stand a higher chance of keeping the weight off if he were to stop the drug, but his doctor talks about him always being on a low maintenance dose.

stantaylor··on Marion County agrees to pay out $3M for newspaper raid, expresses regret
I agree that that "likely" is not a good look, but this was written by a lawyer to fulfill a legal obligation as part of this settlement, so I'm not surprised.
stantaylor··on My bank keeps on undermining anti-phishing education
I used to work for a financial services company that had a strong and well-managed security culture. The company got acquired, and afterwards, we kept getting emails from third parties for various things, all supposedly initiated by execs/groups at the parent company.

We employees of the acquired company discussed the emails in Slack: we were sure that these emails were legitimate, but acting on them would have broken our security policies, so we all decided to all report them as phishing attempts. We understood that we were engaging in malicious compliance, but our actions were also a best practice, so we couldn't technically be criticized for it.

After a while of this, execs at the parent company would send out sometimes exasperated-sounding emails ahead of time, alerting us to the email that we should expect to receive and how they wanted us to respond. Of course, that led to discussions of how we know that that pre-email emails were legitimate. After a while, we all lost interest in this malicious compliance and adopted the much laxer security culture of the acquiring company.

stantaylor··on A $20k American-made electric pickup with no paint, no stereo, no screen
Very true. This truck appeals to me very much. My wife and I have a 2010 Accord and a 2014 CR-V. We could afford newer and/or fancier cars, but we just don't care about those things.

We're thinking of buying a newer car at some point, but between interest rates and, now, tariffs, we're not in any hurry.

stantaylor··on A $20k American-made electric pickup with no paint, no stereo, no screen
My 30-year-old daughter is still driving the Toyota version, the Matrix, also 2008, that we bought in about 2013. She loves the thing. If she didn't have it, I'm sure I would still be driving it.

I find it hilarious that it's a limited-edition M Theory model. It has a badge glued to the dash that says "1926 of 5000." For a Toyota econobox.

stantaylor··on Corporations Learned the Maximum Amount They Can Charge for a Product
Unfortunately, people like you and me are the minority.
stantaylor··on The Rise and Fall of the Trad Wife
> It seems to me that the whole "trad wife" thing is rage-bait that the press took hold of and blew out of proportion

I don't disagree with you, but there were a couple of crucial steps before that: first, extreme views/lifestyles being amplified on social media that lead people to belief that they are more widespread than they may be, and second, people with related political beliefs latching onto and further amplifying this trend for their own political gain.

stantaylor··on The Rise and Fall of the Trad Wife
You basically made the comment that I was considering. The problem isn't whether some people want to live in specific types of relationships. The problem is how social media amplifies extremism, as you note. It makes a small minority of people doing a specific thing look like an actual trend when it isn't. Throw in monetization--people making money peddling specific beliefs as if they actually believe and live them when in fact they may not--and it's just a recipe for a mess.
stantaylor··on Dear Tim Cook: Be a Decent Human Being and Delete This Revolting Apple Ad
I'm with you. I go out of my way to avoid advertising whenever possible, I'm critical of marketing and advertising, and I pride myself on my rationality, thinking that I'm relatively immune to advertising. But yeah, people like you and me are just one speck in a constellation of human emotion and ration.

Disclaimer: I have an iphone, apple watch, ipad, airpods, and personal MacBook. I use a MacBook for work as well. Judge me as you will.

stantaylor··on Spotify CEO Daniel Ek surprised by how much 1,500 layoffs' impacted operations
This is about as close as you'll ever get to a CEO actually admitting that doing layoffs for the sake of the short-term (lol as if that even needs to be stated) stock price actually had a negative business impact.

I once worked for a public company that panicked if it looked like the company wasn't going to meet its quarterly earnings projection. All the actions that the company took--layoffs, getting rid of contractors (also layofs), making employees take banked PTO--for this short-term benefit negatively affected the company's ability to meet its longer-term goals. It was infuriating.

stantaylor··on Please don't put checkmarks in checkboxes before I checked them
There is unintentional poor design and then there are intentional dark patterns. That sounds like the latter.
stantaylor··on Why tech job interviews became such a nightmare
I think a lot of people buy into the fallacy that there is a single best candidate, and you must find that candidate. I choose to approach hiring assuming that there are many good enough candidates. Furthermore, hiring is the process of finding the best candidate within the given constraints on the hiring company/manager: time, effort, primarily.
stantaylor··on Wi-Fi sniffers strapped to drones: odd plan to stop election fraud
Why drones? was my first thought as well. I think your answer is as good as any. Mike Lindell is an idiot.
stantaylor··on Startup CEOs learned engineering management from captain kirk
That was my thought, too. The real problem here is that the CEOs making these unreasonable ultimatums think that the fate of the galaxy is at stake when in fact, the company will just make a little less money or something.
stantaylor··on Uber Eats' Swapped Order Problem
It's a human nature problem, and here's a pretty trivial example in a different realm:

I am a commissioner on the Parks and Rec commission for my suburb (the citizen oversight commission appointed by the city council). I often hear from my fellow residents about some problem that they want solved, and half the people who tell me about problems follow up their problem description with some form of "And if they city would only do X..."

Every time one of these issues is brought before the commission, the staff explain the 37 different factors that they have take into consideration in finding a solution. "Just doing X" is rarely feasible because of a plethora of factors that they person who suggested that was unaware of.

stantaylor··on Study finds mushrooms magnify memory by boosting nerve growth
> Meanwhile, most people don't sleep well, dont drink enough water, overindulge in alcohol, don't get enough excercise, and don't get much sunlight.

A couple I know in their mid-60s were both diagnosed with type 2 diabetes. They were both sedentary, overweight and ate horribly. They embarked on an ambitious diet and exercise plan, have both lost a lot of weight and are both no longer diabetic. It truly is fantastic, and I'm happy for them.

One of them is convinced that people just don't know that they can beat type 2 diabetes; she wants to publish a book about what they've done. I keep trying to tell her it's not a lack of information, but a lack of will for most people, that she and her husband are very much outliers in that regard. Her publishing their method won't change things for hardly anyone.

I'm 59 years old and have been a moderate athlete my whole life; I keep my weight decent (not as low as I'd like but well under official obesity levels), eat pretty well, get enough sleep. I am having a medical procedure done tomorrow (that's completely unrelated to anything here), and the nurse who did intake for the hospital was shocked that I don't take any prescription medications. I call that a win.

stantaylor··on The coffee maker that ate my kitchen
> I hate these annoying articles about coffee which imply you need to be a rich snob to enjoy it

Well, it is a WSJ article. I used to be a regular reader of NYT, and this very much reminds me of NYT "lifestyle" reporting. Wealthy New Yorkers, amiright?

stantaylor··on Parent time
As someone whose kids are both (ages 27 and 23) finally out of the house in the last couple of years--but no grandkids yet--I totally get this. I've very much gotten used to having my own time FINALLY, being on my schedule, etc. My son and his fiancee have talked about moving back in with us for a year or two to save money, and the prospect does't sound that appealing to me at this point. I'm happy that our son thinks he's always welcome back, and he is, but it will be an imposition if they do it.
stantaylor··on Roku will now work with Nielsen to track cross-media viewership
I run PiHole on my home network, but it's not my default DNS server (for technical and other reasons); I have to configure custom DNS. I'm disappointed that I can't do that with my Roku devices.
stantaylor··on Historic Rotterdam bridge won't be dismantled for Jeff Bezos superyacht
According to the article, Rotterdamers don't want a new bridge. This bridge has historical and sentimental value to them.
stantaylor··on Silicon Valley finds remote work is easier to begin than end
> we had simply grown too much for anyone but the tenured folks to remember

The institutional memory part fascinates me. Currently, some people lament the lack of proverbial BSing around the water cooler. In a few years, nobody will even know that was a thing or at least a thing that was valued.

stantaylor··on Why Some People Think They're Great Even When Their Work Is Terrible (2017)
The point of that anecdote wasn't the actual work of that programmer, but that he ranks himself much more competent than others who know his work do. That last part is the point of Dunning-Kruger.
stantaylor··on The CIA Rebrands with a New Website
When I clicked on the "Spy Kids" link, that page made requests to DoubleClick and a Youtube tracker. So, now I'm tracked by the CIA and by ad networks that know I visited the CIA site. Yay capitalism.
stantaylor··on My daughter was a creative genius, and then we bought her an iPhone
I'm with you. The only audible notifications that I get are phone, text and a couple of other messaging apps that I barely use (I'm talking one message per month per app). I get visual notifications for my personal email. Contrary to many people apparently, I also view texting as an asynchronous activity; I don't fee any urge to view and reply instantly to texts.
stantaylor··on Stripe can make automatic LLCs but a wire transfer from Citi nearly ended me
> I’ve never understood how branches can be profitable. My theory after this week is that some unknown force is sabotaging successful self-serve systems.

If the Wells Fargo clusterfuck of several years ago is any indication, that "unknown" is very well known: upsell opportunities (or, in the case of WF, just surreptitiously adding services and hoping the customer doesn't read anything when they sign)

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