stone-monkey

Looks amazing. WC3 has outsize influence on the online gaming landscape. It'd be interesting to dissect how much of the design choices of MOBAs are holdovers of the constraints of the WC3 world editor.

I read in an article that real vanilla only matters for applications that don't involve high heat, as the other flavors in a real vanilla bean get cooked out. Imitation is just as good for most purposes.

Just remembered, it was a food lab article:

https://sweets.seriouseats.com/2013/12/taste-test-is-better-...

Food lab is my go to for food related articles interesting details behind the science and process of cooking.

Social pressure is easy to write off in theory, but it can add extra friction to your life. You might be fine telling the first guy to fuck off, but after telling the hundredth person to fuck off, you might be a bit weary of telling people about your controversial life choice. Even if you don't give a fuck about others opinions, this added friction can wear you down over time - it's death by a thousand cuts.

Not to mention the self reinforcing effects of social pressure - for example, if you're a vegan and you want to go out to eat with your friends, your options may likely be limited depending on the restaurant. If your friend group is considerate, they may take vegan options into account, or you might end up going out less with your friends as a result.

Why not write under a pseudonym? If you don't want people to associate you with every little detail of your writing, the easiest thing to do is to disassociate your writing identity with your offline identity.

This is to be expected as people get closer to equality - the more low hanging fruit we pick, the smaller the gains will be. But does that mean we should stop shooting for equality as "close enough" because it's not on the same magnitude as ending slavery?

>>Rape happens a lot in war too, for strategic reasons. Are you going to argue that rape in war is also competitive?

I'm honestly baffled at how you came to any of these conclusions.

I don't condone war at all. I don't condone murder or rape either. Like I said earlier, my point is that there are certain scenarios in which western society rationalizes killing as acceptable. There is no equivalent for rape.

>Rape doesn't apply only to humans.

Yes, and society generally doesn't find it acceptable to rape animals, either, which was my point. As a counterpoint, try to think of the most contrived example where rape can somehow be justified. My argument is it doesn't exist in western society, whereas this isn't the case for killing and stealing.

>>Nobody's thinking of self-defense when they say "we absolutely massacred them."

My point is that there are other cases where the of killing people is justifiable in some way. Self defense may not apply, but that phrase could be used when both parties are complicit in the killing. Generally, you'd use the above phrase in competitive events - that is, two parties fighting each other and one side winning in a landslide. Same difference in warfare - what separate it from murder is the complicity of both sides. Murder keeps getting thrown out there, but again, the analogies are more in line with general killing than murder.

I'd argue the difference is that rape is on a higher pedestal, simply because it's always unacceptable.

Regarding the slaughter analogy: it's not explicitly about murder, but killing. Slaughter doesn't apply only to humans, of course. Slaughter is typically associated with the killing of animals for food, after all. The difference between rape, killing, and stealing, en mi opinion, is society still grapples with killing and thievery, for certain edge cases. There's no such gray area for rape.

Stealing if you're starving isn't condoned, but people do have more sympathy if you have extenuating circumstances. Murder is wrong, of course, but killing people in self defense is understandable. Killing animals for sustenance is okay. We need to eat or we'll die. Killing animals for pleasure is also okay. I could cut out steaks/Popeyes/breakfast sausages from my diet, but I've calculated the cost of a dead cow/chicken/pig is worth a nice meal.

There's no equivalent case in society where people find it defensible to rape.

That's exactly what doxxing is.(Paraphrasing here) "This guy was really shitty in my job interview. Here's their LinkedIn page."

Seemed pretty cut and dry to me. What about it disqualified it as a not-doxxing situation?

Solid content marketing - I just spent the last 30 minutes taking the coding test because of this post.

This process sounds similar to seasoning a cast iron pan. Does that mean using a seasoned cast iron pan can play a factor in diabetes, since you're in taking more rancid fats?

Here's another good take on the moral killer in Ender's Game:

http://adamcadre.ac/calendar/13/13857.html

Empathy deficiency is definitively not what the battle school was looking for. It's the reverse - they wanted someone capable of emphathizing with his enemy while still willing to destroy them with no hesitation. The obvious counterpoint in the story is his brother Peter: he's just as brilliant as Ender, but gets rejected by the academy explicitly for being a sociopath.

Huh - I would've guessed Algorithm Design Manual by Skienna. I have no idea which book the red book is supposed to be either, but I did read the Steve Yegge blog post about getting a job at Google in which he recommended reading it. Since that Yegge article is also used by Google recruiters as a resource for interview prep (according to Yegge), seemed natural to assume Skienna.

> How is that different from the gig economy?

It's different because the purpose of the deposit isn't to crowdsource people to exploit via underpaying them to recycle, whereas that is exactly the case for the gig economy. Uber, Airbnb, etc. rely on individual contractors being cheaper than their regulated equivalent (Taxis, hotels) while also putting the risk on them. The purpose of the deposit is harm reduction - incentivize people to stop littering their recyclables by charging them money for the bottles/cans.

If we were to remove the deposit system and instead replace it with paid workers, why would any particular individual care about not littering? After all, our taxes pay for workers to clean it up. I'm not saying I espouse that belief, but when you increase the convenience factor of something like littering, people will do it more often. When it hurts people's pocketbooks to litter, they do it less. Take, for example, plastic grocery bags. Everyone knows plastic grocery bags create a huge waste problem and a little bit of thoughtfulness (bringing reusable bags with you) can mitigate the amount of bags used. However, it wasn't until we started charging a fee for grocery bags that usage numbers dropped significantly.

Does that frame of reference make sense for a recycling program though? The deposit system is a zero sum system that isn't designed for the purpose of making money - the deposit is to discourage consumers from throwing recyclables away and instead get their money back.

It seems like more of a side effect that low income workers use it as an income stream more than anything. It's like a metaphorical form of picking up loose change that others have dropped and deemed not worth their time to pick up.

I don't see their comment as paranoid because cloud providers generally aee incompetent/steal your data, but because other cloud providers are direct competitors.

Even if they're not sifting through your server data, they can possibly try to get a competitive advantage by analyzing things like usage data as someone above pointed out.

It doesn't really make sense to say it because it's not as if there's a general cultural tendency towards shrift. Most people aren't saving enough, what's the point in popularizing the message that we should continue on that same course?

Since you asked: https://dailyflywheel.com

To be honest, I put as little effort into maintaining this blog as possible. It's a default WordPress setup I use to spew my digressions that never have the opportunity to come into conversation.

It's also to help me log the general flow of how the year went. Increasingly, as I get older, I forget things at a faster rate - not just events, but the general time frame for things. Even when I remember anecdotes, I can only remember it as happening in a general year, maybe in a specific six month period if I can recall enough clarifying detail. The blog really helped me recall specific events that occurred last year in the general time line in which they occurred. My only regret is I've stopped doing it regularly.

Edit: Recalling why I started in the first place sparked my desire to start up blogging again. Hopefully I can keep it up this go around.

Isn't this pretty common in East Asia though? I've heard similar stories about South Korea, and the salaryman culture there is supposed to be pretty bad.

>>no ketchup, no canned fish, no juices, no syrupy breads, etc

One of these things don't seem to be like the others. Is there typically added sugar in canned fish? My go to is canned tuna, but the nutritional label checks out to me.

I can easily believe it. The overall structure may be designed to be ruthless to employees, but teams and orgs have a ton of leeway to form their own culture.

They purposely break up teams that get too big in order to keep with the idea of "two pizza teams", that is, a team small enough that two pizzas would be enough to feed everyone. The team and managers set the tone of culture at this level. At the next level up, the smaller teams coalesce into the upper org headed by a vp or whatever. The upper management here and the team managers sets the culture for cross team interactions.

It can therefore be possible to be on a good team if your managers are proactive and shield their team, but managers also have a ton on their plate and are beholden to the same power structures that are attempting to grind them into dust.

There was one manager that was beloved by all in the org because he took care of his direct reports - he saw the writing on the wall and jumped ship to a greenfield project in a different org. A bunch of senior engineers followed along shortly after.

I can only think of one former coworker who cried from stress during work. Strangely enough, she's one of only two devs I know still on that team out of the original ten members when I joined. (I'm not the other dev)

For chromebooks, I still like the original Pixel. You can pick up a refurbished model for about 300 usd.

>> I found out they have a very generous severance program if you know what to ask about.

What do you mean? Are you referring to the severance you get if you leave on a PIP?

Shenzhen losing Cantonese somewhat makes sense due to the sheer number of migrants moving in from different regions of China. They likely outnumber the population several-fold now. It was only declared a special economic zone back in the 80's - Before that, it was a relatively small town. Now it has a population of about 20 million.

Compare that with Guangzhou, which also has a ton of migrant inflow from other provinces but with a large local populace - if you walk down any given street you'll still hear Cantonese spoken pretty often, though Mandarin is more frequently used (since it's the common tongue.)

Your point is wrong, though. Targeting everyone based on their distinct still isn't being equally hostile to everyone - you're just more exclusionary. That just means gaming communities are racist and fat shaming and etc in addition to being sexist. Equal harassment would mean they target people based on shared characteristics - like skill level, for example.

It's hard to imagine consolidation in a winner take all market like we currently have. If content producers license their shows to Netflix, they're only going to get a fraction of that 9.99 a month subscription fee, with Netflix itself getting the lion's share of the money. They also become more beholden to Netflix' demands if they're the only major player in the video streaming market. Also, with Netflix now producing content, they're helping to prop up their competitor if they hand over their content libraries. This is pretty similar to how mind geek killed the porn production market, except instead of outright pirating content, Netflix gives producers a fraction of what they're previously making through TV. Basically, consolidation will only happen if Netflix can kill and absorb traditional TV media.

I would think LoL and Starcraft would be easier in terms of difficulty than something like Go, because they both have the fast twitch aspect of play. An automated player would have the advantage of perfect situational awareness of the mini map and consistency in character placement and so forth. This is a big advantsge in games where a single misclick or a missed visual can cost a match.

Using healthcare.gov might not have been the best example of health care's simplicity, considering its estimated size is hundreds of million of lines of code and cost tens of millions of dollars. The process may be easy for the consumer, but it's obviously much harder in the backend.