tim58

For a certain kind of user computer UI really peaked during the CLI age. Reading text and typing on a keyboard is the fastest way to get data into and out of computers.

> Cash is also essential for grease/bribes.

Am I not bribing enough people? I've never had to.

When I am having difficulty starting a task I start with making a list of everything that needs to get done to solve the problem. It always make it more manageable.

> It's pretty crucial to remember, though, that your current source of anxiety is probably just a red herring.

Everytime I have anxiety it's my brain focusing on one thing to avoid confronting the real problem. When I finally find the thing I am avoiding it's usually not that bad of an experience to deal with it directly. Some examples are "I should call person X to deliver news Y." Or "I need to make a big decision soon."

It sounds like you need to adjust your expectations of your own work.

Being tired is terrible for your short term mental performance and your long term health. It also increases the chances you will be involved in an accident.

The problem is a lot bigger than coal power. One example, agriculture is the leading cause of deforestation and many of our current agricultural practices have questionable long term sustainability. In addition our agricultural processes are introducing new diseases into the human population, including our current pandemic.

The problem of sustainably providing nutritious food people want to eat is just one of a dozen that we are not solving at acceptable levels.

Antidotally I am a heavy airpod pro user, averaging seven hours a day. I have two pairs so one is always at full power. I have not experienced this problem.

My guess is that the damage to Apple's brand name that occurs with each replacement is larger than the cost of replacing the product.

I once had an expensive brand of computer mouse. After eight months the mouse failed. Later I bought another mouse from the same brand. The mouse failed after 14 months. I stopped buying from the brand. The same thing can happen to Apple, and they need to be careful about the quality of the products they sale when they charge premium prices.

The neat thing about 10,000 bitcoins is that it can exist in your pocket.

Did people in Greece and Venezuela fair substantially better than peers that had holdings of multiple foreign currencies?

> They figured that in the worst case slapping a specific brand on a few hotels in a few major Chinese cities is a cheap price to pay.

Did they do that?

While it's true the trump administration is very anti immigrant at, it is also very anti ccp.

While it wouldn't be exactly like HK, being a semi-autonomous territory of the US would allow the new goverment/economy to be in a unique position. Imagine, for example, if New-HK was allowed to set their own tariffs and taxes for goods coming into/out of their ports, while maintaining 100% free trade with the continental US.

> This was shortly after the end of the cold war, after all, which demonstrated that such change is possible, if not inevitable.

In 1997 most people wouldn't have thought it would be possible (or at least likely) for China to both be such a powerful country and be such an authoritarian country.

The point is you are starting the comparison at the most convenient point for your argument.

75 years ago the United States was part of the allied powers that helped put an end to a genocidal dictator with world domination plans. 200 years ago the United States was a major participator in the global slave trade and actively waging war and committing genocide against the ingenious people of North America.

No ethnic or national group of people have been virtuous throughout history. No ethnic or national group of people have been evil throughout history. Trying to cut history into a small slice in order to draw a moral contrast is misleading and ignorant at best.

Currently people with a Computer Science degree have ~95% employment during the worst economic downturn of my lifetime. I don't need goverment protection for my job. In order to be more competitive my company needs more workers with Computer Science degrees. Reducing the supply of computer science degree holders actually hurts my long term career prospects by reducing the international competitiveness of the type of business that would hire me.

Walmart really fails at providing quality food that isn't highly processed. I find much better quality, and often better prices on the grains and legumes that make up the bulk of my caloric needs, and their selection of organic produce is very lacking.

While I'm happy people have affordable, convenient, and socially distanced access to food, most of what is in the Walmart grocery section are things I wouldn't personally consider food.

I always find the best local food sources from word of mouth. Usually there's not a large web presence because web is extra overhead, and high quality food has a much higher demand than supply so there's no need for it. A good place to meet local people to talk about food is a farmer's market.

> Whereas, a lot of CS curricula today at least implicitly assume that you're comfortable with computer command lines, basic programming, etc. And, if not, you'd better get up to speed in a big hurry.

I graduated a CS program in 2013. In my program there was no assumption of familiarity with the command line. I specifically remember several lectures about how to navigate a file tree on a command line, how to run programs on a command line, what STDIN and STDOUT were, what pipes were, etc.

> Is this meme the single greatest reason why the developed world has so few successful moonshots?

I think you are experiencing a bias. The developed world takes a lot of moonshots. Very few succeed. Many last decades. Here are some currently active moonshots.

* Novel Coronavirus vaccine

* Self driving cars

* Delivery drones

* SETI

* Commercial fusion

* General Purpose AI

* Quantum Computers

* "Quiet" supersonic airplanes.

* The search for a Theory of Everything

The article talks about eye strain, and states that using the OS's blue light filter is a better way to reduce eye strain. The blue light filter significantly reduces the amount of contrast, which makes the screen harder to use, especially with something like an IDE/Text Editor with many colors of syntax highlighting. I'd personally like to know if dark mode has less eye strain than default mode instead of knowing what the absolute best way to avoid eye strain is.

It combines two things very important in American culture, outlaw activity and automobiles.

1. There's too many people violating local orders across the United States to arrest them all.

2. Putting them in jail is actually worse for their health than almost any other activity.

3. IANAL but I doubt many of the local orders would hold up in a higher court.

#2 is pretty trivial without very good sales figures.

Something happened between 1984 and 1992 where imagining a virtual world had to include large numbers of everyday people.

I think there probably is a lot more porn being produced on a per-person basis. We have a lot more cameras and a lot more ways to share photos/videos now.

I think there is a lot more content in general being produced too.

This conversation has stuck with me for several days, and I'd like to recap my thoughts on it.

I think this highlights the difference between risk and uncertainty. Risk is something calculable. Uncertainty is either incalculable or the error bars are so wide that it is practically incalculable.

I, for example, am willing to take a calculated risk and ride a motorcycle. It's a fun, economical way of traveling. I am not willing to ride a motorcycle I am unfamiliar with without a close inspection. Maybe an unfamiliar bike is in complete operational order. Maybe it has a crack in a frame wield and the frame may snap during normal operations. The error bars for what can go wrong on an uninspected motorcycle are too wide and it introduces a level of uncertainty I am not comfortable with.

The downsides of a bad vaccine have been shown multiple times in multiple places. It's _very_ bad. I'm unwilling to accept uncertainty when the downside is so large.

The human brain processes ~40gigabits/second of information. Current direct brain interfaces are probably closer to 400bits/second Computer to Brain. I think it's very possible that we will hit wetware limitations for direct brain interfaces an order of magnitude or two less than ~40gigabits/seconds. With less information to process the digital worlds created by brain machine interfaces will be significantly less stimulating than the real world.

In conclusion I believe the real world will always feel more real, and be generally preferred because the digital world will provide less total information to our brains than digital worlds, even with brain machine interfaces.

Neal Stephenson's 2019 book "Fall; or, Dodge in Hell" describes a path forward to the mysterious and sexy place through upload. Upload removes the wetware limitations and provides the most likely candidate for a mysterious and sexy place.

I think one of the things it was easy to miss in 1984 when Neuromancer was published was how accessible the internet and computers is. I've watched two year olds interact with the modern internet.

If you have a system with a high barrier to entry -- like computers where in 1984 and as they are described in Neuromancer -- it's safe to assume that a lot of "boring" and "average" people wouldn't use it. At the time Microsoft's unofficial mission was "a computer on every [office] desk, and in every home, running Microsoft software". It sounded overly ambitious, even into the 90s.

In 1976 we rushed a vaccine without adequate safety tests (formal clinical trials) and more people were hurt by the unsafe vaccine than would have been sick without the vaccine.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1976_swine_flu_outbreak