wirthjason

I’m not saying it’s outright fraud but companies change things and don’t tell the consumer. Im making up this example but let’s say you buy a coffee blend that’s composed of 60% bean A, which is more expensive, and 40% bean B. Then next week they flip the ratio, 60% B/40% A but still charge the same price. I can’t say it’s outright fraud but it kinda feels deceptive. Of course the company might say “consumers actually prefer the 2nd mix blah blah blah.”

I found a this article pretty good.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-05-12/how-infla...

Excellent points. It makes me wonder… I love yuzukosho. I don’t taste the difference but I wonder if the ingredients are significantly different from between the JP and the US one.

While not a true counterfeit I'd be curious on the brands/foods/restaurants that increasingly add fillers to their products. As inflation rises companies turn shady tricks like less product for the same price and substituting ingredients to help offset the costs. These tricks tend to happen slowly so they go unnoticed to the average consumer.

I don’t see much problem with this. Most Japanese people have a green tube of grated wasabi in their house. (https://www.sbfoods.co.jp/products/detail/16343.html)

There’s definitely filler (more than 50% is real)but I don’t think people care, especially the average busy wife trying to get dinner on the table every day.

Most of the time I’ve had real wasabi its at a super nice place, like eating kaiseki, and it’s presented as the root with a small shark skin grater.

I’m more shocked that the developer of a “skill” that says the holy Mary makes $2 a month and has 10,000 users. That’s a sweet return for work that on the scale of copy-pasting the Alexa getting started tutorial.

“Unknown Quantity: A Real and Imaginary History of Algebra”

This is a great history of algebra. Math comes alive for me when I know more about how things come to be, the problems people we’re working on, etc.

As another 80’s kid we shouldn’t forget about Captain Planet!

Curious what would happen to trendy names like “.io”. Most names are country specific, e.g. I can’t imagine people outside of Japan wanting “.jp” domain, others can transcend the country.

For anyone who hasn’t attended PyCon I’ll offer this anecdote.

This was my 10th year attending. In my first year I meticulously planned all the talks I’ve as going to attend. I later learned this was a giant mistake.

As the years went on I spent less time in the talks and more time in other areas… Talking to people in the exhibition hall (what hard problems are you guys solving? How do you manage the business side of open source?) The “Hallway track”. Joining groups of people for random excursions.

This year I went all in on open spaces. They are the most unique part of PyCon. I don’t know how to phrase it other than “what topic are you interested in but haven’t yet heard about? Do an open space on that and people will show up.”

PyCon is truly about the people. All of those “I came for the language and stayed for the community” comments are 100% and it’s hard to get this point across if you haven’t experienced it.

I don't think there's anything wrong with watching it to learn something new like malmare dissection. I can appreciate the rawness of it, even if some consider it "boring", because it accurately shows how it really is. Editing it out presents a false idea about what really happens.

That said, watching something for the sake of it, without purpose or end goal feels odd4

I’m a firm believer in many of the things mentioned.

When I study with someone there’s a real life component. We take breaks together, chat, ask each other questions.

Also, studying in common places can remove environmental distractions. For some reason during finals time I had the urge to clean the apartment.

I can relate to the physical in-person-ness of the experience. I cannot relate to the non-interactive, passive watching of it.

A comment on the CV. At quick glance it looked like you only worked at places for a year or two then changed. This is generally a red flag for me. But because I saw the salary history I knew there was a Lon time at Capital One. However this was harder to spot on the resume. It might be better to group your experience at a single employer together so your loyalty stands out.

I’m curious if employers ever saw your salary posts and responded.

For some reason this article stirs a lot of internal conflict in me.

A part of me wants to view it without any judgement but another part, the old man part, feels there’s something deeply wrong with this. The problem is that I cannot think of a substantive reason it’s wrong other than “half a million people don’t have something better to do than watch someone study?” Or “do kids have such a weak will that they cannot study by themselves?” Or, “are we so lonely/needy that we have to broadcast ourselves/watch others doing mundane things rather than something more important?”

Neither of these are really true and in fact it’s a positive that others are accomplishing they study goals by watching him.

I’m just in my 40’s but it feels like the old Simpsons joke “old man yells at cloud”. This is a bit unsettling.

The best part of my experience was trying to form a study group (Google Hangouts at the time). Most people dropped but I made a very good friend. We still stay in touch to this day.

Slack and other conferencing tools are game changers. People getting used to these tools is one silver lining to the pandemic.

I have a more mixed experience with the OMSCS. Overall it's a good program, and if the choice is between Udemy or OMSCS then it wins hands down. For me the central issue is online vs. in-person.

Education is an interactive experience, the value of a good professor and classmates is helping to identify issues when you are stuck and nudge you just enough for you to connect the dots. As an undergraduate I liked attending study groups and office hours. I learned as much from my peers, both me helping them and them helping me, as I did from my professors. This spirit was difficult to replicate this in OMSCS.

The problem is that high tough, in-person communication is very effective but this doesn't "scale" well. I can only imagine how different the world would be if Plato was teaching online. :)

Also I was in the 2nd cohort, there were certainly a lot of "bugs" and issues they were working through. Additionally, the culture of video conference and zoom was also less a few years ago, which could make an impact.

Definitely not immune but far from perfect. I was talking to folks at PyCon about this problem. There’s definitely “framework fatigue” in data engineering.

Luigi, Airflow, Argo, Prefect, Dagster, bash + cron, MLFlow. Pandas, Dask, Spark, Fugue, etc.

I generally could care less about the color of an egg yolk but there’s one exception: the egg in ramen. It’s not that it tastes particularly better, marinating anything in soy sauce for a couple days will make it taste delicious. It’s often said we eat first with our eyes. I enjoy the contrast of colors. The dark red/orange looks much more appealing than a pale yellow yolk floating in a bowl of soup.

For people into this kind of stuff check out “Taste: What You’re Missing” from food scientist Barb Stucky.

It’s a pop science collection of stores about measuring tastes and food pleasure. I remember reading a chapter on texture and how one of the founders of Ben and Jerry’s ice cram, Ben Chohen, doesn’t have a sense of taste. When you can’t taste anything food, ice cream in particular, becomes very boring after the first couple bites. So the sense of pleasure comes from different textures rather than different flavors. That’s why B&J’s ice cream has so many chunky ingredients.

http://barbstuckey.com/the-shop/

I’m curious about your ex-student being a low level gangster. What kind of activities did he do?

This is one part of Japanese society I know very little about. My wife always talks about yakuza being bad but can’t provide an details other than “they are bad.”

She hates going to Kabukicho but it never feels particularly unsafe to me where as in the US there’s definitely places I would avoid at all cost.

Limitations and constraints matter. Technology is often the most fun when you have to be creative to solve a problem. My first programming was on TI-85 calculator in high school circa 1995 making crappy games. There wasn’t even a proper keyboard, just the number keys and plethora of other scientific keys.

Now JavaScript and other web technologies have made it so easy to build full blown games in the browser. Ironically because it’s less constrained it’s harder to make something good.

When everyone has access to technology creativity matters more. I like Nintendo’s philosophy, find cheap off the shelf technology and make something fun. Because they are not competing in a graphics arms race they focus on gameplay. The goal is “fun” not “technology.”

I echo other comments about age factoring in. When tech is a thing to play with its fun, when it’s work it’s not fun. We all have that inner child inside, the challenge is finding ways to bring it out.

I cannot find anything substantial that the author thinks is materially worse about today’s show than the one from his childhood.

The animations and style are different, or the length has changed, but so what. That’s changing with the times.

This feels a bit like an old man ranting “it was better in my day than it is today!” Memories get locked into our brain at certain ages and become out reference point for what we consider “best”, and anything new isn’t as good. We tend to talk about nostalgia with rose color glasses, overemphasizing the the good parts while forgetting the bad.

OK boomer! I’m 42 and have a 3 yr old daughter. I grew up with Sesame Street and I try to watch as much of it with her as possible. (We watch on public television WTTW, not HBO.) I cannot say it’s gone downhill.

One key point pioneered by Sesame Street that’s still true today is trying to make a show that parents watch with their kids because then the learning continues after the show stops. One example is featuring musical acts feature artists recognizable by adults.

Another key point is showing diversity. Sesame Street keeps a variety of characters it has tremendous value. The the author even mentions this as one of the good things! The worked has grown up and we show diversity a lot more today than in the 70’s and 80’s so what Sesame Street pioneered has now been adopted by everyone. The show hasn’t gone downhill, other have risen to the level of excellence.

Another pioneering part of Sesame Street was developing child entertainment around research and learning outcomes. I’m not sure how that compares between the original and today but curious ti know.

I’m a huge fan of Cytoscape.js. Not sure if it would be a competitor to Gephi as it’s just a JavaScript library but it’s very useful for things one might use D3 for. Not too not does it have the ability to draw, style, and animate the networks it has all the graph algorithms to do the analysis and traversal.

https://js.cytoscape.org/

I’d like to add that I think e-sports will come to overtaking physical sports in my lifetime.

I really enjoy watching sports (pretty much every sport, although I’m a partial to college football) and played sports as a kid but it’s much harder to do as I get older for the obvious physical reasons and the fact that adults don’t have the coordinated free time and schedules of children.

Video games are a much more accessible medium. I see my 8 year old nephew play video games and watch streamers. He can then play the same game for himself. As much as I loved watching Michael Jordan as a kid I could never, and will never, be able to dunk a basketball. There barriers to entry for video games is much lower, almost anyone can do it, such that it’s practically zero. It’s much more relatable and as he gets older I think he’ll choose to watch people compete in the things he grew up with and relates to. Given the shear number of people to game it’s not unimaginable to see how e-sports could surpass professional sports one day.

I used to think e-sports and games were not real things compared to their counterpart but I’ve come to feel that they are just as real. The different is subtle but let me try and explain.

He is playing “real guitar hero” not fake guitar hero or simulated guitar hero. Playing the guitar and playing guitar hero are not the same despite containing similar looking elements. In one case the target is to produce music, in the other it’s to produce points or a high score. He doesn’t care about producing music, he cares about producing a high score. Likewise, the musician’s aim isn’t to be better at scoring points, it’s to be better at producing music.

To use another game, one could say “why play Madden when you could play ‘real’ football?” Madden IS real. Is it football, no. It’s a game. But that’s OK. Football is a game, Madden is a game, but they are different games. The aim of playing Madden isn’t to become the next great linebacker for the Chicago Bears, it’s to be better at playing Madden.

Chess is an example outside of video games. It’s said that chew is a simulation of war. But people don’t play chess to become better generals and generals don’t play chess to become better at winning wars. They are each their own thing.

I know what you’re staying but a philosophical point I’d argue that there is a cost for adding that information. It implies that if the recipe deviates from the one listed it won’t be as good, as if there is some platonic ideal and the the only way to get there is this recipe.

When I started cooking I had a very scientific approach, as if it were like chemistry class in high school. It felt like if the recipe wasn’t exact then it would be garbage, which is far from the truth.

Also, there’s a trap where some things are hard to define and are better left to the senses and judgement.

When a recipe says “cook for 30-40 minutes” some people feel trapped — which is it, 30 or 40? “Oh no, I cooked it for 45, it’s going to be awful.” Or “I cooked it the time that the recipe stated and the skin came out soggy.”

This x 100!

Recipe writing (and recipe following) varies a lot. For some people a recipe is a formula, very precise. For others it’s a rough guide of an idea that should be adjusted.

This is the great thing about life, everyone is different and we care about different things and we all get along.

Im the complete opposite but I totally get your point and respect everything you said.

Everything you listed as a positive is a negative for me. Cooking isn’t a waste of time, it’s an opportunity to be creative. I get a lot of pleasure from making a good meal, both a sense of accomplishment but also the pleasure of eating good food. It’s also a time to spend with family. Eating the same food every day, and a texture-less shakes at that, sounds awful. So many of my family memories are around the table.

I get that people see shopping as a waste of time but I enjoy exploring grocery stores and specialty markets, trying out new products and flavors. The other day my wife and I went shopping with our daughter, we got some beer to enjoy while walking around, my daughter got a slice of pizza. The staff in the bakery section was decorating a cake, she thought my daughter was cute and gave her a little cup of frosting and some Easter cake toppings. As a 3 year old it was the greatest experience of her life.

    > And so, the oversimplified description of MarketRank is “just add up all the upvotes”. 

Wait… the sum of fake internet points is what we’re using to measure pages? I agree that search results could be better but this doesn’t seem to be the way.

Sounds like they want a devops person and not a developer. I understand the line is often blurred. I think it comes down to if the role is deploying K8’s etc. or just using it. If they are administering it then I’d hope that they would be able to answer those questions.

Good teams contain a balance of skills and abilities. It’s not unreasonable to want someone stronger in some areas than others to compliment the team. A diversity of talents also helps so that people teach each other.

    > I was steaming after a night of karaoke and somewhere between the bar, taxi and my hotel, I'd lost my phone.

A lost phone sobers you up pretty quickly! Especially for what would have been a very fun night. I’m sure there was a nice sigh of relief after getting your phone back though. All is well that ends well!