BSOhealth

This is very cool. The Aaron Swartz piece is powerful.

I just came from a funeral. We all leave digital footprints, some more than others and some more intentionally than others. But it is still so transient relative to the longevity of the human race.

We have things like clock of the long now or whatever, but we really don’t have much that will stand as physical documentation of individuals. And the Terracotta Army is a really interesting analog to something like everyone having their own homepage memorialized forever.

What will have a longer lifespan: the archive.org data set or the Terracotta Army?

I totally agree with basically all that. I’m at an age where video games quickly bore me (totally respecting people who enjoy them), but I also have had some profound VR experiences that make me believe there is a moral imperative to create experiences for people to see what life is like in other peoples’ shoes, and travel to places they otherwise couldn’t, and to learn new things and concepts in ways we couldn’t before.

Your comment made me think something like, “People of VR”

I have vr.dev and want to do something meaningful with it, additive to the community, and not just a trash content blog. any ideas? who’s down?

AI, bots, and the constant need to fuel training, turns the internet forest into a place where anything a person publishes will be vampirically consumed, mimicked to see whether it can replicate whatever value could be had, and capitalized on if possible or ignored if not.

It’s an interesting contrast to actual dark forest theory—-AI doesn’t want to destroy us, so we don’t need to hide for existential sake. But imagine walking outside and as soon as you do, innumerable copies of you spring up, and each action and sound you make is replicated and amplified. Like a weird Phantom Tollbooth meets Alice in Wonderland on DMT

This museum is a must-see if you’re visiting SD or south LA.

I suggested we visit it, and was very surprised that my family and I spent >2 hours (kids younger than 10). For the kids, they have scavenger hunts which require some attention to complete.

It is great.

All respect, this guy is was ~91. I’m uncomfortable driving with my mom. As a total layperson, what sort of tests does a person have to pass annually(?) to maintain a pilot’s license? Or is this dude just so O.G. that he was bound to go out living his dream?

this reminds me of some of the collaborative pixel art sites in the late 90s/early 00s, where you’d reserve some blocks and a bunch of us would contribute. any internet historians out there with some archive links? can’t remember at all…

fwiw, Midsommer also has the best approximation of psylocibin visual come-up in video format that I’ve found

Recently, Midsommer. I think if you go into it with an open mind (and not get too weirded out by the gore) it asks some really fascinating anthropological and social questions.

By the end of the movie, I was almost entirely on the side of the culture and their behavior made complete sense to me. During the course of the movie I experienced a shift of position and perspective and continues to affect me 4 years later.

All the token others… Pi, Memento, Waking Life, Fight Club, Requiem for a Dream, etc. etc.

I felt like Midsommer was the best interesting film in decades.

Another interesting way to headline this is, Madagascar was the last place on earth to be settled, despite being right next to the first

For all the negative comments, think of the huge value this will have to improving life in countries where farming is not some pastoralized, romantic fantasy. The amount of food we have to grow is staggering. The alternative is continuing to prop up the economic disparity where first world HN posters rely on third world family farmers who would rather send their kids to college.

Yes, you should be able to grow your own food if you want to. Yes, you should be able to buy a tractor that is repairable.

I see all the GPT stuff and whatnot, and see that and AI/ML entering so many domains/markets. But psychedelics and the human experience are not something we can automate and I wonder if AI will allow us to deploy more people to help and guide others through life, experiences, and relationships (all IRL).

I probably owe much of my 10 year software eng career to Jennifer Widom’s open courses on databases that I went through in 2011-2012. I was writing out unions and other queries on yellow notepads while working phones in tech support, devoured the courses, and really boosted my path.

Anecdata, but I made an unfair amount with some lucky spins. That was a few years ago, but I immediately understood how stupid my experience was and moved all the earnings into index funds and am scared to ever play options again.

I essentially earned a college degree’s worth of languages/frameworks (Ruby, Node ecosystems) on free Heroku instances, and I owe my career to it. Other comments speak to this point as well. There’s probably a generation of us who completed some blog/O’Reilly “curriculum” involving Heroku > Digital Ocean > AWS > etc.

I never paid Heroku a dime and, after everything has shaken out, I don’t know why I would start now.

Libraries are very important, and Kindle supports borrowing from them (for free): https://help.overdrive.com/en-us/0431.html

Only here to support Silca (as a consumer) but hopefully relevant to HN as it’s just to highlight their product design. After tracking their American “rebirth” I dove in for Silca’s top-of-the-line $500 pump ~5 years ago and the quality and durability is exceptional. If you are, or claim to be, someone who appreciates mechanical watches, “The Design of Everyday Things” type stuff, unboxing and inspecting Apple products, etc. etc., _and_ you are a cyclist, I totally recommend seeing if you have a friend with a Silca pump to check out.

The push-on chuck, beautifully braided and flexible hose, and general height and ergonomics combines for a nearly a zero-to-one improvement over the rest of the market. It removes almost all cognitive and physical friction to getting the job done (filling a tyre), short of just automating it with an air compressor — which has its own complications for filling bike tyres.

Off-topic (but on-topic): REI also has a notoriously forgiving return policy. Generally, just about anything can be returned after years of use, abuse, wear, and tear, and it typically ends up getting sold. I know many REI shoppers who first run upstairs (or wherever) to the “Returns” racks to see what they can find at a discount. Granted, it’s a hit REI is taking, but it’s clearly not a total loss as the “Returns” section turns over pretty quickly.

I’ll be interested to see if others here have a similar aversion to the name, septum, completely separate from the tool itself. Septum is both a very biological word and a word with an almost visceral, bodily intonation. The vision of nasal passages, mucous, deviated septums, etc. Additionally, all the bodily words ending in -tum immediately end up associated in my mind.

Is the name supposed to be illustrative of the adjacency of search results? Or, what is the root of this name, if you’re willing to entertain such a question after hearing my bias?

Agreed, the labels for some of the numbers never loaded (or the CSS just borked) and it was just a vertical list of random numbers.

I mean, to Dell and the XPS's credit, it all appeared great until I started using the trackpad. Structurally it's super rigid and the hinge was satisfying. I also really prefer the rubberized+carbon fiber thing other Dell laptops have going on, much more than the cold and sharp MacBook. Even the packaging is getting Apple-esque with heavy cardboard and near-mechanical boxes. But, that trackpad produced so much dissonance and is such a critical part of interacting with the machine and software.

I purchased and returned an XPS last year and the trackpad was unbelievably bad. After using Mac laptops for the previous 10 years, I hadn’t thought the difference in hardware quality could be so far apart. MacBooks are at least a generation ahead of the best PC hardware (generation as in, 10 years)

Website doesn’t work all that great on mobile. But I’d be supportive of a Linux laptop that can market itself to regular consumers rather than already-converted Linux folks.

Anyone have any experience or anecdotes on the extent to which Apple has Product Managers working on its in-house software? And what sort of overlap or collaboration happens between products and teams? Is it a fun gig?

As a PM, I would love to work at Apple. If I were looking at open job descriptions, should I expect them to call out specific apps I’d be working on?

"Surely you're joking Mr. Feynman" is so good. I read it, or listen to the audio book through my library via Libby, at least once a year. It portrays Feynman as so “normal” relative to his achievements and then makes his ideas much more accessible, such as the Feynman lectures. Sort of the sense of, if he can do it so can I.

This has nothing to do with Blender specifically: is there, or why isn’t there, a DAW (Pro Tools, Logic Pro, etc.) that is relatively comparable with closed-source tools?

I’ve often heard the sound/plugin packs for DAW keep people on the paid products. Why shouldn’t there be a competitive open source option?

Edit to contextualize, and maybe an added question: Blender is amazing and competes in so many ways with high-cost, industry-standard software. How is the DAW world not a great analog and opportunity?

The whole premise that “nothing in nature or the real world is true black” does not address the fact that text, language, and words are not of the real, physical world. So why should I make my words the color of the deep ocean instead of vast interstellar voids?

What is the natural color of language?

Richard Feynman did just this and described it at least in his great autobiography, “Surely you must be joking, Mr. Feynman!”

I’m on the opposite side of many folks responding. After spending the quarantine at home through the pandemic, I’m now looking at HCOL cities which headquarter big tech or startups (SF, NYC, Seattle, Austin). I’d love to spend time in a posh office again, meeting new people, getting drinks after work. Now, I have everything I need in one room: computer, weights, instruments, art supplies, dog, etc.

TBH, I’m crossing my fingers employers will prioritize folks willing to work in the office to compensate for my lack of pedigree in other hiring/HR attention areas.