20,066 karma · joined October 10, 2011
Keep telling yourself that.
Remember the amount of effort VW was willing to expand to cheat emissions testing.
At the end of the day, unless you have a really nice microscope, solid understanding of electrical engineering, and a few tens of thousands of hours ahead of you, you have to trust whoever you're buying the hardware from that it will do what they say it will. No amount of hardware efforts can solve the fundamental human trust problem.
"I launched the site in July 9, 2009 from a small kitchen in Botoșani, Romania."
https://blog.pinboard.in/2019/07/i_cant_stop_winning/
I suspect that's the kitchen :) My own kitchen table during this confinement period isn't too dissimilar...
I've used it a few times in a pinch when traveling, it's nice. Unfortunately I've never been able to find a fixer formula that's as easy/off the shelf.
It's also interesting to dig into the author's name - apparently a half century ago he had some reputation in tech circles, but as far as I can tell he's mostly forgotten today.
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/05/what-...
He sadly seems to have passed a couple years ago:
https://www.legacy.com/obituaries/name/erik-sandberg-diment-...
In the end, you have to decide what outcome you want - using half effective measures hoping that the racists will keep it down, or kicking them out and making it clear that they aren't welcome? You can't have it both ways.
I wonder what the phpBB of social media/smartphone apps would look like.
https://explorabl.es is a more general hub.
> especially when you can tell that the 'teacher' is also the UI designer and developer in one and there's a very high level of quality and polish. There's nothing quite like it for learning a complex subject.
Agreed. Unfortunately I think this is the inherent limitation to the explosion of such material (Bret's seminal essay [0] was almost a decade ago) - it takes an insane amount of skill, in mostly orthogonal disciplines, as well as a lot of time and effort to make it. Some tools attempt to make them a little straightforward to program, but due to the nature of it you can't really have a one size fits all solution that isn't just a general programming language + rendering engine.
And there is no "explorables industry" to fund the production of those (unlike say, textbooks), so it ends up being mostly side projects for otherwise gainfully employed developers.
It would be amazing to have eg. attempts at building an entire K-12 curriculum around explorable explanations. It's also the kind of work that probably loses in clarity and value when done by a team/committee rather than a single person dedicated to their vision.
Many countries have broadcast laws around a maximum amount of foreign programming (for one example amongst many, private French radios have to play French music for at least 40% of their programming).
SQLite is a great example that was recently discussed on HN.
https://condensedscience.wordpress.com/2011/06/28/life-expec...
Still bad, but much better than 3 in 20.
Of course the system is free to do whatever it wants under the hood (e.g. Python generates .pyc files) etc, but as a user if you can double click the main source file/feed it to a program and have the full program run, then it's a scripting language.
(not quoting every other part of the article where plants form committees to decide what to do next and receive "lignin" as a ready made thing, not as an emergent result of its own evolutionary process)
Oh, no. These kind of weird anthropomorphic ideas - that evolution is actively "finding problems" and "testing solutions" - take years to remove from students' minds. And make it very unclear whether the author themselves actually do understand what they're talking about or just parroting the same story they heard.
Cue the "but it's for kids!" arguments. Kids aren't dumb, and perfectly capable of understanding selective pressure - but you are doing them a huge disservice by making them feel like they understand something when really they understand your inaccurate (yet entertaining!) story.
A gallery show will bring people to you and your work, let you sell prints, collect emails, potentially meet publishers/other curators/etc. Good luck getting noticed in all the noise on Instagram, or making any money.
I am not affiliated with Source Hut in anyway other than being a satisfied customer.
> I then have the decision as the speaker whether to ask for questions or just slow down a bit or stop altogether and see if they naturally show their curiosity.
Much like people don’t get 90% of what is said 90% of the time, I find that 90% of the time speakers don’t really want to cause understanding in their audience. They want to show off how smart they are, how cool their solution is - they want validation and recognition, but not to teach.
If your goal is to create understanding in your listeners, then you have to also be listening to their feedback (vocal or not) and aggressively adapting your approach based on the feedback you get, rather than rattling 500 words that sound SO GOOD in your head.
You are likely to end up in a situation where the “listener” is doing most of the talking, and that’s a great sign! But people think of a great teacher/explainer as someone who finds the magic words to make the right connections in their student’s head, but that’s not really how it works.