MarkusWandel

"always something trying to grab attention", that's the root problem right there. Even on a work computer unless you've changed your homepage, every time you open a tab on Edge you get a screen full of distraction clickbait. And then you wonder why you never manage to concentrate any more.

Did he though? TMK Shannon did specifically not give a way to deal with noisy channels, no. He invented a way to quantify what could be sent on a noisy channel if you figure out the optimal way to do it. This is very similar to "no matter what you figure out about faster travel, you can't go faster than light in a vacuum".

Calculating the limit is easy with Shannon's theorem. Approaching it in practice is hard.

I started taking a scoop of the Creatine Hydrate from Costco every afternoon because why not. Wife had bought it and the bag was sitting right there.

I honestly don't know whether it made a difference. Sleep didn't get worse, no noticeable metabolic effects. Possibly the "perma tired muscles" I've been suffering from increasingly since about age 57 (I'm an active cyclist) have gotten a bit better, with <50% of days affected rather than >90% last year, but even that is subjective.

If "taking the stuff" means "more uptake" (does it?) and there are other beneficial effects, bring it on.

Only a quick skim, and - hey I'm in Canada, so I can still talk about gender issues, right? What about "born into the wrong body" types? Who always felt they belong in the other gender and eventually transition? I guess it would be hard to test at scale, but would they at birth already exhibit the "other gender" behaviour patterns?

Storage space inevitably fills up with stuff. I have the stereotypical "garage too full of stuff to park the car in" but it's one side of a 2-car garage and the other side, and this the wife and I are in perfect agreement on, is reserved for the car.

Then I inherited a second car, which for various reasons is barely practical to keep while it works. It lives outside so that the stuff in the garage (a clutter of far too many bicycles, mostly) can stay accessible. But in winter, it is possible - barely - to park the car inside, with bicycles hanging only inches above it. Some stuff had to be disposed of to make this possible, and I fear some additional stuff will have to go this fall. But you have to set yourself limits or the stuff will grow infinitely.

Meanwhile premium locations all over town are sprouting Dymon Self Storage units. That's the local brand of "premium climate controlled storage". There's one less than a mile, as the crow flies, from my house.

On average, obviously. Any given day ranges from zero, to a couple hundred for especially interesting days. Also a huge blip when the kids were young. Runs of "zero" days end up being dark ages in long term memory. Sure, went to work, ate, slept etc. but nothing interesting. That's where the "at least one interesting picture for Mom" thing provided a baseline.

Well, call it "Monetization" then. Most platforms start optimistically, free to use, lots of features, burn VC money. Users love them.

Then you want to make $$, and inevitably this causes the platform to be less good. Even my favourite non-ensh*ttified (so far) social platform, let's just say it has the same orange colour scheme as the HN titlebar, is getting ever more aggressive at promoting its paid plan to the detriment of usability for a free user. But so far hasn't started putting formerly free features behind a paywall (premium features are, of course).

And CD's argument that first you stiff your users to favour your advertisers/vendors, then you start stiffing them to favour yourself. Well, what about Amazon then? Isn't that exactly what they have been doing?*

This of course applies to my (sarcastic) description of women's memory too. A given conversation is compressed to a small amount of memory, a significant part of which is the "feel" of the conversation rather than the actual words. So of course the memory is not word-for-word exact. But, let's just say, a subset of persons, a majority of which may or may not be female, does not acknowledge this and insists that the (reconstructed) sequence of words is exactly what was said 20 years ago.

I think that's because memories really are highly compressed, with the average complex memory (of a grand day out, for example) being compressed into at most a paragraph of text's worth of information. Everything else is made up of context.

For example, having no photographic memory, I can remember the general "feel" of the innards of an antique shortwave receiver I used to have as a kid. But almost all of that is context. I know what canned octal base vacuum tubes and big tuning capacitors look like, what sort of components were in the big band selector "sled" (for geeks: This was an NC2-40D) and so on. So I can "zoom in" on the coarse memory by just filling in details that are generic, not specific. And these details may be from different sources than the original memory too.

And so the brain needs to remember - if one is not faceblind, which in fact I am - just the overall geometry of someone's face, and all the other stuff can be filled in as needed (how they look when they smile or are anxious etc.) Compression, compression. We have a lot to learn from nature. Note that a faceblind person does this too, of course - just not with a geometrically exact visualization of that person's face, just one with the correct "feel".

And that's also why synthetic memories can be formed so easily. You really don't have to insert much. The brain infers the rest as needed.

When my mom was still alive and relatively new to a smartphone (at age 80) I decided to send her some sort of relevant picture every day via Whatsapp, to get her used to communicating that way. Sometimes it was a real stretch to come up with something. But yes, this forces you to evaluate your life from that viewpoint "surely something was interesting today? Let's keep a picture of it". Even if it's just what I'm having for lunch that day.

But she's gone now and so is that habit.

Being an "aging brain" myself I can totally relate to this. I've been a relatively obsessive photographer (i.e. visual diary) since digital cameras were practical, i.e. over 25 years now. 238K photos in the collection so far, and I can actually find things in it.

And I've more than once found that an anecdote I've been telling has been incorrect, precisely in a "melded memories" kind of way. It happened at this sort of gathering which were usually held for that reason so X was involved... and then finally look at the old pictures and there's no sign of X. It is literally the brain invoking "lossy compression" to make it all fit, just like certain web services that let you upload pictures without limit might reduce old ones, that hardly anyone ever looks at any more, to lower quality to limit storage bloat.

Of course any married man can confirm that this only applies to men. Women's memories are flawless. If they claim that they remember a conversation exactly, word for word, 20 years later, who's to prove them wrong?

I don't like paying $1K for a phone. My current one was CAD$140 at Costco three years ago. It has 32GB of built-in storage which is always 90% full regardless how diligent I am at moving stuff to the SD card, and it has 3GB RAM which was fine three years ago, but is now insufficient to run certain apps at all. Without anything else (that you have control over!) running, start the app, immediately killed due to out of memory. These are apps which were snappy and reliable a few (forced) updates ago. No new features, maybe some UI restyle, but now too bloated to use.

Time to upgrade to the latest cheapy? Well, thanks AI boom, there aren't really any cheapies any more. And even $600+ phones now come with... drum roll... 5GB of RAM. OK, which maybe covers me for another two years of bloat until I'm right back where I started.

Yes, it's possible to stay ahead of the bloat if you pay $1.5K+ for your phone and upgrade somewhat regularly. A colleague has hundreds of apps on his phone and they all work.

Me, I use a desktop browser. Except for certain things that are only available as an app. The xda-developers types say no problem, just unlock and root the d*mn thing and then you can run debloating tools and if you jump through all the right hoops the banking app will still work. Bleech.

The article mentions several times that early sugar exposure affects sugar craving for a lifetime. Did they correct for that? I.e. people born during sugar rationing who later developed normal sugar consumption patterns compared to people not born during rationing who consume similar amounts?

I was born into a traditional food culture without excessive sugar, but I sure as heck developed a sugar craving later, to the detriment of my diet. I'm guessing this cancels out the early healthy effect.

Yep. Precisely because of our efficient manufacturing, throw-away culture a lot of gadgets that used to be serious luxuries are now nearly free. For example basic espresso machines. In my area you can get one for $25 off FBM any day. Or (adjusted for inflation) affordable sandwiches with tasty ingredients nobody had heard of when I was a kid (I'm old). Or pretty decent bicycles if you're willing to learn a little how to fix them. Or low-end smartphones for about the price of a landline phone back in the day (adjusted for inflation) and cellular service plans that are actually much cheaper than a landline used to cost.

Or synthetic clothing. Sure, natural fiber stuff is in retreat but some synthetic stuff is actually really comfortable.

How do you actually do that? I ran mine for years with a single, borderless full screen CLI window but that hardly disabled the windowing system, you could still run GUI apps.

Mostly true but not quite.

You can't do email the "old way" because you'll be buried in spam, and even if you can handle that, others who don't do it the old way may never get your mail.

You can't put a server on the internet the old way because there is nonstop automated door knocking for security violations. In the old days, the attacks were much less sophisticated and mostly a "gentleman's agreement" meant they didn't happen at all.

You can't just open a port and expose a service if you're on CG-NAT or if your provider prohibits or blocks it otherwise.

You can't really do instant messaging the old ways (remember pidgin?) because 99% of the people you'd want to message are on systems with no external API to connect to.

Aside from that yes. I still have an old school static IPv4 address that serves an old school, mostly static HTML web site (and behind authentication some other useful stuff to immediate family members). Uh oh, did I just invite more door knocking?

Wonderful but it irritates me that so many descriptions of internal combustion engines refer to "explosions" of the fuel. You don't want that. It causes knocking and pinging and engine damage. You want a controlled burn that generates heat smoothly.

To an oldster like me, this is already post classic internet, where the "golden" era was that of Usenet, and the web was just one interesting new use of the internet.

Which begs the obvious question - to those whose internet values are formed in the current era, will this feel like a lost "golden era" 30 years from now?

I did test it with various known weights. It was a good scale.

I used to have a bathroom scale with a single strain gauge that was accurate. Accurate, as in weigh yourself, pick up a 1lb object, weigh yourself again and see an extra pound. That scale had a "lifetime" nonreplaceable battery in it and after 20 years or so, gave up the ghost.

Every scale I've tried since is wildly inaccurate, and they do have brains and they fake it. Step on, get a random weight within a 5lb range of the true weight. Step on repeatedly, even after the scale has timed out and had to be rezeroed, and get that exact weight again. Fake. Every single 4-sensor scale (one in each corner post) that I've tried does this.

I've since found another relatively vintage single strain gauge scale whose battery still works. And I have a mechanical scale in reserve for when it no longer does.

You have to view all cloud storage - all free cloud storage anyway - as ephemeral. If you want your childhood pictures to survive, store them someplace you have control over.

Somewhat recently, tried to activate a SIM for a guest here in Canada, and while you could fill in anything you want for personal info, the only way to hook up (prepaid) billing was with a Canadian credit card number. Whoops. This was only for a month, so I put in mine and he reimbursed me in cash. Other carriers may still let you buy one-time payment cards for cash at retail; this one didn't.

Maybe this isn't proper, but, what I do is wet them, rub them with a tiny amount of dish soap, then rinse them under the hot water tap.

Then blow the droplets off both sides and let the rest air dry. We have soft water here, so no water spots. No rubbing dry with any kind of cloth.

Does systemd ship with something to upgrade your cron jobs for you? That would be the friendly way. Write your old school cron jobs, and then a script that converts them to do things the systemd way, documenting its steps, i.e. I created this file and this is why. Friendly "I help you do things better" rather than standoffish "your way is obsolete, you need to do it our way". Oh wait. I get it. LLM agents can do exactly that for you can't they. Another way I'm behind the curve.

I have knocked together a systemd service or three based on google copypasta. But generally, for cron jobs, why make it complicated? One line in /etc/crontab and done. I generally call an encapsulation script that sets the right environment variables, uses absolute paths, captures stdout/stderr if required and so on. I just want the simplest possible way to launch that script on a schedule.

The damaged social fabric - for me - didn't consist of spendy stuff. Just backyard BBQ's, pool parties, (hosted) brunch or dinner invitations, that sort of thing. You keep doing it because habit. But then a 2 year interruption because of COVID, habit broken and before you know it you haven't talked to some people for 5 years and now it would be awkward to call them up again...

A lot of friendships aren't that deep. I've had work colleagues I really liked and even socialized with outside the workplace, and yet, if they left the company or retired... faded away. If it takes real effort to keep up contact, you get a lot more choosy.

COVID also hit pretty bad. Speaking from personal experience, several friends that we saw once or twice a year at informally recurring BBQ/brunch/etc. kind of occasions have faded away as that series was interrupted and never restarted.

And finally... you learn who you are as you age. Friends who seemed cool, who seemed to have the answers... may not be so great from a mature perspective.

Being "Costco people" is easy. The quality of the product is good, the prices are good, there's little "choice paralysis" and it's all under one roof. But socially, it's like having IKEA art on your walls. You don't want to have the same thing everyone else has; as a host (if you still do that sort of thing) or potluck participant, you have to somehow differentiate yourself. Of course you can cook interesting stuff from ingredients found at Costco, but serving any kind of ready made snacks or meal items from Costco is just lame given that your guests are probably Costco-istas too.

The part he didn't mention is interpolation at the low end "specs are mere suggestions" end of things. I have a backup Android phone - a true "brand X" type of thing, vanilla android, bought at a garage sale. Nice enough phone, but claims a 40MP camera. The merest glance at a picture taken by it shows it has an ordinary-for-its-time 13MP camera in it and the pictures are interpolated to 40MP.

Hopefully the camera doesn't upscale and then downscale again if told so save at its actual native-ish resolution.

The internet was places. Plural. Places like watmath, ucbvax and the like. Real physical computers in places you'd heard of, and the amazing thing was that you could access them from elsewhere.

Maybe I was a special case even then, but I wanted a place of my own. A place running a Unix type operating system and permanently connected to the internet with a fixed IP address, like those places of old. I've actually had this for 25+ years.

Accces to those "places" from a device in your pocket didn't change any of that.

Nowadays it's become the anonymous "cloud". Nobody knows how it works, or where the server is or who runs it.

I grew up on a farm in Germany. Our "little" tractor was the MF135 (3 cylinder engine!). I started driving it for real work at 12 for the simple reason that my grandpa, who was the third driver when the hay was being brought in, had passed away, and someone had to do it.

My dad and a cousin drove the big tractors. Can't remember whether MF55 or MF65, possibly one of each. Thundering monsters being driven flat out, double-clutched gear changes and all. The reason for all the rush is that the weather isn't that reliable in south Germany, and when they hay is dry and ready, it's all hands on deck.

Anyway... years later I visited the old homestead and there they still were, those big... umm. On Youtube you can probably still find a video of one being turned into a riding lawnmower, underslung mowing deck and all. Those tractors belong in the "Old MacDonald had a farm" era. The modern world is different with the base model of those tractors in the article having three times the power of those old ones, and it goes up from there.