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Singletoned

608 karma · joined May 18, 2009

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Singletoned··on The Gervais Principle, or the Office According to “The Office” (2009)
You are assuming that there's something bad about everything you believe being false. There's a fair amount of evidence that it's a good thing. EG religious people being happier and living longer
Singletoned··on How we hacked McKinsey's AI platform
The idea of "sentience" here could be replaced with "a soul" or "magic thinking powers" or almost anything else. It's an undefinable concept.
Singletoned··on Your app subscription is now my weekend project
For the same reason that there are already lots of markdown editors out there. Why didn't the they all use the first one that came out?
Singletoned··on Airbnb is in midlife crisis mode
I think this is different in different countries. I use them a lot in the UK and the customer support has been excellent.
Singletoned··on Void: Open-source Cursor alternative
I think it's really interesting that Void (and Zed) are both much more tastefully designed than Cursor, Windsurf or VSCode (though I wouldn't have expected VSCode to be well designed)
Singletoned··on AI Blindspots – Blindspots in LLMs I've noticed while AI coding
"The Rule of Three" I have been expressing as "it takes 3 points to make a straight line".

Any two points will look as if they are on a straight line, but you need a third point to confirm the pattern as being a straight line

Singletoned··on Why you should fail our interview
There's a double space on this page: https://www.otherbranch.com/for-engineers in "arbitrary black box" and it's really annoying me, but I can't see anyway to tell anyone about it
Singletoned··on Disney seeks dismissal of wrongful death lawsuit citing waiver in Disney+ terms
Ratners is the famous example that springs to mind here in the UK.
Singletoned··on Amber: A code search and replace tool
Can it do multiline search and replace?
Singletoned··on My next Mac might be the last
> Hello. I am rational developer. I am very clever and very rational. Devoid of emotion. Oh what is this? [Something has changed that I don't like]. What is this bubbling feeling in me? An emotional response? No way. I am rational. Therefore these changes must be objectively stupid and dumb and wrong. Let me explain why.

I certainly do this a lot.

I'm going to put that paragraph on a postcard and put it up in my office to try to remind me about it.

(It would also be helpful to come up with a name for this phenomenon).

Singletoned··on Deadlines are pointless – what to do instead
Creating "a system in which you consistently increase the number of miles you run" is pointless if it doesn't get you to the point where you can run the marathon on the day that it happens.

How long you have until the marathon would determine what kind of training schedule (system) you create.

Singletoned··on Deadlines are pointless – what to do instead
Even his first metaphor falls down:

> You can’t simply start training today and run a half marathon tomorrow, for example. You can, however, create a system in which you consistently increase the number of miles you run.

The marathon will be on a specific day, ie a deadline. If you haven't finished your training before the day of the marathon, you fail.

Singletoned··on ‘Stunning’ Anglo-Saxon burial site found along HS2 route
> "climate change", "people working from home", "less cars", etc etc

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/hs2-will-never-be-carbon-...

It doesn't look as if HS2 will help towards climate change, even in the long run...

Singletoned··on Write plain text files
I hate to be pedantic[1], but:

> HTML, Markdown, JSON, LaTeX, and many other standard formats, are just plain text.

On this definition, Word and Excel are just (zipped) plain text files.

> Every device, including ones long gone, and ones not invented yet, can read and edit plain text.

This definitely isn't true, and it kind of misses the point that there's no such thing as "plain text". It's still encoded in ascii, or utf-8, and still potentially has problems being read on other machines.

It's reasonable to say that ascii has become so ubiquitous as to be universal, but it definitely wasn't always so, and won't definitely always be.

[1] Okay, I love to be pedantic

Singletoned··on Why in the world would you own bonds?
Or in other words, they are sensible
Singletoned··on Why doesn't capitalism produce good kettles?
No filter jug removes all the limescale in hard water areas. You still need a filter on the kettle
Singletoned··on Why doesn't capitalism produce good kettles?
But that wouldn’t answer the question. Why is it not profitable to make good kettles?

Also, you’re wrong. The people designing these kettles aren’t doing so to make more money for their company. If anything you could say that capitalism optimises for job security. That’s why you don’t see new features on kettles, and why no one will make a left handed microwave. No one wants to take a risk

Singletoned··on Modern action films fetishize the body even as they desexualize it
If a job description involves something you object to then you probably shouldn’t apply for the job, whatever it is
Singletoned··on Modern action films fetishize the body even as they desexualize it
No, he said it couldn’t be made there, which seems about right
Singletoned··on Beyond Meat signs global supply deals with McDonald’s, KFC and Pizza Hut
That pizza would be illegal in the Uk. BHA and BHP are banned over here
Singletoned··on The FAQ of comp.lang.prolog is maintained as a Prolog source file
What if bash scripting is your main language?
Singletoned··on All the money in the world couldn’t make Kinect happen
Xbox Fitness was the best exercise app I've ever used in my life. The most thorough work outs and hardest sustained effort I've ever put into exercising. I was absolutely gutted when they "sunsetted" it.

They killed it so aggressively that they deleted it off your console so that there was no way you could play it. There was clearly internal politics going on behind the scenes.

Singletoned··on All the money in the world couldn’t make Kinect happen
Didn't catch on? The Wii was Nintendo's best selling console ever (apart from the original Gameboy), and outsold the PS3 from the same generation (and ever Xbox ever). It's quite likely that the Wii is the reason why PS3 was Sony's lowest selling console.
Singletoned··on California car burglaries are at crisis levels
DUI is as victimless as shooting a gun into a crowd and happening not to hit anyone. Just because you got lucky doesn't mean it's victimless.
Singletoned··on Bike crash left Spokane man unconscious, so his Apple Watch called 911
And the compiler code that compiled the compiler.
Singletoned··on How the UK Security Services neutralised The Guardian
The link you posted starts by giving three definitions, only one of which corresponds with "not". Maybe you meant to post a different link?
Singletoned··on How the UK Security Services neutralised The Guardian
The article is deeply biased in trying to make a point. Nothing in the article actually clears the Labour Party (as opposed to their supporters).

An "independent inquiry" that they commissioned has all the weight of every other "independent inquiry" that has ever been commission, ie none.

That few members of party have been investigated (by the party) is one of the problems that people are complaining about.

Singletoned··on How the UK Security Services neutralised The Guardian
I'm pondering this too, and I'm willing to be wrong on it, but I would have said that you can't be disappointed by a movie without having had some sort of raised expectation about it. If you thought it would be rubbish you wouldn't be disappointed.

"Dis" always suggests to me some sort of removal, rather than just the absence of.

Singletoned··on How the UK Security Services neutralised The Guardian
I suspect that there going to be a divergence between "left-leaning" and "liberal-leaning" in Britain. The British Labour party isn't inherently liberal (as they have shown with their anti-semitism and resistance to gay marriage). I think they will continue further down a path of non-liberal socialism, alienating a lot of people who hadn't previously considered that "left" and "liberal" were different concepts.
Singletoned··on How the UK Security Services neutralised The Guardian
"dischuffed"?

Surely "nonchuffed"? "Dischuffed" suggests that they had been previously chuffed with the Guardian.

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