adamesque

Yeah, Nick Lutsko is super super funny and a very talented musician. That’s hard to replicate.

I’m in a very similar position and it has been very challenging finding good resources — most feel like the “now draw the rest of the owl” meme after explaining how the pieces move.

I’ve been enjoying the Dr Wolf app, which mixes lessons, actual play against a very forgiving CPU opponent, and spaced repetition of mistakes.

I tried Chessable but the UI was awful and beginner/learning content was poor.

The reason Vercel was selected for this privilege is pretty simple, to my understanding: they volunteered and committed engineering resources to partner with the React team to work through a pretty major and experimental new API with a lot of expected breaking changes.

Child of a sibling comment has more details: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37408918

Oof. I tried to make it through the first season and don’t think I’d put “new ideas” near the top of my list of descriptors. But I get that many people are enjoying it.

I’m curious what part of Silo reminds you of B5?

“Tech” is very broad but it’s still a field where the impact of a single individual’s effort scales disproportionately, because for the most part it’s all 1s and 0s over a wire. That’s fundamentally why tech salaries are high imo.

We absolutely do not. We have a responsibility to seek out the truth and act in the interest of the common good. Quite often this means NOT strongly or blindly advocating our own opinions when our knowledge is incomplete or motivated by self-interest. Many times our responsibility is to advocate someone else’s opinion or present multiple options.

I have many many opinions and very few of them would benefit from my strongest advocacy.

Humans also typically pay up-front for the content that inspires them and assimilate it over the long course of their natural lives, and are constrained in overall output.

Mechanizing that process so that it can be wielded at scale and automated is a pretty significant "change to the contract", and worth exploring what compensation is fair under these new circumstances.

It’s actually usually the paying customers asking via support to be added to the holdback, improved experience or no.

This is more true for larger flags that substantially change the experience and may not implement niche or edge-case functionality. Obviously you want to avoid these kinds of tests if possible but it’s not always possible.

As a long(ish)time Mimestream beta user (1.5 years) I paid up for a year pretty much instantly. I totally get why some folks are unhappy with how quickly they're expiring the beta builds (and with how little formal notice), and think that's worth a separate discussion.

That aside, it struck me this morning that this is the native Mac OS desktop gmail client I have wanted since at least 2008, when I first got a job at a gmail shop (my own email is non-Gmail). In that time, I've tried literally every non-browser client I could get my hands on and none are good. Most are electron-style wrappers or feel decidedly un-Mac-like.

And now, 15 years later, there's an extremely high-quality "Mac-assed" [1] Mac OS client that is everything I've ever wanted. I have to look at my work email multiple times a day, every day of my working life. $50/year to make that a pleasant, productive experience is well worth it in my mind.

[1] https://daringfireball.net/linked/2020/03/20/mac-assed-mac-a...

It’s really tempting to see the success of something you don’t understand or value as “marketing” or “mass psychology” but I suspect that path doesn’t usually lead to any interesting or useful insight.

https://percy.io/, https://www.chromatic.com/features/test

A few off the top of my head. Many e2e testing tools can capture and compare screenshots but I think to be maximally effective (and minimally frustrating) you want a tool to manage approving, reviewing, etc.

I think people are increasingly uncomfortable seeing the price for strategic errors not being paid at all by the people responsible for those errors. It's tricky because I don't necessarily think the CEO should be fired, but it feels like the chain of accountability is broken.

I'm vaccinated and boosted (but never got the Omicron booster this fall). On day 6 of my first COVID-positive infection and while I never lost my sense of smell, I had a super high fever (104ºF-ish) and awful headache for 2-3 days, and have been having intermittent brain fog and fatigue and a cough since then but feel 65%-95% recovered at any given moment.

I also just finished my round of Paxlovid, which feels like it may have reduced my recovery time slightly, at the cost of an _awful_ constant metallic taste in my mouth and mild but increasing gastrointestinal upset.

On day 6 of my first time.

They do explicitly discuss how the feature might work on other platforms (aka Mac OS and Linux), and have published a spec, which is also an interesting read: https://wicg.github.io/window-controls-overlay/

Context is so important. If the expected response to "what would it take to get this done twice/10x as quickly" is "We shall work twice/10x hours or add equivalent headcount", then you have a serious context problem.

The point of these questions should be to encourage really creative thinking to break out of "normal" operating modes (take on tech debt, etc) and if that's not well understood, or perceived to be an instruction to crunch, then you haven't set the context appropriately and will burn people out.

This is kind of a wild take. Estimates should be reviewed like anything else on a team, and if the estimate doesn’t fit the timeline, the team should try to either split up / parallelize the work, drop scope, or look for a creative solution (usually involving taking on some strategic tech debt).

Work planning should be a team effort.

My favorite way for a core loop to become richer over time is when the loop has a very high skill ceiling the player can move through in a semi-controlled way. For multiplayer games, this means good matchmaking, but for other games this is layered in via optional challenges/achievments/bonus goals etc.

The stated goal of the game (aka reaching the ending) may or may not be along this path.

As pointed out in other comments, this article doesn't discuss the fundamental prerequisite for replayability, which is to build a core loop that is fun and rewarding. The fact that there are so many definitions of "rewarding" (challenging, relaxing, aesthetically pleasing, competitive, collectability) makes the solution space huge, and loot tables and biomes are a very small fraction.

Parent says that California is their home state. Some people are okay with leaving home but many, many people like to stay close, even if that happens to be a HCOL place.

I dunno, a little sympathy goes a long way.

Sparklehorse's Mark Linkous permanently damaged his legs and almost died after passing out / ODing overnight with his legs folded beneath him.

https://pitchfork.com/features/article/9745-the-sad-and-beau...

> In the original 1937 edition of "The Hobbit" Gollum was genuinely willing to bet his ring on the riddle game, the deal being that Bilbo would receive a "present" if he won. Gollum in fact was dismayed when he couldn't keep his promise because the ring was missing. He showed Bilbo the way out as an alternative, and they parted courteously.

> As the writing of LotR progressed the nature of the Ring changed. No longer a "convenient magical device", it had become an irresistable power object, and Gollum's behavior now seemed inexplicable, indeed, impossible. In the rough drafts of the "Shadow of the Past" chapter Gandalf was made to perform much squirming in an attempt to make it appear credible, not wholly successfully.

> Tolkien resolved the difficulty by re-writing the chapter into its present form, in which Gollum had no intention whatsoever of giving up the Ring but rather would show Bilbo the way out if he lost. Also, Gollum was made far more wretched, as befitted one enslaved and tormented by the Ruling Ring. At the same time, however, Bilbo's claim to the Ring was seriously undercut.

http://tolkien.cro.net/tolkien/changes.html

This isn't quite the right analogy; it's not the difference between a fancy tool you can't service yourself and a simple tool you can.

It's like a world where everyone uses a particular kind of tool that works well and is expensive, but also… the standard. Everyone expects you to know how to use this tool to do a particular kind of common work.

And then you come along and say, no, we should teach people how to use a _different_, cheaper tool! It doesn't work nearly as well, and isn't what people in the "real world" use, but if you spend years familiarizing yourself with a completely different field, you can service and maintain it yourself!

You might not get many takers.

I believe Sourcegraph uses Comby under the hood to an extent for structural matching as well!

I mean, if that's not evidence he deeply understands Twitter then I'm not sure what is.

My early pandemic project was to record live covers & re-arrangements of the entire Pet Sounds album on instagram, and when I got to God Only Knows I was stunned. I’d learned the verse & chorus chord progressions and things were going great, but at the bridge it fell apart. I knew it was the verse progression repeated, but it wasn’t resolving into the final verse like I knew it should.

That’s when I checked the chords more closely and realized there was a key change at the bridge that felt so natural I missed it completely. Without that piece there’s no way to connect the two sections. “Musical sudoku” is right on.

Objectives and Key Results. The things you choose to optimize for during any given planning period.

individual contributor (aka someone judged on their own work output, not the output of a team like a manager or director)

not to mention this is an insanely anti-progressive prosecution once you dig into the details. just dumb.