agigao

Almost fall into the pitfall. Have seen friends around spending 300-400$ in "custom" keyboards.

Used a couple of mechanical keyboards over time: Razer, Anne Pro II, Logitech G something, custom made, Asus Rog TKL etc. Well, used those for fun with PC but my major workhorse has always been Mac setup: MacBook + Monitor + Magic Keyboard/Trackpad, and productivity has always been there with this setup.

Although I spent some time with Mechanical keyboards, still Magic Keyboard TKL scores the highest, in terms of productivity, stability, comfort.

You can have fun w/mech keyboards, but I'd rather spend my time onto something that actually matters. Go with simplicity without overthinking and wasting time.

- The Gospel According to Jesus Christ (1991) - Jose Saramago

- The War of the End of the World (1981) - Mario Vargas Llosa

Favourites among the books I’ve read lately.

Other than that, there are plenty to enjoy some serious fiction from authors such as:

- Homer (watching Troy is way too far from the book)

- Thomas Mann - The Magic Mountain is top pick among his works

- Robert Musil - The Man Without Qualities I think is one of the finest pieces of literature

- Albert Camus - pick any of his works, but the shortest is considered to be the finest - The Stranger (~ 80-100 pages)

- Herman Melville - Moby Dick was a wonderful journey I enjoyed thoroughly

- Leo Tolstoy - War and Peace is a book that will raise the bar for fiction, I couldn’t start a new one for a month after finishing it, tried but I was still living in the book. I remember taking a vacation at work to finish the book, couldn’t put it down. Was working as a Java dev at The Ministry of Internal Affairs, must have been 20 or 21 yrs old.

- Dostoevsky - bot reading any of the big five is a missed opportunity: The Demons (one of the finest political fiction work), Brothers Karamazov (Will drain you from emotions), Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, Notes from Underground

- Oh, Cervantes - Don Quixote was the book took me 2 years and some more life experience when it started to tick in my mind the depth, importance of the book, perhaps it was 24 or 25.

- And so on, it will be useless to list them all, and many will slip from my mind :)

One important realization an decision I made at the age 18 was that I had to ask around, listen to people who know world literature inside out and follow their suggestions. The reason? At first I wanted to read everything, but pretty quickly that started to sound like a dumb idea which ignored reality and life longevity. Next decision was to read finest of the written works. And the strategy worked.

Books or authors I didn’t enjoy much?

- Gabriel Garcia Marquez, 100 Years of Solitude - finished it this month and the story felt like the one I’ve already experienced before, emotions I’ve had. If I had read it 8-10 years ago, I would have been dazzled l, but at the age of 29, not much.

- Kafka - The Tower was an awful translation, I felt that, which isn’t authors fault. The next book went smoothly but nothing groundbreaking.

- Ishiguro - mediocre

- Turgenev - mediocre, again

- Calvino - despite my love and respect towards a very good friend, his suggestion didn’t work for me, the book felt like - the author knows too well what’s he’s writing and that’s not a good thing. At first author writes and then he reads it as a reader just to find out what he has written. Calvino and many many more know what they’re writing and hence the mediocrity. - etc.

My next friend will be Ulysses, dragged it a bit too long and finally 2022 is a good year to read it.

Software engineering takes awful a lot of time and energy that it leaves a narrow path to reading something other than technical books and documentation, but the path exists and with discipline we can still enjoy finest pieces of philosophy and literature.

P.S. Many of the printed products are marketed and sold as “books”, but book is a title ought to be earned.

Emacs did speed-up on M1? When/How? :D

Which Emacs distribution are you using?

Here comes another sad ex-FF-user.

I've been using Firefox since early days and the latest UI bumbling forced me to look elsewhere.

Surely I tried alternatives over the years but my main browser has always stayed FF. Now, times has come to actually change the main browser, which turned out to be Edge. UI is slick and functional out of the box.

Newport’s “achievements”, as he proudly presents as books, aren’t books but a printed product.

But still, this blog post bears a truth for me. I find it harder to sit down in a calm env. and concentrate on writing code for a prolonged period of time. Partially covid-19, remote work (and my gf) is to blame.

Regarding Murakami, I couldn’t find it interesting enough to finish a book. There are 2 types of fiction writers from my point of view: 1. Clever ones who know what they are writing *in* the process. 2. Writers who figure out what they wrote *after* the process.

And Murakami is the first kind.

Thanks!

NVIDIA, can you please make my GTX 1070 not to tear a screen when I'm scrolling a web-page in a browser in GNU/Linux?

Thank you!

Thanks for the right wording.

Yeah, the tool is fine, I got nothing against it, just our attitude makes our world more cluttered and fragmented, we lost the way to communicate in programming world at large.

The Mess We're In - Joe Armstrong - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKXe3HUG2l4

Can we please stop calling every new set of rules “a programming language”?

A few weeks ago I decided to completely stop using gifs and emojis in conversations, and goes what conversations got more meaningful and thoughtful.

Well, spacemacs is an awesome intro for new users, which makes it cool, useful and quickly configurable.

Tried to use Emacs for data analysis in Python, because I write lots of docs in org and client project status/tasks report page is also generated from my org file. But the problem is proper support of repl in python. We got number of packages but none really solves my problem to have a proper analytics workflow.

P.S. I also write Clojure and Emacs it surely the go-to environment! Actually, I got into Emacs due to Clojure back in 2014.

- Spacemacs for all the bells and whistles

- Emacs Prelude for simple base

- Doom Emacs is another beast, though.

P.S. What might make it much more accessible I think is builtin project structure view such as Treemacs. Also, let's not forget that Most of the world do use Windows and Emacs has a poor support for this platform.

- The problem with VSCode, Atom and alikes are just absolutely inconsistent keybindings, half-baked packages and honestly I don't really want to write code in a browser. It's like a flashy smartphone - does everything but few things well. Hence my favourite tools for coding are produced by JetBrains - PyCharm and IntelliJ. These tools do also have their keyboard inconsistency issues, but it is what it is.

Happy Hacking!

Well, I was talking about "YouTuber", "Streamer" careers.

Let's avoid putting all the weight on the shoulders of Microsoft, although I tried to use W10 couple of times last few years, for the job (SE), it doesn't work for me, but for other major reasons.

Using Manjaro i3 on desktop and MBP 15 on mobility.

But overall in UI/UX we are having a hype of newness, to stand out among competitors on the expense of functionality and also making it all "accessible" for as wider audience as possible. FF's address bar zooming "feature" makes me feel like a damn moron :))

1. The job is still done on desktop/laptop computers and touch screens doesn't really make much difference I think. I wish all the major companies incorporated that point of view into the planning process. F*ck shareholders, you gotta think about your users in the first place!

Apple suffers another dead end here - so many colors it squeezes the energy out of my brain! Maverick was the last sane macOS with sane colors.

2. Regression to the mean, that's exactly what happened to educational system, and textbooks as well, make everyone comfortable with themselves, instead of pushing kids to actually learn.

Dumb down everything!

I (might) sound arrogant but never understood this industry, the value of it (other than financial). Feels quite embarrassing to me.

Would love to hear opinions.

NO.

$70K for 2 years? No, thanks.

Community college for 2 years ~ 20-25K tuition, then "learning your heart out" for those 2 years and transfer to a proper university with scholarship seems far more plausible to me.

Classical CS education with high standards is a proper way to go, otherwise you'll spend first 10 years your programming career "wishing you had known that before", and you might never step into the depth of career, especially into ML/AI field, without that prior knowledge of the theory.

Actually, such "new kind of school" done better is https://www.42.fr

Talking with my 7+ years of software/data engineering experience, last couple of years spent in DS{ML/DL}.

Clojure.

Defn has been my favorite tech podcast for years.

Clojure/Functional Programming etc. Hosts: Vijay Kiran, Ray McDermott https://defn.io

On the other hand Entitles Opinions (about Life and Literature) is one of its kind. Host: Robert Harrison, professor of Italian Literature at Stanford. The podcast is aired from KZSU. https://entitledopinions.stanford.edu

Other personal favorites: The Life Scientific and In Our Time by BBC, also Intelligence Squared.

Same here.

After working in a fin-tech for a while, I realized how greedy these companies are for data, and how useless they render it. I was amazed by the scarcity of talent and overwhelming amount of routine job I encountered and lack of diversity of projects and space for free thinking.

Anyway, I got rid of FB/Insta years ago(4-5 maybe), and recently I also closed LinkedIn acc. as well, I have low tolerance to BS and self-glorified business gurus. I'd rather do something meaningful in my everyday life)))

Cheers.

Guys, perhaps, we should to give such examples a context.

I lived/studied in Boston, MA number of years, and I used to meet up with my childhood friend who immigrated from Georgia roughly 8 years ago at his late teen years. He graduated from a very prestigious business school, and has a decent job but after the day was over he used to do some extra stuff, like driving someone from place to place, some screw driving job (I don't exactly know). It seemed crazy to me, I asked numerous times what are you doing dude? His response was extra $ is not a bad thing.

It might sound a bit bold and too generalized, no offense, I'm up for conversation - in the US people forgot what it means to rest properly.

Roughly a year ago, I was visiting my good friend in Germany, who immigrated 15 years ago. He was encouraged by another friend who lived in California to move to the US. We sat down and make a list of comparisons. Just to name a few:

Germany: 1. Workers Union protects employees. Pays a salary (70%+ of it) for 6 months if one looses a job. Also, a simple cold is good enough reason to take a week long leave and you're encouraged to do so. - US? no bro, you're on your own. It's a god damn pressure that makes people work unworkable hours and being in the endless state of anxiety.

2. Car insurance - he drives a new BMW and pays ~ 350 USD per year. We quoted the minimal package for insurance in MA for the same car, guess the number? 10fold: 3000 USD per year.

3. Education? - Free. US: 70$K per year.

4. Cost of food. Well, Germany is "notorious" even in EU for grocery affordability.

5. And Beer? German Hefeweizen 60 cents. Samuel Adams? no thank you. (half joking)

I did eventually left the US, although data science/engineering is the dream job generate money, but quality of life is no less important than the number of 0s at the end of bank acc. balance.

I miss those times when enthusiasm used to drive the net. Seeking profit in every corner of one’s life is demoralizing to say at least.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19063829 - McKinsey Advised Purdue Pharma How to ‘Turbocharge’ Opioid Sales, Lawsuit Says.

I’m not in any sense offended by the words company chooses, and neither I care about them being polite or not, the heart of the issue is the attitude and the word consumer expresses that very attitude rather accurately.

1. Netflix has consumers

2. Mubi has customers

Go on, develop the argument.

Thank you! :)

An extract from the article: “23andMe has said that its health tests can raise awareness about various medical conditions and empower _consumers_ to take charge of their health information.”

It’s a damn NEW DARK AGE way of thinking to refer PEOPLE through one single universal word all the time - A CONSUMER!

Choose any word from x, and carefully observe your thoughts afterwards:

”23andMe has said that its health tests can raise awareness about various medical conditions and empower _x_ to take charge of their health information.”

x = [“customers”, “individuals”, “humans”, “people”, “citizens”, etc]

good one.

Well said! Simple yet thorough explanation in a single sentence.

One parallel came to mind is comparison of graphic novels and regular ones.

Good luck conveying War and Peace, The Iliad, The Magic Mountain or any single serious piece of literature into a graphic novel.

Public Transport has been free for kids/teenagers(under 18) in Tbilisi, Georgia(The Caucasus), for almost a decade. And 40% of the fare for studens.

This one I do like.

People could diverge from consumption of “data deluge”, and return back in time when we used to have meaningful conversations on a private forums created around a very concrete ideas other than feeding society with ads.