allochthon

I was trying to make sense of these lines from the article. I probably misunderstood.

> Twitter has said that it expects a majority of its staff to spend some time working remotely and some time in the office. That's despite its boss Jack Dorsey initially saying that employees could work from home "forever".

> And Google rejigged its timetable for bringing people back to the workplace. As of 1 September, employees wishing to work from home for more than 14 days a year would have to apply to do so.

I've been working remotely for about five years, now, and I love it. I've always been curious about working at Twitter and Google, and I was vaguely hoping that they'd start looking at full-time remote hires across their engineering orgs. I value remote work more than I do the possibility of working at Twitter or Google, so it is a little wistfully that I realize I might never follow up on that curiosity.

That makes me wonder whether an analysis could be done over a long period of time to determine where in the region the user isn't, and thereby narrow down where the user is.

And even beyond UBI. UBI provides a way for people not to be completely washed away in a world with a lot more automation. But in a country like the US, where money is readily translated into political power, having increasing differentials of wealth and poverty, even with a UBI floor, will mean that a select handful of people will increasingly be able to shape the information ecosystem and political landscape in the service of their private interests.

As a user of other people's popular open-source projects, I generally lack awareness of the effort and investment of time that the maintainers put into the projects. It's always eye-opening and helpful for me to see posts like this, because I gradually take their work less for granted.

I've noticed that online influence campaigns are starting to really kick into gear. Any comments in news articles posted to the r/worldnews subreddit about the Uyghurs in Xinjiang that do not defend the status quo there will be downvoted to -15 or more, and if you take note of commenters, it soon becomes clear that there's a lot of brigading. Many of the comments conflate criticism of the situation with racism or a desire to start a war.

I think it's the lack of price vetting on Amazon's part that makes me hesitant to buy certain things there, e.g., groceries. That wariness happened after buying several packages of dried beans that were also available at Walmart (a retailer in the US), and then realizing I had paid literally three times the Walmart price.

Now I buy directly from Walmart if something's available there, because I have more confidence that their usual price controls are at work.

I like to think of GraphQL as a specific tool to address a specific set of challenges. Is it convenient to be able to batch up a bunch of requests in one go for a frontend JS client? Would it be useful to be able to specify a subset of the fields to be returned in a query? If the answers to these questions and others are "yes," GraphQL might be a good fit for what one is doing.

I've personally had good experiences with it. It does bring in additional complexity. Is the complexity worth taking on in a specific dev team? This is something that will depend on the team.

It is usually the case that a tool is not useful outside of the set of challenges it is tailored to address. And in some cases a tool is not well designed or implemented. It's always good to use the right tool for the job, at the level of complexity that a team is in a good position to handle.

I have the same question as you. Two sources of potential feedback I've found, which are not spammy or unpleasant for people:

- Adding an update to an Indie Hacker product profile with a link to a blog post

- Adding a post to the "Share Your Startup" thread in r/startups, which has been a thread that is started on the first of each month [0]

But, in general, I have the same questions as you, so I don't imagine this will provide more than a small boost in feedback.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/?f=flair_name%3A%22Share%2...

Often I'm looking for a Wikipedia page, and it seems that in the past year or so Wikipedia pages have been moved way down on the first page of search results, especially if the topic is a medical one.

See https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Based. Seems to be a word that you'll occasionally see on Reddit, etc., but I've never used it that way, personally.

Yikes. This vaguely reminds me of Frostpunk. Things must be getting pretty bad in NYC.

Slightly related. Here is a side project I wrote to keep track of the tons of information I've read about or _might want_ to read about one day, which kind of overlaps with the journal app that was described: https://digraph.app/.

Information is different than knowledge, and part of the challenge of acquiring knowledge is being able to get back to information you know you've seen in the past if it seems relevant to something in front of you right now.

I start a timer on my phone and run it up to ~ 8 hours to mark the end of the day. While the timer is running, I don't do anything too leisurely (e.g., playing video games). If I want/need to do something unrelated to work, I stop the timer.

The idea isn't to work exactly 8 hours per day. It's to get a sense of how much of my time is going towards work-related activities.

Slightly related: I'm running Ubuntu on a Thinkpad and the trackpad is pretty painful to use (after using macOS for years). I went out and bought a mouse a few days ago for this reason.

Interesting. 100 years is a long time. Would this be a generation ship [0]? If so, I'm curious about their discussion of the moral and ethical considerations of committing children to such a journey.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_ship

I'm developing this app, which I'm currently using for a personal knowledge base, but whose ambitions are quite a bit larger:

https://digraph.app

https://digraph.app/wiki/topics/39b38b69-1c22-4e98-bb79-661b...

https://blog.digraph.app/2019-07-06-ten-thousands-links.html

This is a new app, although it's an iteration on one that I made more than ten years ago.

At 200 microns across, I'd be worried about inadvertently causing puncture wounds. (Might be an unfounded worry.)

From my own experience maintaining legacy systems and then re-implementing them — strive for a system that future maintainers will be able to refactor instead of wanting to replace it, whatever that entails. Even if all of what you write will be refactored away, you've accomplished something if they're able to continue using the code base in some form.

The statement looks like an assignment, and unless I was really used to seeing it, I would never expect an implicit return.

Hrm. American here. I always say "neesh," and I rarely hear "nitch" from other Americans. Wondering whether this is a regional thing.

Having lived in Oakland for years, as well as smaller cities around the country, I can add that there's an additional appeal to living in out-of-the-way places. It's definitely a different thing from living in the heart of where everything is happening, like in the middle of San Francisco. But places off the beaten path have their own kind of allure.

It's a side project. :) The "environment" in this case would be k8s. My (small) point was that that component is straightforward to upgrade if needed.

I like these things about the setup:

- Straightforward upgrades of the environment to incorporate security patches

- Straightforward deploys

- Straightforward recreation of the setup (sort of like what terraform gets you)

- Straightforward migration to another hosted k8s shop if the savings are attractive

- I don't have to configure HAProxy, logging, systemd, etc.

- Straightforward horizontal scaling

I don't think Kubernetes is necessarily overly complex. I use it for a side project, and knowing the config primitives, it's been pretty easy to set up a web app with postgres, redis and a load balancer on a single node hosted on DigitalOcean. Since I'm already familiar with k8s from work, I find the maintenance of the mini cluster to be pretty hands-off.

Looks like there's a mongodb helm chart that uses stateful sets: https://github.com/helm/charts/tree/master/stable/mongodb

Used to work with Matt Keveney, the author. Pretty cool guy.

I'll just add that good, maintainable software is as much about communication with other devs, in the form of code that they can read without being too distracted, as it is about getting the immediate job done. That requires socialization with other software developers on some level. That kind of socialization is going to be harder for a lone developer to obtain. But I imagine working on an open source project where there are other people will do the trick.

I am tackling a related challenge with Digraph, an app I'm working on [0]. My project is focused less on providing an infrastructure for learning and retention, and more on simply organizing the vast amount of information that each of us reads every day, month and year into a collection that is coherent and growing and that builds upon itself.

The long-term vision is a crowd-sourced alternative to search engines like Google and Bing. But the short-term focus is on something targeted and immediately useful.

> If the company that runs your PKR goes out of business you’re entire education might be in jeopardy.

I'm dealing with this problem in part by making the Digraph source available under the MIT license.

[0] https://digraph.app/, https://digraph.app/about

I wonder whether there's something deeper going on here in the world. The explosion of content on the Internet in the past 15 years has resulted in a great deal of high quality articles and long form journalism becoming readily available. Perhaps books were what we put up with when there was just less quality writing within reach. But now with heightened expectations we grow tired with the occasional rambling, repetition and longueurs that previously we would just power through out of habit.

I'm not arguing this is the case. But it's something I've wondered about as a possible explanation for why books are less appealing to me now.