andrewzah

To be honest I haven't really noticed that much, as I just scrub through all commercials with my players.

This is a bit reductionistic and over-sells American media. People in other countries may watch American-made media in addition to their own country's media, unless it simply doesn't have any. Foreign media, is also just that: foreign media. It's an entirely different context when watching, say, dramas made and set in Taiwan or Korea.

The fact of the matter is that in American media, most of the actors, writers, and producers are from one group in terms of looks. How is it "mind boggling" to think about how it feels to rarely see someone who looks like you in popular media (and almost never for leads in films)? Or when someone like you is depicted, it's usually a tired trope or racial stereotype?

America is extremely diverse and yet our media disproportionately represents one type of person, and only very recently has begun to correct itself. It's easy to say "hey, we're all Americans", when most people in media look like us. Would you say the same thing if most tv shows and nearly all lead roles in films were solely of Asian-Americans? The answer is clearly no.

For anyone who finds words and etymology fascinating, I highly recommend John McWhorter's podcast, Lexicon Valley.

Firing a scapegoat is meaningless. Bobby Kotick needs to be fired if any real change is to be done.

"South Korea has plenty of problems, social and otherwise"

So does the US, and Japan, and ... basically every country. Each country is going to have pros and cons. Talking with my Korean friends, their perspective is that the US also has plenty of problems, social and otherwise. Are they wrong? And we've had discussions around e.g. why US cops are going around killing US citizens, etc.

The pros for Korea for me include hospitable people, great food, universal healthcare, and fantastic public transportation (you can get around basically the entire country via bus/metro/trains with a unified T-Money card). I also felt a sense of unity that I don't often feel in the US.

Some cons would include a work culture around working insane hours and compulsory drinking. Those are changing with the current generation though. Schooling is extremely competitive since everyone is trying to get into a handful of colleges in order to have career prospects with the large conglomerations. And having to worry about the air quality index is annoying from my US perspective.

That zoom in on S2J is hilarious.

You can use dfhack to run the game, which provides some niceties [0]. There are graphical packs; many people like Phoebus. You can also use an external program like Dwarf Therapist for dwarf management, which becomes necessary once you have a lot of dwarves.

[0]: https://docs.dfhack.org/en/stable/docs/Introduction.html

Even if it were open source I doubt there would be enough impetus to implement multithreading.

It would literally be easier to completely make a new game from scratch with async and threading designs taken into account, instead of trying to adapt an existing monolith.

Async and multithreading are complex and introduce many subtle bugs. It's not so easy to just move to that from a single-thread event loop.

Yes, those are a bit more nuanced. As noted in the sibling comment, part of this is also coming across as someone who listens when people voice their concerns.

For the dress issue, it really just depends on the context and your relationship with the person. If it's your -friend- who you actually know makes custom dresses as a hobby, why would they be upset at a (genuine) compliment? My friends who pay attention to clothes and I give out (genuine) compliments to each other all the time. With a stranger I don't do that unless it's like something that truly stands out. I've been genuinely complimented on my coats and blazers by random strangers numerous times and I think nothing of it. But social environments like bars and cafes are quite different from contexts like office environments, particularly male-dominated workplaces.

I don't know the exact reasoning about the "ethical workplace" training, but I imagine it's a blanket thing since some people just don't know how to give compliments without being creepy about it, or just use it as a proxy to hit on the person. Of course companies large enough for ethical trainings would want to play things as safe as possible. Idiots ruin things for everyone else.

Anyway, I find it hard to believe anyone would take offense at something like "hey, did you make that dress? That's awesome!". But this is also why working at a large corp is probably my least favorite option when selecting a job.

"Males would get very direct, sometimes harsh, and detailed negative feedback, whilst women would get the far less usable vague sugar-coated version of it."

This is definitely an issue and I don't really know how to deal with it other than not hiring people who would take offense at something like honest feedback. That is more of a company-level cultural issue where people are afraid to give honest feedback lest they be accused by an idiot of being <X-ist>. I don't think that culture would develop if they had higherups who they could trust to fairly evaluate the situation. Higherups who are not afraid to go "yeah, no, that's not being <X-ist>, that's just the same level of feedback everyone else gets" if that's truly the case... or higherups who reliably can go "yeah, there seems to be a discrepancy here based on gender and we should take appropriate measures".

...this is a lot of words to basically agree that sometimes edgecases require some additional pondering. Context is very important, and knowing who you're dealing with is also very important. None of this matters if you're dealing with people who assume everything is done in bad faith and you're out to get them, etc. Life is short so just say "alright", and move on. Now, if multiple people start saying similar things... then maybe it's time to do some self-reflection.

Well, sure, those things exist. What I'm getting at is that the % of it that happens purely because I'm -male- (or another natural property about me) is basically zero. Either they're just being belligerent in general or they perceive me to be underperforming (rightly or wrongly).

Whereas when I play with women who e.g. use a mic, very frequently it's like a switch gets flipped and people start being weird, overtly sexual, or just flat out insanely critical of every little thing the female players do. If we start losing the round (in e.g. Overwatch), they start blaming the female players unfairly, etc.

Obviously this is all anecdata but from everyone that I've spoken to it's a very common experience, hence most of my female friends just eschewing the mic entirely or only playing with specific groups instead of general matchmaking.

"it's common for men to talk down to men on video games too"

This is very tone deaf.

I have spent probably thousands of hours playing games (with a mic) and the % of times I've been "talked down to" is very small, and it was never because of a natural property about me (that I'm male, etc).

Literally every woman that I've played with who has used a mic or otherwise presented themselves as female has faced vitriolic harassment (and/or sexual harassment) for no reason other than that they were female. I've been in lobbies with them and suddenly see men becoming -far- more judgemental and critical about the female player's ability/skill than usual. This is why a lot of women don't use mics at all or otherwise identify themselves as female in online games.

The "talking down" (or just general random toxicity) that men sometimes face from other male players is not even remotely comparable.

How hard is it to not make inappropriate comments about someone or their body? It's -exceedingly- easy to not be a creepy dick to one's coworkers and fellow human beings.

One only has to act like a robot if they have zero social awareness or tact.

"You have nothing to add to my reply"

Please re-read the rest of my reply.

"Diverse often means to accept less qualification for the sake of accomplishing diversity, unfortunately."

This is your opinion. It's not factual, and I'm pointing this out. There is nothing intrinsic about being more diverse that makes it lower quality or less able "to execute" than a monoculture. There is nothing about monocultures that means they are more, or less, capable "to execute" in the first place... a lot of them are just buddies hiring buddies. It's your assumption in the first place that these are efficient or meritocratic in the first place. They can be. Many businesses aren't even efficient or good at executing.

"It's not the perspectives that matter, its execution."

...perspectives are what influence execution in the first place. You need to be able to execute a plan well, but creating a good plan is also vital. Diverse perspectives catch potential design flaws and other things that can be missed by having a monoculture (any monoculture) in leadership.

That doesn't mean that we should just ignore efficiency. Smaller downloads means less bandwidth required on apple's side as well.

This also ignores that not everyone has stellar connection speeds, and that some people -do- have bandwidth caps (also, let's ignore that people are often mobile). Developers really need to stop making assumptions about people's hardware or internet speeds... and just do their jobs and make efficient designs. Maybe one day everyone will have super beefy machines on fiber optic networks with 10gb nics, but that's not the reality as of now.

If a patch needs to be 2gb, then so be it. But if it could be 100mb, then that's certainly better and something to strive for.

That's your personal interpretation, and in my opinion it's quite revealing.

It should go without saying, but I guess it needs to be explicitly stated here: it's good to have -qualified-, diverse candidates in leadership roles. Obviously just putting some underqualified person isn't going to work out and it's a bit tautological to state this. There's nothing about "young" that automatically means "lack of experience", or "old" that automatically means "experienced". There's nothing about "more diverse candidates" that means "not qualified"- that's your personal interpretation. It doesn't mean "more qualified" either.

Leadership (and really, all company roles) benefit from having different perspectives. When your perspective is from generally one group it's easy to be out of touch and just start missing the mark.

For selfhosting bitwarden, I recommend vaultwarden [0] (previously known as bitwarden_rs).

[0]: https://github.com/dani-garcia/vaultwarden

It depends on my mood but I am most productive in silence without headphones on.

Sometimes I need a little bit of noise to help with focus, and sometimes I just put on jazz anyways.

The safety record of the Shinkansen lines in Japan is impeccable [0].

The design and maintenance of train lines is not really comparable to typical software design.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shinkansen#Safety_record

> You don't need attendants on rail at all - what is there for them to do?

* Check passenger tickets

* Observe the cars & make sure people aren't breaking rules, etc

* Serve food/drink if applicable (e.g. for business class)

And so forth. This is how the KTX and Shinkansen work, and they know what they're doing.

> Your idea that this person was 'doing it wrong' is quite a hand-wavy posture to start with, especially as the author finds that such problems have been described by experienced practitioners.

How they handled it and went about it was wrong. Actual experienced practicioners may face those problems (see dukkha nanas / the dark night of the soul), but with proper instructors there are well-known ways of dealing with it.

> The article mentions whom ... the great and the good that attend and throw conferences, those that throw workshops and run retreats

What I was getting at is that <what> is ambiguous. "Mindfulness" is anywhere from jhana, "intensive meditation", etc, to more elements of stoicism. Practicing stoicism has just about nothing that can actively harm anyone or is dangerous. As pointed out in this article's discussion, the author has been conflating terminology which demonstrates a lack of understanding.

> Do you have evidence that the author was not learning from experienced practitioners?

Firstly, problems like the ones described in the article are well-known. Knowledgeable instructors are upfront about them and provide frameworks and guidance for dealing with them, instead of, as per the article, just "suggesting various ways that I might alter my meditation practice to alleviate my symptoms".

This looks to me like a case of the blind leading the blind in a consumerized and repackaged version of meditation that advertises "mindfulness/meditation" as a cure-all for one's problems. There is a reason that Transmission [0] is a thing. Just like even if I practice guitar for 10 years, that doesn't mean I'm actually qualified to teach it or provide useful guidance.

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

Yes, I imagine that in the future we'll be writing these sorts of tools in memory-safe languages like Rust.

In fact I believe that it's hubris to think that we can write massive, complex systems in unsafe languages and -not- overlook some bugs here and there. We had no choice but to use these languages before, but Rust, etc, give us alternate choices now.

10 years doesn't really mean much by itself. If I incorrectly practice guitar for 10 years, I'll have experience of practicing the guitar incorrectly, and maybe RSI/health issues from not learning correct posture, etc. There is no rule that I'll actually get "good" at guitar by practicing that way.

"that <what>'s being taught and lauded so much as a panacea"

Lauded by whom? And <what> exactly? Buddhism? Meditation? Those are very different and learning from an experienced practitioner is important.

Perfectly secure computers are an oxymoron. They don’t exist.

iOS is the least worst mobile option and it’s ridiculous to say Apple is lying about security if any exploits are found, ever.

If you look at e.g. how messaging works in iOS 14 [0] you’ll see that they do in fact work on making secure systems. But parsing and memory safety are hard. Like, really hard. The fact that NSO found exploits doesn’t mean Apple is doing anything, but Apple is clearly making it more and more difficult to find and abuse such exploits.

For the average person that isn’t being specifically targeted by sophisticated malware from companies funded by -governments-, iOS is pretty damn secure. Dealing with being attacked is a different threat model.

[0]: https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/2021/01/a-look-at-ime...

I write my own css for my statically generated website (andrewzah.com). The problem with bootstrap etc is exactly that they’re aimed at being generic. They’re not specific enough to do what I want quite how I want it… and there’s the burden of learning them.

It’s a lot easier to start with a good, semantic html structure and come up with exactly the CSS that one needs, rather than continually fight a system aimed at no one in particular.

Not to mention the bloat of unnecessary CSS/JS that you don’t actually need.

That was the case long before Amazon acquired twitch. They’ve always had questionable leadership.

Essentially you self-host it and it operates, I assume, via YouTube’s API or scraping.

Invidious is another alternative frontend to youtube. I use it because it loads much faster than YT and it has an API that makes it easy for me to batch download my playlists. However it occasionally gets authentication errors and I have to restart the service manually.

That’s the trending tab. But your main page is tailored based on the videos that you clicked on or watched.

I just listen to specific genres of music so my recommendations are all great.

> but I doubt they undergo drastic changes that the nutrition profile is entirely different.

It probably is gradually done, but I recommend looking at the amount of sugar each brand of bread has next time you're at a supermarket. Or milk, lemonade. Or other common groceries. It really is crazy to see just how much of -everything- has added sugar. Including products that are branded as "healthy". AFAIK Naked juice is a great example of this.

As a remote worker with a great schedule, I have the time to do such research. But not everyone is in that situation, particularly if they have a job and have kids, etc. Brands can essentially lie through their teeth and get away with labeling as the regulation can be quite loose.

Many people "know" processed food isn't healthy, but to what extent it's bad for them, maybe not. And it comes down to time and cost. Also, some people don't really grow up knowing what "healthy" food is like.

> It's from bad diet over a long period of time.

It doesn't help that healthy foods are more expensive than food that's absolutely terrible for you.

I think Mexico's new laws around food labeling is the way to go, but time will tell if that's actually effective or not.

I'm really tired of this argument of "people want to move to X country, so criticism is not possible of X country". I'm sure that many people want to move to China. I'm sure that many people want to move to X, Y, and Z developed countries.

So what?

Nothing useful is gained from comparing the US with some other country further down the rankings. The issues I mention are don't go away because X country has it worse than the US. Saying "well, X country has it worse" is just a deflection.

I am -not- saying countries Y and Z are just so much better than the US. What I'm saying is what makes a country "good" or "desirable" is multi-faceted and very complex, much more complex than "does the government randomly arrest people or not". That is one factor, but that does not automatically make the US such a utopia.

The many, serious problems the US has won't go away until we actually start addressing them as a nation, instead of deflecting by going "well, it mustn't be so bad since people want to move here".

Quite a lot of people do lack self control and it’s controversial to state this. Also, it is time consuming to read every single label on food that one buys. The labels on the front are often misleading.

I frequently work at state fairs & arts and crafts festivals on the east coast. The amount of very overweight and obese people is simply astounding.

About half of one coke is the average adult’s recommended sugar intake. I know more people than I’d like who have at least one soda every day, and some who have multiple every day.

Nearly everything in our supermarkets has a lot of sugar. Including common things like bread and pasta sauce. Last time I checked at publix, I only found -one- type of bread that didn’t have a lot of sugar in it. Finding a protein bar without tons of sugar was rather difficult. Etc.

Combine this with sitting all day + driving everywhere and we’ve got a huge problem.