arghnoname

I'm torn on this. Often I feel like the parent, but I recognize maybe I'm being stubborn.

You say libraries purpose is to help the community. If that's true, what you're saying makes sense. On the other hand, if their purpose is to promote literacy and reading, well, this is off mission.

I think of the former mission as more being a community center. My mother loves this form and spends a lot of time at her local library. I'm a curmudgeon and an intellectual snob apparently. I don't even like them having popular books, but I'm trying to be less rigid and more honest here and admit that some scope creep is probably healthy and the question is just where you draw the line.

I don't go to libraries very often anymore because so often they're effectively homeless shelters. Should I not mind this? I don't know, 'should' is doing a lot here, but the truth is I used to love going to libraries, browsing books, and soak up the general scholastic atmosphere.

Homeless shelter just isn't that much fun for me. If I want to be virtuous and go to a soup kitchen or otherwise try to interact with and help homeless people, I'll just do that.

What people in general don't seem to realize by taking things that almost everyone likes (libraries, as one example) and requiring one to go through some virtue test to go is that in the end, public support for the good is going to collapse, it will lose funding, and then no one can have it.

I think we're going to lose libraries.

If you want to hire people who share your values and your values include moral responsibility for the megacorp one works for, you’re right not to hire from companies you feel are immoral.

I personally don’t ascribe corporate amorality (as opposed to immorality) to all who work for it and thus with narrow exceptions would blacklist someone for working at a company who, e.g., has a CEO I dislike, practices wage suppression, etc.

Thanks, that's a much better photo. You can really see the effects of light pollution well in that one too.

You'd want to keep your network alive. Publish, be on program committees doing reviews, etc. If the number of jobs is fairly static and you're doing this and your area doesn't collapse, (e.g., the AI winter), your network can probably land you okay. Networks in the academic world is a pretty big deal and it's a small world. Some people like doing this kind of 'service,' I wasn't one of them.

If there are general headwinds (i.e., research spending in general drops, which seems to have been an ongoing trend), there is almost definitionally more people getting cast off than there are actual researcher roles, not including new entrants to the market.

As with all things, the better off you do (very high quality lab, for instance), the more places you have to try to grab onto if you get cast off.

My peers from grad school have gone every which route, industrial labs, academia, more applied research-lite positions, finance, and fairly direct software engineering jobs. A decent chunk that started in academia or at labs have migrated into more standard software engineering roles. Personally, I really miss research, but it is what it is.

On H1B, its abuses, and big tech capture in general, it's a shame we can't generally admit that the democrats are terrible on this without others perceiving this as an endorsement of everything the other side wants to do.

Both major parties suck really bad here. I'm not partisan anymore, I'll vote split-ticket for whatever individual best represents my individual interests because if I'm going to exercise my apparently useless vote, I might as well use it to meekly voice my preferences in the extremely remote chance someone will decide pretending to give a shit would be helpful for them.

Our problems predate the current regime and they'll last past it. Pretty pessimistic if I'm honest.

I have a CS PhD from a good (but not top 5) program and have published in top venues. I perceived my chances of getting a job at Microsoft Research (MSR) to be low (on par with getting a faculty position at a top place) and didn't feel like going through the unpleasant prospect of coming up with job talks and slides, sending off to universities while I'm at it, writing diversity statements, etc, for fairly low chances at getting something at MSR.

I could have gotten something at a 'lesser' place, but my guess is they'd be even more likely to be disrupted by budget cuts.

Even getting one of these roles though leaves you in a position where the next guy who wants to save money can just axe the whole division and then you're on your ass and due to a general paucity of research roles and high competition, this can be very, very bad.

I went bog-standard industry and the PhD probably didn't help much there. My industry job largely wastes my training and research experience. In retrospect, I was foolish to get a PhD and people choosing to not do so are generally making the right choice.

There are multiple axes upon which something like this can be evaluated. I'm not against us as a society collectively deciding we should enforce rules that may be counter to business logic (e.g., child labor laws to pick something uncontroversial).

When something is more controversial, it's common to look at the business case. It has commonly been argued that 'diversity' is good business even disregarding any desire one may have related to restorative justice.

Put simply, if it's good business and good morals we should do it, if it's bad business and good morals or good business and bad morals, we have to weigh the balance of it (bad business can lead to morally bad outcomes, like layoffs), and if it's bad business and bad morals we ought not do it at all. I was just focusing on the business case under the assumption that the poster believed it to be good morally.

From a business perspective, did it work? Was the team more, less, or equally effective than one where you didn't expend the time and expense of hiring a more homogenous group? Was turnover better or worse?

I know you can't absolutely know the counter-factual, but I've always wondered this. Incidentally, when I was a young man and CS major, I changed majors and went into a different field because I wanted to be around more women, but I've never known if being outside that kind of monoculture actually is better for the business or not.

sure, but absent infinite energy supplies with which much is possible, it falls under the general rubric of "no free lunch," which often in the physical world may fall under the conservation of energy (e.g., perpetual motion machines like wind turbines on cars) or the laws of thermodynamics.

The layman's "no free lunch" is a pretty good heuristic though.

Probably something like requiring an advanced license, like heavy truck drivers require, to operate vehicles that cross certain mass and speed thresholds would be reasonable.

I like a fast car and I've done a little track time, etc. It's not the same as controlling a Camry and recognizing that would be reasonable.

The truck isn't to my taste, but absent any indication that this was due to something unique to this automobile I don't see why it's news anymore than people tragically dying in a Camry running into a tree at 3:00 am after a party.

I work at one of the big companies and some people do that even here. People just talk about their experience or other systems that they know. It always feels conservative to me, as often it's said to suggest emulating what some other group or company did to solve an often superficially similar problem, but with entirely different constraints. I think some people with certain kinds of thought patterns just pattern match and try to apply past experience a bit too broadly.

Of course it's objectively easier, particularly if you hold some variables constant (distance or pace) relative to weight.

The wrinkle is that most runners run to a pain point. Over time, I went from neverrunning to running decent mileage per week, and my runs hurt _more_ now than they did when I started because I run to a pain point. I run further, faster, and more frequently and I have a higher pain tolerance, so it hurts more while I run and the recovery is rougher.

So my runs are at least as hard, but yes, I'd absolutely destroy the version of me that thought three miles was an accomplishment by any objective metric.

I'm on the heavy side for a distance runner, but compared to the general population, I've never been very heavy or very light (BMI currently around 26). I mostly run longer distances (a half marathon most weeks, lots of six mile runs, full marathons and the distances to train for them about twice a year).

In my experience, qualitatively, what you say is absolutely true. I don't even notice a change in pace if my weight floats up or down a bit, I mostly run at a specific level of effort and the pace adjusts itself depending on how much I've over-indulged. However, there are thresholds.

If I try to run a pace that is too slow, there's a point where it almost becomes more shuffle than run, gait goes to hell, and there's a loss of efficiency. As I've gotten more fit (but not lighter) I can now do zone 2 running on the flat with workable form, but this wasn't always the case. It's still less efficient than a fast pace, but at least it looks like running.

So if one is too heavy to even run with actual running form for any length of time, it's harder to be heavy. That's okay, they should probably try run/walk intervals until they get there.

On the other hand, it can also be harder when you're more fit. My pain tolerance has gone way up. I can just beat the ever living snot out of myself, and if I'm not careful, I do just that. It's much easier to do too many miles way too quickly now and that starts manifesting itself in all kinds of noisome ways. Find anyone who considers themselves a runner and get them talking about their injuries and you better not have anywhere else you need to be.

Wow what a nightmare. I try to time it so I'm lucid before landing, but that's a horror I hadn't even considered!

Benzos are my flight go-to. I got them for some flight anxiety, since my stupid brain started getting scared of flying, but boy do they just make the time go by and I manage to doze. It's not good quality, but it beats the total lack of sleep I'd customarily get.

Outside of flying, I have no temptation or desire to take them thankfully, so a prescription with ten pills lasts me literally years.

Emacs pauses are almost always due to some operation blocking in the main thread. It's pretty annoying and is mostly a consequence to a lot of things effectively being single-threaded. Stock emacs doesn't do this very often, but third party packages that might do expensive tasks often do

I'll try to use the more common Windows/MacOS terms for it, but in emacs I often have the same file opened in two different panes within one window or two separate windows. I do this when I want to be looking at one part of a file while editing another.

Markers are used to mark a different point in the file and one can pop their location to a previous mark.

That's wild, when I saw 16 weeks I assumed it was a typo and you meant 'days.' I should try to jump ship from FAANG-land

I road one three days a week for my commute for about six months, but it was only about two miles. I went out of my way to be on roads with an ample bike lane.

More than drivers being aggressive towards me (helps I wasn't slowing them down, which I know can make some people aggro), I noticed that I was invisible to many drivers and had to be very cognizant of that in turning lanes and when needing to be out of the bike lean due to construction, etc.

My daily driver is a 2300 pound miata with a stock exhaust. It's small and low to the ground and only has 181 HP. I think this is the lightest production car you can get--certainly close.

I see people in Cybertrucks and some other electric trucks--they don't have local pollution, but between the weight and the height, I'm living pretty dangerously. You always notice the big cars in the miata, but the big, heavy electrics is when I started feeling about as protected as a cyclist in it.

Still, I don't think they're creepy assholes who want to murder me or have emotional issues or whatever. I think they just like their big dumb truck, just like I like my ridiculous small car. I don't have to drive this car, it's impractical, it's dangerous, if someone kills me that'll probably ruin their day, but I do it because I like it. I'm not psychologically deranged with a death wish. Sometimes people just like different things.

Ventilation is good even with electric, just to deal with pollutants being put off by the food being cooked. As I understand it, these are often worse than the combustion byproducts, but I'm not well informed on the composition of each kind of pollution.

So I think in either case, kitchens should have good ventilation. Fortunately, it's just an ingress and egress hole in the house with a fan. If trying to retain the moisture and temperature of indoor air, it's more complicated because heat may have to be exchanged and air dehumidified (though kitchen air is often hotter and wetter than general air conditioned air).

However, this is also true of ventilation needed to prevent well insulated houses from getting damp and moldy and removing other indoor pollutants, such as from off-gassing of new home goods, etc. In summary, we need ventilation period. It should be a part of building codes and it should be done in a way that is appropriate to the local climate.

I'll be buying a house in the next few years and if I'm allowed to get gas, I'm not actually sure if I will or not. Customarily it's what I've used and it works well for my needs, but induction has advantages. I'm open to it. If I had my pick, I'd probably have a mix of induction and gas ranges, but maybe I'd look into induction and be sold. I just don't want this forced on me on with such thing rationale.

that's pretty slick!

While this is just a label, municipalities in California have been banning use of gas appliances in homes for new construction and significant renovations. It was recently overturned by a court decision, so the proponents do want this to be coercive.

I am not remotely convinced there is any need to do this. Code updates for improved ventilation in kitchens, okay, but you're going to have a hard time convincing my that my grilled cheese destroyed the environment significantly more with gas than electric.

I suspect these petty heavy-handed bureaucratic moves will make enemies out of regular people (try cooking with a round bottomed wok on electric) for no real gain. I'm increasingly feeling resentful of these sorts of things.

My apologies and I stand corrected. My memory is not a reliable witness, but the general point about it being a fairly normal human foible to over-react when you think you or your wife are being publicly besmirched I think is left unharmed.

I've never been a Will Smith fan, but of all the bad behavior in the world, two guys getting into a minor physical altercation over jokes about the sexual relationships involving the other's wife does not do much for my outrage meter. This is almost normal human weakness stuff, as opposed to 'must be cancelled and shunned by all of society "for eternity" stuff.'

Rock presumably could have pressed charges. Smith can receive public approbation, but for me the world would be much less interesting if anyone who ever erred be prohibited in participating in it for the rest of their lives.

While these images are stylized and would never be interpreted as real, we are just rapidly entering a world where photos should not be trusted. Or at least they shouldn't be trusted anymore than a sketch.

It's not the end of the world--no one gets confused by a political cartoon showing political opponent X dressed as legacy enemy Y (e.g., Trump as Hitler). I think the fuss about safety here is overblown once we more widely accept that a 'picture perfect' rendering of an event is as unreliable as a sketch of an event.

It may even be a positive: it will give us all plausible deniability if real but embarrassing photos get released.

This is true, but just to quantify it a bit, a lot of people can run at their lactate threshold for about an hour. This isn't 'long' but may be longer than most people think.

That said, I remember doing similar 'runs to the parking lot' and being gassed when I was totally untrained despite being capable of long walks/hikes. I suspect there are even more basic adaptations one needs to be able to do these very short activities for which a more trained individual can complete anaerobically.

Auto company profit margins provide further evidence supporting your hypothesis (modern car requirements are just inherently more expensive).

The auto companies whose profit margins I checked are in the single-digits, sometimes negative. If it was just greedy price gouging, we'd expect them to see much healthier profit margins.

I don't understand why people don't check these figures more often for these publicly traded companies when offering the 'companies are being greedy' narratives.