asark

Biased political commentary's better than armchair political campaign strategy commentary and horserace-style campaign coverage. At least that's about something that might matter. Looking at you, NPR.

Revolutionary Road was released at the tail end of 1962 and has some stuff to say about office work. If it's accurate (I suspect it's pretty close) then it was largely about passing papers around trying to avoid having to actually do anything with them, without it looking like you're trying to avoid doing anything.

Very similar to modern corporate email, sending crap around forever and bringing in more "eyes" trying to avoid making a decision or—god forbid—actually personally doing real work that produces an actual good.

[EDIT] tail end of 1961, actually, got that wrong.

Good lord, don't worry about this BS, it's clearly fine outside the world of fringe complaint-seeking Internet loonies. Or well-attuned trolls, which I'd say is more likely in this case (in which case: well done troll, I mean look at this thread! But then HN's got some of the worst troll defenses around, so, middling victory).

Anywho, unless you're punning with "brought to bare" it should be "brought to bear", as in "bearing", as in the direction of something.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/bring_to_bear

I use Library Genesis for a lot of academic books I definitely wouldn't buy—I need like one chapter or to take some notes, then have little further need for them, and they're usually $50-150 and still expensive or hard to find on the used market, so somewhat out of my worth-purchasing-for-convenience range—but would otherwise have to track them down on interlibrary loan then wait for them to show up.

I dunno, the post's some real n-gate bait.

> Being that my background is in CompSci I tend to think about thinks in terms of probabilities, statistics, game theory, and distributed systems.

Well. OK.

But then a bunch of:

> This would need to be validated experimentally but I suspect that the probability of cooperation (the opposite of defection) would be inversely proportional to the size of the group.

:-|

And the whole post is of about that quality. Fine as a "dear diary" I guess but it's very low-value even as an amateur effort.

"Lots and lots of web developers still use 'bad' 'old' languages and technology."

Garner's advice, to paraphrase—his entry on who/whom is, unsurprisingly, long—amounts to generally understanding and following the rules, but using whichever reads or sounds better if rule-following results in awkwardness, as it certainly sometimes does (he has examples). In this case I'd judge that either works, though the more formal-register the writing the more this use of "who" would stand out.

This being a headline in the Economist—and considering that, apparently, at least some found this use of "who" distracting, while "whom" would have been at least as easy to parse and probably wouldn't have bothered anyone—it's probably fair to call it a small error.

Garner also notes that predictions that "whom" is on its way out are, at this point, part of a long tradition, and do seem to capture the trend but do not yet describe current standard usage outside the fairly informal or colloquial. IOW for the best hope of communicating well at higher-formality registers, especially in writing, do continue (mostly) following the standard rules, in this case, avoiding it only when "correct" use is distracting or strange to a modern reader.

The cherry on top of the cherry is that he was apparently kind of a badass, too, escaping from captivity twice before this battle and then, when the castle was already surrounded by SS troops and under attack:

> ... Lee [US captain, in charge by this point] accepted tennis star Borotra's offer to vault the castle wall and run the gauntlet of SS strongpoints and ambushes to deliver [a message re: their situation, requesting reinforcements]. He succeeded, requested a uniform, then joined the force as it made haste to reach the prison before its defenders fired their last rounds of ammunition.

> But seriously, how did people live before the 80s without all these form of entertainment and useless gadgets ?

They spent $100/mo (inflation adjusted) on bowling lane fees, drinks at the bowling alley, team shirts, bowling shoes, et c, instead of Internet service plus a streaming service or three. Or something similar. Our modern distractions aren't exactly crazy-expensive. They're insanely cheap, really. We can have a big-ass flatscreen—at least one—for the cost of one little color TV they'd have in a 1970s house, and they would have one, with rare exceptions.

> As for child care, health care, retirement and school I'm genuinely sorry for you but you're paying the price of america's vision of capitalism.

Heh, no kidding. It's a pretty crappy deal.

Even if you buy your cars cash, unless you already have that much liquid sitting around you've gotta be saving hundreds every month to prep for the next car and for major repairs to the current car. You're either saving hundreds a month for future car expenses, already have a large savings (so, not these folks), or you're 100% for sure guaranteeing future debt.

[EDIT] which is to say that even without a car payment, you better be saving the equivalent of at least half a car payment a month, or you're probably falling behind.

Some of the general attitude-toward-spending stuff is fine. His specific advice is sometimes iffy, and any anecdotes/figures about his personal situation should be taken with a huge grain of salt. Essentially treat the voice of the blog as a character the writer's creating (as one of his jobs...) and you'll be approaching it with the right frame of mind.

Probably 95+% of all my sent or received Whatsapp messages are for groups. If I don't get most of the people I communicate with to switch to another (the same!) messenger, it's pretty inconvenient.

It doesn't help that, last I checked, the good (open) alternatives were all much jankier or missing one or more major features we use. Makes them hard to sell. :-/

Yeah, Netflix ain't the problem. Even $100 in coffee budget a month ain't the problem, as long as that's not one of several $100/mo unnecessary budget items. Health care, housing somewhere with non-shit schools, child care (when young, or after school care, or summer care), those are the biggies. Food not up in that category but high, even if you spend quite a bit of time cooking yourself and rarely dine out. Utilities next. Clothing somewhere under that unless you just have to buy all your kids' clothes new, and maybe by the time you're that far down the spending ladder you've found an item that's rivaled by "frivolous" spending. Phone bill's probably down around here somewhere, too.

Oh boy, I spend zero on entertainment or other unnecessary stuff so my spending dropped perhaps 5%/mo. Great. I'm only miserable and hate life is all, but great.

I see that sort of thing come up a lot, but is there, like, a blow-by-blow guide out there for how they get to that position without running afoul of the law? Is it something you can only do with expensive tax lawyers and money to throw around for a bunch of temporary maneuvers, or is it something your average freelancer/consultant with an LLC can pull off?

Yup. Rich is when money's just there. Like water on tap. Maybe you'd think twice about running a hose out in the street and turning it on for a week straight, or filling an olympic swimming pool. But if you want a glass to drink, to rinse off a dish, to wash your hands, to run a bath, whatever, all you do is turn a knob and there it is. You don't even think about it.

Shoulda been taxing any extraction of non-renewable resources into a fund like this. The whole country—literally, the physical country—gets poorer when that stuff's taken out. Shame we didn't capture some of that value for public, shared, long-term benefit.

[EDIT] all non-renewables, that is, not just oil. Should easily make up the difference between population and extracted natural resource value vs. Norway.

Editions that actually come with all the content, including the stuff they held back to trickle it out over the next ~3-6mo, usually are more like $80-100 at launch. That seems to be how they've (the game companies) dealt with inflation. But yeah if you game way behind the times and don't do the latest hot multiplayer games, like I do then you rarely pay more than $30 for a game, average probably closer to $15-20 for non-indie games (lower for those, of course).

If I don't want it, and I certainly don't want any more, then it's spam. Doesn't matter if it's showing up because I forgot to unclick a checkbox somewhere and so isn't technically "unsolicited". Ain't no-one got time to help marketers lie to them. Try not sending me stuff I don't want.

Plenty of otherwise-viable business models can't compete with free-but-spying. Hell, open protocols with free implementations aren't having much success. Just not enough incentive to use them, which lowers incentive to work on them, causing a feedback loop that keeps them from improving much.

> Ads are the magic money fountain that give them the power to organize all of human knowledge, a phenomenal resource anyone can tap.

They're not too great at the "all" part. Or the "organize" part, anymore.

It wouldn't be that big a deal. Ad-funded commercial services like Facebook and Twitter would probably just be protocols, if not for all those ad dollars incentivizing moat-creation and jealous user capture. We'd figure something out to replace google—the need's too strong not to. The replacement(s) probably wouldn't make $3,000,000/employee or whatever Google does, though. Which is fine.

Sheer count's not everything. I thought maybe there was some other analysis that'd support the assertions (first thing I did was check that page, which certainly doesn't support them).

I think we're about to find out there's a lot of asymmetry in the ability to use executive power, in that laws put some sort of ceiling (fuzzy, perhaps, but it's there) on the power of the executive branch in various areas, but there's no court-enforced floor on it, for the most part. So it's easy to, say, stop the CFPB from doing anything at all or cripple the EPA, but much harder to push those offices beyond their congressional mandate.

Restraint in this regard, and (especially) Republican willingness to let agencies, laws, and policies they don't like even sort-of work when they're in power, has essentially been due to courtesy or deference to convention. That may be going away.

> George W Bush vastly expanded the use of executive orders. Libs like myself complained about that to no end.

> Then Obama came in and did it even more!

What are you basing that on? How are you arriving at either 1) W expanding the use of executive orders, or 2) Obama doing it even more?

Drug companies only have any kind of exclusivity or advantage at the pleasure of governments. They can't go too long playing hardball or countries will just start ignoring their patents.

Neo4j, at least as of about a year ago, was seriously lacking in constraints and guarantees to use it as a database of record. Performance-wise, it's fundamentally built to perform well at a small set of specific graph operations, while more normal DB operations or even doing graph things plus fairly ordinary data fetching with those graphs was, necessarily, anywhere from so-so to terrible, as far as performance. Looking at how N4j stores its data is enlightening. It's also a huge memory hog (Java, plus leaning hard on cached data in memory to keep performance tolerable due to the aforementioned trade-offs).

Didn't stop N4j's marketing folks from trying to sell it as suitable for basically any purpose. Gotta get that unicorn growth. Very early-MongoDB in that regard. "No, really, it's suitable for whatever you're doing—probably the best for it, in fact! Uh, what is it you're doing, again?"

That one, at least, is best suited to assisting some other, primary DB, for a certain narrow set of tasks.

You can shut off auto-play junk on the menus? Didn't used to be able to. Great news, one of the worst UI features I've ever seen (as in, intended behavior, not a bug).

Now that my kids are old enough to control Netflix, it's awful all around. Needs much better parental controls. I suppose they don't do that because any useful ones would make their preferred metrics drop. Gonna feel good to cancel soon, for that and other reasons.

Ours has definitely ended up playing to an empty room for a good long while, a few times.

Unstoppable play-while-browsing plus the price hikes has me poised to drop it as soon as I finish two shows I'm near the end of. Probably in the next month. Either problem alone wouldn't get me over the "bother to cancel" speedbump, but I dread opening Netflix unless I'm browsing straight to something I already know is on there, these days. If it were still super cheap, whatever, but I can get a couple cheap services for its price now. Out it goes.

I'll just start picking it up a month a year or so to binge whatever I've missed.

Playing-on-the-menu and autoplay-after-episode would keep me from recommending it to older relatives. The last thing they need is their devices doing shit without their telling them to, especially with audio and video involved for extra confusing-the-hell out of them, doubly so when they're trying to direct it to do something (browsing the media selection). Probably direct them to Hulu, I guess, if they asked.