bernawil

Anybody ever floated the idea that it's all tax evasion?

Company sells ticket officially at 50, black market clears at 150 off the books.

Were I'm from it's the most popular take. Doesn't have to be done by the company itself, could be just some insiders doing it for their sole profit.

This take is widespread and it's just wrong. Most artists are hired by organizers and just paid a flat fee for performing, the company then selling and promoting the event. Can you imagine what it'd take to organize an international tour otherwise? Some huge names may also run their own operation (Pearl Jam where notorious for this) but still just some of the time, they'll still do some shows in festivals or different countries where they are just hired to perform and not selli ng tickets themselves.

Oh, around 2010 youtube (peak vlogger era) the cool thing to do in monologues was removing pauses between sentences, making a sort of galloping cadence.

People say this but they -mostly- just want to live somewhere wealthier.

Would anybody move from Serbia to USA/Canada if they where equally wealthy? What if Serbia was even wealthier but still more corrupt?

Well, that's way more friction.

Well, there isn't much of invidual every day morality in LOTR basically. It's more of a morality for kings tale.

who is the most moral character? Gandalf. And he is a mouthpiece from the Valar to men.

Who are the most moral people? The elves. They're closest to the Valar and are always good, to the point you can debate whether they have free will or not.

What's the job of a moral ruler? To fight the beasts of Morgoth and men not from the north west, all the people that never got told morality from the Elves in ancient times.

what's the ultimate sin? to challenge God and the Valar, of course. God will sink your continent to the sea and reshape the planet if you dare.

It's a story about a world where God and deities objectively exist and interact with it in visible ways, it makes sense everything turns around being for or against them.

There isn't much of an economy or progress in general, with magic being a thing. The only sin the good guys are allowed is Pride.

Hi there! I'm running every post through several filters with GPT for every category. Like:

1. is it remote? 2. is it remote within some location? 3. tech stack? etc.

and then trying to coalesce some tags together. I'll probably open source the script once it's mature after a couple of months posts :)

yeah, such a silly myth. People have known you can make water safe by boiling since forever. This myth also often dispelled along "they drank it for safety and didn't get very drunk because it was very week beer" like they couldn't just drink more of it until they got as drunk as they wanted.

cottage cheese and ricotta, yes, note the clumpy texture. That's what you get when you heat enough and cook the milk with an acid, it clumps into that typical texture.

But cream cheese is more like yogurt. You put the culture in the milk, add some sugar to feed it, heat it until barely warm and store until it thickens and can be separated from the whey by straining. The process is similar for both, just not sure if they use different cultures.

if you put milk in a pot, heated and added lemon until it separated sounds like you made ricotta, not cream cheese.

Cream cheese is more like yogurt actually (I'm sure I've had some brands that where really just yoghurt with very low water percentage). Maybe the culture they use is different, but I've left homemade greek yogurt straining in the fridge and forgot about it for an extra day and it came out exactly like cream cheese.

Credit came before currency. The oldest civilizations we know of (Sumerians, Babylonians, etc.) traded on credit on the daily to be later settled come harvest. "Okay, I owe the bar for 100 barley beers, it's harvest time and they have to pay their taxes too. I'll pay 100 barley beers in grain to the taxman in their name when I go pay mine."

Sounds like a just-so explanation and something something causation ≠ correlation. Like me saying "Countries that use imperial units are richer than countries that use metric. The inconsistency in the former make their citizens more adaptable from childhood and supercharge their productivity."

haha, oh of course all of this is implicitly prefaced with "In my opinion".

> Also, screen protectors? Last time I saw one was ~1994.

Ugh, I think you're thinking of those tinted glass things you'd hang on old CRT monitors? Never heard of those being called "screen protectors" though. By screen protector I mean replaceable covers for flat screens:

https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256805177079468.html?spm=a2g...

My proposal for the industry: ship screens as glossy and add the matte as an optional screen protector. Note that before around 2010 this was already how they shipped displays: the matte was a plastic layers that you could frequently peel off. Nowadays, most matte displays have the surface finish done right on the polarizer layer.

maybe I wasn't very clear in my point. I'm not saying matte doesn't attenuate glare. I'm saying that it does some, mainly by diffusing it and spreading it around and I personally can't stand any amount of it. It's binary for me: If I get any amount of glare I tilt my screen away until there's none.

Another issue is the nature of the reflection. In a glossy screen, the reflection often is a mirror effect that, at least for me, is easier to ignore. Reflections in matte shine up the surface's tiny individual indentations and that blocks more of the screen under it.

And what about screen protectors? You can make a glossy screen matte with one, but not the other way around.

Matte never made sense at all. I have no idea how matte ever made it into PC monitors. I mean, before lcd screens all screen surfaces where smooth glass. Then came LCD in plastic. Did the early LCD tech necessitate that the outside layer be not as smooth for some reason? Maybe it was just a coincidence that was later cargo-culted? Anyway, there's a reason macbooks, and almost every TV uses a glossy surface.

Their main supposed advantage, that they mitigate glare, is just false. With a glossy screen you get a small point of reflection. Matte attenuates it just a tiny bit, but never enough so that is not bothersome. You can usually tilt/angle your screen to fight glare, but matte makes it harder because the glaring spot is bigger/more diffuse. Also, higher brightness is one of the things that fight glare the most and matte reduce it a lot!

Mobile phones, the devices we carry outside the most and should be most susceptible to glare issues never ever come with matte screens! How is matte even still a thing?

they can definitely enforce a strict time limit by only showing the exercise on a website that starts a countdown and telling you so. I'm okay with that. What I'm not okay with is being ambiguous about this and expecting me to game-theorize the risk-reward ratio of competing with people cheating.

  always do exactly one commit with a commit time of exactly when they sent me the take home

  If they require BS I give them BS

So, that's editing git history to fit a narrative. I'm not judging though! I guess it really depends how bad you want the job after all. But personally I wouldn't even agree to a process like this that ensures cheating is the only way to be competitive. No company that does this is paying nearly enough to make up for the possible reputational damage, and not counting the hazzle.

Or maybe younger/less experienced people feel anxious about competing with everybody in the remote market so they don't even bother and go for the less competitive in-office market.

I once had a recruiter send me the project template in a .zip for the take home with the instructions to take less than 3 hours (the email wasn't timed to start right away either). No server with countdown, no forking from github, just download this zip and then email back in less than 3 hours. I thought to myself: will they check the download time from the share drive (if they even can)? will they just pass me by default for starting one day after the email delivery? Open up the zip. You need to add 6 endpoints, 2 of those are some fairly complex aggregate queries and I had to take a quick refresher on the legacy ORM they were using. For the frontend, bootstrap a react app from scratch and implement 6 flows (some even required you to go beyond the api tasks). They even encourage going above and beyond and adding unit testing and some integration tests for the UI! So then it was obvious the metagame was cheating and you'd be compared against people cheating. Are people sending edited git history? doing it in groups? what was the catch?

I obviously noped out, but am still wondering if they are aware that all the people working there 100% cheated on their take homes.

It's a mid 2000s internet trope that somewhat persists. Back when Ericsson and Nokia where cool the media would make an example of Sweden and Finland.

Every discussion would be a variation on:

- "I want $LIBERTARIAN_POLICY policy"

- "In Sweden, they have $SOCIALIST_POLICY and its better!"

- "That only works because it's small and homogeneous!"

That, or people would motte-and-bailey harder left-wing opinions behind the Sweden motte.

hah, good point. Just wanted to point out that callbacks and async/await are different things, and callbacks are still the preferred way to customize behavior.

what do you mean async/await "replaced callbacks"? Async/await "replaced" Promises, specifically then/catch chaining. Turns out Promises can be syntactically-sugared to imperative try/catch blocks.

It's like the basis of that old meme:

In Soviet Rusia, wheat tames you!

I honestly think it was all just hype, or some sort of FOMO of every reviewer not jumping on the M1 hype-train.

I own a base Macbook Pro 14", 16GB RAM. If anything, it feels like less than 16GB (maybe because the shared video memory or macos bloat) saved by the fast SSD that's inevitably going to fail not too far and turn the laptop into e-waste.

I feel like every single talk point of the early review cycle was a huge exaggeration:

1. battery life just browsing the web is no more than 4/5 hours. Like any other windows laptop.

2. Performance is really nothing special really. Things like maximizing/minimizing a youtube video are choppy and lag for 2/3 seconds.

I mean, it's still the best value in the market for the screen, keyboard, chassis, speakers combo but Apple Silicon is extremely overrated.

As I said, the innovation of the Medieval Knight was "charging full speed ahead with crouched lances". "Charging" cavalry, in that sense, was not a thing before. Byzantine Cataphracts fought like all known cavalry of antiquity: they didn't crash into enemy formations, they slowed down and attacked like infantry trying to maintain formation.

  The cavalry charge became a lost art, because people learned how to counter it

I don't know, mounted knights charging where dominant from the mid 1000s until around Agincourt (1415), that's a long time to find a specific counter. What happened imho, is that armies got big again to the point where the charges wouldn't scale anymore. Armies started resembling more the classical period: the landschneckts, and specially the Spanish Tercios resemble Alexander's armies a lot.

And as for being a lost art, the art was really in the breeding and teaching horses to trample through a formation. I imagine it would have been a useful resource in later periods, it's not as there where no <8k unit battles anymore. It's just that since that wasn't the META for the important battles nobody could justify maintaining such an expensive skill.

The Byzantines where shocked when they first encountered knights in southern Italy in the 1000s. They where crushed by the Normans. Cavalry charging full speed ahead with crouched lances was a huge innovation. The norm since forever was for cavalry to approach orderly at walking pace to stay in formation. Horses really don't want to trample anything. The whole knight charge became kind of lost art later as we can tell from something like Waterloo where the cavalry faced the squares of infantry and the horses just started circling around them refusing to engage as they got shot down.

Military tactics don't necessarily scale. Knights where probably optimal at the 10k-20k army size range, but there wouldn't be able to scale to the size of say Alexandrian battle (47k vs 120k).

I'm from Argentina, even now with 100% inflation YoY I wouldn't call it "hyper-inflationary". We had hyper-inflation in 1989 and that was 79% monthly.

  People in general won't accept doing $1,000 in work and by the time they can spend it only having $700, or worse for example $1.

nobody is quitting their jobs because the currency is losing value. You cash your salary and just buy stocks, bonds, crypto, foreign currency and obviously groceries.

  Most companies I know simply are unwilling to adjust their wages for inflation
  With inflation in the double digits, with real inflation according to previous more accurate methods showing roughly a ~33% loss in value YOY, and the corresponding increase in taxes

yes, some real wisdom here. Here, anybody that's in demand becomes self employed and that brings two benefits: first you can raise your rate as often as you want. Second, your tax rate decreases and gets more predicable for the fiscal year.

of course I'm not talking about pugs. I mean dogs, average dogs, as a model for wild animals our hunter gatherer ancestors might have hunted long time ago.

Again I'm not saying it's "literally" impossible. Just not feasible. Actually, chasing an animal worth hunting to exhaustion sounds more like a feat of strength someone would do as a rite of passage. Something you could do once in a lifetime, rather than a reliable source of food.

my point is, can a human reasonably stay within viewing distance from a dog that is running away from him? the dog can just run at top speed, gain some distance, take a little rest and maintain that distance at a comfortable pace.

I used to believe in the endurance hunting thing until I realized playing with my dog it didn't make sense. They DO get tired, but they take a 1 minute break and it's like they are back square 0.

For the record, I'm in shape and with a pretty light frame (181cm/70kg) and go for 10km/1 hour jogs regularly.