blackbrokkoli

Of my ~600 markdown notes, 85 currently contain the string "news.yco". Some of them may be just feel-good pseudo-procrastination (inspiration for the blog I did not start yet) but others definitely shaped me as a person. A big percentage is relevant material for my main side-project - the note taking app for my note - for which I got the idea and various details from HN. Another is a bunch of good (and less good) books I found here and read.

I don't have a collection of Teslas and some bay area real estate to show for it yet, but it comes down to this: My day-to-day thoughts are massively shaped by the media I consume. I can spend all day contemplating some dumb /r/askreddit question or a novel take on Docker CI/CD I read on HN. I am pretty sure the second one aligns more to whatever the opposite of opportunity cost is. IMO, in the end, being knowledgeable makes you a better dev.

Also, I am practicing my English writing skill, so if I start this blog one day, maybe it will not even suck (and earn me all that tangible money, of course ;) ).

In my opinion, daily (or close to daily) practice is the most important thing.

Other commenters already cover which topics to go for, so I am just going to say this: If you do daily deliberate practice for a year, and whenever you are motivated research something with more depth from time to time...well, you will be somewhat good after doing this 365 times.

A bit shameless plug; I recently coded a small website which presents you with two daily changing images as drawing inspiration, maybe it will help you too: https://www.inspirationbot.art/

Fun anecdote, but what is your larger point?

Do you think the skinheads then went on to join a moderate left party because they could actually read their party program?

At the point where you are already committed to an ideology to the point you drastically alter your appearance, you are hardly going to be deterred by a slightly harder to get book.

On the other hand, I don't see how anyone is going to turn Nazis by reading Mein Kampf. The book is hardly relevant today and a mediocre read at best, so the only ones that will make it to the end are academics, people seeking context or people that are already committed to Nazism anyway.

Why would you not read it?

As you dive deeper into Nazi era history a lot is based around the question who knew what, how plausible the denial of that person or this organisation was. Seeing the publicly distributed book that may or may not contain specific details regarding plans for war or "The Jewish Question" for yourself is an excellent starting point, no? I agree with other commenters here that the read was not particularly good, but definitely insightful.

I actually do not agree that banning symbols is bad: Especially the Nazis really had a hand for designing good looking stuff, and that will bleed into pop culture if you don't stop it, unconsciously associating the Nazis with "cool". Just look at the Hydra organisation in the Captain America Movies or Japanese Anime, where using Nazi design language was obviously not taboo. Of course, as you said, banning a symbol does not eradicate it, but it does not have to to have positive effect.

Maybe in 25 years.

As is, electrical car means new car and new car means an inane amount of software components that break all the time. Just pick any specific model, say, the Tesla S: You can find people being confused how to turn it off, the car not starting due to software updates, the car being hacked, the being bricked by broken software or lacking connectivity, erroneous warnings, the car only driving backwards due to low battery.

The simplest car is something like a 1998 Corolla and given the current trends in automotive, that will stay that way for a long time.

So this may look like I am arguing against you, but I actually have a very similar stance.

Look at it like this:

Nowadays, the ads (and the videos) are targeted. Additionally, the algorithms are - no other way to put it - really fucking dumb and are constantly "overcommitting". E.g., I watched a few episodes of a podcast months ago and my YouTube recommendation has been 98% episodes of the same show since then, because the algo registered I spent a disproportionate amount of watch time for those (who knew, podcast episodes are long). Or look at Amazon grouping every single book I read the untranslated English version of in "International Books" because it determined that English ain't my mother tongue. Now I am constantly getting cultural, cosmopolitan and language learning stuff; because I read Ian Banks and software philosophy books.

I am aggressively ad-blocking, but I imagine ads are quite the same and I am sure you can recite similar experiences. Now based on this shitty, bizarro reality I would say that the fear of an ad bubble heavily overlapping with a content bubble (for absurd reasons) is not irrational. It is weird, it is dumb, and we could probably overcome it, but products would be associated with weird/illegal/controversial niches by...association.

This whole situation is a shit cocktail of misguided KPI's, straight up scams, questionable assumptions (we still don't know whether targeted ads do anything), cancel culture, bad software and US censorship (we can show you two passenger planes colliding and 700 people incinerating but we can't show you the pilot going "motherfucker"). But this specific choice, to aggressively ban to avoid bad association, is actually somewhat rational.

Yeah, if you do it uncontrolled and with the prime motivation of a few people getting rich in the process.

My university in Europe literally costs me a hundred bucks a year, and child care is a similar story (although my country has some problems with providing enough capacity).

Yeah, sure settlement in Bitcoin happens within a few minutes. Getting that converted into usable money is a whole other story, no?

I can basically think of two scenario types when you are in need of international, spontaneous money transfer:

a) "I just got carjacked in Sierra Leone and need some money for an hotel and a flight home"

b) "I have some weird novel business and I would like to pay my contractors in East Timor biweekly"

I cannot image using Bitcoin for either, first one because of the convert-to-money-thing, second one because of the volatility. There is also some kind of - how do you call this - meta-trust that I just don't have in Bitcoin: Go off-grid for two weeks and there is a non trivial chance that some weird shit happened within crypto that is now an obstacle (crash or rally, outlawing, split, ...). That does not happen with US dollars.

I got the feeling that this is yet another incredibly obscure use case that doesn't even really work Bitcoin fanatics (not directed at the quite reasonable parent comment) use to justify their gambling and Lambo-dreams. Just like "it could be the new gold" or "what if the US gov collapses".

But I am certainly no expert in international money transfer by any means, so feel free to change my mind!

While I was reading this rant about erroneous brackets, I was consistently thrown off by the authors wrong styling of links.

That is not even snark, the bold read, weirdly placed lines under links kept pulling my eyes in. Apparently, the author removed the (old-fashioned, but agreed upon) typographical underline for links and replaced it by border-bottom, which starts below the descender of the letters instead of the baseline. That way, they look...misaligned.

Meanwhile, I never considered the brackets in quotes confusing and found them quite helpful at times, especially when reading particularly old English which is weird enough even if correct.

Not sure what the lesson is here, but definitively entertaining.

Yes, and we determined TV to be archaic, rigid and top-down. We tried to build something better. Now we are trying to not become as shitty. That is literally the point.

Does not even have to be that grim/profound.

Ever used your phone in the blazing sun, or rain? Had a partly shattered screen or tried to do something on the stone-age library computer? Searched for something with really slow or shaky connection? Tried to explain where to click via phone?

Suddenly all those accessibility features and "fail gracefully" come in really handy.

mega.nz filled that gap for me.

Gloriously boring, no flashy corporate identity. I give them money and the give me file storage/sync. One or two bugs and questionable UI choices, but it just works and I don't see them doing a pointless chain of redesigns or ads.

Not too unlikely.

After they bought League of Legends, they "updated" several dozen paid skins, some worth significant money apparently without communicating to Riot Games (the company directly in control of LoL, or rather the one who once was) or the player base. The quality of the update was mediocre to laughable.

Reversion/Fixing took month and there was never any apology IIRC.

Also, putting money into an indie game dev vs. putting money into a CRP-controled conglomerate which is silently buying more and more media may or may not be a morally different endeavor for someone.

> This just means their CTO was sloppy, Amazon legal department would have never allowed that tweet.

Sure, but we are not talking about "the intern tweeted something incorrect, gather your pitchforks until they delete it".

We are talking about a prolonged time span where AWS completely abused their massive size and market tower to basically do the legal and PR equivalent of laughing in the face of another company they were using and abusing. Details aside, that is a pretty grim view for the world of software, no?

A lot of comments here are discussing the greater implications of OSS and the like - which is appropriate. But can we take a minute to talk about AWS' specific, egregious behavior?

Blatantly stealing the trademark, not even entering negotiations. Lying on Twitter about being in a partnership with a company when they are not is the kind of behavior I expect from a shady sneakers reseller on Reddit, not AWS. In my book, this is shockingly unprofessional and indicates some serious rot as a company...

Airport security theatre apparently completely collapsed into a bizzaro world where wet streets cause rain and actors behave like they are on strong drugs.

So, we are talking about the area you are in after a flight, yes? Remind me, BBC, why is that a "secure" area? In case people smuggle bombs/weapons on a flight, just do nothing on the flight and than harm people afterwards?! I get that you want the are to be a one-lane-road to the outside, so nobody boards a plane that way. But how is a random passenger who is supposed to be there a danger? Do passengers spoil, like idk, milk, and become dangerous after a certain date? Why and how would anyone detect a passenger overstaying in the post-flight area? Who cares? That is the world most dumb threat model? Why is this a felony? This is the most victimless "crime" I have ever seen. Did the private prison called with a need for more slave labour, or why is this guy in court and not therapy?

"Based upon the need for airports to be absolutely secure so that people feel safe to travel [...]" - you mean the need to implement wide-net surveillance and a massive military under the veil of an imaginary terrorist threat?

Also, why the fuck is the full name and age of this obviously unwell guy printed? So that I can imagine that he is brown based on the last name? This disgusting practice adds zero journalistic value and ensures that this three-month mental health episode will now harm him for the rest of his life.

This is disgusting journalism, disgusting framing and disgusting behaviour from all officials mentioned. It reads like someone badly satirizing Reagan-propaganda. Disgusting.

The text color in comparison to the background partially fails accessibility due to low contrast.

On the other hand, the titles on the overview page are now giant and unnecessarily spaced out, making threads of interest three times harder to find. I can see hard limiting the width on text for longer text (e.g. comments) but on the front page it's unnecessary and contributes to the problem above.

For such an arrogant title it does not hold up - "does not follow every 2021 trend" =! "bad".

There is a long history of EU institutions fining Facebook, Google and the like.

Could the punishment be more swift, more consistent and hurt more? Sure! But they are definitely not turning a blind eye either.

That sounds like a highway towards a system where only the ones who can afford (in terms of time and many) persecution get justice. With a nice dose of second order effects you usually get from a "everybody sues everybody for everything because you may get rich system". Reminds me of a certain "justice" system on the other side of the pond.

The solution to weak law enforcement is to give more power to the law enforcement, not to a selected class of privileged people.

I am sorry that you are downvoted and getting negative responses, you are exactly right.

Beside the implementation problems (non-randomized etc.) and the backer problem (result is self-serving) the study is literally just "we give patients and intricate personal treatment with daily expert interventions" vs "go on live your life". You explain this away with the Hawthorne effect alone.

Really reminds me of the sugar propaganda some decades ago. They used the exact same combination you see embodied in this thread: Anecdata, Appeal to Authority, Appeal to Emotion, Ad Hominem.

Here is a nice poster to illustrate: " Are you making your children pay for your weight problem?" - Sugar Information, Inc. ad [c.1966]https://old.reddit.com/r/PropagandaPosters/comments/db4mmp/a...

In other words, he has very strong motivation to lie, misrepresent and be as polemic and polarizing as possible!

Stop trying to invent a startup for every problem. There are so much more dimensions and ideas to "solve" obesity.

For starters, look at the vast differences between national food cultures and their varying success in battling obesity.

There is healthy food which is tasty and cheap, right now, in abundance. They are societal, regulatory, cultural and individual ways to get people to eat it. On the other hand, we are not even remotely close to understanding nutrition well enough to "re-engineer" a significant portion of the populace's food w/o some serious first and second order consequences.

So, we are finally dismissing "low fat-low weight" because the evidence was always weak and the few actually relevant studies had very questionable backers (sugar industry) and very widely misrepresented to benefit nutrition gurus to sell their books? Good!

Aaaand we are replacing that immediately with a similarly reductionist view (see title) with questionable backed evidence (one study by a start-up, not randomized) easily misrepresented by nutrition gurus (title image of the blog is the author) to sell his two books? Incredible!

We still don't even really understand where the "hungry" feeling comes from, entirely. Nutrition is incredibly complex. It is a function of culture, genetics, neurology, society, healthcare system, medical education, funding, corporate culture, advertising, cognition, organ function, sports, mental health, environment, climate, industry regulations and probably fifty more. It would be nice if at least the scientific community move away from the idea that we just have to find the "10 diet rules to change your life" and then we win - that's as embarrassing as it is prevalent.

If you want people to push to a test branch before master, just set your CI/CD up in a way that enforces this? Build proper infrastructure instead of reinventing the Stasi with more Black Mirror.

This is like counting LOC all over again, but worse. As soon as you introduce a metric, (some) people will do anything to win. Make a clique, cheer each other on an hourly base. Introduce a bunch of typos on the about page, tank the penality, fix each one as a separate bug. My points triple whenever I hit 10 green commits? Brb, setting up a background task that checks whether my commit was green and if so deploys it 9 more times. Good use of dev time and resources!

Who looses? Your silent wizard dev who could not care less about social gratification and (used to) work on the big picture instead of fixing an endless stream of trivial bugs.

I also disagree with the notion that you can/should outsource manager-dev interaction to such a program. If an engine can trivially measure a dev faux pas, it can also just prevent it in the first place. If something unforeseeable goes wrong, you need the "human friction" as you call it. Why? Because you want to actually unroot the root cause (call it 5 Why's or whatever) and not just finger-point someone, and you certainly don't want to tank someone's social score for it.

Please look at a database of engineering/software disasters. People die because engineers are dis-incentivised to speak up, challenge security assumptions or break things. Sometimes that includes testing stuff a whole week w/o pushing anything (which you punish) or breaking something (which you punish).

Sorry - the idea is well presented and your landing page is nice - but IMO this software somewhere between useless and harmful...

Tether aka the guys printing their own partially backed coin to enrich themselves with free Bitcoin, single-handedly increasing the Bitcoin volume to the current record heights in the process?

They are just now disclosing their finances to the feds, you might want to change your sales pitch...

We are agreeing actually.

The group you are describing are the ones who bought the car. The one I am describing are the ones who are holding Tesla shares/options and doing mental gymnastics how Tesla is still undervalued and will moon forever.

It is in Tesla-land.

To keep the meme bubble Musk's created alive and justify the market cap as well as personal buying decisions, it is neccessary to create a conversation where a Tesla is always the default, the "normal".

Thus: A three year old car is "aging", the steering wheel falling off is no reason to complain [0] and buying a two-ton sportscar is the ultimate pro-environment move.

[0] https://preview.redd.it/canfcfr00tw41.jpg?width=551&auto=web...

They did evolve from aquatic lizards IIRC - so presumably, genes coding dominant "hands" could be still there!

Will never work.

You can get stuff like this to work if it's pathetic and emotional enough (9/11 minute of silence, clap for essential workers from your balcony) and if it's low-cost (shutting up for a minute) or no cost (holiday). And that still is highly regional. Even "The West" are not that many people.

Sadly, your proposal checks none of the mark. Don't get me wrong, I don't think it would be bad or anything, but you know, people are people.

That is wrong actually. Organizations are even somewhat defined by having goals or agendas independent of the entire body of people making it up.

That is not neccessarily bad (It would suck if the tax office would entirely redefine itself every couple year) but it is something to be aware of.