calmlynarczyk

This is a pretty popular topic this past month, huh?

https://www.construction-physics.com/p/how-the-strategic-pet...

Eh, not nearly as thought-provoking as it thinks it is. The sections about the old Settings app and how making all of the icons gray was an improvement contradict the complaints made about the current versions.

The old single-view Settings app was more mobile-device like with all-or-nothing visual context, whereas the current Settings app with the sidebar and main display pane gives the user immediate understanding of where they are in the settings tree. It takes advantage of the larger display size of a desktop device.

The all-gray icons everywhere mirrors the same monochromatic issues of the current macOS version.

However, seeing all of the OS versions side-by-side made me realize that Catalina's visual design was probably my favorite, combining minimalistic visual flair and functionality while holding onto rich gradients and color palettes that made it easy to scan and find controls and actions.

There's a difference between being unaware of something and actively denying it like the responses in this poll. It's good to also have knowledge of the events you called out, but I bet more people are aware of them than you're giving credit. A lot of Jews are pretty aware that the Nazi Holocaust targeted other groups of people as well, including Romani, Slavs, and the mentally handicapped.

By your logic, as long as a tragic historical event is referenced over and over again, it's ok for lots of people to doubt or play down its significance. Are you understanding of large numbers of people being against any of the recent black civil rights touch-points, since slavery, Jim Crow, and racism against blacks has been _the_ talking point and justification for contentious events in the US for the last 5 years?

It's fascinating that for the last couple of decades, Holocaust denialism was seen by US liberals as this inhuman and inexcusable philosophy. However, now that it's not just the "evil" right-wingers being called out for buying into it, a common and acceptable response has effectively become "eh, what do the Jews expect?" I'm not aligning with either political philosophy, just calling out the hypocrisy.

Your theoretical examples imply that you think the age range called out in this article headline refers to children, when it's actually 18-29 year olds. These are legal adults that responded to this poll, not kids who may not have yet gone through the requisite history classes. Are you really using belief in the Easter Bunny as a "whatabout" argument to hand-wave away the significantly higher rate of Holocaust denialism among this age range?

The Economist did an article about this as well and pointed out that math scores were already sliding downward in the US prior to 2019. They argued that COVID is only partly to blame for the decrease.

https://www.economist.com/international/2023/12/05/the-pande...

It's a really vague ask and the article doesn't explain the specifics of what constitutes "plastic surgery filters." Are you no longer allowed to have pics with those Snapchat-esque glowing faces or big eyes? Is the detection system able to differentiate between a filter and actual plastic surgery? It's also a bit of a can of worms if Meta no longer allows certain modifications to images of people on its platform "for the sake of the children."

Let's not pretend like young people chasing sex and beauty is some brand new concept only concocted in the last 15 years by the evil developers at Facebook.

I can't tell if this is sarcasm or not.

I think that's just being wise by broadening your horizons. You've already gotten the Army's take on this matter from your training.

After a decade of both civilian and Army experience, the one thing I can say the US military teaches better than any other organization is how to lead people. It has its share of leaders that fail upwards just like anywhere else, but on average the people in upper levels got there primarily on meritocracy. Your Soldiers are a big part of that, as they can actively prop you up if you do them right or bring you down should you fail them.

My napkin theory is that any profession which has a known risk of serious injury or death requires more competent leadership abilities in order to align an organization in the direction you want or need it to go (everything I've said here probably applies for first-responders as well). The fear and stress that comes with these kinds of jobs requires a certain finesse and connection from leaders with subordinates in order to convince them to put themselves in harms way for the sake of the "mission."

Since getting into weed, it's surprised me how little the anxiety-inducing effects of psychedelics are brought up. I tried smoking non-medicinal weed for the first time recently and was not prepared for the massive panic attack that I had when taking what would be considered a typical dose of THC (10mg). Psychedelics cause a very different kind of loss of control from what you get on alcohol that my mind just does not seem capable of handling.

I've probed other people about the anxiety and fear I experienced, and have since learned that it's actually a fairly common feeling that even experienced users get. However, it's just considered part of the trip and requires experience to understand how to manage it. I wish I could reach a tolerance level that would allow me to have a more reliably enjoyable psychedelic experience, because I feel like I'm missing out on something that so many others seem to get positive results from.

Psychopathy is a hell of a drug

In theory, the idea of distributed, or at least decentralized online communities is something I like and want to see a return to. However, I think the folks championing this stuff need to set more realistic expectations.

Anyone whose spent awhile in a hobbyist forum or IRC network has likely experienced that they're just as, if not more prone to moderator drama than even Reddit. Wait until an admin rage-deletes a whole instance over an argument with someone or one community brigades/DOS's another and then you'll get to see the dark side of the "good ol'" community-run forum days.

Seeing the original site design, which is considered "superior" by its users to the new one, makes me feel very out-of-touch with what many others consider good user experience design.

I find the original design hard to use. The post text is very small. There is no max width to the main content, which makes it difficult to keep track of where you are when text spans multiple lines. The links are on the far-side of the page from the posts/comments they relate to, without any horizontal spacing indicators, so it's very difficult to tell what lines up with what.

The only thing I like less in the redesign is that the sidebar sections are intermixed with banner ads, which makes them hard to find and get to. But overall, I found the new design a big improvement to the old one, which judging by the responses to this and the linked post, puts me in a small minority.

I think the more click-baitey aspect of the article title is that they didn't specify that this occurred 60–80 years ago; it's phrased as if this test recently happened. The US defense agencies today sure aren't perfect, but they certainly aren't this reckless anymore. The fear during the first few decades of the Cold War instigated a lot of poor moral decisions by the US Government that can't just be extrapolated to the organization today.

Spreadsheets get a bad rap, particularly from software developers. However, even as a dev myself, I've always found them to be surprisingly powerful and a great tool for people who can bridge their gap in coding skills using formulas to build data-driven declarative capabilities. It might not be as powerful or performant as SQL or Pandas, but it's rather impressive given that you can do it off-the-shelf within a widely-used application.

I've seen non-technical people build some really cool things off of the back of spreadsheet data using things like AppSheet and Google Looker Studio (not sure why they changed the name from Data Studio). And now with Excel adding a ChatGPT formula and Google Sheets adding their own AI-driven features, power and non-power users alike will be able to really up their capabilities using only plain-language queries without having to devise complex algorithms or formulas (I realize ChatGPT isn't flawless yet).

We're under the FDIC threshold in our account at the moment, so we are just riding it out expecting to get fully recouped in case of bank insolvency. We're looking into additional lines of credit for the short-term in case we're locked out of our funds for an excessive length of time.

It sounds like it's too late to withdraw anyways, so all their customers can do at this point is exercise an emergency plan and line up options for short-term liquidity.

In 1,000 years humanity is going to look back on everyone alive today and think we are all backwards monsters for our conservative acceptance of the 40-hour work week, mistreatment of Earth's ecosystem, factory farming of animals, and society's dismissal of people who want to legally marry their computers.

"The vegans didn't take up arms against the oppressors? Silence is violence!"

Everyone's a critic.

One of the pieces of advice I received from the founder of a startup I once worked for is that you don't give out C-level titles at a young company other than what is legally required (i.e. a CEO). The reason is that when you likely get acquired there isn't a massive shock for those C-level employees since they're almost certainly not getting a C-suite position at the acquiring organization.

Instead, all of the startup execs had VP titles. When we got acquired by a large corporation, many of them went down to Senior Manager titles, a few being able to get Director titles. I suppose a cynic might argue this is actually about the ego of the startup CEO, but after seeing it in action I believe it was good advice and have used it in my own startup.

If anything, this article was damning of Mastodon's outlook because it admits up front that joining an instance with a large user count has all of the same issues as Twitter with more drawbacks in the UX. As soon as Mastodon gains the level of traction that Twitter has, it's just going to have all of the same problems as Twitter with the only out being to spin up new instances. Why bother investing your time in it unless you're at the forefront of the gold rush?

It's basically the same story as Reddit where once subs get popular, they become a shell of their former selves. Or crypto, where the hype outpaces the utility and turns it into a speculative asset for a future that will never meet expectations.

That's why the BLS provides data for broken-down categories that make up the overall CPI calculation. Groceries saw a 12.4% increase in prices from a year ago, with dairy products at 15.5%. Restaurant food is up 8.6% for the year. And since you don't provide a reference point for when your anecdotal price data was taken, there's no way to say if it's in line with the official CPI data.

If you follow the official data 3 years back to pre-COVID/loose(r) fiscal policy in October 2019, then restaurant food prices are up 18.8% according to BLS, which is right in line with the Dollar Menu datapoint you provided.

How long ago was that a thing? I got in in the 2000s and there was only a single email system for the entire Army. 10 years ago they moved the whole DoD to DEE.

I don't know the best way society can better integrate the knowledge and viewpoints of domain experts into public policy. On one hand, the approach put forth in the article is to speak more candidly and humbly to the public about the decisions proposed by experts. I believe that's a rather idealistic view on how the general population handles this stuff. Plenty of knowledgeable people do speak in plain, straightforward terms about their ideas and proposals, often in less "look at me" outlets, but you don't hear about them because that tone just doesn't capture attention. Instead, all we're left with is the "politician-bureaucrats" who have the knack for selling their message, even if it's watered down for broad consumption.

I do agree that treating science like religion (or at least something akin to the Catholic Church's religious structure) is bad all around. Enough people can see through the veil and call out inconsistencies either in research or in the academic process when it deviates from arguing purely on the merits evidence.

Honestly, with the high availability of information via channels like the internet, I have little sympathy for people who rely on filters such as media outlets to aggregate experts' ideas down to them. It's easier than ever to find and process primary sources, yet we're still arguing about how certain middle[wo]men of information twist and spin news. I just don't think any system that humans try to concoct for disseminating information and knowledge will ever beat simply putting in the time and effort to read and analyze that knowledge at the source, including the energy needed to learn how to process information. Even if a topic is deemed incredibly important by others, I personally try not to form any strong opinions on it until I can verify as much information as feasible about it. I realize asking that of every other human is as idealistic though as what I first called out in the article.

It really begs the question "what is a company?" if one can shift between such disparate markets. Surely mission doesn't define a company then. Perhaps ability to accumulate capital for a means?

I work at a global corporation with 50,000 employees. Even though I've never been at Google I felt every pain point this video was getting at because our company is trying to implement all of this stuff right now.

"Oh you want to go to production? Here's a list from A-XX stating what you need to accomplish that." Thing is I thought they actually handled this gracefully when I started because lots of requirements were tiered with various criteria you had to meet to move up (mostly for brownie points).

But then one day the Tech Execs lose their minds and decide "everything needs to meet all criteria for every single process." You want to create an S3 bucket to store data? That will be a week of submitting paperwork and another month of meetings and approvals from various teams you've never heard of. Plus you have to register your schema, implement data quality checks, unit tests, regression tests, get a PR and CO approved for your central config change, remediate any CVEs in the tooling that you used, and build all of this using our in-house CI/CD platform we created because we're just soooo special. Now you're allowed to launch. Oh wait, NO because we've put the entire corporation on hold from launching new systems for the last calendar year because we're still trying to agree on the final process everyone needs to follow to go to production.

It's surreal how universally so many orgs makes the same mistake of trying to throw more and more process at problems.

I'm not saying it can't be done cheaper or more efficiently on simpler providers or even self-hosting, but you need the expertise and time to stand up the foundation of a secure platform yourself then. For example, AWS Secrets Manager is just there and ready to code against, as opposed to standing up a Vault service and working through all of the configuration oddities before you can even start integrating secrets management into an application. If you already have a configuration-in-a-box that you can scale up, then more power to you.

Your use-case of running a web service that is written in a very efficient language like C++ is not something you see too much these days. While it would be nice if most devs could pump out services built on performant tech stacks, our industry isn't doing things that way for a reason. Even high-prestige companies with loads of talented engineers only build select parts of their systems using low-level languages.

> May I ask how you dealt with this? Were you able to explain it to Amazon support and get some of these charges forgiven? Also, how would you recommend monitoring for this type of issue with Lambda?

AWS support caught it before we did, so they did something on their end to throttle the Lambda invocations. We asked for billing forgiveness from them; last I heard that negotiation was still ongoing over a year after it occurred.

Part of the problem was we had temporarily disabled our billing alarms at the time for some reason, which caused our team to miss this spike. We've enabled alerts on both billing and Lambda invocation counts to see if either go outside of normal thresholds. It still doesn't hard-stop this from occurring again, but we at least get proactively notified about it before it gets as bad as it did. I don't think we've ever found a solution to cut off resource usage if something like this is detected.

This is more just "missed optimization opportunities in EC2" than a statement about mistakes in AWS as a whole.

If you want to talk systemic AWS mistakes you can make, we accidentally created an infinite event loop between two Lambdas. Racked up a several-hundred-thousand dollar bill in a couple of hours. You can accidentally create this issue across lots of different AWS services if you don't verify you haven't created any loops between resources and don't configure scaling limitations where available. "Infinite" scaling is great until you do it when you didn't mean to.

That being said, I think AWS (can't speak for other big providers) does offer a lot of value compared to bare-metal and self-hosting. Their paradigms for things like VPCs, load balancing, and permissions management are something you end up recreating in most every project anyways, so might as well railroad that configuration process. I've experienced how painful companies that tried to run their own infrastructure made things like DB backups and upgrades that it would be hard to go back to a non-managed DB service like RDS for anything other than a personal project.

After so many years using AWS at work, I'd never consider anything besides Fargate or Lambda for compute solutions, except maybe Batch if you can't fit scheduled processes into Lambda's time/resource limitations. If you're just going to run VMs on EC2, you're better off with other providers that focus on simple VM hosting.

Cool, now those with the means can manipulate securities with bot farms.

I'm in a similar situation right now where I am unable to create an Instagram account. I deleted my Facebook and Instagram accounts nearly a decade ago. Recently, I've been searching for artists to commission for work, but everyone uses Insta for their portfolios now instead of an openly accessible website. Browsing Insta without an account is a PITA because you constantly get blocked from content until you log in. So I caved and tried creating an account.

Go to the registration screen, enter all of my info, and submit. Get a weird error message along the lines of "your information is incorrect; please enter your phone number to verify your info." Enter my phone number; "your information is incorrect." Get booted back to the login screen. Try to log in using the credentials I just entered and get an invalid email address message. Try to create an account again with that email; "that email address can not be used to create an account."

So I tried two more times, first registering with all the correct personal info and a different email address. Same result. Try again with yet another email address that I have never used to sign up for an account, this time entering random personal information, using a different web browser, and connecting to the hotspot on my phone instead of my wifi. Still the same result. Ask my significant other to log in on my browser with her account; works just fine.

Funny, why do they claim to know my personal information better than me? How would they even know all of that information? I don't know what criteria they are using to decide that I am not a valid person and therefore not allowed to sign up for their service. The only option I have left is to create a new email address and try registering an account using it and some fake identity.

We will see if that actually happens or if that was all just a show to make them sound like the scrappy underdog for the people.

I’m a moderate and I already get lumped in as a “Nazi sympathizer” by people in my work and social circles. I know people like me are next to get targeted with this shit.

Folks are content to throw around big words like “treason” and “Nazi” in these situations without any in-depth explanation. They should realize as soon as they don’t toe the narrative of the mainstream those same tactics will get used against them. You would have thought we learned this lesson from McCarthyism.