compscistd

Remote VS Code via SSH works absolutely fantastically everywhere with the one exception being the Pi Zero which is a shame.

A lot of these gripes seem to be aimed at either poor imitations of well designed and implemented marketing pages or just straight up poor designs. From my experience as a front ender, I want to make the user experience as welcoming as possible instead of replacing native scrolling, stolen keyboard shortcuts, etc. It’s a designer that tries to impose their mock-up on browser defaults and only with front end pushback do we get a mediocre middle ground.

There are certainly poor front-end led sites but I think that can go away quickly after some experience in the field. Design is largely shielded from that if they stay in the land of Sketch or Figma instead of interacting with the real web.

This problem is as old as time: even in print, it takes experience and planning to visualize a digital composite as a physical object that lives up to your expectations.

I think MOOCs are great for the thing you've been sorta kinda interested in but didn't know where to start. Around the 0%-20% background-info ballpark. For me, my most successful MOOCs have been:

- CS50 at they very beginning of my career ~2015 that brought me to the fundamentals of CS and all that it can do in a very fun way.

- Jazz Appreciation from UTAustin (https://www.edx.org/course/jazz-appreciation-3). I lived near a Jazz club and I often heard snippets of performances while walking by, but I felt like I needed a music background to really appreciate what I was hearing. I randomly spotted this course and I learned which eras of Jazz I like best, common themes in music, common instrument combinations, and the final project encouraged me to go listen to Jazz myself. It's become a fun part of my life in a way that a short YouTube intro or just walking into the club wouldn't have been able to inspire. Part of that was likely the predefined path it offered and Jeffrey Helmer's enthusiasm for teaching the course.

Ultimately, MOOCs can very well be a way to procrastinate on a professional or personal level from just diving into the thing you already have the basics for. But it can just as easily be a way to open you up to something you never thought was in your wheelhouse in a structured path. Blog posts, documentation, and most YouTube videos are too static to serve an absolute beginner that needs questions answered early, consistently, and frequently.

There's a concerning alert on Glassdoor about your company taking legal action against reviewers or Glassdoor itself. Care to comment on that? I hope that's not indicative of company culture.

Because someone on the inside opened the door and let them in, it’s not “storming”? Those Twitter comments are all suggesting this was a setup, but the more likely scenario is that most of those that should be serving as police either were sympathetic to today’s right wing rhetoric or weren’t prepared for a mess of people. What were they supposed to do at the point of this video? Pull out their guns and escalate the situation?

People died anyway.

A classmate of mine in HS always played with his TI in class and I had a similar calculator (TI-84 plus silver edition). I asked him what he was doing and he introduced me to basic logical operators to make math class easier. That’s how it all began for me.

Will, if you’re reading this, I owe you my career!

Heads up: the Heroku Dyno seems to be down for the Tom Hanks Covid-19 challenge.

I refuse to read something from authors that don't have track records of finishing series after reading Rothfuss and Martin. The way GoT was handled should be a good indicator for TV studios that authors who can't deliver a complete story can't deliver a complete TV series. I already lost clout from my friends for recommending anything written by them when expected sequels haven't materialized in almost a decade.

On the other hand, Sanderson's Stormlight Archives made me actually like the genre again.

> In the early days of despair, I looked at Spotify and decided that everything sounded bad. All songs were boring, and I was sick of everything. What that really meant was I was sick of myself.

Wow, what a concise way to articulate an experience I've felt this year. Overall, this piece is dripping in a kind of self-flagellation specific to our year 2020.

I regret not jumping on this offer (expired two days ago)

I didn’t know a thing about state machines and lately would deprioritize your xstate frontendmasters course on my learning queue just out of ignorance. For whatever reason, I just watched your React Rally video and I can think of a bunch of projects where state machines would help get the UI in order! A “legacy” ui we have (much older than a week) has these state flags (and then some):

IsConfirmed IsSent IsSentAndConfirmed IsDraft IsLoading IsInTheEther IsError IsNaN

I want to rewind the clock for a redo on that mega component but I suppose refactoring will have to do. Again, thank you for that great talk!

Rarely have I see ROT13 in the wild. A surprisingly sipid and not at all nocuous way of earthing spoilers.

I disagree with your metaphor. Apple is less like a cigarette company making nicotine patches and more like a pharmacy selling cigarettes with warnings on the labels _and_ offering store-brand nicotine patches. A related note: it was only recently that CVS stopped selling cigarettes.

Does that distinction make Apple less ethically problematic? Heck yeah. And I imagine many people, myself included, are okay with where it lies on the gray line.

I use the native Apple Shortcuts app to get my health data from my watch (calories burned, steps, etc.) and send it to my personal db for a dashboard

I'm building a color palette now for a hobby site. The MaterialUI color guide matches this writeup pretty well.

An additional guide that I would love to see: how to make a complementary dark mode (or light mode) palette that still holds on to your app's existing color brand.

But what number would you like to see on a one liner bullet point to indicate “scale, scope, and complexity”?

I prefer the joy of using a great lightweight cordless vacuum over having a robot vacuum. Vacuuming has been one of the household chores that was delegated to me as a kid growing up, and the difference compared to extremely heavy corded vacuums makes the experience feel like house magic.

She didn’t have access to them because they weren’t made available by the professor, but instead, by past students.

Yep, it was the official Indian student group registered on campus. Nothing wrong with the association itself, but a large subset of it were Bio majors so I’d imagine that’s how many were involved.

Highly anecdotal, but my ex at the time (white), bio major, had a real tough time studying for midterms and finals in undergrad. Meanwhile, my cousin (Indian) in the same class was breezing through the exams, partying more than me (a liberal arts major!), generally screwing around and somehow consistently ended up with a better score. My ex couldn’t parse this and just assumed my cousin was smarter or more qualified academically. An understatement to say that she second-guessed if she was qualified to be in medicine.

Years later, my cousin laughingly confided in me that he had access to all the old exams that were just questions shuffled around through the years. He got them through his campus Indian student group. I confirmed this with some other people I knew in that group, all of who treated it like common knowledge. Changed the way I saw and interacted with people I’ve known my whole life. Certainly changed the way my ex felt about those haunting exam scores.

My personal take? Residencies have n spots. The people qualified to succeed in those spots is n * y (where y > 2). It may be that people who cheat to get into a residency were qualified to do the job, but it doesn’t mean they deserved to be there. This can be true in a lot of other positions that require the applicant to jump through different hoops.

Ha, that's a pretty good point! I doubt contributors will see good PRs as spam, even if it does have to be sifted through a puddle of nonsense.

I've been a developer for 5 years. One of my 2020 goals, aided by being stuck at home because of a certain pandemic, is to make the leap to being a contributor in an open source project I care about.

One of my coworkers shared Hacktoberfest details and I got really fired up! I looked through repositories I could reasonably contribute bug fixes or light features to. Got myself familiar with the codebases, PR process, Hacktoberfest guidelines (that are very clear about spammy contributions).

Then reading this and seeing some of the bogus contributions myself (some by contributors who coincidentally share my name!), I don't know how to feel about this. Maybe keep up my laziness streak and punt my contributions to November (and reward myself with nerdy apparel!)? Or take this as a fun opportunity to redeem my name?

I think this is an area where instead of optimizing local hardware, it's all about optimizing network connections. Stadia works great for me for 10-20 minutes until I get a 10 second long stutter (WiFi, router in a different room). I'd imagine the experience is way better with an ethernet connection. I just wish for single player games, Stadia cloud could detect I'm lagging and pause the game.

Certainly, there's middle ground (concessions) in several issues like tax rates, zoning, visa policy.

Rights-based positions, on the other hand, are no-compromise by their premise. They're binary issues. "Women/BlackPeople/Felons/OtherGroup should be allowed to vote." "Women/BlackPeople/Felons/OtherGroup should not be allowed to vote." Sometimes you have what looks like a concession in these issues but it's really just one side masquerading like a concession. Example: voter disenfranchisement disguised as implementing voter literacy tests or "you must pay your court debt". Straight up abortion denial disguised as good faith "limitations" (limit after x weeks, insurance requirements, clinic closings, heartbeat, sleep on the issue, fake clinics, etc.).

The policy that follows isn't the thing that most people find appalling. It's the premise. You're absolutely right that we should be focused on policy, but only if people are on board with the premise. Check out the top ranked articles shared on Facebook and you'll agree.

If you take your comment and apply it to moments that sparked huge civil rights changes, I don't think minority groups would have gotten this far. It's the "no compromises" attitude that leads to great social change. Not half measures.

Edit: On further thought, it's arguable that segregation was the "middle ground" between slavery and equal rights. The middle ground just doesn't sound too appealing when it comes to equal rights. Minorities are right to instinctively distrust invitations towards "compromise".

I know it doesn't mean much, but I filled out a plea to both my Republican senators and Mitch McConnell's contact forms to respect the McConnell / Merrick Garland precedent in 2016. Obviously they've explicitly said they wouldn't, but it doesn't hurt to try.

They tease it through the text editor environments screenshotted in the Nova page!

I was in a similar boat. I eventually said sure why not, might actually be great!, sold my house, and moved back in with them. A month later and now I live with my sibling because I hit my breaking point.

In an era of rampant misinformation feeding reality-denial, I think our collective willingness to respond to global catastrophe is worse off today than a hundred years ago. The US response to the coronavirus epidemic is a great example of this.

You hear it time and time again: people who have personally felt the loss of loved ones to pandemic or wildfire or flood still deny the cause. I fully expect 50% of the (surviving) public to point out that "some scientists disagree" on the cause of global climate change while we slowly perish in a Water World dystopia.

Ha! I was wondering what the point of Memoji were... it’s to copy our facial expressions or get us more used to animated faces to warm up to Memoji instructors!

I tend to pass out easily from strenuous cardio exercise (I’m bad at knowing my limits when it comes to cardio. Just about passed out ten minutes ago because I pushed too hard on a treadmill/rower cycle. This is why I prefer gradual, predictable weightlifting, a challenge during the pandemic but that’s it’s own story).

Having metrics like heart rate, calories burned, and time remaining would show me clearly where my body is in addition to how I physically feel on screen which could be a huge help for me. Add factors like sleep tracking and I have an even better idea of how much I can push myself before I workout.

Unrelated with this announcement: there’s a lot of value to an Apple One bundle now (Apple TV, Music, Arcade, Fitness, News) but I have too much brand loyalty to Spotify to switch to Apple Music and feel like I would hurt publishers by using Apple News instead of keeping my individual news subscriptions.

On the other hand, if they offered free 2-day shipping with Apple Pay for Apple One subscribers at a bunch of premium retailers and bump up the price, you’ve got the first competitor to Amazon Prime.