dan-bailey

Chiang's stuff is fantastic. I'd love to live in a timeline where he writes novels instead of just short stories, but I'll take what I can get. (Big fan of Arrival, too -- even hit the GitHub repo of all the glyphs and got one tattooed.)

Yeah, I have about 5000 of them in the to-read pile. I think I'm suffering from choice paralysis right now, which was why I posted this in the first place.

<I>Poor Charlie's Almanack</I> is sitting in that pile somewhere. I might have to pick it up soon. And speaking of literary, maybe I should get back to that. I try to read 1-2 titles per year in that vein. Camus, maybe?

I can see where Dungeon Crawler could go that way -- I just did the newest Bobiverse book on Audible, and it's just so goddamned repetitive. I'm not sure I can slog through another one. I feel like Dungeon Crawler is doing a really good job of setting up and laying the groundwork for more _meaningful_ conflict in future books. But I'm only on Book 3, so who knows? Ask me again 2 books from now.

I'm not sure how to best/politely say "duh", but that's where my brain went. This is just a re-hash of the thing about American libertarians seeming to think like cats: "if I need it, there will be someone who brings it to me."

You leave my Lego collection out of this.

Thank you. Surprisingly, less than you'd think. She started showing the first signs around 2020 or 2021, so by the time she had a diagnosis in 2023, I had pretty well wrapped my head around it. (Having a regular therapist has helped a bunch, too.). It's still tough, but that's a difficulty that's spread out over years rather than a sudden out-of-nowhere illness.

Man, that makes me happy. I'm guessing your grandmother was a very upbeat, happy person who dealt with change well. My mother's the opposite, so now every little thing going wrong is the end of the world. It's rough, but I also get to see these moments where I can see how she was when I was little/before I was born, and those are moments that I do really enjoy.

Hey! Apple finally cranked out a folding product!

This comes as absolutely no surprise to me -- my mother was recently transferred into memory care, and the changes to her memories are definitely showing some interesting changes. The foremost was that her new "apartment" is shared with one other person, gives off a bit of a dorm room vibe. First day, she was talking about how excited she was to be going back to school and seeing her boyfriends again(?!). I said, "Oh, like Doug? [my dad]". Her response? "Ew. No."

But, she's come around on that, and recently been upset about the affair he's been having (they divorced in 1980), and is irate over him having another kid with his new wife (1983), but isn't surprised that I haven't spoken to him in 12 years. She's never surprised at how I've aged, but doesn't remember her grandkids even exist and insists on meeting them soon (but remembers them when she sees them). Two weeks ago, she called to yell at me for things I did in high school (1990). At this point, I seem to be the anchor for everything recent, but when I'm not around physically, it's scattered everywhere else.

"Sees" doing a lot of heavy lifting in this sentence.

Do they have a variant for visionOS so we can have it flying around in the 3D AR space around us? Because that would be even more awful.

I don't know where my wife got mine, but I'm also on Team Meteorite (inset into a titanium band -- CP titanium so I don't need to worry about it being cut off in an emergency).

I think that the biggest hurdle for older developers right now is getting past the filtering systems that review résumés. I realize this is anecdata, but during the mid-2024 to early-2025 timeframe, this fifty-something developer had a hard time getting to the interview phase, but once I did, getting in was a pretty straightforward deal.

I don't know that it's just the issues surrounding junior-vs.-senior experience. I feel like a lot of what I'm experiencing with talking to kids that are in high school and college, is a lot of what I can best describe as "intellectual ennui" -- a lack of curiosity, an inability to analyze, and a lack of any sort of intellectual pursuits. Again, I'm in my fifties, and I understand that my contact pool with that age group is somewhat limited, so I'm not sure if I'm capable of painting the whole picture.

In this comments section: a deep pool of talented people that make my imposter syndrome go "foom!"...

This is definitely true, and we definitely need something similar again. I've been using a game ("The Farmer Was Replaced") as a jumping-off point for teaching the kids Python, but the more I think about it, the more I think that they need some sort of hardware package similar to an old Apple //e that gives them just enough rope to hang themselves. It was easy, back in the day, to learn a ton (even assembler) on a system like that, and I feel like there's some value in rewinding the clock back to that point, forking the experience from there, and seeing what a new generation of kids will cook up.

Dude, you can still recover some of those friendships. I went through a phase during college where I alienated a TON of my friends, and that was on me. For a variety of reasons we don't need to expound upon here. I eventually reached out to them, made my apologies, and would occasionally check in and see how they were doing. A few of those friendships are repaired and growing again. I think that there's a tendency toward second chance for people who've recognized their shortcomings, worked on them, and then taken responsibility for their actions.

This is beginning to look less and less like a ballroom.

I used to design fonts back in the 90's — I always designed the S first, because if I couldn't get the S to work, there was no fuckin' point.

One of the things that I loved about Paris when I was there a couple of years ago was that everyone on the subway had books out (whether Kindles or paper) -- very few phones in sight.

General Incompetence is at it again. If you've served, you've seen what happens when something contagious like pinkeye or the flu or whatever sweeps through the barracks. It happens fast and it brings whole units grinding to a halt. This is terrible for readiness and shows that Pete Hague-seth is so far out of his depth that it'd be hilarious if it weren't so concerning.

For me, it was accepting that I will never be the smartest guy in the room and never know the most about a topic. I decided to play to the strengths that come from ADHD, and have cultivated broad knowledge, with only a few points of depth. I work with AI/ML, and I transitioned into it from web dev. I make a point to learn what I need when I need it, rather than trying to stuff my head full of stuff that may or may not be relevant. Changed my focus to "be good in the current situation" rather than "be good at everything." Over time, that fosters learning that sticks.

Projects become more stable with time? Since when?

Now those old-timey photo places in every mall in the U.S.? Definitely a money-laundering front.

Oh thank god. I was planning on a 200km, 300km, and 400km this year, all as mental preparation, and then having to blitz next year by traveling to warmer locales. I I'm doing my 200km at the end of April, and my 300km in early July, followed by a 400km gravel in early August. Going to be a grind.

Good luck tomorrow!

When your only tool is a hammer, every problem begins to resemble a nail.

https://danbailey.net -- personal blog https://danbailey.dev -- projects site (just started this, so it's pretty sparse)

Yeah, similar experience when I was in Berlin on vacation in 2023. Had a rail transfer to Amsterdam set for 16:30. Canceled without explanation or warning, and the replacement was: Berlin -> Duisberg, with a 13-minute layover Duisberg -> Viersen, with a 6-minute layover Viersen -> Venlo, with a 7-minute layover Venlo -> Eindhoven, with a 38-minute layover Eindhoven -> Amsterdam

As you can probably guess, this is not at all what happened. Shit started to disintegrate around Viersen, we did some shuffling and waiting for later trains, and wound up in Aachen around midnight. The hotel across from the train station was closed for the night, we weren't going to stay in the nearby hostel after seeing one too many horror movies, and so we walked over a mile to a nearby hotel. Staff was lovely. We got in to a room by 01:00, showered, plugged in all our devices, and passed out around 02:00. Up at 05:00 and back to the train station to catch a ride to Rotterdam (very full train), and then on to Amsterdam. We hit our hotel about 12 hours behind schedule, changed clothes and got on with it.

Germany and France had the worst trains. Italy was insanely efficient/on-time.

Anecdata != data.

That MicroCenter continues to exist tells me that there's at least enough people shopping for parts in meatspace that there's net revenue to be had.

Bicycles are an odd duck where this is concerned -- you go to a department store (no, actually don't) or a bike shop and buy a whole bike as a single assembly. But because there are standards, as others have pointed out re: computers, it's very feasible to just buy all the parts individually and piece together the bike that you want (which is what I do). Honestly, working in a hot (or cold, it is Minnesota, after all) garage, sometimes I question my sanity when I'm assembling these things...but the ability to fine-tune what you want and not be beholden to the standards of some marketing department or the cost-cutting assholes that run private equity funds is quite nice.

Ultimately, I'd love it if there were enough standards out there where I could spec out a car, and have it built up from parts...or just buy a stock one, if that's what I wanted. I feel that way about a lot of products that I interact with -- appliances usually have shitty UX, car software is usually garbage, and I'd love it if I didn't have to rely on DJI for a drone (good luck getting them in the U.S. anymore, anyway).

I think that with any product there's a subset of people who are like, "Eh, good enough," and willing to buy whatever the big manufacturers are pushing, but there's a smaller subset that wants to really dial-in something that fits their needs.

The "reading out loud" method is something I do, too -- learned it while getting my B.A. in Creative Writing -- it's great for helping you understand when a sentence is awkward or too wordy, or when the rhythm of a longer piece of writing is off. Writing is just speech with the benefit of an extra filter. Use the filter.