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I get spam newsletters that I never signed up for from my alma mater, the GaTech ChE school. The tiny unsubscribe button 404s! Into the spam bucket it goes.

Without meaning to be critical, but just to expand the conversation a bit, what does the word "beef" mean in your comment?

Let's broaden the scope, and consider lean and fatty versions of say "grass fed beef" vs. "industrial beef".

The word "fatty" here is just a placeholder for "less than 85% lean" ("lean" is problematical, as is "fatty", too). (How those map to "tough" and "tender" is related but of course the skill of the cook now matters too).

I would rank flavor and texture of those 4 choices this way:

freshly slaughtered as grassfed fatty > industrial fatty > grassfed lean > industrial lean.

Now add in "aged for several weeks" or how about a carefully managed 4 weeks (not that hard). The ranking changes slightly, but for all 4 the result is remarkably superior in flavor.

I've recently eaten on a sailing school boat in the Golfo de California slices of a trashier tuna than bluefin caught about 30 minutes before, and it was outstanding. Almost all US grocery stores will sell you a right proper many day aged raw tuna, and they suck. Of course it's correct that you can go to that market in JP and get a counter example.

My kid went through a phase in Middle School where she believed that in order to fit in she had to make sure her grades were not "too good". So she sabotaged herself for a few months. Once we got wind of what was going on there was family uproar for too long, but eventually we got through to her.

So thenceforth she stuck out and was hard to relate to I suppose all the way through high school. No, our family wasn't a crammer family, and she didn't seem too psychologically damaged then or now, working on a food science PhD (why? asks her overly practical father) at UCD.

Fitting in to the giant mode of the mediocre self damaging but socially favored crowd has costs too.

I very carefully read through this issue years ago when Christopher Hitchens came to his aid. Yeah, that Christopher Hitchens, the much later Iraq War II fanatic.

I'm not going to repeat the exercise but at the time it was a teaching moment for me, that anybody can get things wrong. I would not be surprised that he walked back his initial strongly held stance, good for him.

The Ukraine/Russia stuff though is just ridiculous, but he's old. I know (former) world class scientists who are old, and also sadly ridiculous. Terrifying when you yourself are getting old.

I've read most of his books and pretty much bought into a lot of his analysis around "manufacturing consent", corporate power, etc, 35 years ago. I still think it's largely correct .

However, I also waded into the Khmer Rouge business and his words are uncomfortably close to justifying Pol Pot. Complex as that situation was there's really not any excuse for what the Khmer Rouge did.

You can also read his actual words on Ukraine/Russia (easy to find) and see the same tendency there.

At the same time, his analysis on the US and ME wars is more accurate, IMHO.

This seems to be a pit some otherwise excellent minds fall into: one side bad implies opposing sides are somehow good.

This is what I was looking for.

Because I learned this from informal situations in the US something like 30 years ago, it stuck. But, surprise, surprise, the pronunciation was just an approximation, and led me astray.

Mordida it shall be forevermore.

Muchas Gracias.

I would be much obliged if you could say why. I really love to learn these vernacular differences.

Muchas gracias, I am but a beginner still in Mexican Spanish, however my only slightly engaged over the years gringo brain remembers "mordita" instead of "mordida".

google translate says for both: "bite".

I have slightly worried for a long time that nuance will be lost via translate devices, and here we are.

I've driven around a lot of dogs sleeping in the street in Mexico. Everybody else does too, claro que si. Now imagine a child. No one is going to threaten that child.

Assholes exist everywhere in the world but I would walk across an ungoverned street intersection in Mexico sooner than cross your average 2+lanes each fully lighted intersection in the US.

Edit: and so I now add, that that's what it means to bump around with your neighbors, near daily. Humans seem to need the street life of a busy neighborhood with pedestrian traffic toward the local suppliers of the banal things of daily life, before they retain the idea of the sanctity of humans when they are thinking more abstractly.

The contradiction of course is WW1 and WW2, which happened in countries all adhering more or less to these characteristics.

So I dunno. Maybe we're all fucked in the end, and I at least will indulge my family in the residual beauty before the inevitable next societal upheaval.

It doesn't take you 3.

I'm a gringo and have driven all over NW Mexico: BCS/BCN and Sonora. So cities: Guaymas, Nogales, Puerto Peñasco, Mexicali, Tijuana, Ensenada, La Paz, Cabo, etc. With my wife and occasional daughter, we've city-hiked extensively CDMX, Querétaro, Guadalajara, Oaxaca, and by design not the wealthiest areas. Also by design we are happiest when we're the only gringos around, for instance in a restaurant. We all stick out prominently. I hiked across lower middle class Guadalajara and rode the new subway back to the centro and I had nothing but positive interactions the whole way.

In summary every one of these trips has been a positive experience with nary a rotten situation, although one has to be careful on the further reaches of the Metro de la Ciudad de México. Even then, behavior matters, and I've extricated us from a possibly escalatory situation by just acting like a native, no problemo. Even done the early Sunday traffic ticket (in Guaymas) with a few hours cooling our heels at (not in) the police station before la mordita set us free. We were finally brought before el jefe, and had to listen to an impenetrable Sonoran dialect harangue (I couldn't pick out the numbers!). When he paused for a while, I respectfully fanned $150US or so of pesos in front of him, he picks the fine. About $80US. Not rotten though. Rotten is when you find yourself adjacent to near future health issues.

I read various Mexico news sites in Spanish and the facts are if you are a low status Mexicano not living close to a city center it seems occasionally quite gruesome. In the US our family has explored the deepest wildernesses by ourselves all over the country, and never had a problem[1]. In México I wouldn't dare do such a thing. I also wouldn't travel at night outside of the nice areas of city centers.

If you want to learn more about what it's like for the low status Mexicanos working extraordinarly hard to make a living in the rural areas of Mexico, I highly recommend the recent (poorly edited and overly verbose) book "Searching For Modern Mexico". He has a section focusing on the avocado industry situation, which is just awful. My heart goes out to those people.

We're all converging in Tijuana soon to spend a while in Ensenada, including snorkeling south of Ensenada not that far from where those poor surfers had the ultimate rotten experience. => give up the vehicle, walk out.

We love Mexico.

[1] Uh... well there was that one time decades ago when we were hiking on a remote trail in the N. Georgia mountains and we got held up at gunpoint by a bandido in flip flops(!). I gave him the $2 in my wallet and we hiked back out of there pronto!.

None of the US comments are true in the large areas of Georgia and Arizona that I'm familiar with. Sidewalks are very uncommon. One side of street only, if even there. Which is problematic at multilane intersections. Then the kid has to cross twice on each side. I actually managed to get a crossing light installed on my kid's bike route to school by complaining to a city council member. There are traffic jams at every school for drop-off/pick-up. Drive through the quite nice looking housing developments on weekends/holidays and there are zero children out and about. My wife and I think that's very sad.

That said, my kid rode a bike to school from 5-10th grades in Arizona. She was the only kid that did that.

There are about 7 grocery stores within 5 miles of my suburban house. I have never seen anyone walk/bike to any of them. (I look.) If you tried to you would spend quite a bit of time navigating parking/road infrastructure where the drivers clearly believe is their entire right of way.

In Mexico you would think it would be much worse, but it is light years better. Kids take care of getting themselves to school in Paris, from what we have seen.

This idea that "unless universal, the claim false" is... not helpful. As a family in suburban US we did the bike thing. It fucking sucked.

I am unconvinced with this log linear extrapolation argument.

But I've got no strong evidence one way or another: it's an extrapolation.

Why? You proved you're competent to the potential suitor by obtaining an offer. They got some valuable quality candidate interviewing experience which can be difficult to achieve, and you got a rock solid tangible improvement in your work QoL, even if the target ultimately didn't achieve their hopeful hire. Possibly they got some data that (to them) implies they should have offered more money. Win win. I would say a win for all of us because "more money".

EDIT: Grrr! This comment meant for the GP, sorry.

I think there is an unstated underlying assumption in this comment that "higher performing" implies "drop-in transferable technical/social skills" legible to the target interviewing entity. Maybe for software but for wide swaths of actually engineering (double graduate engineers in this family) I doubt that rather strongly.

The default 2 weeks vacation for the decades experienced new hire is a pretty strong tell.

- there is friction for an employee with established systems for dealing with childcare/k-12 school to potentially have to start all over again figuring out those systems.

You could subsume all of these points into "moving house is hard", but the details matter. We moved across the country for a job for the money and even with an empty nest it was dauntingly difficult, the hardest thing we have ever done over 4 decades, and we didn't have to worry about money!

I have done[1] my own taxes most years over the last 4 decades, but only in the last few years has the Federal IRS fixed my errors for me and sent me more money[2] than I expected. Pretty cool.

I moved house from AZ to GA in 2022 and both State revenue departments refunded me more than what I expected from filling out the partial year forms. GA was almost double[3]. The move included a corporate 6 figure relocation package, with all the fraught income tax issues with that. A lot of anxiety... just dissipated.

[1] I download the pdf forms and instructions and just fill them out, and if I have to I print 'em out and mail 'em in.

[2] I try hard to keep refunds to a minimum, certainly less than $1K.

[3] My partner and I puzzled over the GA instructions for quite some time, which are impressively ambiguous. I could make an argument for 3 different scenarios given the instructions, and we decided to go conservative and use the middle strategy. However the refunded amount did not match any of the scenarios I myself calculated!

La Boqueria, La Merced, oh let's see in Paris, Marche Couvert San Quentin, La Libertad in Guadalajara, I could go on and on. What on earth could you do with the stuff you can buy there, but hardly anywhere in the US. I should go out for a drive in my FSD Tesla, and meditate on this question.

(I don't have a Tesla.)

With a kitchen and a washer/dryer?

I have a stayed in hundreds, maybe into thousands of reputable hotels in many countries over 40 years.

It is such a drag when this tired line comes out. 98% of our AirBnB stays have been fantastic, and I have cooked out of many food markets in lots of interesting places. Including Romania. The host interactions, often through side channels, have been quite cool in close to a dozen cases: theatre tickets gratis in Paris, local pointers that are truly local in some places.

But all good things must come to pass, and it seems likely that the enshittification process has terminally afflicted AirBnB. In the future probably we'll be joining the rest of you in our sterile "reputable hotel" rooms, eating out of the adjacent dreary (but sterile!) industrialized corporate food processors (aka "restaurants"), all of which might as well be located in the same interstellar spaceship, no matter where the nominal physical location is claimed to be. A dreary future.

I had this precise MO happen to me in Romania, only I got a "cancellation" message at about midnight the evening before. Plumbing issues. "We have another property that is much better instead."

I am not a trusting soul, especially at midnight, so I just said fuck you Rus, ima get on the line to AirBnB. And amazingly they made us whole, and after a night of interaction between an AirBnB droid, and apparently a couple of unconnected hosts in Bucharest, by 9AM I had another rental, not too bad in fact. This was 2018, does AirBnB still do that?

Also non-US countries' cellular networks for the win, a lot of communication happened the next day while I was on a bus heading toward Bucharest. Almost as good as Mexico in fact. Which is where I'm going next month. However I'm suspicious these days so my next AirBnB I have already stayed with that host before.

Anyway as I was messaging with the AirBnB repair droid all night, the Rus kept coming back and I decided to have some fun, and boy howdy did he get mad. I trolled him intelligently, good and hard, apparently they don't get much pushback. I got to thinking though, maybe not a good idea to troll the scammer hard as I'm about to inject into a city I don't know that well? Spicy!

Sadly AirBnB edited that message thread quite savagely, very annoying when I went back to enjoy the exchange later on.

I just remembered that I had the last minute cancel thing happen to me in Chicago too! Only the host didn't do the divert to the "better" apartment bit, and it was 2 days before, so I was able to find another rental.

I made myself learn modern cmake after using archaic cmake and programming hundreds of lines of cmake functions. Aren't the variable scope semantics kind of fun in an admittedly sadomasochistic way? I'm not particularly competent and I had no problem grossing myself out. I programmed things in cmake that made my ancient advanced perl look like go. However it does all work and your own invented cmake build system is certainly not the most gruesome out there, and there is a lot out there.

Then I tried meson for my own projects, after deciding that cmake was just too ugly and aesthetics matter, to me. For about 3 months I fought the carefully thought out constraints but still liked it. After that the meson design clicked and boy howdy the amount of mental energy I put into my build systems has gone down comfortably close to zero. I adore meson.

Ah I should mention that five years ago or more even I bumped into rough patches in meson but I can say zero in the last few years. Bugs get fixed.

I don't think it implausible though that cmake seems to be getting better for the projects I dive deep into, in an almost meson way. Maybe the days of a project ~/cmake directory containing tens of files and 1000s of lines of bespoke cmake code are dwindling.

Now that I've drunk the meson koolaid, especially about the syntax not being a full programming language, something natively supporting lua, like xmake seems to, makes me wary.

In 1993 or so g++ couldn't do it, but I suspect that all c++ compilers today would. Then why would I need anything else? However the point is that when dealing with proprietary hardware devices you occasionally get a situation where the incantations as "documented" should work, but they don't, and the usual software process diagnostics are silent about it. Some domain specific experienced creativity is required to coax a response to begin finding the illness. Yes you can pay for support and escalate but small shop management sometimes is a bit hesitant to pay for that.

I am very curious how an LLM is supposed to be trained on situations whose context does not exist on the open internet.

I think it would be quite mentally difficult to be successful at writing device drivers (any hardware device, many different fields) if a person had the slightest reservation about debugging. I've got past a lot of blockers by creative trial and error and making it work was the satisfaction driver. I actually enjoy the making things work part. I have had employees who felt the same, one of my jobs was telling management to fuck off while the person worked on the bug, for days without result if need be[1]. The "just writing code" part is how one actually gets to the interesting part where I earn my salary.

I have no idea how an LLM could help with that process.

[1] I successfully found a bug in a CFD solver (not a device driver) in the early days of templated g++ only after 2 weeks of fairly grueling half time work. Missing ampersand in an argument list. Believe it or not I was very happy and doubled down on the code. However! I once fucked up a job situation where my MPI-IO driver failed because I had a very subtle linux RAID hardware bug that I could not find after weeks of effort. I found it later, too late. That truly sucked. I really don't know how LLMs could possibly help with any of this.

Gambusia to the rescue! Might need some cover to reduce the predator problem. Experimenting would be part of the fun.

No problems with Herons? Here in suburban Atlanta I have several different kinds visit our big pond daily, including Great Blue. Fun to watch them fish.

Your pond looks lovely.

"... hardware sales motion meant that you were paying through the teeth for compilers..."

For Fortran? My memory is hazy but at NASA NAS a bunch of us were using gcc/g++ starting ~1990. g++ was... an adventure. Building my own (fine!) compiler for free(!) got me hooked on OSS to the point that when Linux/FreeBSD launched I jumped in as fast as I could.

I really loved my various SGI boxen. Magical times. I was a NASA "manager" so had the Macintosh "manager" interface box that I solved by keeping it turned off.

Thank you for this pointer. I have been studying coroutines off and on for a while and my google/ddg foo is weak and did not find this. Or maybe google/ddg are getting weak. Sadness. I was using David Mazières' tutorial[1] but was still puzzled about the seemingly magical promise_type/coroutine_handle conversions that are nicely explained here.

[1] https://www.scs.stanford.edu/~dm/blog/c++-coroutines.html

This [1] cured me of Girard. Read that and then read the rest of the comments here. Don't worry, it's very well written and quite funny. Also provides an implicit side view of Silicon Valley culture.

[1] https://arcade.stanford.edu/rofl/deceit-desire-and-literatur...

GaTech ChE here, married to a very successful GaTech ChE, been battling the financial efficiency wars for a quite a few decades: never met an engineer who couldn't be bought when the downside was (realistically, short term) job security. You get married to a company and job mobility is very constrained.

Credentials at the top don't mean that the process culture from the neck down isn't rotten.

I quit a cushy, maybe even a galactic set of Gubmint jobs when I was a young whippersnapper because I wanted to go to where the real work was getting done, in the F500 corporate world. Bell Labs, baby.

Hahahahahaha.

Now to in order to multiply a sequence of numbers correctly in a "high performance" shared store, you have external process synchronization. Just awesome. Thank you for the lesson. I had no idea concurrent processing could be so easy.