fcbrooklyn

They talk about Concrete City as if it's satire, but when I read the title, I assumed it would have something to do with Concrete, Washington. A real place, named after the substance, and immortalized in This Boy's Life, by Tobias Wolff.

They're delicious, but you have to like game. Kind of like a really strong tasting duck, but hard to describe. Maybe a cross between duck breast and liver?

That said, they should probably slow down on the hunting until they've worked out what's going on.

There was a video a few years ago that explained how this works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r_1T2_l43Xo

I can't listen to anything with words I understand. Podcasts would be ridiculous.

I had trouble with flying, especially taking off, and my strategy for dealing with it was to buy a thriller of some sort at the airport, and start reading it prior to getting on the plane. Books by people like Tom Clancy, John Grisham, or Daniel Silva, are cunningly designed to be hard to stop reading, so as long as I have ten minutes or so before takeoff, I could usually get to a place where I was thoroughly absorbed in the book. One side effect is that I have read an embarrassing number of really cheesy books, but hey, it worked.

They sure did. I used to have three numbers of black car services on my phone, and if I couldn't get a cab, which was common in my neighborhood, and I needed a ride badly enough to pay 2-3x what a yellow would cost, I'd call those numbers one by one, until one of 'em had a driver available. If I was in manhattan, I'd pretty much never call a car, because it was easier to street hail a yellow, usually.

The medallions are auctioned. The city is one of many sellers in the auctions, as I understand it.

Because the city sold them on the basis that they offered an exclusive right to pick up street hails in manhattan. Uber, et al, have essentially eliminated that exclusivity.

Haha, that's a good one. I had a guy take his seatbelt off, and try to tell me that the dinging I was hearing was an alarm about oil pressure. The only sympathy I have for the yellow cabs is that the city screwed them with those pricey medallions, the city should refund a substantial portion of the money.

It won't harm the insurance companies, as it'll be a level playing field, and they'll all have to simply quote new rates that work out for them given the new data they're allowed to consider. The parties harmed will be, on average, women, whose rates will go up, and the beneficiaries will be, on average, men, especially young men, whose rates will come down.

I wonder if they'll be allowed to order a pizza.

If you haven't read Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari, you'd probably dig it. He makes a very good case that storytelling is a cornerstone of the evolution of society as we know it.

That's actually exactly how insurance works. You place a bet against yourself, and you hope not to lose, but if you do lose, at least you win the bet.

This is such a common issue in NYC that we have a business (the couch doctor) that does nothing but take apart furniture and reassemble it in place. Friend of mine used them and they were apparently really impressive (he told them what sofa he had, the dimensions of his door, and they knew right away it wouldn't be a problem)

It's a pain to reach. And now that I have an escape key, no need.

nope.

I wouldn't say I'm so fixated on the escape key that nothing else matters. The base OS matters a great deal! I pursued three lines at this particular fork in the road, I considered buying a 2016 MBP, a refurb or whatever, I considered switching to unix on whatever hardware (leant toward dell XPS), and I considered a windows box, with unix living underneath, somehow. The first option just seemed crazy to me, perhaps irrationally, but making my new machine a two year old machine just felt wrong, the second option could have mostly worked, except that I really need excel, and I really want ableton. I decided to give the third option a try, thanks to the money back guarantee, and I'm amazed at the improvement.

I suffered the temporary pain of switching to OSX in '06 because I'm not religious about these things, and at that time macbooks running OSX were providing an exceptional environment for devs like me. It was a hard transition, but after a couple of months I was (mostly) fine. A fair amount has changed in the world in 12 years, and I'm no longer convinced that OSX inherently provides the best environment for a dev. I figured give windows a shot and see how it goes. It took me 24 hours to get the machine in a state where I could work as before (this would have been impossible on a windows box in 2006), and the question now becomes, why would I go back? It's only been a week, so perhaps windows will show me why very soon, but my gut feeling is it won't.

Also worth considering, is that from about 2000 onwards, apple was catering to open source focussed devs, at the exact moment that microsoft was making their lives impossible. I think that trend may have been reversed. Every upgrade to OSX for the past six years or so has represented more pain than pleasure for me. YMMV, but microsoft's offerings, even when flawed seem to be headed in the right direction.

As far as the comment, yeah, I was a little snarky I suppose, but a common response to complaints about the lack of an escape key is "you don't actually need one". I'm sorry, but I do. Ok, I don't need one. but I really want one, and this is a laptop we're talking about, and I use it as a laptop most of the time. I also want ports, a headphone jack, etc. But the escape key is for me the last straw, and enough of an incentive to actually look on the other side of the fence, which I've avoided doing for 12 years. I like what I see there.

I hear you. The little annoyances are far outweighed by the positives. Even the display seems crisper which I didn't expect over a retina display. WSL is not amazing performance, but it's probably about the same (the machine itself is faster, phoenix under WSL is not. Perhaps that's the perf issue at play)

Just tried it in cmd, powershell, and cmder, and it worked in all three. Don't have putty.

Heh... the current plan is to hold onto it as a backup (in case windows decides to rise up and ruin me in a couple months) and just use it with an external kb.

Sadly I already remap caps-lock to ctrl. Don't worry though, this SB2 is so nice I'm no longer feeling any pain. Literally my only complaint about it so far is that the headphone jack is in the wrong place (it's on the edge of the screen in the upper right, which is sort of an odd place for a wire to be coming out. It should be on the lower edge either left or right.)

Escape key is non negotiable. Sorry, you won't change my mind on that point.

I was considering the XPS series myself. Heard great things about it. Are you running windows or unix?

Yeah, I looked at the pros too. I don't think they were powerful enough for me, and I went with the SB2 instead.

I was a windows guy for many years before switching to OSX in 2006 (I actually worked for microsoft in the early 90's, but we all hated windows as much as the rest of the world, maybe moreso, because we had to develop on weekly builds). Therefore I have seen windows suck in a wide variety of ways, hence my desire to try it for 30 days and return it if needs be. In all my years in the windows world. I've never seen an app use anything other than ctrl-c/ctrl-v for copy paste (ok, I think you used to be able to do ctrl-ins, shift-ins, but that was optional), but the rest of your experiences sound quite plausible. I haven't run into any of them.

Also, I don't have to restart my wifi 5 times a day anymore, which is kind of a nice win.

EDIT: Oops, I thought these were complaints about windows (highly plausible!). actually it's unix under windows. Apologies.

For awhile the 'e' key was only working about 90% of the time. Then it began working about 120% of the time, so I had to remap it to nothing, move the 'e' to the backslash, and plug in an external keyboard. The trackpad and all the rest of the keys were working just fine. I usually replace machines every three years or so anyway, so the key issue was just the trigger. Thank you for your advice. Do you think that might be the issue, given that the trackpad worked fine?

So my main concern was being able to easily run elixir/erlang, with some flavor of unix as a production target. Therefore running natively on windows was, at best, a nice to have. On OSX I could just work in the native environment, since it's unix, albeit a bit of a peculiar unix with the occasion random odd thing installed to trick me. On windows I've found two possible solutions so far. The first is Ubuntu installed under WSL. I've heard people complain that WSL doesn't always work, but so far I've had no issues. easily installed elixir, erlang, npm and vim. Phoenix works no problem. I installed elixir natively on windows as well, just to see if I could, and again, no problems at all, and it works fine. I'm using cmder, which gives you a much more unix-like command environment. Chocolatey is the equivalent of homebrew, and actually seems to be superior, or at least more complete. ("choco install chrome", "choco install spotify", kinda handy). I'm mostly a vim guy, but I'm not religious about that. Neovim worked fine in WSL, so that's all good for now. Might give vscode a shot, as it has some nice elixir plugins.

Finally, I installed vagrant under windows, with virtualbox. I haven't used that before, but I think it could provide another alternative dev environment in case WSL turns out to be unreliable. My ultimate fallback plan was always to use vmware or similar and just run unix for dev, windows for things like excel, but my feeling is I'm not going to have to do that.

I had to replace my 2015 MBP last week, because the kb started failing (it wasn't one of the ones eligible for a free repair, sadly, and I can't live without a machine for however long it takes them to fix it anyway). I was really torn, because although I could reluctantly live without the function keys, the escape key is a complete dealbreaker.

After much debate I decided to take a chance on a surface book. I figured I'd try it, try and get my dev environment in a decent place, and see how I felt about windows after 30 days, with the idea that I might have to return it if things didn't work out. I'm 6 days in, and I can pretty safely say there's no way I'm going back to apple. Windows has managed not to suck at all, my dev environment is arguably better than what I had before, and I'm absolutely loving the machine itself. Most joyful new laptop experience in many years.

Heh... see, it was the distant past, fading from my memory. You're absolutely right. The machine in question was an early pentium box as I recall, and the fastest machine I'd ever used at the time.

Oops! 32 Meg, not K. 4.7 is correct I think though.

That machine was probably worth about 3-4 grand at the time (1992)