genthree

The golf one’s especially weird to me. The overall effect of the fancy gear is that courses doubled in acreage and… you hit the ball over most of that new land on your first stroke anyway (at least, that’s the idea, lol). Like, the advantage is gone as soon as courses adjust, and you’re back to about the same thing, just way bigger (and all-around more expensive). It almost seems like we’d have been better off if ultra-long-range targeted drives had become a separate sport, and golf stayed smaller with “bad” clubs.

Teach me your ways. I’ve long wished for an actual, human secretary to handle that for me. The context-switching and digging around in a painful, slow interface (I don’t just mean Jira, 100% of the ones project managers find acceptable seem to have this quality) is such a productivity killer, and it’s so easy to miss important things in all the noise.

Yeah, I’d have a mental breakdown within weeks if I had to pair more than an hour a day, max (even that much, consistently, would probably harm my quality of life quite a bit—a little every now and then is no big deal, though). No exaggeration, it’d break me in ways that’d take a while to fix.

[edit] I’m not even anti-social, but the feeling of being watched while working is extremely draining. An hour of that is like four hours without it.

AI autocomplete and suggestions built-in to Jira are making our ticket tracker so goddamn spammy that I’m 100% sure that “feature” has done more harm than good.

I don’t think anybody’s tracking the actual net-effects of any of this crap on productivity, just the “vibes” they get in the moment, using it. “I got my part of this particular thing done so fast!”

I believe that to be the case, in part, because not a lot of organizations are usefully tracking overall productivity to begin with. Too hard, too expensive. They might “track” it, but so poorly it’s basically meaningless. I don’t think they’ve turned that around on a dime just to see if the c-suite’s latest fad is good or bad (they never want a real answer to that kind of question anyway)

Basically every contest tends to lose interest, for me, either as a spectator or participant, the more “refined” the play. From board games to sports.

I’d love to be able to go back and watch some of the goofy stuff that went on in, say, early baseball, among the best players of the time. And the slower play, et cetera.

I’d take up golf if the equipment and course sizes were more like they were in the early 20th century. (Yes, there are organizations and a handful of courses that support this, but they’re rare enough not to be something a person can really do unless they live close to the right place, are comfortably retired, or are the idle rich). Ultra-engineered balls and clubs so you can hit the ball farther than you can even see… what? Why? How is that improving the game?

“… on Opposite Day!”

> I've found that everywhere else, certainly in the midwest, where I live, either gets too hot in summer or too cold in winter

Much of the midwest gets both. Stifling humidity and temps often in the 90s, sometimes topping 100, for (effectively) a horrid 5- to 6-month-long summer. "Arctic blasts" in the Winter for sustained highs under 10 for days on end, lots of ice storms (and, if you do get a real, good snow, nowhere to ski anyway). 3 months total shared between Spring and Fall when the weather doesn't suck.

Good office with a short walkable or bike able commute is my preference.

I've never had "good" plus that kind of commute. I've only had one of those at a time, and about half the time, neither.

So skipping the commute—and having a private bathroom, and all my own food available for lunch without packing, and fewer infections per year, and being able to deal with kid-emergencies with far less disruption to my work day et c—easily wins.

But yes I prefer a good office and a nice, active commute. I'm on track to literally never have that combo together ever in my life, but it'd be my favorite way to work.

These limits don’t apply to self-funded programs that are administered by big insurance companies (most large employers’ plans, then) or plans less than two years old (whether there are measures in place to prevent simply rotating plans often to exploit this, I do not know)

Try really low doses.

I hate being truly high, but a weed "buzz" is great for falling asleep, especially when ill (I often suffer more from severe lack of sleep than from any of the other effects of whatever common virus or bacterial infection I manage to catch). It doesn't take much for a lightweight (a status I have carefully maintained) to reach "buzz" territory, and only a little more to reach "properly high" territory (which, again, I find rather unpleasant).

I'd suggest edibles and starting at 2mg, max, for a first attempt, working up 1mg at a time (in a totally different session, on another day!) until desired effect achieved. Like I've been at this a while and a 10mg gummy, which is a common single-gummy dose size in many states, will take me past where I ever want to be. 5ish is about right for me, maybe up to 8 if I need a stronger kick for some reason (like, say, I'm sick and need to get high enough to sleep most of the night despite significant sinus discomfort or throat pain)

FWIW I also doubt the anti-Alzheimer's stuff will pan out, or if it does, it'll be some targeted therapy with specific chemicals, which won't look a lot like any products from a dispensary.

Docker's what lets me spend more time using the software on my server than fiddling with it. I got the fiddling out of my system years ago, I just want shit to work now.

I don't really care about it per se but having a cross-distro unified daemon config & supervisor, package manager, and ability to cram every single important file into a file tree (again, using the same interface to achieve this with every daemon) that has only those files in it (making backups and restores trivial) and then easily verify that I got all the important files (destroy image -> re-create, does it still look good? Then I got everything) makes everything so easy. I no longer put off trying a new service until the weekend because it'll take an unknown amount of time that could end up being hours. Odds are I can have anything available in the official Docker registry (which is approximately everything, these days) up in five minutes flat to try it out, and may not even need any further modifications for it to be ready for (personal) "production".

I use Debian but don't even care, I haven't had to touch systemd once (thank god) and the only Debian-parts I even use are its ZFS, SSH, and Docker, with my ten or so actual user-facing services all just pulled and managed via Docker, ready to transfer to any other distro seamlessly, should I ever care to. Even Samba is under Docker (oh my god it is so much easier to configure for common use-cases this way).

(I would definitely be using FreeBSD on my server if I cared about anything other than Docker, though—I haven't actually liked Linux for about fifteen years now)

Yeah I basically don’t trust anyone but Apple for wireless audio because every time I’ve tried allegedly-good non-Apple Bluetooth audio devices, they’ve been a ton worse, so bad I ended up barely using them.

In this case these are more expensive than I’d pay for headphones, but that just means I won’t have any Bluetooth headphones in this form factor. Been down that road before, non-Apple was a frustrating waste of money.

I mean FFS my AirPods are worse on Windows and Linux than in the Apple ecosystem, but are still better than the non-Apple ones I’ve tried, even there. It’s not even just the home-field advantage.

The most-crippling part of this is removing their ability to use wire services (AP, Reuters, et c).

It means they can only cover news if they send a correspondent. They cannot cover much at all that way. It basically means it’s just a company newsletter now. They don’t even have any correspondents covering the war.

Consider the motivation behind the new nickname.

It’s plainly not an attempt at honesty. Watching almost any speech by Hegseth makes it clear it’s another “tough guy” thing—his latest effort included announcing “no quarter” in the war with Iran, which one supposes he did because it sounds tough, but it’s so incredibly illegal that just issuing that instruction, as he did, even if nothing happens afterward, is specifically illegal.

It’s a modern outgrowth of the conservative belief that we lost Vietnam because we didn’t war crime hard enough (this is a real, and common, thing, talk to republicans old enough and you’ll encounter it often) and that the military’s too soft.

I bounced off it in about the same amount of time, just the other day. I’ll probably return to it at some point given how talked-about it is, but as soon as the woman was revealed to be pregnant the implicit “ho ho! Who’s the father?!” made my eyes roll so hard it knocked me right out of the movie.

The new norm is blanket pardons for everybody at the end of a presidency. And a lot more even-more-openly selling pardons in those final weeks, than already went on.

Real fear of malicious prosecution of out-of-power political enemies (we’re seeing a bunch of this attempted now, though grand juries mostly haven’t been cooperating) and real fear of being held accountable for tons of actual criming you did, guarantee that everyone gets pardons now. The more-corrupt admins will also use this as a tool of control (I think this is why public “fealty” is so constantly on display with this second admin, to a degree it was not the first time)

1) Get a couple million dollars you’re willing to gamble.

2) Spend a few tens of K creating some amount of a front of having a company.

3) Buy a dinner or two with the right people in the admin, ideally Trump himself (you can literally do this). Talk like an AM radio host or MAGA-aligned right wing podcaster any time political topics come up (that part’s extremely easy, but you do need to do it)

4) Work out some way to help someone at that dinner line their pockets with any public money they send your way. This will mean only keeping part of what you get, but you’re still gonna beat your investment handily.

Remaining cash is for incidentals and having to repeat the dinner thing (not sure it’s enough for 2x with Trump himself, but should get you a few with other groups of admin members)

Don’t forget to buy and have tailored a Hickey Freeman suit (modern, post-production-shift overseas is fine, no need to track down the good vintage Rochester-made stuff), either pinchingly-tightly-tailored like it’s 2009 (Hegseth) if you’re fairly trim, or ill-fitting (leaning too large in every way) otherwise. Brooks Brothers might be an OK option too, in the latter case. Do not buy a dinner jacket, they just wear business suits everywhere. Red tie is safe. Don’t forget some tasteless dumbshit lapel pin, maybe an AR-15 (don’t go for a US flag unless you’re an elected official) or something outright Trump-branded (if you can get one with his face on it, do that for sure)

Some more taxes are a lot better than being disappeared with no due process whatsoever, or having huge amounts of your property seized with no due process. The rich benefit immensely from liberal democracy. The alternative is being forced to play all kinds of power-games with stakes a hell of a lot higher than the ones they deal with when they mess around with politics in democracies, and at a disadvantage if they’re foreign and those aren’t open, pluralistic societies.

Their worst-plausible-case in a liberal democracy (barring state collapse into something else) is they lose a teensy bit of their stuff. Nowhere near all of it.

Right-wing media strategy has been a lot more heavily-planned and intentional than you’re suggesting.

“Climate change safe” for the rich:

- Hard to reach by land (not vulnerable to migration waves)

- Not so small there will be incredible deprivation if sea trade volume plunges (this rules out the vast majority of island nations)

- Not badly overpopulated

- Correct latitude (not too close to the equator)

- Stable liberal democracy (so they probably won’t take all your stuff)

- Unlikely target for outright conquest in great-powers games or expansion.

Bonus points:

- Interesting, varied natural environments.

They are indeed thinking about this stuff. It’s why so many are buying New Zealand citizenship and buying land there (and sometimes building their survival bunkers there too). It checks every single box, and basically nowhere else does.

My experience has been that a good small team, even full of people who’d stand no chance in a FAANG interview (fwiw) can outperform at least 5x as many devs in your median bigco, while maintaining a relaxed pace.

The reason for this has nothing to do with how productive the devs are per se and everything to do with bloated decision making processes and extremely high communication overhead. “AI” does nothing for that (in fact, I’m seeing integrated suggestions in ticket tracking tools making things spammier and reducing quality of tickets, so if anything, it’s making it worse)

Similar story here, I love wired headphones but have to admit that, after being gifted my first set of AirPods, my actual use of any sort of personal speaker device went up like 20x or more. It’s exactly that factor of being able to get up and walk around without a thought that does it. That’s the reason I’ll often not put wired headphones on in the first place, but no such concern with wireless.

(I actually don’t like 3.5mm jacks as much as some people do, though, as my experience has been the ports get janky over time if they’re under any strain at all, which they will be on a mobile device and which is always a back-of-my-mind source of stress when using them, but quarter-inch jacks are awesome)

The specific example was indeed a poor one since we have extensive data on that, and even high-touch non-surgical interventions involving hours per week from multiple specialists (read: incredibly expensive) with very-willing participants have proven a lot less effective than one might hope (somewhat effective! But only moderately so, which ain't enough given the price tag). Docs saying "eat better and exercise" at an annual check-up has basically no effect whatsoever.

Turning dozens to hundreds of decisions per week for which the correct decision must be made in nearly every case, into a single decision per week for which the correct choice must be made, has proven wildly more effective than any of that (I mean glp-1 agonists).

Depends very much on whether the kids' interests leans toward doing computer stuff, or doing stuff with computers.

And they can do the former in a VM anyway. Install Linux, or a BSD, and go. With the bonus that you can experiment fearlessly because you've got snapshots and the worst-case for experimentation still leaves you with an entirely functioning laptop. Or use a cheap VPS, remotely.

I'm a computer nerd who started on DOS on IIRC a 286, all the Windowses (OK not quite all, though my first job did expose me to a couple NT versions and 2K in addition to nearly-all the home versions I upgraded through on my own) and various Linuces (Gentoo as my primary OS, even, for like... five years, LOL)

These days there are two things I use my "real" non-server computers for in my personal life:

1) Media piracy, only because I've been too lazy to set up a headless torrent system on my media server w/ VPN connection (why does the media server exist? Again, purely for piracy, remove that use case and it'd be gone as a waste of electricity and space the very next day). I could fix this in a Saturday and remove this entire use case, improving my process significantly at the same time, just haven't yet.

2) Video games. Really hoping that new Steam console doesn't end up being sky-high expensive, because I'm excited about "consolizing" this use case and ditching my last "real" PC tower (other than one server that I go months and months without directly messing-with; and that "real" PC tower is already running Bazzite to make it Steamdeck-like, it's just janky as fuck because it's Linux on frankensteined hardware so of course it's janky as fuck, so I'm still eager to swap it for something designed and with support for that actual use case).

Everything actually-important happens on iOS, and usually on a phone.

In my personal life, I've concluded that I just have no idea what more-useful-than-the-time-it-takes stuff I'd even do with a "real" computer, despite spending absolute fuckloads of my time screwing around with them from ages like 7-30. What I learned in that time was "how to computer" to a pretty advanced level, and luckily that per se has paid the bills and then some, but in all that time the actually-directly-useful-to-me stuff I've done with it has amounted to very little.

To me, personally, I've realized PCs are a solution looking for a problem, and that so rarely does my trying to bridge that gap result in an actual net-benefit (usually, not even close) that I've mostly stopped trying. That impulse got me where I am, can't complain, that "wasted" time over literal decades gained me a bunch of skills that are (it turns out) almost entirely useless to me personally but that others are willing to pay for, great, but I find myself a computer nerd who doesn't actually know WTF to do with a "real" computer. I just use my damn phone.

I suppose I'd still find them a lot more useful if iPads and iPhones didn't exist and so I needed to do banking and reading and such on some other computery device, but those do exist, so... yeah, not a lot of motivation to even own a "real" PC anymore, to include a MacBook—I doubt I'll replace my M1 Air when it finally dies.

To sum up, as a lifelong computer dork, I don't even know why I need a "real" computer any more, let alone why anyone else does.