3,350 karma · joined September 21, 2021
> The court case isn't about Matt being a jerk, it's about crime.
If we're going to get that pedantic, and ignore the "spirit" in which that statement of mine was intended, then it's equally fair for me to point out that no, the legal case is not anything to do with a "crime." It is a civil dispute.
"Troll" is another one. It used to mean a person who posted a contentious comment that they knew would invoke a flame war so that they could sit back and wait to see who "bit." It came from fishing. These days it can just mean someone who is rude on the Internet.
You're not wrong, the "opposition" did take the word and run with it for their own use. No dispute there.
But let's not pretend that this is a conservative vs progressive thing. On the partisan isle I'm "neither." But when someone uses the word "woke", in conversation, I usually know exactly what they're getting at. And I hear it from left-leaning friends and right-leaning alike.
It's a short-cut umbrella term to mean an amalgamation of a) moral busybodies b) purity spirals c) cancel culture d) some bizarre racist philosophy that markets itself as anti-racist (critical race theory) and e) an extreme version of political correctness.
I'm not arguing whether or not left-wingers are (or aren't) using it themselves in serious conversation. Only that, colloquially, I've only encountered confusion about what it means in Internet forum discussions with like-minded nerds, such as this one. The average person I talk to has little difficulty.
And maybe that definition was shaped, wholly or in part, by the conservatives making it out to be a boogeyman. Even if so, and even if it was an unfair hijack and it's appropriate to hate on them for doing so, it doesn't change how people interpret the word in casual conversation today.
I have since read the WP Engine complaint. I understand what they are alleging. I'm just not 100% clear on the nitty and gritty details that led there. All I know are the high level about WP Foundation demanding payment from WP Engine.
As a matter of principle, I believe very strongly that a creator has the right to set the conditions upon which their creations are disposed of, and that no one is entitled to services provided by others free of charge in perpetuity. If it is the case that WP Engine was costing WordPress.org a lot of money and that they were the single largest consumer of WordPress.org's web services, then I don't think it is unreasonable for WordPress.org to say "Hey, this is not financially viable for us, we think we're going to need either ask that you setup local mirrors, or we can maybe arrange a pay as you go deal."
I hear a lot of people express the opinion that Matt seems unhinged and is trying to "extort" money from WP Engine. But without knowing more that seems, to me, like looters and moochers demanding that other people pay out of pocket for things they want or need. I want there to be more to the story than that.
And for what it's worth I have little difficulty believing that Matt just went about things in all the wrong ways and could have worked things out without resorts to litigation if he wasn't such a jerk about it.
But being a jerk isn't a crime and doesn't forfeit your rights. WordPress.org has to pay for their servers and WP Engine is a for-profit company that is using WordPress.org's services, free of charge, for their own gain. Mutual consideration here seems warranted.
So what, specifically, led to WP Foundation choosing to ask WP Engine to pay for the services they are using? I've heard accusations that there has been a feud between the two going back years but if those finer details are buried in that story, then why is Matt / WP Foundation acting unfairly by asking for payment?
(Before anyone responds, I understand the Promissory Estoppel theory that forms the legal complaint, I'm asking specifically about peoples' understanding, even if speculative, regarding Matt's motivations).
I compare those hyper-creative people to other people that I know and I work with and it becomes very apparent that what we tend to think of as "creativity" is not something that even the majority of people possess.
I definitely agree that everyone is "creative" to an extent within their respective interests and productive pursuits. But I think we might be conflating creativity with productivity. Everyone produces, or at least is capable of producing things. But what we tend to think of as "creativity" involves abstract thinking and piecing together things that are non-obvious.
In that sense, hackers and engineers do tend to often exhibit this form of creativity. I mean using something in a way that it was not original intended is an example of that "outside of the box" abstract thinking.
But my point, as anectodal as it is, in my 40+ years on this planet I've encountered far more people who are incapable of abstract thinking and coming up with novel ways to combine things than I have people who do possess this ability.
Now it might be a muscle, it might boil down to interests and personal ambitions. But, and I think you'd even agree with this, that's a hypothesis. I don't personally see evidence in support of that. The people who can't think abstractly are even some really decent programmers that I've met. They can produce shippable code and solve problems, but they can't think in terms of design patterns and abstractions... they need concrete examples for everything. The second you start to abstract a solution and talk in terms of generics you lose them. And I'm not putting them down, they're still great people to have on your team. Great work ethic and love what they do. They just can't think abstractly and are therefore not "creative" in the way that I interpret that word.
(slightly off topic: I have no idea why tf my comment got down-voted. I'm not even expressing any personal opinions about Trudeau or politics. I'm just answering the question as factually as I can from the point of view of a Canadian who is observing what is going on.. I have data and sources for everything I said .. including how low Trudeau's approval rating is as well as the polling... the only thing I wasn't sure of is how his rating compares to that of previous PMs. Thing is, I even know people who have voted Liberal their entire lives, and plan to in the upcoming election regardless of who the leader is, and even they can't shut up about how much they despise him. So regardless of your partisan affiliation, I don't think I even said anything that most Canadians would find the least bit controversial).
However, our upcoming election is this year. It certainly does not surprise me that Trudeau is stepping down from leader of the Liberal party in light of the polling, since the polls are predicting that if an election were called today, the conservatives would win in such a landslide that I don't think many countries have even seen that before. Of course polling and actual election results are two very different things... but I think the Liberal party sees the writing on the wall. If they hope to have any shot of getting re-elected, they can't do it with Trudeau at the head.
... but that doesn't necessarily mean that we all saw him resigning as PM incumbent coming. He's also proroguing parliament until March. This is probably a move to get the other parties to step back and "STFU"; to not pass any motions during the party shift (particularly related to calling an early election etc).
Lastly, as others have said, the PM position is usually held for an average of 9-10 years (and that's multiple terms .. most incumbents just get re-elected into second and third terms). Trudeau was elected in 2015 so he's about due to exit anyway if we go by averages (though some have served longer).
Why did you read this confusion into my post? Was it because I'm using YouTube thumbnails as an example or referring to A/B tests that websites employ to measure engagement?
These were concrete examples used to describe abstract concepts relating to human behaviour. The quality of a design affects how a user engages with the product, how they feel about the product and how they enjoy using it. I never really considered "marketing" in my comment at all. I was talking about demonstrable design elements (composition, mise en scene, copy, typography) and how those elements combine to affect the quality of the finished product .. and how that quality impacts user experience. This applies whether the "product" is ad copy or a physical object bought from the store.
> You may take pride in your craft, but the majority of people physically cannot notice the difference between good and bad design. Not even subconsciously.
Particularly the "not even subconsciously" part thrown in at the end. Because, if this were true, then YouTube creators would not pour an insane amount of effort into the THUMBNAILS of their videos. Marketing talent would not study human psychology and do A/B tests to figure out why certain ads sell products and others don't.
There is so much theory and study behind design, attraction, pattern recognition, contrast and standing out from the crowd that even though the average person doesn't necessarily notice how these strings are being tugged on, it doesn't mean that they aren't having an influence .
And I don't even mean to this to say "we're all sheep being brainwashed by corporations." That's actually far from my point. My point is that attention to quality affects the user experience regardless of whether the user can recognize or articulate WHY.
In a photograph, and think about YouTube thumbnails as a good working example, the "mise en scene" is critical for supporting the clarity of the message. There's a reason that the majority of thumbnails contain pictures of peoples' faces: the human brain is distracted by faces... so if you're trying to pull attention to your thumbnail, it's a good method. Why are these faces usually obnoxious? Because the facial expression also communicates the tone of the content and how the viewer is intended to feel about it. The ALL CAPS sections in titles and captions, while annoying, also has a purpose: to highlight key words that describe the promise of the video.
All of this speaks to the quality of design. And users might not know why they prefer certain designs over others. Why certain websites sell products and others don't. Why certain videos and articles get clicked on while others don't. That doesn't mean that, therefore, "most people don't care about quality." It means that, like you said, most people don't have the relevant domain expertise necessary to be able to judge why the quality of one design "feels" better than the quality of another.
An interface often accompanies an abstraction, sometimes even represents one. But if we get down to definitions, an interface is merely something that you interact with: a function, a class, a network endpoint etc. If you write in machine code, you might not think that you are working with any kind of an interface, and certainly it's not a high level one, but you are interfacing with the machine's native instruction set. You could then argue that the instruction is an abstraction that hides what the machine is capable of. But now we're splitting hairs and about to ask silly philosophical questions like whether a car's steering wheel qualifies as an abstraction that exists to hide the axles. I would argue not. The interface's primary responsibility is to provide a mechanism of interaction, rather than to reduce complexity (though a good interface is simple and intuitive).
Both you and the author of the article posit a similar definition of 'abstraction'. From the article:
> An abstraction is only as good as its ability to hide the complexity of what lies underneath.
And from your comment:
> Abstraction means removing details from the thing you present.
I would actually argue that both, while very close, are missing the mark.
An abstraction exists to reduce a concept down to its essentials.
This doesn't necessarily contradict the definitions offered, but I think there is a nuance here that, if missed, causes the offered definitions to become useless.
The nuance is in deciding what is essential or necessary. If, definitionally, you choose to dispense with acknowledging the essential... well then you get the problems that the author is writing about. You get shit abstractions because no one bothered to think in terms of what they INCLUDING rather than DISPENSING with.
Yes, obviously, we abstract in an attempt to simplify. But that simplification needs to come from a positive rather than a negative.
In other words: What is the thing for? What does it do?
"Hides complexity" is the shittiest answer that anyone could ever offer as a response when faced with a given problem. First, what is the complexity that we are trying to reduce? Secondly, why are we trying to reduce it? Thirdly, when we have achieved our primary goal of reducing the complexity, then what does the thing look like? What value does it offer over interfacing directly with the "thing" being abstracted?
Abstractions in computer science are extremely valuable. So valuable, I would offer, that any time we hear engineers decry abstractions or point to abstractions as the root of all evil we ought to ask a very pressing question: "who hurt you?"
A good engineering solution is a simple one, and an abstraction is intended to be a simpification mechanism. But it doesn't have to necessarily simplify the intuitive understanding of the problem at hand. This is a good goal if you can achieve it, don't get me wrong. But that abstraction might exist so you can swap vendors in the future if that's a business priority. Or because you've identified some other element / component in your system that will be difficult to change later. So you stick it behind an abstraction and "Program to Interfaces" rather than "implementations" so that you can simplify the process of change down the road, even if it comes at an more immediate cost of making the code a bit less intuitive today.
Everything in software is tradeoffs. And a good abstraction exists so that we can focus on requirements and programming to those requirements. This is a smiplification when done properly.But the focus ought to be on defining those requirements, of asking "what should simple look like?"
I would say that we mostly perform parlour with high ambitions of performing in 500+ seat theatres. It's not that we love box illusions and want to do a ton of them or anything. It's more that we like being in control of the entire experience, even down to what the audience experiences when they show up to the theatre before the show and leave at the end. This type of attention to detail is something that you can only achieve in a theatre setting. It doesn't have to be a traditional theatre with a stage... but it has to be a venue that you are entirely in control of.
What we're doing right now is trying to have the most of where we see ourselves in a few years, while working within our limitations. And we'll take a strolling gig or say yes to pretty much anything. But where we try to position ourselves right now is parlour because that's where we can do the type of material that lets us really showcase our characters and what we try to be about. We do a lot of material that plays just as well for a room of 20 people as it does a theatre with 1500.
How about yourself? Tell me your magic story.
It has been such a rabbit hole because, much like software development, it is not just one skill but lots of different skills and disciplines that combine. From design sketches to pattern drafting to understanding the nature of fabrics and how to cut them properly for wear and durability to the actual sewing and fitting etc.
The first is looking for a return on investment. If you're going to attract other peoples' money, those "other people" are obviously looking for companies that are going to provide a return. And since a wise investor diversifies their portfolios, they know that a lot of their investments are going to fail, so one way to hedge that is by encouraging all of their investments to grow as much as possible. That way a small number of hyper-performers will make up for the losses.
But we also see vertical growth happen with major corporations as well. Not just startups. And I suspect this has a lot of to do with red tape, over-regulation and bureaucracy. When you need to jump through tons of hoops including getting licensing and permits, setting up tax and payroll accounts... not to mention if you want your company to be publicly traded and the hoops you need to jump through for that ... it can be way cheaper and lower-risk to expand the activities of an existing, already established company than to spin off a new one.
What we need, admittedly, is more research and study around this. I know of one study which supports my position, but I'm happy to admit that the data is sparse.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.04374
From the abstract:
"By analyzing activity in 30,737 files, we find that low quality code contains 15 times more defects than high quality code."
Software is interesting because if you buy a refrigerator, even an inexpensive one, you have certain expectations as to its basic functions. If the compressor were to cut out periodically in unexpected ways, affecting your food safety, you would return it.
But in software customers seem to be conditioned to just accept bugs and poor performance as a fact of life.
You're correct that customers don't care about "code quality", because they don't understand code or how to evaluate it.
But you're assuming that customers don't care about the quality of the product they are paying for, and you're divorcing that quality from the quality of the code as if the code doesn't represent THE implementation of the final product. The hardware matters too, but to assume that code quality doesn't directly affect product quality is to pretend that food quality is not directly impacted by its ingredients.
> This is ego speaking.
Consider this, 100% of AI training data is human-generated content.
Generally speaking, we apply the 90/10 rule to human generated content: 90% of (books, movies, tv shows, software applications, products available on Amazon) is not very good. 10% shines.
In software development, I would say it's more like 99 to 1 after working in the industry professionally for over 25 years.
How do I divorce this from my personal ego? It's easy to apply objective criteria:
- Is the intent of code easy to understand?
- Are the "moving pieces" isolated, such that you can change the implementation of one with minimal risk of altering the others by mistake?
- Is the solution in code a simple one relative to alternatives?
The majority of human produced code does not pass the above sniff test. Most of my job, as a Principal on a platform team, is cleaning up other peoples' messes and training them how to make less of a mess in the future.
If the majority of human generated content fails to follow basic engineering practices that are employed in other engineering disciplines (i.e: it never ceases to amaze me how much of an uphill battle it is just to get some SWEs just to break down their work into small, single responsibility, easily testable and reusable "modules") then we can't logically expect any better from LLMs because this is what they're being trained on.
And we are VERY far off from LLMs that can weigh the merits of different approaches within the context of the overall business requirements and choose which one makes the most sense for the problem at hand, as opposed to just "what's the most common answer to this question?"
LLMs today are a type of magic trick. You give it a whole bunch of 1s and 0s so that you can input some new 1s and 0s and it can use some fancy proability maths to predict "based on the previous 1s and 0s, what are the statistically most likely next 1s and 0s to follow from the input?"
That is useful, and the result can be shockingly impressive depending on what you're trying to do. But the limitations are so limited that the prospect of replacing an entire high-skilled profession with that magic trick is kind of a joke.
From the wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euthanasia_in_the_Netherlands, this stood out to me:
> There is much discussion about people with early dementia who have previously stated in a written will that if they ever got dementia, they would want to get euthanasia.
This doesn't necessarily mean "controversy", but is very much an ongoing discussion and speaks to a problem that euthanasia introduces that has yet to be solved in the Netherlands.
And this really is the issue and complexity when it comes to euthanasia in general: we're talking about a form of legal homicide. So under what circumstances this should be permitted is a very valid legal question. Questions about consent, state of mind, paper trails and proof of consent are also very pressing questions and it sounds like no, not ALL of these questions are currently answered in the Dutch framework.
This is also not me arguing against euthanasia. I believe that adults have the right to commit suicide by any means of their choosing (assuming they're not infringing upon the rights of others in the process). The only thing I'm saying, really, is "it's a complicated issue with lots to consider."
- Because I want to
Not everything is security sensitive. Some information is entirely public and has no need for encryption. While SSL is also provides protection against man in the middle attacks, which helps you to trust that the information you are reading has not been compromised and altered, this is also a security requirement that just doesn't exist in a lot of use cases.
So yeah, private internal networks where information security just isn't a requirement because the information is not at all sensitive and nothing bad will happen in a worst case scenario ... don't force things on people that don't require those things.
I can sort of understand the rationale for web browsers pushing encryption for public websites, with the amount of ecommerce that happens in current year. But if your use case doesn't fall into that bucket, and if you've done your own risk analysis and came to the conclusion that you don't need encryption for what you're doing because nothing bad can possibly happen then there's no need to jump through the hassle of setting up certificates.
Euthanasia is controversial for a lot of reasons. Some people worry that authoritarians will use it as a way to "purge" or, such as here in Canada, as a way to "reneg" on health care obligations that tax payers are paying for. Others worry that family members and care providers will abuse the law for financial gain ("legal murder" for inheritance etc.).
Then you have cases like this one: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/calgary-maid-father-d...
It's complicated because we're not talking about an elderly person with terminal cancer. We're talking about a 27 year-old high functioning adult who sought, and was granted, medical assistance in dying due to a mental illness. When you dive into that story, even if you agree that the courts made the right decision and that the 27 year-old had the right to decide her own fate, your heart can't not break thinking about the father.
Morally, I agree that every [adult] individual has the right to commit suicide by any means of their choosing (as long as they're not infringing upon the rights of others in the process). That doesn't mean that there aren't valid reasons for people to debate whether or not ehutanasia should be legal and under what circumstances.
And yeah I turn off notifications always on everything. Even my smart phone is usually in Do Not Disturb.
I don't know how much of my online experience shaped this, though. I've got an asperger personality (worded as such because I've not been diagnosed) and unexpected interruptions of any kind drive me insane.
Then there are notifications like they have on LinkedIn and now Facebook where they're more like ads than they are genuine notifications. Things such as "so and so shared a post you might be interested in." These are not designed to notify of you something you wanted to be alerted to, they exist to "drive engagement." Because I don't even like notifications when it's something I care about, these really trigger me to the point where I don't even want to use the "platform" anymore. It's so bad on LinkedIn that I just stopped reading the notifications all together since if you try and turn off all notifcations on LinkedIn .. good luck. You'll spend hours navigating through complex multi-page forms clicking on toggles and then they'll just add some new notification and auto-enable it for you. There's no global "turn of all notifications for all devices" option that I've been able to find.
I don't comment on YouTube videos as much as I used to, because people started comparing the comments sections they are shown for a given video to what their friends and spouses are shown and realized that the comments section is also now algorithmically curated for you based on your viewing and commenting habits. This leads into some serious "dead Internet theory" territory, especially related to this article about OF creators using AI to reply to DMs. Because if two people can see different subsets of comments for the same video, and if YouTube has AI reply features for creators ... how can I trust that the comments I'm reading and replying to are actual humans? Even if they are humans, I don't want to interact with people that just agree with me.
But these days, if I feel like watching a movie that I own physically... sometimes I still look to see if it's on a streaming service that I'm subscribed to, or will even pirate it ... just because it's more convenient than having to turn on the BluRay player and then navigate those awful menus with un-skippable ads (you forgot those) and copyright screens.
The copyright notices were especially egregious and annoying to me BECAUSE I PAID FOR IT! Don't punish your paying customers because of the people you don't like... people that are not reading your annoying message.
I watch a ridiculous amount of this type of content. As a "maker" myself, I get inspired by watching other people make stuff .. and I pick up a few tips and tricks along the way too.
But, the trap here that a lot in the comments seem in-tune with, is the trap of deluding yourself into thinking that you're being productive by consuming content ... as opposed to, well, producing stuff.
My wife and I are part time performing magicians, and when it comes to our magic act we fall into this trap a LOT. Because I make good money as a software engineer, I wanted to create for us a "library" where no matter what we want to write or create we will have resources that will empower us with method possibilities. Sounds great on paper, until we look back on what we accomplished in the past weeks and all we can come up with "Well, we read a bunch of books... and some are super expensive and hard to find out of print magic books that only have < 1,000 known copies in existence ... does that count?"
No, it doesn't. Some of the most innovative inventions and artistic creations have been borne from scarcity and limitations. An over-abundance of information is not necessarily bad it's just that we tend, as humans, to find ways to trick ourselves into thinking we're accomplishing something when we're really being passive.
To circle back to my original point, while watching "edu-tainment" content on YouTube is still being passive, at least there is the capacity to gain high-level knowledge that can give you a head's start when you're ready to actually start diving into doing something.
This varied like everything in the period. My Edwardian recreation is a single layer. There's no structural canvas.
I'm not entirely sure when structural interfacing became common in virtually all mens' suit jackets, but based on my personal experience wearing recreations and going down the rabbit hole of late Victorian & early Edwardian clothing... I tend to view structural interfacing as something typical of more formal wear as opposed something you would see in everyday wear. So it's kind of a more modern evolution of the mens' formal suit that we always see it. I.e: historically you probably would have seen interfacing in tuxedos and tails and would have been less likely to see it in every day business and work attire.
Historically structure is something that has been achieved just as much through different undergarments and pieces (think of a 18th century pennier for example), rather than "one size fits all, off the shelf" clothing that is so common today that is going to include everything in one piece.
Structure in general has been insanely common throughout history. Both mens' and womens' clothing often featured structural boning, for example. I also mentioned penniers above. Victorian women's wear then mostly dispensed with penniers and women started padding their rear-ends, because "baby got back" was all the rage then too.
So most of the Victorian woman's hourglass figure, that we assume was created through unhealthy tight lacing that tried to squish and conform the woman's waist into something that it wasn't, was actually more commonly created by padding out areas around the waist (the hips, rear-end, bust and shoulders - you can't have Victorian fashion without puff sleeves) to create a certain proportion. It was a magic trick. You have to remember that people wore corsets and stays as undergarments for hundreds of years as everyday wear. This stuff was way way way more comfortable than we imagine. In fact, I think we tend to project a lot of our modern clothing trends onto the past and assume that if WE'RE uncomfortable in what we see as "formal wear", that people of the time must have been as well. Tight lacing corsets and trying to strong-arm the human body into a particular shape is something that is actually more modern than we tend to assume.
Also what we consider to be "formal wear" today is different than formal wear of the past. So formal suits may have had structural interfacing, but men also wore corsets (yes mens' corsets were common, but also remember that corsets were undergarments and wearing them as outergarments is a very modern trend that would have made Victorians blush) and other forms of undergarments that could create an outer figure through padding and shaping.
So I'm inclined to suspect that my Edwardian suit, which was made to be a historic recreation, is likely the most common. It looks formal to our modern eye, but was intended to be worn as every day business attire and so there is no structural interfacing.
But if you come across something like a tuxedo with tails of the era, I would imagine that would be more likely to contain structural interfacing as well as stays (small bones intended to stiffen and provide structure to a particular part of the garment).
This is not nearly as hypocritical as people want to think it is.
I suspect that the philosophical root of this position is cultural relativism. The idea that all countries, by and large, are both good and bad and that one country's politics and culture is not necessarily better or worse than another. That a country that throws journalists in prison and doesn't recognize freedom of expression or religion, for example, is on par morally with the United States of America.
Fuck that. That position is literally evil as far as I'm concerned, because it dispenses with the very concepts of liberty and morality, putting the worst of the worst dictatorships on a level footing as free, rights-protecting countries.
In my world view, government is a necessary good but it is necessary because human beings have the capacity for both reason and force. When people deal with one another through reason, we get peace, prosperity and life flourishes (reason is a human being's primary tool of survival). When people choose force we get gang warfare, anarchy, death, destruction and life struggles.
My working definition of "liberty" is an environment where all interpersonal relations are consensual. This is achieved by removing the element of force from civil existence, placed into hands of a monopoly (the government) that recognizes that an individual has rights and uses that monopoly to protect and defend those rights. Never to violate them.
Therefore, and I know this will be controversial (I'm certainly not trying to troll as I genuinely hold this position), a free, rights respecting country, even one that is imperfect, has every moral right to invade and liberate a dictatorship if and when it decides that it is in its best interest to do so.
A country that routinely infringes upon the rights of others is morally illegitimate. It is certainly unfortunate that every country in the world today does that to some extent (taxes are theft). Still, that doesn't mean that you can't evaluate a country based on how well it implements this raison d'etre.
So in any conflict between the USA (or any other rights-respecting country) and <pick one: Iran, China, Russia, Afghanistan, Iraq etc.>, I will side with the USA 10 out of 10 times and I see no hypocrisy. The USA, as a government, is imperfect but still better than China in every single possible way and I have no problem saying that, in my opinion, the Chinese population at large would be better off if the CPP were taken out by a free nation. And yeah, I know that the USA has ended up making things worse, practically, in many countries through interventionism. Iran is a great example. I'm not saying that they should invade any country and I'm not saying that they wouldn't screw it up if they tried. I'm just saying that morally and rationally I would be on their side every time.
I will happily criticize the USA when they lie to us about weapons of mass destruction or anything else. I think that any lie is immoral and they were wrong to do so. This is one of many things that makes the USA imperfect. But I also don't think that they should have NEEDED that lie to justify invading Iraq and ending Saddam Hussein's reign. There are valid arguments to be had about whether or not Iraq is better or worse for liberty today than it was pre-2003. But morally they had every right to go in and should have done it even harder.
My wife and I are part time performing magicians and what I like about magic is that it is kind of the ultimate "maker hobby." If you're performing a trick, it can be as simple as a card trick or it can be as complicated as involving prosthetic makeup and practical vfx. So you can bring in all kinds of skills from woodworking to costuming to welding to special vfx makeup and you can make the hobby as wide or narrow as you like. Being someone with a ton of hobbies mostly centred around making stuff ... it enables me to be a "renaissance man" and consolidate all of those into one focused endeavour.
So we do all of our own costuming. The 3 piece Edwardian suit I mentioned I purchased from Darcy Clothing LTD in the UK and had it fitted by a tailor and then I altered it myself to add a few sneaky features for magic reasons. And I'm currently fabricating for my wife's costume a longline underbust corset in a late Victorian / early Edwardian style to replace the mass-produced one she's been wearing that is falling apart. This is my most ambitious project yet, clothing wise, because it's the first piece of visible outer-wear that I am fabricating from scratch and to fit her. Gradually I want to be able to do all of our own tailoring and costuming from scratch (i.e: would love to be able to make my own bespoke 3-piece suit by hand) but it's a craft that takes a long time to get good at.
Yes and no.
Something that people often take for granted is doing laundry. The invention of the automatic clothes washer and dryer changed things dramatically.
Before automation, laundry day for a household of 4 was a huge, laborious, and often multi-day task.
Not only did garments need to be washed by hand, but there was a lot of attention to how to clean certain types of garments and fabrics effectively. A woman's summer dress with grass stains on the bottom hems, for example, needed different treatment than a man's 3 piece grey suit (which, by the way, were constructed very differently than they are today).
Since you needed your stove-top to heat water, most laundry was done in the kitchen which meant that you also needed to plan in advance what your family was going to eat that day and have things prepared.
I own a recreation Edwardian era 3 piece suit. It has no zippers and it is unlined (I recently wore this to a funeral here in Canada and it was COLD despite the layers that I was wearing).
The reason that the suit is unlined is because, as you say, it was common at the time to wear layers. So the thing is shockingly breathable and light compared to a modern, lined formal suit (which is also made out of different suiting wool so the texture is different too, an Edwardian suit "feels" less formal than a modern suit).
But the reason people wore those layers was not always necessarily to stay warm. In fact, the layers were worn in the summer in hot climates as well as during winter in cold climates.
Today people often assume that full body undergarments were born out of a prudish sense of modesty (a la "magic Mormon underwear"). This is a myth. The reality is that they:
a) kept the outer garment clean for longer by avoiding direct contact with the skin (and thus sweat etc.) and
b) they gave everyone in the family roughly the same general style of undergarment (in terms of colour and fabric) so that you could batch-wash what needs to be washed most often all together in a single pot on the stove
Here's a good YouTube video that really puts into perspective why laundry was so different pre-automation, and it was one major factor (though not the only one) that informed how people dressed:
I'm not just introverted, I am rather extreme ... to the point where I've wondered if I might have schizoid personality disorder (characterized by apathy towards forming close personal relationships).
I don't dislike being around people, I'm no misantrhope, but when I do engage in social activities I'm usually literally bed-ridden for a day or two after. I'm not even exaggerating. It is a level of fatigue that is reminiscent of the symptoms of clinical depression (but it's not depression because the cause and effect is well observed over 40 years of trying to figure myself out). When this happens I have zero motivation, zero energy, zero desire to do anything but sit on my fat unproductive lazy ass and be a complete vegetable and this will last for a day two depending on the intensity of the social interaction (if I go on vacation and disrupt my routine for a couple of weeks, I'm looking at upwards of a week to recover).
Introverts commonly describe the need "re-charge" after social interaction, and that's clearly what this is. It's just dialled up to 11 for me.
And this happens even if I had a great time with people that I really care about. Even date night with my wife will do this to me.
Every time I hear about the loneliness epidemic I wonder how universally applicable this is: to what degree are introverts susceptible to the negative effects of loneliness? To what degree do other introverts feel lonely? And are some people (like me) just wired so differently in the brain that we're "immune" to loneliness.
I mean I've gone months without talking to a single other human being. The data suggests that I should have all sorts of symptoms as a result, including "cabin fever" etc. But I've never experienced that. I certainly don't feel depressed when this happens. If anything I'm more productive and energetic and happy versus when I'm interacting with people regularly. I'm not even sure that I know what loneliness feels like or if I'm capable of experiencing it.
This is very personal and subjective. I'm mostly writing it just to see if other introverts feel the same or differently. If the "epidemic" is an "extrovert's epidemic" or I'm just, for lack of a better term, completely fucked in the head with an actual mental disorder that prevents me from ever feeling the slightest desire to connect with others, even following prolonged periods of isolation.
You're largely preaching to the choir, I don't disagree with anything you said.
As a web application developer who got started professionally in the 1990s, I not only vividly remember Perl being everywhere, I actively wrote a lot of it.
However, in my more recent experience, it is more likely to hear people talk about COBOL, FORTRAN or C++ than it is to discuss Perl. All of those languages predate Perl.
Java also still gets a ton of discussion and it's not shiny and new anymore.
Most of us who spent time writing and maintaining Perl in the 1990s were all too willing to abandon it in favour of other languages with similar features, not because they were shiny and new but because of major pain points with Perl (it earned the meme that it's a write-only language). In my opinion, Perl's greatest contribution and staying power was it's regex engine and syntax which persists.
I don't even like python, for what it's worth, but it's popular for more reasons than it just being "shiny and new" (to the extent that you can even say that about python these days).
These days when we find ourselves needing to write a script our first go-to would be bash, and if we need more features or if it's going to be complex enough to have to worry about maintenance costs we'd probably reach for python.
TIL that there is a non-profit foundation that focuses, in part, on supporting Perl. That surprises me to the same extent that I would be surprised to learn that there is a foundation aimed at supporting VB6 (though now watch someone is going to share that there is).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Young_adult
.. this one silly statement really triggered my autism this morning lol.