hc-taway

Oh yeah, I love the "office suite". It reminds me of when I ran Linux and used some of the lighter, alternative office-type options (OpenOffice was so damn heavy and not all that pleasant to use) like Gnumeric, Abiword, et c., except... well, much better in almost every way. But I don't have to interop with MS Office very often so I'm not sure if they're much good at that. Certainly they beat the hell out of using resource-hog Google Docs tabs, though, plus they're way more pleasant (far less laggy, for one thing).

Notes is nice. I wish it had a 1st-party export solution. Markdown as an option for formatting would be good but it's not a deal-breaker. Being able to drag all kinds of crap, including entire PDFs(!) into Notes and have it Just Work is pretty great.

Preview is so, so good. Thanks to it, macOS is the only platform I've ever used where I don't hesitate even a second to open a PDF. Plus it's great at so many other things.

A note for any macOS n00bs out there getting M1s: the first rule of having crazy-good battery life on a MacBook is to use Safari. Chrome and Firefox eat battery (and memory, and CPU cycles) like it's free. If you've not used Safari before, you may not realize how bad they are because you haven't seen an example of what "good" looks like. They're quite bad. The weak extension ecosystem kinda sucks, but you're stuck with it unless you like losing 2+ hours of battery life per day (believe it or not, it used to be worse) just for having FF or Chrome open in the background, instead of Safari. Perhaps one glorious day anyone whatsoever making any major software product will care as muh about power & resource use as Apple does. That day is not today.

Do this especially since you're probably not gonna be able to avoid using at least a couple resource-hog Electron apps, so you need to save your battery for them.

Also: Apple's first-party "apps" in general are pretty great. Preview is a religious experience. Terminal.app is one of the best GUI terminal emulators on any platform. Give them a shot if you're not used to bundled software being much good.

That they last so long (and, consequently, have high resale value even when they're several years old) is part of why Apple can charge so much in the first place. The resale-value thing also helps people justify those 2-3 year replacement cycles.

I have to disable most of the Touch Bar (set it not to change with context, and replace most of it with a blank "spacer") to make it usable. I tend to just barely brush it when striking number keys during normal typing (which happens a lot for parens and such when programming—and just now, in fact) which makes it do crazy stuff like open iTunes (because I "pressed" the media play button). Real buttons don't do that because you have to push down on them to activate them, not ever-so-slightly brush the bottom edge, which is why I'd never noticed, in my 25ish years of touch-typing, that I did that, until I used a TouchBar MacBook.

I also have to disable force-touch (or whatever it's called on there) on the trackpad, for models that have that, or else my drag-&-drop success rate is reduced from about 100% to more like 30%. Took me quite a while to figure out why that was happening. Luckily I have no clue why I'd want that feature in the first place, so I don't miss it. I don't have any kind of motor-function disorder, I just can't drag-&-drop while maintaining perfectly even pressure, I guess.

Agreed that iOS7 was a big UX downgrade. It went from being the only OS I'd be halfway-comfortable turning older tech-illiterate relatives loose on, to yet another OS that would leave them confused and lost much of the time. Discoverability and intuitiveness plummeted with 7.

Once you're above the grade of "cheese" that I'd suppose Europeans wouldn't recognize as such at all, even our low-end actual cheese in the US is incredibly expensive compared to (Western, at least, IDK about the rest) Europe. Not sure why.

Looks worriedly and significantly at my sleeping cat.

Trouble is, lots of laptops are subtly (or not so subtly) damaged over time by extra stuff being closed in the lid. Apple laptops, notably, but plenty of others too. It'd be much better for it to be built-in. Covers also ruin the (absolutely wonderful and hard to do without, once you're used to it) True Tone feature on Apple laptops, so they'd need some kind of secondary ultra-low-res never-exposed-as-a-real-camera color-temp sensor to properly support either built-in or add-on camera covers or kill-switches while still letting that work.

(I'm basically agreeing and elaborating, not correcting you, since your point isn't that that's a great solution, but that it's more proof that more than just security geeks and computer nerds consider this a problem)

1) physical kill switch for camera (as in, it breaks the power or data connection to it, physically) or at least a physical cover.

2) physical kill switch for the microphone

These are very much not "nerd" concerns, either. I see a lot of non-techies with stickers over their laptop cameras.

[EDIT] teachers in particular spread the "put a sticker over the camera" practice, in my experience, both before and during the pandemic. The last thing they need is to be responding to some student message late at night and accidentally snap a picture or start a video chat. That could easily be career-ending, and they wisely don't trust software safeguards to prevent that. Yet they do want the camera, sometimes. Not having a kill-switch or cover built in sucks.

The norm used to be never to post personal info online. Yes, some things could still be found out, and there were still attack vectors, but typing your real name in a web form, except maybe (and only fairly late in the time period I'm talking about) to pay with a CC on a well-known site? LOL no. Posting photos of yourself, and with your name and maybe even a location attached? Madness! Are you nuts!?

I'm convinced Zuckerberg's infamous "dumb fucks" comment was made in a state of puzzlement that all these n00bs just had no idea they shouldn't be giving him that info, and indeed, the dawn of Facebook and all the people it added to the set of folks posting information online ended the previous "no-one knows you're a dog" set of norms of the Web.

Now there's money tied up in it, so of course people insist they must be able to post all kinds of things under their real names so they can market themselves. Never mind that it remains a terrible idea.

This is the source of conflict, I think, between people who want more real names online and those who want none. The former are the new folks who think posting personal info online is normal, or even necessary (see again: personal brand-building and marketing) and believe that we need to be able to ID everyone to prevent abuse (i.e. be able to find abusers to punish them), and the latter are the old-school Web users (post-Eternal-September, pre-Facebook) who don't get why all these idiots are making themselves easy to abuse in the first place, who see more anonymity as the obvious cure.

I've started searching for "ethnic" recipes in their home languages, because the English-language ones are often so badly under-spiced that the called-for amounts aren't even useful as a rough estimate (for e.g. shopping or judging whether you have enough on-hand to make the dish), and sometimes are practically a completely different dish than the real thing. (if the dish has an English-language Wikipedia entry, clicking the link on that page for the dish's page in its native language is a great way to find the right thing to search for, and then Google Translate usually does an OK job on the recipe itself)

> Prescriptivists never seem to add that clarifying nuance to their advice though.

They often do, in my experience. AFAIK it hasn't been common to attempt any kind of real, strict prescriptivism in English since the middle of last century (yes, I'm sure a few examples exist). These days it's mostly "write like this—until you know better" or "avoid X if your audience is Y, for such-and-such reason".

A lot of writing rules are of the "follow it until you know how and when to break it" variety. That way if you never learn how to break them correctly, your writing is still a lot better than it was. It's no surprise that studies of writing already known to be good will find much rule-breaking, as one is not surprised to find race cars on a race track moving faster than we'd want any car to, ordinarily.

> Fiction and poetry vs whatever type of writing blogging is.

Essayists, pamphleteers, and diarists (blogs), and aphorists (Twitter). Genres with centuries-long histories.

> I would argue that academic writing tends to be pretty poor.

The above-namedropped David Foster Wallace certainly thought so.

Among people who spend their days thinking about language I'm pretty sure academese is considered more of an elaborate, extended shibboleth than an effective communication tool, going beyond merely being sprinkled with jargon and fake-fancy clichés (like, say, business language) so that it serves as an effective gatekeeping tool. Hard(er than it needs to be) to read, hard to correctly write.

If they’re just warning but letting you proceed, that’s fine. They do that because they see looooots of people screwing up their own email addresses in a few common ways. Run any email signup with a general audience and any kind of volume and you’ll end up doing the same, to reduce the load on support.

Sports are another big reason parents want older kids to get to school earlier than younger kids (as they can't take everyone at once, or else you need way more busses)—longer daylight hours after school for practice. Any attempt to change the schedule to get older kids to school later and younger ones earlier, will run into strong resistance from Sports Parents™, no matter the benefits to health or academics.

("why don't they just have the sports teams do one short practice in the morning, and one short practice in the afternoon?" 1. some of them actually do that already, despite the crazy-early school start time, and 2. for the less-insanely-dedicated sports that can't rely on parents to drop all the team members off before school, you'd need to run extra busses just for the sports kids, if they're showing up earlier than everyone else, and 3. Depending on the sport, one long practice is better and/or a lot more convenient than two short ones)

Yes, as is Pop Shell implemented on top of Gnome (mentioned in another comment).

You can tell they've made some questionable decisions when you try to use Gnome on very weak hardware.

On an old dual-core Celeron w/ 2GB memory I found it unusable. KDE—which, when I first started using Linux desktops on machines less than 1/4 that powerful, was noticeably heavier than Gnome—was a little slow but basically fine.

To my eyes gnome also drops frames like crazy (like, even for Linux, which is a pretty jittery environment to begin with) even on excellent hardware—not sure, but I think it's a reasonable guess that's also a symptom of sprinkling a scripting language all over the system without incredible levels of discipline to make sure it's never in the way of anything important.

Webtech strikes again.

> There are qualitative differences in response between people with and without ADHD, that manifest across the board, not just on few school metrics - and a psychiatrist will be able to see them.

I was under the impression that this "it works differently on people with ADHD" thing was essentially a pleasant myth. If you've got solid citations that stimulants do somehow work differently on people with ADHD I'd be interested in reading them. My understanding was that the effect is broadly similar, with the only meaningful distinction being that ADHD-diagnosed individuals have been judged as needing those effects, and others have not.

> If you don't know this stuff first hand, please refrain from making broad statements about it.

Unless all the kids illegally buying ADHD meds to do better in school when they have not been diagnosed with ADHD (and adults doing the same, for that matter, to do better at work) are doing that for no reason, I'm pretty sure I'm correct that amphetamines improve performance for most everyone, and that distinguishing between ADHD-and-improved-on-meds and not-ADHD-and-improved-on-meds is not trivial.

I was replying to a post that read:

> If they're on stims in particular, and the meds actually improve their behavior, then the cause most likely isn't insufficient PE time.

I object to that being proof of much other than amphetamines making most people perform better in school, without commenting on whether ADHD is a "real" thing (I'm not even sure what it would even mean for it not to be "real", given the state of our understanding and diagnosis of mental disorders). "We gave the kid amphetamines and they improved, must have had ADHD" is dangerously misguided.

> Well said, Cephalus, I replied; but as concerning justice, what is it? --to speak the truth and to pay your debts --no more than this? And even to this are there not exceptions? Suppose that a friend when in his right mind has deposited arms with me and he asks for them when he is not in his right mind, ought I to give them back to him? No one would say that I ought or that I should be right in doing so, any more than they would say that I ought always to speak the truth to one who is in his condition.

Intent very much matters. It's right there at the beginning of the reading on the topic. (The Republic, Book I)

> ORY Kratos, as an example, will happily create different conceptual types of users and you can store arbitrary data in those user documents, but it is modified through an API and exposes to you stable IDs against which you can code the rest of your application.

The stable-ID solution was how I handled this when I wrote one of these as an internal tool (guess you'd call it a "microservice") for a startup I worked for back in like 2010. In hindsight I guess I should have pushed to pivot to selling that as our product since we ended up selling the company for barely-pay-back-the-investors money, but who knew? Hahaha.

Also identified permissionable-objects as UUIDs, which let me handle authorization in addition to authentication. Creating a new "permission" object meant asking for one from the service, then you'd receive a UUID, associate that with whatever thing you were applying the permissions to on your end, and tell the service to assign the desired permissions. Then you could just query the permissions for that UUID (which could, potentially, represent a bundle of items, a single item, or permissions to an entire service—how to interpret it was left up to the consuming service) and of course cache them as much as you felt was proper. IIRC there as also a concept of owning-objects so you could let permissions be inherited, then override on a case-by-case basis, plus it'd let you ask which objects belonged to a given collection. IIRC I used that to represent organizations, too, since they were basically the same thing as a permissionable-object container themselves needing to be permissionable.

Not a perfectly-flexible system (billions of items that all need distinct permissions might have eventually forced sharding or something, but luckily we didn't have to worry about that) but it was rock solid for our purposes and made spinning up new services or products sharing login with our main product super-easy.

Around ‘08 or ‘09 they declared defeat in the Great Webspam War and decided webspam could rank highly as long as it didn’t get too nasty. The whole web (as far as searches results will tell you) promptly turned into webspam. I imagine this, along with their plainly-evil inlining of ads with search results within a couple years of that, made their profit arrow go up-and-to-the-right so hard that no-one who opposed those moves was paid any mind.

The effect of amphetamines on kids with ADHD is to improve school performance.

The effect of amphetamines on kids without ADHD is to improve school performance.

The effect of amphetamines on kids without ADHD but who've been diagnosed with ADHD because they're not getting enough exercise is... to improve school performance.

Two of my kids (one a boy and one a girl) act absolutely nuts and "must" have something like ADHD... until you make sure they run around outside at least 4hrs a day, consistently. Then they're fine.

Unfortunately this is effectively impossible to achieve for 2-3 months every year, with school in session and short Winter days. They're in lower elementary school but I think their total recess time per day is only about 30-40 minutes, and much of the time they don't even get that because it's raining or too cold (pft, whatever, wear coats) or something else, and they have them watch a movie more often than not in those cases (nb. this is a "good" school district)

We have one other kid—a girl—who doesn't seem to need this to not "act wild".

The other trigger for "crazy" behavior seems to be when they're presented with unpleasant social situations and don't know how to deal with them. Like, say, being forced to be around kids who are mean to them. Gee, I wonder where that happens a whole bunch.

King Solomon's Mines would count as fantasy-adventure, for its time period. It gets listed among influences on or precursors to 20th-century fantasy literature pretty often. I think it's 200ish pages, maybe 250. It's closer to Indiana Jones than to modern fantasy, though. You're not going to find a ton of "high fantasy" before Tolkien, if that's your thing. Mostly fantasy-adventure (as King Solomon's) or "low fantasy" (think: Conan the Barbarian) and a few works playing with folk-tale and fairy tale motifs.

Sci-fi is easy because it's a genre full of great short stories and novellas. Arguably, it's better suited to those than to novels. The New Hugo Winners collections showcase a lot of shorter works that tend to be a bit more "literary" (in an early Asimov-penned forward to one of these, he claims to have passed off editing duties on the "New Hugo" series because he doesn't quite understand the appeal of these newer stories). The chief difference is that older, less-literary sci-fi tends to focus on ideas, while in more recent material characters, theme, mood, and quality of prose take greater prominence. However there were authors working in that more literary space in the more classic-era of sci-fi like, as I mentioned before, Bradbury.

I'd hit up broad collections of classic sci-fi stories, which will mostly be good stuff and will give you an idea of the intentions and capabilities of a ton of authors, most of whom have large bodies of work to explore, and the New Hugo Winners series. Both kinds of book are readily found for very little money at thrift shops and used book stores. I'd avoid other annual collections (Year's Best, The Hugo Winners) until you've got a better idea of what you're looking for—get wide-ranging best-of collections and the New Hugos until then.

> As if I had left a traumatic situation, I vividly remember enjoying a lot finally having time for myself after work the first few years after I dropped out of high school. I had to put real effort 8 hours a day, then nothing else was expected of me.

Same. I slacked a lot in high school (in hindsight, I'd have gone actually-nuts otherwise) but it was still by far the hardest consistent work I've ever done, largely due to the sheer amount of time it took and the constant, overlapping, usually-very-short ("due tomorrow") deadlines. College was a vacation. Work is easy.

High school did little to prepare me for "how the real world works" (always the excuse for deadlines and requirements and such in school) but did harm me psychologically in ways that took more than a decade to get over—and I wasn't even bullied or anything like that, it was mostly just the strict schedule, extreme lack of freedom (asking to go to the bathroom, stuff like that), and crazy workload.

My graduating class was remarked on through multiple schools as an exceptionally smart class. We had lots of very bright boys and girls. Maybe our class was unusual in other ways so this isn't part of a broader trend or tendency, but practically all the smart girls did all their homework and maintained a 3.5GPA or higher (most more like 3.8+), while probably half or more of the smart boys skipped lots of it and pulled Cs and Bs (with the occasional A in classes that had little homework). Meanwhile, those same boys who skipped much of their homework scored in the top percentile or two when it came time for ACTs and SATs and achieved excellent marks on annual state testing (not that the latter matters whatsoever for students), were often in gifted programs or active on "smart kid" extracurriculars, et c.

So those boys "did poorly in school" (which, to be sure, wasn't a great thing for e.g. college admissions above high-tier state schools) but that didn't give the full picture.

I think it depends on where you're coming from—like, what do you already read? Romance? Sci-fi? Fantasy? Contemporary adventure fiction? Young adult (Harry Potter, The Hunger Games, et c.)?

There are a couple kinds of classics: there are adventure stories that have endured, and there are books that are considered outstanding literature. There's some overlap in these categories, but there are plenty which are definitely in one category but not the other.

There are some difficulties that accompany classics: 1) quality of translation, if not in a language you can read; 2) "old" language, if in one you can (also a problem in translations, actually, especially public-domain ones), 3) they take place in times that are alien enough that they're harder to understand now than they were originally, and 4) in the case of "literary" works, what one may be expected to appreciate about them is... not always the same sort of thing one may expect to appreciate about, say, a Tom Clancy novel. For most people it takes time to really get that, and begin to enjoy it.

Research and advice can help with #1, and one must get used to the idea that one may read a book once and hate it, but read it again in another translation and love it, and anyway, it's not a problem for everything, just works in translation. Exposure and practice are what get you through #2 and #4, precisely like getting into a new genre of music (especially one that's considered hard to appreciate, like, say, jazz or classical music, but hell, hip-hop's dense AF and takes time to really get, too). #3, exposure helps (as you pick up more about various cultures and time periods) but you've really gotta get comfortable with annotated editions and seeking extra material outside the book you're trying to read.

So, I'd say entry-level depends on the kind of classic, and where you're coming from.

Adventure-classic? For a native English speaker? Easy recommendation for King Solomon's Mines. It's great, it's pulpy, it's not terribly long, it's... weirdly modern in some ways? The language isn't old enough to be hard to read. Delightful, even in 2021.

Adventure-classic + literature? The Odyssey. Easy. If you find verse hard to read, just get a prose translation. Bonus: try to appreciate the so-called "Telemachy" (a few "books" [chapters] about Telemachus looking for his father, but mostly just drinking with his dad's old acquaintances). You'll be on your way to appreciating the more literary-side of classics if you can find enjoyment in that part.

You a sci-fi reader and want to learn to appreciate more literary things? Bradbury. Lots. Of. Bradbury. When you're loving his "boring" stories, you've made it.

Everyone who likes romance seems to get into Austen just fine, so that's easy. If you bounce off the more popular ones, try Persuasion. It's very short and, I gather, didn't get a "polishing" edit/rewrite pass from Austen so it reads differently from the others. Maybe stretch into Isak Dinesen's short stories? Not romance, exactly, but I think it'd do the job.

I'm garbage at fantasy, so I'll leave that rec. to someone else. Tolkien seems obvious, but IDK, and I'm not sure he's really a great gateway to broader "literature", and anyway I'm not that well read in him (I've read Fellowship and The Hobbit—I enjoyed The Hobbit). Ditto young-adult. The usual path there is just to move into friendly, short, easy-to-read semi-literary authors like Vonnegut, I think.

I only mentioned the tax thing because for some reason when I've brought this up other places people thought I was trying to avoid paying taxes. So I figured I'd head that off at the beginning.

I just want to move somewhere with a decent social system (esp. healthcare, though none of us are or expect to be sick in the near future—I'm also not trying to cheat a healthcare system in some fashion) and good schools, and use my certainly-except-in-a-handful-of-expensive-cities above-median income to pay taxes and support the local economy like anyone else. 95% of why I want to do this is so my kids can grow up somewhere with saner government and a generally saner society. None of why I want to do it is to cheat anyone. I'd just rather not also have to change jobs (and probably take a pay cut, and likely end up back in an office, too) to do it. :-/