jesperlang

But what does it mean to be "social"? I've been thinking about this alot lately and it's not easy to define. But social media's version of social is making me more and more uncomfortable. I have so many unfinished thoughts around this but here goes..

I can say that a good social experience is usually in a very small group, dynamic, immersive, thrilling, you can feel it in your entire body, you loose your sense of time. On some social media the interactions are relatively slow, shallow, fragmented, in some sense performative because you know potentially alot of people can read what you're posting. It's like a totally different kind of social, which of course can have it's value but it becomes a problem when most of our social interactions are like this.

Take the experience of sharing your vacation pictures. On social media it is like you are packaging your memory to present for a broader audience. Imagine, in contrast, how you would invite your friend over and share your (printed) pictures over a coffee. Depending on what your relationship looks like you will present your trip differently. This shared memory will be woven into your relationship in a unique way, giving it yet another layer.

It's like the word social has been hijacked. It was never about making a "social media". It was about changing our idea about what social means..

bans some polluting vehicles:

> The plan, known as Madrid Central, establishes a low-emissions zone that covers 472 hectares (1,166 acres). All petrol vehicles registered before 2000 and diesel ones registered before 2006 will be banned from the area, unless they are used by residents of the area or meet other exemptions.

Nevertheless a good step!

I'm wondering this as well. Firefox has built-in containers. Can't we just use them?

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/containers

I should have rephrased that! The main point is it seem to put us in a very risky situation with methane release. They're mentioning how doing the extraction can potentially destabilize the whole reserve and lead to massive releases.

Then there's also the eco system aspect. The environments surrounding the reserves have unique organisms. What's going to happen with that? Just because we don't see it, it doesn't seem to matter..

How is it the future of energy? As the article later states, "All the social and environmental issues associated with fossil fuels apply to gas hydrates ". It's later awkwardly explained as a transitional energy source, sure methane is more short lived but do we really want to gamble with the possible tippings that we have set ourselves up for?

> In our resting states, we do not rest.

It's funny how language shapes our thinking. The word rest has a bias towards related words such as inactivity and being passive. Hard to change that now! Imagine a culture/language where we would say "time travel" instead of "rest"! It would completely change how we look at resting..

I need to go time travel a bit now :)

> The key to occupational happiness is to first figure out what you’re passionate about and then find a job that matches this passion.

I think alot of people can misunderstand the "what" of their passion, especially when trying to match it with a job. Take for example photography. If you tell yourself you're passionate about photography but not understand what kind of photography and in what context/social situation you can make some pretty bad occupational choices. So if what you really are passionate about is street photography, socializing with random people, observing people in an urban environment, and you end up with working with photography in an indoor studio setting doing meaningless marketing campaigns you are probably going to end up unhappy. Maybe even loosing the passion of street photography as well...

So, NPR still doesn't link properly from the data protection choice page to the plain text site...

Here is the plain text version:

https://text.npr.org/s.php?sId=645629133

I think people just deal with the culture/infrastructure they are born into. If you live in Los Angeles you buy a car, if you live in Amsterdam you buy a bicycle, if you live in Venice you walk. It's the institutions that set this up that are to blame (and the corporations/politicians/voters that affected them). Problem is that most infrastructure was "set up" during high growth years decades ago and now it's just there and very very hard/slow to change...

This looks great! I was looking for something similar to Dr Racket but for python. I am going to use this in a beginner's course in programming for high school students.

I guess you have already seen this article: http://worrydream.com/LearnableProgramming/ , any plans on getting some features there implemented? Especially seeing state/flow over time would be immensely helpful for beginners. The state inspector panel is good enough for now though!

Another simpler thing that would be nice is to have some explanations when you hover on keywords/functions

Another article that refers to the book "The Mind is Flat", there was recently a submission and related discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17625244

Highly recommend reading the book, it really is mind blowing and thought provoking!

> but slowness only became a bad thing when time became money.

This. After downscaling my expenses and started working at 25-50% it's amazing how much time I got now compared to working full time. We really under value time and have a weird perspective on it and what we can use it for. Walking to the shop can take 45 minutes for me now which seem ridiculous for some when a car ride takes 5-10 minutes. But what is not accounted for is that slowness itself has value, I have time for reflection while walking, I get fresh air and move my body, I don't need to worry about a car and its costs. The same goes for food. I used to do alot of take outs when I worked full time but now I don't hesitate to prepare and cook for 2-3 hours, I get a much more intimate experience with food, I learn things and get to eat food that taste great.

I see this point coming up a lot. But if you consider the car a medium of transport for the individual and how it affects the collective it makes more sense. Think of it as "build cities for people, not individuals"

Can relate to this 100%, at the moment I'm trying to enter teaching, for me that feels like a good focus if you aim for "interesting outcomes"

I assume they mean sterile when they say clean. Why do we still insist only on sterile environments? Shouldn't we focus on creating small eco systems that are suitable for humans, where probably lots of different microbes that are beneficial to us are included..

> To the farming families of Switzerland’s Engelberg region, cable cars aren’t built for ski holidays and scenic views

The simple farmer's cable cars are used by skiers as well though. The terrain around Engelberg is excellent for skiing and many skiers use them (paying a small fee to the farmers) to reach areas not heavily skied like the nearby resort

key sentence:

> Microplastics make up 94 percent of an estimated 1.8 trillion pieces of plastic in the patch. But that only amounts to eight percent of the total tonnage. As it turns out, of the 79,000 metric tons of plastic in the patch, most of it is abandoned fishing gear—not plastic bottles or packaging drawing headlines today.

"only eight percent of the total tonnage"? We are talking about microplastics, that is still an incredible amount of plastic.

What's more interesting is I think this article shows how journalism about environmental destruction has some significant problems. It works as with most other human communication, we want narratives and images that evokes emotion (a kind of mythic/romantic understanding of things). That's why "The Great Pacific Garbage Patch" works so well, we all mentally see an island of trash in our heads that needs "cleaning up" and along comes the hero, a young entreprenour. Other things that work well are pictures of dead birds on a beach with their stomach full of different colored plastics.

The problem is when our "romantic" idea of pollution hides/ignores the more destructive (and more complex) effects. Pictures of flooding being the poster images for climate change is an incredibly shallow view of the problem. And no part of the world is free of plastic, so basically the entire earth is a plastic garbage patch. Even worse, when an image that is built up doesn't fit what it started out as. You have basically made things worse by planting doubt about the problem in general by having an incomplete and shallow image of the problem..

Ignoring the ridiculous price tag this phone is as close to what I'm looking for yet. I also want to go lighter but a major thing for me is battery life. Light Phone 2 is aiming at 5 days stand by, why are we still dealing with battery life in terms of days, not weeks or months?

So, that means my Nokia 120 is still an awesome phone with 3-4 weeks of battery life, calls, texts, radio, alarm and a 32GB (via micro SD) music player. And that at a tenth of the price of Light Phone 2.

Reading code always felt awkward, slow and ineffective. The cognitive load is huge, you have to compute some things while memorizing others and at the same time keep track of flows. Thats why I always have pen and paper while diving into a new big code base, you simply can't keep it in your head. But something we forget often is... the goal of reading code is almost always to understand a system or some part of it. And reading code for me is a terrible way to do it.

Code is just one level of abstraction and one way of seeing things. We should have multiple ways of "reading" a system depending on what level we want to understand it. No, I don't think that rushed, out of date "system documentation" you wrote will do. I still think this is not solved in a satisfying way. We could find inspiration from things that works well, just imagine how google maps lets you look at the world at many different levels, from continents down to street level. Also it provides different views of each level, street maps are useful for tourists, terrain maps for hikers and satellite images for someone who want to study vegetation. How you will "read" a system depends on what you are trying to understand.

Here's a temperature anomaly map for reference. North pole 30C warmer and arctic in general 6C warmer.

http://cci-reanalyzer.org/wx/DailySummary/#t2anom

Could data become part of UNESCO's world heritage? Nowadays alot of culture happens in the digital space and it's always a tragedy when huge amounts of cultural creations just vanish into nothing. Web archives are perhaps not enough, lots of content are inside walled gardens, convincing a company to release all that information is a different question of course :)

I have used both Bitstamp and Kraken for Ripple. Bitstamp is probably the easiest, allowing direct purchase using credit cards. Kraken has had major scaling issues but performance seem to have improved after a recent upgrade..

This is so sneaky! I am trying to find a good black list and found this:

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Network.IDN.blacklist_chars

Or maybe black listing is not the best approach, maybe a mix of multiple approaches. First strip out stuff and then view the text in a program that displays "unconventional" characters? As a test I pasted the post's test sentences in Vim and the invisible characters are replaced by blocks of <XXXX> that are very hard not to notice. The more you think about it the more tricky corner cases you find :O

it's incredibly how much you can spend on take out, drinks and useless knicknack/gadgets. It was easily $300-800 for me before (camera geek).

But made an active choice to cut them out. And it hasn't been a loss for me, instead of take out I make exactly what I want (and no stress now that I have time to cook), instead of drinks out invite friends over and have a drink (cheap) at home, instead of useless things try to realize that you don't actually need them. Also living in a place with public transport helps, but I mostly bike everywhere.

I am in my mid 30s, started my professional career in 2008. Hard to tell if when is a good time for doing it. My feeling is I should have done it earlier but I guess it depends on your situation. Maybe if you have an active social life and hobbies you love it will be easier at any point. If you have worked a lot and over long time I think friends/hobbies can fade, and it will be easier to fall into loneliness/depression if you quit working.

But, I think doing it early (say after ~3 years) has the advantage of settling/deepening the understanding of your work. Often the early years are super hectic and you try to be your best, neglecting things like mindful reflection. I believe sabbatical can help this, kind of like how sleep organizes and "cleans up" thoughts/memories. We need both the short sleep and "long" sleep.

Nope, in Sweden

actually I moved back to friends and family. But it does get lonely sometimes when you don't have a strict schedule and lots of free time when people are locked in at their 9-5 jobs..

I quit what many would consider a successfull job in programming and had a sabbatical year. Moved to a smaller town and down sized everything in spending to the point where I pay $600 per month for housing, food and bills, so living of my savings haven't been an issue at all.

I have focused on things like reading (read +40 books in 2017, up from 1-2 per year), wood working, sketching, running and skiing. To keep up my programming skills I have done a deep dive in new programming languages and fiddling with some side projects. It has been an incredible year for personal development and it has changed my perspective on what things are important in life (sitting in front of a screen 40-60 hours a week not being one of them). I highly recommend everyone to do this at least once in your career!

I think a more fair view of the term social media should be as a marketing term? When these tech giants were growing they needed a name to refer to them as a whole, but that name reflected what they wanted those services to be viewed as, not the effects they came to have. We see this everywhere in how labelling of things appeal to some of our inner desires -- in this case the need of social interactions -- and not necessarily accurately describing their effects.

I think the main reason these services exist at all is not to create social mediums but to tap into the flows of human communication for profit. And, since their version of communication is, in the true social aspect, an incredibly crippling one compared to the rich, immersive experience of more old ways of interacting -- no wonder we can be left with a deeply dissatisfying feeling when use social media services.

is Zerg related to Ling? It seems like this project has (sadly) died out. Anyone know the current status?

https://github.com/cloudozer/ling/issues/141