jmbwell

I’m not saying who or when or whether this ever actually happened, but there were kids in my hometown who would do this but announce to each location “please hold for a call from the regional manager” or something equally officious, then put them on and say something ridiculous but plausible enough to get them going. Ahh a different time.

Allegedly

Thanks at least for citing a reference and not just saying “language evolves” or something.

Those interested in this kind of pedantry might also take care to note that it’s called “daylight saving time,” with no “s.”

It is a system of time for saving daylight.

It is not a sales event promising “savings.”

Frustrating to read an otherwise excellent and detailed article that makes this error throughout.

I’ve heard what the article describes about specializing being the way to go. In the US, insurance is also a huge pain in the ass; doctors have to fight to get paid as often as we have to fight to have things covered. There’s also the overhead of insurance for their practice, the costs of running a clinic or being part of a clinic group, maintaining compliance with everything, paying Epic’s extortionate fees, etc.

The last two doctors I’ve had have gone to “concierge” services to help mitigate this. They stabilize their income with annual membership fees that sidestep the insurance company horseshit. They constrain their roster a bit. They can see people more quickly. But you have to be a member.

It’s sad for me, but I get it from their perspective. “Retail” healthcare in the US is by all accounts a nightmare.

Being a parent is why I value them

Alone time I find quite valuable.

Every now and then I find myself with a day or two by myself, having no expectations, nobody to have to coordinate with, nowhere to be at a particular time. It’s incredibly resetting.

I know it’s valuable because when I can pull it off, I feel like I’m stealing something.

As long as the flow of money isn’t disrupted, the system works as designed.

The most significant laws Texas enacted after the freeze — HB 3 and 5, SB 1015 and 2627 - mainly establish new funding for gas-fired plant construction, cut funding for renewable construction, and allow energy companies to raise rates on customers more frequently.

Observers will note that gas fired plants had the most unplanned outages, while renewable sources had the fewest. In any case, what matters is that the $9/kWh costs are duly distributed to the customers and tax payers, to the benefit of energy traders.

Many of these are on Peacock in the U.S.

Door’s open with the keys in the ignition…

American news is unhealthy and unhealthy for you.

Local news is dying.

We have wealth management to thank for all of it

Love this stuff from the “if you’re doing nothing wrong you should have nothing to fear” crowd.

I would add that, at least historically, a reputable photojournalist wouldn't likely build a very successful career on faked photos. It's heavily disincentivized. The time and effort required to build the necessary skills and clout won't casually be wasted by a professional. And if and when it does happen that a photojournalist is caught in a lie, the rest are quick to reject it, because it damages their own reputations and livelihoods.

But now, there's little to stop anyone from producing images depicting anything, and we've seen how systems that are blind to ethics can be manipulated into disseminating such images at a speed and scale that far outpaces fact-checking. Professional standards and traditional gatekeeping have no power against it.

I sometimes battle perfectionism for various reasons. Someone pointed out that it can’t be perfect if it isn’t even finished, so why not add “done” to what it means to be “perfect.” Somehow that tweaked my perspective in a helpful way. Edit: on reflection, possibly because it doesn’t imply a compromise of my standards, but actually strengthens them, so I don’t have the feeling of giving up or giving less.

Also very much believe in doing some kind of planning, any kind being better than none at all. Otherwise you put yourself in a tunnel but you don’t give yourself a light at the end. The plan can change and it will, but if you have none, you might end up digging forever

One of my early frustrations with Microsoft's "To-do" app was that it discarded my "today" tasks every day. But now I love that it does this, for the reasons the author describes.

I was used to apps like Asana that would just let things sit there and accumulate and fester. It made me hate how much I wasn't getting done every day. One or two tasks a day piling up over the course of many days just grows into a mountain of shame, and as the author says, it builds this "UGH field" around it that makes me not want to look at it at all, much less try to wade through it. The system was hurting more than helping, really.

I started using To-Do because we recently switched to Microsoft at work, and I'm trying to embrace the ecosystem or whatever. And what was an annoying deficiency (why can't this crappy MS app do what I want) has become a huge relief.

Automatically having my day reset every day has helped me feel more like I can actually get through most of what I realistically intend to do in a day. I take a minute in the morning to throw stuff on the list, MS does helpfully suggest some things (presumably using something they now call "AI"), and then I start working down it. At the end of the day, anything I didn't get to -- honestly, anything that wasn't as important as I thought it would be that day -- is gone. The next day, I start fresh. Re-focus, re-prioritize, and start executing. Everything still gets done, but my focus is on the day ahead rather than days past. And no "ugh field."

I would note that my approach to projects with teams is different, of course. All of those tasks will eventually need to get done, so it's not helpful to let things disappear. But where this does apply is in how much a given contributor wants to bite off in a day. The backlog on a project is the backlog, no getting around it, but a tighter focus each day on whatever's realistic, 3-5 tasks probably, relieves a lot of tension that helps work be more effective, I find.

Last comment, I love that the author also puts things on the list just to scratch them off. I picked up this habit somewhere long ago. It seems silly to do something, then put it on the list, then just scratch it right off, but it has the real effect of notching another task done. Helps limit the days where you feel like you didn't actually do anything, those yak-shaving days. You can look at the "completed" tab and see that no, you did actually do stuff. Another source of shame neutralized.

This was a fascinating and ... detailed ... story. I appreciate that it went a little further into the history of Apple's involvement ARM than the recent spate of blog posts that didn't go back past Newton.

[[[[[THINKING]]]]]

[[[[[PRINTING]]]]]

The first time I saw the pulsating rainbow screens as a second-grader, it blew my mind. I'm not sure my experience with The Print Shop didn't set me on the path toward my early career in publishing. If you needed me after school, you'd find me in the computer lab waiting on a banner.

Favorite border: The one with the square loops in the corners.

With so many other package managers available, I often wish something else was the de facto package manager on macOS. Something like pkgsrc, which follows conventions much better and is thereby much easier to manage.

Here in Houston as well, dew point is as important as temperature and %PoP. Apple Weather suffices for now but I hope it gets richer with the various types of data that are of greater relevance in different regions.

iOS/iCloud has a built-in TOTP function also. Maybe better for friends and family than some people here.

https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/automatically-fill-in...

The president now has legal authority to do whatever he wants.

At the same time, the president's agencies no longer have the authority to do whatever they want.

So I guess the president can order the military to drone strike the FCC if he wants at this rate. I don't see what influence the Constitution is still going to have at this point.

Ah the push and pull. In the beginning, scroll bars were a feature. Then proportional scroll bars were a major development. Then scroll bars were dynamic, auto-hiding, optional, or removed altogether. So designers put progress bars across the top of individual pages--some sites have them, most don't, all different ad-hoc implementations. It's a new feature all over again, going through the cycle of learning what works and what doesn't. People hate it. People love it. All this has happened before. All this will happen again.

A ToC might be more distracting with a style that benefits less from a clear structure, like a personal essay. It can be important in a more technical-procedural style of writing, though.

In which case, why not just have humans write the text we need instead of firing all our writers in the first place?

I have Ambient Weather equipment at multiple locations and it works great. Ambient’s own site and software is also very good lately.

Holy crap, this list nails it.

"But all the cheap front-end talent is in thick client frameworks, telemetry indicates most revenue conversions are from users on 5G, our MVP works for 80% of our target user base, and all we need to do is make back our VC's investment plus enough to cash out on our IPO exit strategy, plus other reasons not to care" — self-identified serial entrepreneur, probably

> Even if you do your own thing and make something super cool, nobody's gonna stumble upon it randomly. You either have to spam it on social media or aim for high ranking in search results (while that's still somewhat of a possibility).

Seems like this might depend on the objective. Spamming social media and aiming for search rank might be necessary for ad revenue, self-promotion, or other conversions, whatever those might be. But it is not strictly necessary. Doing your own thing and making something cool can be 100% the end in itself.

The issue I have leans the other way. I'm hesitant to self-publish anymore primarily because I don't want my work to get sucked up into the commercial machinery of the Big Tech Web. I have no interest and gain no benefit from feeding AI, scrapers, aggregators, or other "creators" who do surf around for other people's work they can mill into their own hash for their own purposes.

I'd love it if I could somehow publish only for other end-user humans, but I don't see how I can do that without paradoxically engaging with some aspect of the commercial apparatus. It's like a Foucaultian nightmare. There's no way not to be part of the system. Rejecting it requires first embracing it.

To wit: here I am on HN complaining about giving away my work for free

If things are working well, they are automated and I rarely see the real time output.

If I’m looking at real time output, it’s because I’m doing something manually because something isn’t working the way it’s supposed to, and I’m in no mood for anything that doesn’t help me understand and address the issue.

This work is impressive. I love it. For some reason I really like “printer.” I’d be all about it for games or toys. But too many tools for real work try to do cute Unicode things or fancy colors or animations. I don’t need it on anything I will ever have to develop or troubleshoot, personally. After the first lengthy wait for a broken container to come up, I’m well over the colorful attitude.

Being reachable only from a PC at home… man. Now that I miss. The whole lifestyle of having a clear distinction between being at the computer and not. Status messages for a time when “away” was a state of being you ever were. Coming back to see whether your crush had messaged you. Simpler times for sure.

Before we even had “wi-fi!”

I don’t think there’s an XKCD for this, but there is a Sesame Street:

https://youtu.be/aCsY3REaADo?si=ODNcG3LvXNPxYSyQ