josephorjoe

while i do agree that anyone traveling from anywhere now (but esp. hard hit areas like nyc) should be self quarantining for 14 days before circulating in the new community, to be fair, 3 weeks ago it wasn't clear what people should and should not be doing and the government was giving very mixed messages to people.

I know several people who left nyc over the last few weeks, mostly to stay w family in neighboring states.

We decided we are staying in nyc, and since the schools closed (march 13 was the last day they were open), we have had very limited exposure to anyone outside our apartment and have not left our apartment at all in 8 days except to go in our small backyard (which i am very grateful for right now).

3/9 was the last day I commuted to work and last day I was on the subway. I remember I went into work late and left early to avoid crowds.

That was also the day my company changed our policy from "if you want to work from home, talk to your boss to see if that is appropriate" to "if you can work from home, you must work from home".

My boss and most of my co-workers were already working from home since the previous week (my boss had announced he was OK w anyone working from home), and I only went in on the 9th because I had agreed to meet w someone in the office.

Hard to believe that was 20 days ago...

Ooooh, like gas rationing in the 70s.

In my (normally very busy) neighborhood in nyc, I'd say this week vehicle traffic is down like 70-80% and pedestrian traffic had been down 50-60% earlier in the week and yesterday and today is looking more like 80-90% reduced -- and actually today vehicle traffic seems like it is almost gone. Just delivery and sanitation vehicles.

People seem to be taking it seriously here, but I'm sure there are plenty of places where people are not.

Well, for one thing, if people can be tested to confirm they had and recovered from the virus and therefore have some immunity to it, those people can more safely assist people who are currently ill and move about more freely in society (unless they are still at risk to transmit the virus to others, of course).

I think the motivation for this change is to prevent employers from trying to maintain "business as usual" operating conditions.

Anecdotally I've heard of places where the company has made no policy changes about sick leave or what employees who are feeling ill should do and, therefore, hourly workers keep coming in to work with "flu-like symptoms" or days after having had symtpoms because otherwise they don't get paid and could get fired.

You can save the industry without bailing out the stock holders and bond holders, as those are three different things.

So, what is important?

1. Maintaining a functional airline industry

2. Making sure the bondholders get back 100% of their loans?

3. Making sure shareholders don't lose their equity stake?

I would agree that #1 is important.

It is not at all incorrect.

For whatever reason, the US lacks the ability and/or the capability of responding effectively to this crisis.

The assistance is valuable and should be respected and appreciated accordingly.

And if people in the US feel uncomfortable about what this assistance implies about the US -- well, there will be time to consider why that is so and what can be done about it at a future date.

Be careful with how you throw around your "not very American at all" claims.

America is a big place. It is unwise to presume you know all of it.

In my part of it, most of us think letting people die of privation due to misfortune and societal factors outside their control in such a wealthy society is cruel and foolish (read history to understand why it is foolish). In my part of America, most of us also think letting random individuals own weapons constructed purposely for killing multiple humans quickly is absolutely insane.

YMMV

By controversial issues we apparently mean "providing food and a safety net for people who lose their jobs" (most of whom will lose their jobs due to the crisis brought about by the pandemic).

I feel there is something very wrong with us that this is immediately seen as "OMG Super partisan crazy talk!!!"

South Korea...

Senate may well be dead if they are seen to be standing in the way of getting testing done (or at least the 33 of them up for reelection this year).

and thank you again when reading stack traces

it's never fun to track down a bug to a line that is doing 8 things.

I predict the virus will persist in being unmoved by public opinion no matter how fake the news is.

With less confidence, I predict people who get sick, have friends and family get sick, and/or watch their 401k value drop 25% in a month will develop antibodies to certain types of fake news.

I guess we'll find out how susceptible viruses are to propaganda, political spin, and troll farms...

This seemingly constant ratcheting up of anti-customer behavior by product manufacturers is starting to feel more and more like symptoms of the end of an economic cycle where executives desperate for One More Good Bonus are willing to risk damaging the company's reputation to hit the next quarter's sales target.

"Customers hate it, but" <-- remember that for the company post mortem.

I'm not a farmer and I am a software engineer, but I'm with the famers here. I want as little software in my products as possible.

I've been shopping for some audio equipment, and noticed that the latest version of an audio interface I'm interested in has replaced hardware switches on the device with software controls run from an attached computer.

I was immediately turned off by the new version and will likely buy a used one or one from a different manufacturer.

The hardware switches are old reliable technology and do not add much weight or size to the unit. And while the device is meant to be connected to a computer, it just needs to do so as a signal passing device, not as a device that is dependent upon software on the computer.

I'm sure the marketing department could explain why the new software controlled version is super awesome, but all it looks like to me is extra setup headaches and creating a dependency on software that I have no guarantee of being able to install on a future computer/OS combo.

Plus, there is always a chance the manufacturer will do something stupid/evil and brick old versions some day.

So, the future of transportation is an e-bike with more power so it can have higher top speeds, carry larger loads, and operate more safely in adverse weather conditions.

Of course, with higher top speeds you will probably want a windshield to protect the driver from bugs, debris, or precipitation. Hard to concentrate when you are getting hit in the face with stuff at 45 kph.

And really once the windshield is there, you should put a roof on too to provide better protection from the elements.

And a passenger seat or two. Maybe some storage. Maybe another wheel (or two) for better stability.

And then you have an e-car.

Yeah, if the primary economic model of a phone number is to allow 3rd parties to spam individuals, then the phone number needs to die.

Something my kid said to me about YouTube last year (when he was 10) has always stuck with me, even if it was just a kid's throwaway comment:

"There are basically four generations: the grandparents, the parents, the YouTubers, and the kids."

The YouTubers seem to occupy that niche of ephemeral stardom previously occupied primarily by pop musicians, movie actors, and professional athletes.

The athletes, actors, and musicians are still there (and some of them are of course YouTubers too), but I'm sure my son and his friends know far more 'native' YouTubers than other celebrities.

Not sure what this all means, although it did make me start paying much more attention to YouTube and led to some discussions with my son about what "infotainment" is and the dangers implicit in it.

This feels weird to me.

If you have advertised a job and I've given you my resume, it is to give you some information you can use to avoid wasting your time and my time.

Just like I would hope your advertisement is accurate and useful enough to let me decide if it is a good use of time for me to send you a resume (e.g., saw an ad for "react developer" -- got to the interview and they were looking for a "server side java dev" -- I mean -- wtf?).

Not reading a resume before an interview feels... rude. It feels like the path that leads to you asking a Java/Go programmer to do a Javascript coding challenge in 50 minutes, which is a waste of everyone's time.

Whenever I've worked with a new $TECH for an $IMPORTANT_PROJECT_WITH_A_DEADLINE the timeframe for getting up to speed with the new tech has been days, not minutes.

I was on a python/javascript team that transitioned to kotlin -- everything went well, better than I would have expected tbh given only 1 of us even had any production java experience, but 50 minutes would not have been enough time to figure out how to usefully set up the IDE, let alone build anything beyond FizzBuzz.

As someone who has spent too much time on music theory and not nearly enough time on learning to play songs, I'd congratulate you for doing this in the right order.

I've mostly learned music theory by a haphazard procedure of following my interests, which I would not recommend. :p

But one concept that really opened my eyes when I was learning music theory (from the perspective of a not-so-good guitar player) was how "everything" can be built from a scale, or more precisely -- a pattern for spacing a set of notes.

So, C major scale:

C D E F G A B C

half tones between 3rd/4th notes and 7th/8th notes. whole tones everywhere else. Begin with any other note, and follow that pattern, and you have the major scale for that root note:

D E F# G A B C# D

G A B C D E F# G

F G A Bb C D E F

Write any major scale vertically, then next to it rewrite it beginning with the 3rd note then again with the 5th note. Read it horizontally and you have the primary chords in the key for that scale

CEG c major

DFA d minor

EGB e minor

FAC f major

GBD g major

ACE a minor

BDF b minor flat 5 (i think... was always fuzzy on this one)

Of those chords, the famous "3 chords" for a folk/blues/rock song will be the 1st, 4th, and 5th (the 3 majors) with the 6th (relative minor) or sometimes the 2nd or 3rd thrown in fairly often as an extra or replacement.

Write another vertical column there starting on the 7th note and you will get the notes in the 7th chords for the key (although rock/blues traditionally will use some variations on those).

"Rotate" that list to begin with a note other than C and you are defining a new mode (and there is one for each possible starting note). Begin with A and you have the Aelion mode (aka A Minor).

The pentatonic scales are just subsets of this scale (e.g., minor pentatonic is the minor scale without the 2nd and 6th notes, so ABCDEFGA becomes ACDEGA)

Not without government regulation.

Businesses never regulate themselves before the disaster because it is always more profitable to use the "there won't be a disaster" scenario plan.

Honestly without laws and regulations capitalist organizations would eventually just straight out rob and/or blackmail people and claim that doing anything less would be unfair to their shareholders.

I hate bad and onerous regulations as much as the next person, but I'm always amazed by how ingrained the `regulations == bad` sentiment has become in society.

Regulations are the rules that make systems stable. Without them we'd just cycle between abuse and violent revolution...

Project Gutenberg is really a modern day equivalent and is one of the better things created on the internet.

No one who has read Terry Pratchett will be surprised that he has deep insight into human nature.

His books are full of explorations of what motivates humans and how humans misunderstand each other. They are also frequently hilarious.

Bill Gates quote seems to reveal an expectation that humans would respect authority and be guided by it in their decision making -- which shows a shallow understanding of human nature.

The quote also anticipates that information distribution would flow through personal and professional connections and interests rather than being organized in a way to generate the most ad revenue possible.

I only use chrome on my work computer now, and even there I use firefox for logging in to my personal gmail.

My son just got his first computer -- a windows pc. He has edge and firefox installed, but no chrome. I told him he cannot trust google :( and should avoid their software as much a possible.

Well, once the web pages in chrome are bloated with ads that you can block in firefox, its apparent performance edge will fade.