kibibyte

I like Discord but I get that it's not for everybody. Jumping into a very active wide Discord community (with many channels) can be an incredibly jarring sensory assault, and if you don't have a narrower community (e.g. a private server for just your friend group, or honestly just a server with very few channels to keep track of) to figure out things, it can be very off-putting.

That said, the reason why so many people want to go to Discord is pretty hard to miss: out of all the alternatives, it's the one with critical mass now. Even if everyone is distributed across different servers (to be clear to those less familiar, a server is not a physical/virtual host) and cannot directly interact with one another, the network effects are readily apparent.

Something I found dismaying was just how only a few of the subreddit communities I liked had any alternative platforms to go to: only the fountain pens community had a Discord server. And upon joining that server the day before the blackout, it was pretty clear just how much work had already gone into making that community feel immediately welcoming (looks like it took at least a year) and ready to handle huge influx of new users.

Given that Christian Sellig made his criticism of the API changes public only 11 days prior to the blackout and made his decision to close down Apollo only 3 days prior, most subreddits just wouldn't have the chance to get started elsewhere, regardless of whether it's Discord or Lemmy or whatever. Discord arguably requires among the least amount of technical savvy to use among the alternatives, but ensuring it doesn't become instant chaos is a nontrivial social problem. And certainly, 11 days to break the inertia of 100k+ users to move elsewhere is nontrivial as well.

TIL there was a different "First Republic Bank" that failed in 1988. This name carries a curse now.

Combi-ovens are predominantly equipment that belongs in commercial kitchens, but nowadays, there are a few options (still not very many though) that can actually fit on a home kitchen countertop. The two notable ones are the Cuisinart steam oven (~$250-300) and the Anova Precision Oven (~$700); these are the low and high ends of the price range.

Given sufficient information about your personal biomechanics, a sufficiently advanced AI may be able to suggest the right fingering for you. But the main problem with this (and I think this is something that many in this thread simply don't have the familiarity with) is that fingering is simply a 2D projection of the multiple-dimensional problem of how you need to move your entire upper body to play a piece.

I'll use a piece that I am practicing right now to illustrate: Chopin Etude Op 25 #1 ("Aeolian Harp").

Sheet music: https://imslp.org/wiki/Special:ReverseLookup/112921 (the Herrmann Scholtz one) Performance: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ob0AQLp3a5s

For intermediate pianists (perhaps even beginners), the possible fingerings are actually really obvious just from looking at the notes, especially when using the suggested fingerings as a guide. This piece is structured around playing broken chords in circles, so there aren't really any fingering tricks here.

Notice the chords like the first right hand chord on the second bar on the second line, or the simpler left hand 4-note chords on the third line of the second page. Despite the obvious fingerings, somehow you need to figure out how play a broken chord that spans 15 keys, a distance that no one can comfortably cover by just stretching thumb and pinky. And that is because this piece is a study in the circular motion of the wrist (and really, the entire arm). If you do not realize this and try to simply try to stretch your fingers to go from key to key, not only will that limit your ability to increase your speed, but will build tension in your wrist as you go through this piece and eventually lead to injury. Not to mention that it really hurts to stretch your fingers with a static wrist.

(In my Jan Ekier edition of this piece, some of these ~15 key chords have two fingering suggestions that you can play with to decide which one you prefer.)

It may eventually be solvable, but this is a multiple dimensional problem, and a useful AI for this will need to give you a solution in multiple dimensions. If an AI can teach me all the motions of Chopin's etudes and allow me to just think about how to voice these pieces, maybe I won't need a teacher anymore.

Pressure cooking (including the time to bring up to pressure, pressure cooking, and pressure release) can save you about 2-6 of those hours. Depending on who you talk to, it's either almost as good or perhaps better than simmering for several hours.

This explains why I'm able to achieve my lowest ever score (0.7%) by starting a sort of spiral shape near the dot, whereas drawing that spiral in reverse would be much closer to perfect (>85%).

You can get this feature at their lowest end model of that series (CA49), though it may lack some other aspects of the resonance modeling that they reserve for higher end models. I believe almost all digitals starting at $2000 across the board have this feature, and the limiting factor that'll hold you back from hearing it all at the lower end of the price range is the audio setup that comes with the keyboard.

I remember discovering this feature when I held down all keys from A0 through E1 (without sounding them), depressed the sostenuto pedal, and then played a bunch of other keys.

Parental cargo culting, probably. "It makes you smarter" (tenuous, as hinted in article), "all the other parents are doing it to their children"/"I want my child to be better than theirs" (this can be very cultural), "it looks good on your college applications" (this becomes a reason later on, and is also very tenuous), etc.

Thanks for the tip, but I am practicing this with a teacher who has prescribed some similar advice. I've accepted that this just takes time.

I've always felt that Prelude in C major is Bach's prank to all of us. It's the start to Well-Tempered Clavier and makes you feel that maybe this set of compositions is approachable. And then you try out the fugue that's paired with this prelude and find that not only is it so extraordinarily difficult to master it at a technical level (your 2 hands have to play 4 different voices! And sometimes the middle voices require you to use your other hand for assistance), but also to be able to voice it well (your 2 hands have to express all 4 different voices clearly!).

Sheet: https://musescore.com/user/101554/scores/117422 Glenn Gould: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FUJpXpCbNgw

The the rest of the preludes and fugues follow a similar schtick.

I appreciate the author running these experiments; even though I think the answers were obvious, it does confirm a lot of what we know about coffee extraction.

I do have a few related thoughts on some different points in the article.

> The ideal extraction yield for coffee is between 18% and 22%. An under-extraction of 15% or over-extraction of 25% will cause an imbalance in the components and will result in either acidic or a bitter-sweet coffee drink.

The lower bound of the range is accurate, but the upper bound is outdated. People like Scott Rao and the folks at Barista Hustle have been involved in expereriments to push extractions even higher than that; if I recall correctly, I think they've reached just shy of 30% while improving the taste of the resulting coffee. The key is that bitter flavors don't simply start extracting past 22%, but that above 22%, the _evenness_ of extraction becomes very important. This is the point where factors like the grind size distribution (from the specific combination of beans, grinder machine, and burrs) and technique (e.g. your method of hand pouring to avoid fine particles from clogging the filter) really start to matter. Bitterness can even occur at 18% extraction if the grind size distribution is very uneven.

Another related detail the author mentions is that the second and third re-brews result in more watery cups. This is partly because fines (the tiniest particles) in suspension are major contributors to the texture of the coffee beverage, especially for espresso. Once you've extracted most of them in the first brew, there won't be much left for repeated brews.

My angle on this is that this is not a useful technique unless you're intentionally trying to ration coffee. If your repeated brews seem to extract some additional good flavor, you may want to explore ways to increase the extraction from the first brew instead.

On a related note, there is an old invention that essentially constantly rebrews coffee: the percolator.

There is actually a substantial amount of flavor left, but just like in coffee, it's very difficult to extract without increasing the surface area of the vegetables and meat you add in. And how can you increase the surface area? Exactly the way you'd expect to.

James Hoffmann has a video on this topic https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VV68NiRulEk

Scaling back up is really hard though. We had a de facto freeze on hiring (not exactly hiring freeze; more of a headcount cap) just shy of a decade ago to focus on our product. During that time, some of our best recruiters left because they basically had nothing to do anymore.

The freeze worked: we got rid of some products that weren't getting traction and were able to improve the products that did have traction. But the cost of the freeze lingered for at least a year; it reset the hiring pipeline, we couldn't grow fast when we needed to because the limited number of recruiters we had were already overworked, and the limited number of engineers had to balance interviewing needs with their real work. This all happened when my employer was <10% of its current size and pre-IPO, and we didn't even take a headcount reduction.

Twitter is simply at a different scale. 7500 -> 2500 employees is a 66% reduction. Going 2500 -> 7500 is a 200% increase. Recruiting is likely totally gutted, and the current 2500 employees have to support systems previously maintained by a 7500-person company. If they decide they need to grow, it'll have to restart at a snail's pace, and they'll have to make sacrifices on feature development or stability along the way.

Edit: for what it's worth, the fastest way to regrow back 200% is to rehire the people laid off. But, given that I happened to interview earlier today an ex-Twitter candidate who didn't make it through the Elon snap, that route is rapidly closing up.

I can imagine both cases being true, that the renewal process is automated and that certs won't get renewed because institutional knowledge has left the door. Where I'm at, service-to-service TLS certificates (the bulk of our certs) are automatically rotated by our deploy systems. But there are always the edge cases: the certificates manually created a long time ago (predating any standardized monitoring systems) with long expiry dates, and certificates for systems that simply can't run off the standard infrastructure. Sometimes, they'll bring down systems with low SLOs; other times, they'll block all internal development.

It's pretty common. Most pasta cooking directions say to use 4-6 quarts of water for a standard 1-lb pack of dry pasta. Many Italian grandmas (I'm making a guess off n=1 person with Italian heritage who learned it this way) do it like this. Because this technique is so ingrained, it's less obvious to reduce the amount of water.

I was gonna say, Serious Eats talked about this method (starting with a boil and then cutting the heat, mentioned in the article but not in the comment) so many years ago; only that they didn't call it "passive cooking". It comes with the nice benefit that you'll never have to worry about the pot boiling over except during the first minute, and, from what I've noticed, it seems to better align with the suggested cooking times on retail packaging.

I've argued with people about this and could never convince them to try it, mostly because of the "grandma did it this way" reason.

Plant subscription boxes are a thing, so we're not _that_ far off.

One of the funnier problems I ran into recently was when a friend who actually understood my coffee preferences pretty well (though I don't think he actually grasps my preferences fully) got me coffee that was actually not bad, except that I already had way too much (and more preferable) coffee in the freezer.

Fortunately, even if I don't end up brewing all of it, I don't let it go to waste. In the past, I combined all of this throwaway coffee to season some new fancy burrs.

I can provide a little bit of insight into the Google Pay shenanigans, though I didn’t work there or interact with anyone there.

The initial Google Wallet launch irked the card networks because they presented their own proxy card rather than a card that clearly advertised the card issuer and the network. (Oh boy do they care a lot about branding…)

I assume they dropped NFC initially because it was done with the first generation tech that was very insecure and simply transmitted card numbers in the clear. Today’s contactless tech is all EMV based, and also needs to depend on a Secure Enclave chip to be blessed by PCI; that might explain why they cut off support for a number of devices. This happened around the time Apple Pay came into the scene.

The rebranding and all that though, well, that’s Google.

If you bump your budget a little, you will start to find digital pianos that are designed to better emulate grand piano actions. And further on, starting around $3500 and above, you start to find longer key sticks and counterweights and such that do a much better job at it.

Fundamentally, you are correct and I will agree with you. But have you tried any of the higher end digitals from the latest generation of pianos, e.g. Kawai CA79/99 or Yamaha CLP-745/775/785? Those come with some pretty serious audio setups—with 4-6 speakers placed in different locations—that can really pack a punch with the high quality recorded samples from concert grands. As someone who regularly practices in his apartment on his digital and plays on acoustics with my piano teacher once a week in a small piano studio, I can confidently say that these higher quality digitals are nearly indistinguishable in terms of sound richness from those acoustics. (I'll be fair though, I think those acoustics leave quite a lot to be desired and aren't really in the best environments, but I would bet that they cost more than what I paid for my CA79.)

Digitals will always be outclassed by a regularly-tuned decent quality acoustic that is well-placed in a room with decent acoustic characteristics, sure. However, modern higher-end digitals raise the bar quite a lot that, in my opinion, it makes the value proposition of, say, a Yahama U1 a little more questionable for the vast majority of people who aren't professionals or aren't able to set up an optimal acoustic environment at home.

(Worth also mentioning, the key actions on higher-end modern digitals are also pretty damn good these days. My CA79 does a pretty good job at allowing me to play a light legato, and I felt like that experience was quite transferable to some pretty nice Yamaha and Kawai grands I was recently able to play around with. Now, I'm pretty sure I may begin to notice the limits when I start working through level 9/10 (or beyond) pieces in a few years, but that's the point that I'll know it's time to buy a home and put in a grand piano.)

EMV is a very very chatty protocol, basically.

Technically yes you are correct, but the threat model here is similar to someone grabbing a card from you and dipping it into a terminal chip reader without your permission. This is what the PIN part of chip-and-PIN protects against; the chip part (also applicable to EMV contactless) protects against card duplication and transaction replay.

There is a huge difference between this kind of attack and what an attacker can do with the old scheme of magnetic swipe data over RFID. With the former, the only thing an attacker can do is perform a real transaction in that moment; this transaction leaves behind an audit trail tied to a real merchant (the operator of the terminal) and their bank account. An attacker cannot, however, initiate additional payments without accessing the payment card again, and without access to the cryptographic secrets held by the payment service provider, they cannot extract the card number to use for online transactions.

With the latter, it's equivalent to skimming a the magnetic stripe: an attacker can clone the card and reuse it for transactions as often as they'd like for whatever amounts they can authorize. In addition, they will have access to the plaintext card number, which would allow them to use it for online transactions. And absolutely none of this leaves behind an audit trail of how the attacker got your card.

Old payment card RFID contactless was really insecure; it basically spat out the data on the magnetic stripe. New contactless is directly tied to the EMV chips and requires the whole cryptographic round trip and such. You can put a protective sleeve around your cards if you want, but it doesn't really add much in real security anymore.

With gas stations, there is so much more to it than just replacing a card reader in the kiosk, or even just replacing the kiosk itself. You may have to even tear out all of the old networking equipment. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28207062

My experience is that they usually complicate your taxes. In particular, past a certain asset threshold, Wealthfront will do something called "direct indexing", which basically invests your money in individual stocks the way an ETF would. It has TLH benefits, but at the cost of a massive 1099-B that you have to deal with every year.

Considering this press release came out on a Friday afternoon shortly before the Labor Day weekend, I sensed this wasn't supposed to be good news.

I think some parts of this system may already be available to end users today. I noticed recently that Chase allows me to transfer money in real time ("using the US real-time payments network") to an account I own at Bank of America. And indeed, the transfer showed up within minutes.

Ergodox-based keyboards might interest you. I use one myself with a Mac. And you could easily set up a specific layer to give you a numpad. There's a bit of a learning curve however: it's a split keyboard with keys arranged in an ortholinear layout. For off-the-shelf options, look into Ergodox EZ.