npsimons

I am very much convinced that a big downside to being rich is it allows your opinions to ossify. No matter where you started, how hard you worked, or how world-changing (debatable) someone's contributions were, once they get power (in any form, but especially money), it insulates one against having to change. I'm not advocating for austerity all the time, but it's painfully obvious from pretty much every "self-made man" that made it big that they are living in a bubble, full of yes-men because they fired all the people who had the temerity to say "hey, perhaps that's not quite right."

Even though I'm slightly above average in a number of markers and I've taken pains to expand my horizons and take on differing POVs, I'm still surprised (quite often!) by things I just had not thought of. And I'm not even rich, albeit I'm privileged enough to take long breaks from paying work.

"Unreal ][ Main theme" is still on my main playlist on my phone, and I've yet to go through the thousands of .XM files I just grabbed off some FTP site back in the day. The MOD community is a related rabbit hole one could get lost in . . .

Funny you give that as an example - I recall attending a talk round the turn of the century about using Java in real-time systems, and a big stickler at the time was the GC. I haven't kept up with Java (or real-time systems), but given the inroads the JDK VM has made in the embedded space, I wouldn't be surprised at all if something changed enough to make the GC not an issue for (some) real-time systems any more.

> Outliers are bad for business.

That's pretty much the takeaway here. Art (or anything really) that inspires, or is even more than about one sigma out, is not profitable. Sure, it's what you want, and you want to be erudite and trying to fill that final level on Maslow's hierarchy, but that doesn't guarantee quarter after quarter ROI for shareholders.

The sad part is, this is exactly why I left broadcast radio and TV and movie theaters behind. With some heuristics and filters in place, this sort of thing was solvable online, but nope, the market beckons, pulling everyone ever forward into its gaping maw . . .

If that makes you a snob, then I am too. Similar with /r/popular versus my subscribed feed on Reddit. Both it and logged out YouTube are dumpster fires in my eyes.

The logged in version of YouTube isn't much better, though - "oh, you clicked on this talk from the Strange Loop conference? Here's a video on introductory programming in Python!"

I mean, not to yell at clouds, but this is kind of how technology and our use of it progresses - things get faster/cheaper, and pretty soon you don't have to give a shit about pushing to EAX but instead just mapreduce across your cluster.

We're inherently lazy.

As someone who lives in org, this is the way. I'm still shell bound for a lot of things, but M-x shell is far superior, there's just no contest. Only thing that is annoying is stupid things like git diff that think they know better than you and want to do their own paging resulting in "WARNING: terminal is not fully functional". Thankfully I use EGG, but when I forget (and other things do it too), it's annoying.

And farmers working hard manual labor from before sunrise to sundown, in heat and UV exposure would look upon factory workers as spoilt. So what? Are you against progress? You aren't one of those "I had it hard, so these damn kids should too!" boomers are you?

Sure, you don't need to write everything down - but how many times could someone have simply RTFM if people were more in the habit of documenting institutional knowledge among other things? Even just defaulting to email discussions would help keep track of things much better.

And yeah, when I'm working with other people, I make a point to hang out in a BigBlueButton or other similar instance, with a note with my phone number there, as well as putting in my email signature line my phone and a note that I'm available for videconference.

Of course this is probably the case; but how many people in higher positions are invested in REITs that invest in commercial RE? I bet it's a fairly large proportion. Hews to the old adage espoused by Buffet and others of "only invest in what you know."

Just because they don't have skin in the game on that particular building they are bossing people around in doesn't mean they don't have vested interest in seeing office space being rented in general.

For instance, demanding that people commute to the RE they've invested in before their investments fall through the floor in valuation.

Lot of naysayers here claiming illegitimate "bias" when people point out their increased productivity when working from home (just the lack of interruptions and forced writing down of institutional knowledge are worth it), but will they admit there is plenty of bias from corporate officers owning real estate in the downtowns where offices are, or just managers at all levels feeling power to micromanage and lord over people slipping through their fingers?

A good tactic is to ask them about rubber duck debugging when they come to you with a problem. If they don't know what that is, have them Google it. If they still come back after that, hopefully they actually have a problem worth more than one person's attention. Otherwise, they should find another job.

I remember, way back in like 2012? 2015? Not sure when exactly, but we visited the office of a contractor we were working with, and they had a flatscreen on a stand in a public area with their lead developer on webcam, working from home. I don't know how everyone gets so utterly myopic that they forget you can just login to a videoconference (or IRC in the olden days) and just be available for these "quick chats" Bonus, if you need uninterrupted deep focus time, you can turn it off at your end.

And email, did we suddenly conveniently forget about that? LKML and countless other FLOSS mailing lists are proof positive that 100% remote can indeed build any scale of software.

I'm never going back, and have shut down plenty of recruiters and headhunters with one simple phrase: "100% remote."

Not to mention arranging or just notating songs.

Pretty much, yeah.

While this is true, it stands to question: why build systems to encourage this? Shouldn't we be trying to do better?

If nothing else, how can one avoid falling into these traps?

That is incredibly unsettling, and not just because it makes me uncomfortable. Dumbing down should never be a deliberate goal, especially of people.

You do, sure. But you're not a marginal user.

A lot of the fine article reads to me as a sort of elitism, albeit one I find myself falling prey to: the tyranny of the masses, the normies, the filthy casuals, that ruin everything.

I'm not sure where I'm going with this train of thought (possibly derailed, or just no steam), but I'd like to throw in that elitism is not always a bad thing.

Edit to add: I also run DOS games like Ultima Underworld, Master of Orion 2, etc in DOSBox; things are already pretty good, but I will point out two other examples to argue for releasing of source: Jagged Alliance 2 and NeverWinter Nights. Both games released for Linux, but only JA2 had a source release eventually, and it still runs, because having source gives you that. Meanwhile, I still can't go back and replay NWN.

Also, it's not easy, but is as simple as counting calories. Conservation of mass and all that.

    Excellence is an art won by training and habituation: we do not act
    rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have these
    because we have acted rightly;
    
      'these virtues are formed in man by his doing the actions';
    
    we are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit:
    
      'the good of man is a working of the soul in the way of excellence in
       a complete life... for as it is not one swallow or one fine day that
       makes a spring, so it is not one day or a short time that makes a man
       blessed and happy'
    
        -- Will Durant, "The Story of Philosophy: The Lives and Opinions of
           the World's Greatest Philosophers" (1926), Ch. II: Aristotle and
           Greek Science; part VII: Ethics and the Nature of Happiness

Except that's the exception, not the rule - the vast majority of people who eat healthy are not disordered eaters.

> Work out, get injured, need pain killers, get addicted.

Again, this is the exception, not the rule. The majority of people exercise without sustaining an injury.

Oh, but they do, even right here in this very thread!

I admit it's hard losing weight - I've been there. But there are some people who will compound the difficulty of following through by denying the reality of the conservation of mass.

You do know that in most countries, how representatives vote is public? See https://www.govtrack.us/congress/votes for example.