patrickwalton

Thousands of children. That's tragic. I've been lamenting children's loss of free range. I thought it was due to saliency bias around kidnapping, but it sounds like the auto companies may be at larger fault.

Sometimes the solution is to get rid of the problem. Take tobacco for instance.

May not be true of cars, but I'm pretty bitter about the unhealthy car-centric societies that 100 years of auto lobbying has left us with.

It's like saying: ~Don't attack the tobacco companies, talk about alternative forms of recreation.~

Sure, but also attack tobacco companies. Sometimes the solution to a plague is to attack the plague.

This immediately makes me think of the role attacking pedestrians played in the rise of the automobile.

https://www.vox.com/2015/1/15/7551873/jaywalking-history

The auto companies played dirty. Maybe it's time to make it clear that they're the source of so much illness in American people and cities.

Cool! I was just thinking about this!

Google "tyranny of the rocket equation"

Source? I would actually expect there to be around the same amount of drummers, but more people making music.

The orbital index isn't mentioned but should be. It's an incredible newsletter on the space industry.

I wonder how the variance in well-being changes with income. Bigger or smaller swings?

This ranks highly on the Black Mirror scale (how many Black Mirror episodes could be written about it).

I can only consume audiobooks if I'm doing something else. It seems I have to push my brain to the edge of activity it can absorb at once. Too little activity (just listening to an audiobook) and I get bored and distracted. Too much activity (listening while coding) and I don't do either well. Listening while doing mindless tasks like cleaning or exercising seem to be just the right amount of mental activity to keep me engaged well.

My solution is walking while I read. As a result, I end up walking for 4-6 hours at a time when I have a lot of reading to do. My biggest struggle is finding good e-readers that can handle all the reading formats I need, sync annotations, and have good connectivity. Still haven't found one. I'm not sure they exist yet.

I also find myself saving things to read, because I struggle to read them while sitting, but never quite get around to reading everything.

NPR just did a show on consumers fighting back against the HP Inkjet model

https://www.npr.org/2021/02/17/968704526/why-printers-are-th...

I was able to add dimming capability to the lights in my rented apartment where it wasn't available before using smart lights. That was a pretty big benefit to me.

Working on a hardware startup, I'm seeing that hardware infrastructure is way behind software infrastructure. Figuring out to test a new iteration in a week feels like magic, when software companies can deploy iterations in an hour.

I think software infrastructure for hardware development is going to get better, but one of the biggest barriers is the small size of the open source hardware movement compared to open source software.

I've kept extensive notes for years and always find I never use them, so now I'm transitioning towards only taking notes in actionable format, as GitHub issues, task list items, etc.

Very cool! I'll bet we could use this to make it really easy to document any unique issues that come up while assembling iterations of our satellites.