How is the keyboard on the X250 compared to other X200, X220, ... series Thinkpads?
264 karma · joined April 3, 2012
Personally I like the X200, X220, X230, ... series (as well as T400, T430, ...). One of the primary deciding factors is the quality of the keyboard.
P.S. What's it like to run 9front on a laptop? Is this a practical machine for getting the job done, or do you just want to learn about OS'es and experience the joy of Plan9? (I wanted to run Plan9 in the 1990's but was not yet open source at the time; plus computers were still expensive and finding a spare, compatible computer for a what would essentially be a hobby machine was out of the question.)
What are your favorite options for personal blogs? I'm strongly leaning towards self-hosted WP.
I've seen so many static site generators come and go over the past decade that the number of options now is just dizzying. From what I've seen, they all try to be "minimalist"... until the developer realizes there's a lot more work and expertise involved in "minimalist" design than they originally thought, and they grow, bit by bit by bit, etc, ... Then somebody sees these "bloated" SSG's and decides to reinvent the wheel by creating their own "minimalist" SSG with no baggage and thus the cycle starts all over again.
I wholeheartedly agree. And for this reason, and many others, I'm planning on setting up my personal website/blog using Wordpress.
But as for the default template being "less offensive" than Medium, I'd like to do a little better than this. I've looked at other WP templates and I am happy to learn PHP and become a real WP developer just to make a good site (I'm already an experienced developer in other languages). I also get the impression that WP development is a highly transferable skill.
I understand perfectly well that making a good, "minimalist" site takes a of expertise and effort. But I don't have the faintest where to being with this, as all my effort up until this point has been on the back end, data science computation, etc. Should I just start at the wordpress.{org,com} and follow my way from there? Is there some special resource that I should know about?
I would like to see something similar for semicolons.
Truly, only a professional outfit could have written a Twitter update with spelling like this.
I'm kind of glad that we don't do things like trying to replicate the glory of the pyramids if it's true that they required masses upon masses of slave labor to build them. Similarly for the aqueducts (I don't know if slave labor was used to build them, and a Wikipedia search didn't yield anything useful).
The higher power is not "thrown in" to AA, it is the critical foundation.
Also the people who are most critical of this concept or most aggressively reject AA based on a perceived religious foundation also tend to be the ones who have the poorest understanding of what the higher power means.
I'll admit it's not an easy concept to grasp. For many/most fellows AA the principles of AA take a good amount of time to begin to understand, and alcoholics sometimes bumble their way in and out for years before this happens. It's a learning process. Pushing back on these principles, especially the existence of one's higher power, correlates highly with continued active drinking. Acceptance of this is the whole point of the program.
Courant & John, to be exact.
I have my own "best of" list that is very different to this list, although there are a couple of crossovers.
If you are fortunate enough to have access to a university library (or libraries) I would _highly_ recommend inquiring about access to their general collection. I was also fortunate enough to study mathematics to a university-level three-year degree at a research university. So I had an excellent head start.
A HUGE part of my journey of collecting my "perfect library" of mathematics self-tuition and reference books (and course books) was to do my own research on collecting the perfect titles. I started when I was in the early days of my mathematics degree and I used resources like Amazon, Usenet, libraries (already mentioned), and ... that was about it.
Another important question to ask yourself is the following:
"Why am I doing this?"
Life is short and by the time you hit middle age, if you have a family or bills to looks after, are you REALLY going to want to lock yourself away in your study room to learn Lebesgue integration instead of focusing on the rest of your life?
Consider that people fail to emphasise is that mathematics is a social activity much more than many people realize.
Exercise: Find the topics of mathematics that are important to your goals and are missing from the list and find your favorite books or two that cover/s these topics.
Exercise: Consider whether your interest in (self-directed) mathematics is so sincere such that you have a serious application in mind, that you might be better off enroling in a course? Even if it's a night course that last a couple of years, you will meet a LOT of people who can help in ways that are immensely more productive than trying to do this all by yourself.
I recently purchased volume 1 of my favorite calculus and analysis book. It's an incredible masterpiece. The coverage of topics is much broader and more interesting than Aposotol or Spivak. The latter books are both very good but they also have myopic, one-track pedagogical approaches and limited themes in their coverage.
Exercise: Find your own favorite introductory calculus book that is suitable for the motivated student.
So there are two Jan Hesthavens? One (a man) who works in GR and another (a woman) who works in signal processing or time series analysis?
Otherwise you're going to end up with the same old stuff (SICP, Release It!, GEB, Code Complete, blah blah blah). Those books are actually good but they are on every single list and even worse, some "modern classics" are actually complete dreck. You might impress your developer friends but you won't advance yourself.
For example when I was studying for my PhD in signal processing and machine learning (before machine learning became popular again) I had to learn a lot about functional analysis. I also needed to learn a small amount of measure theory; and to go appreciably deeper in to time-frequency analysis, probability, and statistics, than I had before.
I discovered many masterpieces of my own accord. I never would have seen them because one lesson I learned during my literature review and actually doing research is that very few people actually read the books and articles they cite. They merely copy bibliographies from one ancestor article to another without knowing why.
This is FUD.
Btrfs is actively developed and its problems and limitations are acknowledged by upstream in an honest way. Many people DO use it with no more problems than they have with XFS or OpenZFS.
The only people who say "Btrfs is dead" are those who don't use it. It's a bit like people who snigger at the whole "Perl looks like line noise" trope without ever having writting a line of Perl in their lives.
In every report that I have seen of Btrfs doing something bad is when somebody (myself included) has done something incorrectly, not read the docs, not consulted an expert before doing something complicated, not taken the time to understand how it works, using a suboptimal or flakey hardware/software stack underlying it.
Have you seen how strict the FreeNAS community is about using proper, server-grade hardware and configuring the system properly to prevent data loss? This is a very good line to stick to.
Unfortunately Btrfs doesn't have the same consistent message but if it did then there would be fewer problems.
I regularly use Btrfs at home and so far I haven't had any problems. I would not use it in production when other people's data is on it YET.
One reason is technical, and it's too much of a cognitive burden these days when combined with other people's data.
The other reason is because of customer expectations, i.e., because of FUD that people like you are spreading. If there was some data loss, the customer would be angry at me for choosing Btrfs because "everybody knows" that it's unstable /s. If I am using ZFS then there's less of a chance that customers think I make bad decisions and there is a small chance they will be more forgiving.
Mdadm + LVM + XFS is an excellent alternative. The only reason that I don't use this more often is because snapshotting requires twice as much disk space as you plan to use. Otherwise I probably would be using this stack exclusively.
Getting back to the original "Btrfs has no future" nonsense, the only reason this is true is if people make it true. Therefore, one important reason I use Btrfs is that I want to see it succeed. That can only happen when people actually use it and advocate for it in a positive and honest way.
I love Brain Picking, although unfortunately I feel that her articles have a certain sort of "sameness" to them.
I love long-form reading. Personally I feel that encouraging long-form reading is important. I disagree that reducing the attention of time required to read is the answer.
It was the fastest key-value store I'd ever used. I was floored by its speed and relative stability.
And the article and comments rightly point out KT's terrible documentation and thin user community on the ground. TT was just the same. This caused a lot of surprising (and mostly undocumented) issues whenever somebody was trying to get onboarded.
I was surprised that it was so obscure and so undocumented. Especially considering its speed and simplicity (in terms of getting a basic k-v store set up).
I depended a lot on DBA's and DB engineers, our sysadmins, and other engineers with more experience of TT than I had. Usually, whenever I needed to understand a configuration option in detail, deploy a new instance with different characteristics, or optimize an existing instance, I would consult them. I think we had just as much, if not, more, knowledge of this software than any community on the Internet.
But all of this raw speed, at the cost of lack of support, lack of documentation or community bit us in the ass, hard. Either the TT/TC service itself crashed, or the host it was running on crashed (I can't remember).
Some data was lost because it was designed with no fault tolerance. Most data was recovered from backups. An executive decision was immediately made to move to a different DB, with proper resilience, etc. We quickly moved to a well known, open source, commercially supported system with all the usual value-added proprietary parts.
Then the $$$$$ started pouring in to the support contract. At least we had something trustworthy that we could understand, lots of documentation, and good upstream support engineers :-)
It's a bit sad to imagine what could have become of TT/TC. I've no idea about KT/KC. They had a LOT of potential. Maybe the potential is still there? Maybe they're project deserve resurrection, at least for educational purposes?
At least the source code still exists if anybody is interested enough. Documentation generally consists of reading struct definitions and comments; a couple of decent StackOverflow posts; and now-mostly defunct mailing lists on Google Groups.
What have you found so far to be the best options?
In my experience the quality of cabling and power supplies are the factors that most frequently affect stability of electronics hardware.
... and what effect are you implying that this has in this particular context?
The long cables where? I think I know what you're getting at but I would really love some more explanation if possible.