This is scary. While I find it on-topic, I feel compelled to downvote your comment so that less people see the link. Sorry!
1,268 karma · joined July 16, 2020
Of course protests are an important part of a healthy democracy.
Rather I'm pointing that out in the age of social media, a lot of these disruptive climate protests are narcissistic attention grabs. There's a desperate need for validation from peers and a sense that one is the "main character" so to speak.
That's an issue, and it's a new issue. It didn't exist until social media came along, not to the extent it does now.
I'm more than happy for people to protest. But if I'm stuck on a bridge while some 22 year-old rich kid who lives in his parents' Sunshine Coast mansion blocks the road, I should be allowed to counter-protest by throwing him in the river and continuing on my day.
Beware seeing yourself as so intellectually and morally superior that other people can be used as tools for your own ends. That does not end well for anyone.
Now, I'd be happy to support your gluing yourself to footpaths and freeways, as long as I have the right to remove you for obstructing my way. The problem is my options are fairly limited if I'm stuck in traffic for three hours because you're "demonstrating".
A common argument in favour of these disruptive tactics is "yeah but the planet is DYING, this is an EMERGENCY!" OK, go do something about it - other than gluing yourself to the road. Go study science and engineering. Please. Because the more people working on the problem, the quicker we'll get solutions. Don't you CARE?
Funny story - at work we once had a huge spike in requests from a single IP. We all crowded around, thinking it was some malicious hacker from France. How exciting - we're now interesting enough to warrant a DoS! Turns out another team in the company was just pulling all our data into Algolia to improve search. They were clearly not very courteous!
So on the other end (building APIs) I certainly do pay attention to traffic and have Grafana alerts set up around it.
So as not to piss them off (and so they don't try to block me), my script will take about 6 hours. Between each page fetch it sleeps for a small, random amount of time. It's been working like that for years.
Thanks for sharing!
To block ads when web browsing, I find adblockers more than adequate. Eg Brave Browser on Android, or the Ublock Origin addon on desktop.
The main reason I wanted Pihole was to block ads in other situations - eg Android apps. In particular, I wanted to watch a documentary on a free video app, but the number of video ads made it intolerable.
I found Pihole did not effectively block ads in Android apps, or ads in videos. I think they must serve the ads from the same server as their content, therefore rendering DNS blocking useless.
(I will go to extreme lengths to avoid watching video ads. In this case, I actually screen recorded the entire documentary on my phone, with the ads. I could then watch it later on, but skipping all the ads)
Who would have thought software could be such an adrenaline rush. Move over Alex Honnold!
Not sure how an adult paying for ad-free YouTube is inconsistent with not wanting minors on social media. I even stated in the linked comment that I do use YouTube.
I'd never want to ban or censor social media for adults.
- Media center
- Transmission seedbox
- Zoneminder (security camera monitoring)
- Pihole
- Grafana dashboard of temperatures of other Pis
A few years ago I built a project that used wifi to count the number of devices in a given area.
You could set up a basic Linux distro on it, put video game emulators on it so they can experience all the old LucasArts classics.
The 650s are nearly 20 years old and can blow all your modern bluetooth headphones out of the water for sound quality.
So what I do is just buy a bluetooth receiver (eg fiiO BRT3k, BRT5, etc) and clip them onto the side of my headphones. Voila! Bluetooth headphones that sound great and don't need to be thrown away in 5 years.
But that's tied to my personal account. Sometimes I want to watch a video on my work laptop, or just in incognito mode. I would find it incredibly irritating if that were blocked because I use an adblocker. In this case I've paid for no ads, I just don't want this particular video linked to my personal account.
Also, unless you really enjoy waking up, never make a great song your alarm sound. It ruins the song in about a week. It forever becomes associated with that dreadful feeling of having to get up, and becomes unbearable to listen to.
But I only have about three friends, and I see them maybe four times a year.
I really get along with my coworkers and enjoy their company at work. My wife thinks I should make more friends.
But the truth is (and I suspect this is pretty common with HN'ers), I don't want more friends!
Because in addition to those three friends, there's siblings, siblings-in-law, husbands of siblings-in-law, parents, parents-in-law, cousins, my wife's friends, my wife's friends' husbands, etc etc. And they all wanna see you!
That, plus of course spending time with my lovely wife/daughter (which I love to do), leaves not much alone-time to explore all the awesome stuff you can do in this world. Play guitar. Read a great piece of literature. Learn to draw. Learn Blender. Build some furniture. Grow a fruit tree. Grow five fruit trees. Keep a hot compost pile (more amazing to see than you'd think). Write a shitty piece of music. Learn to weld. Lift weights. Run.
There's just so much great stuff to do. I like people, they're great. But I guard my alone-time like a precious gemstone.
That video was great! Although I notice she cooks it in a large jar of water. I suspect that it would take a long time to heat up all that water, hence it never reaches 62°C. Whereas if you just wrapped it in foil, it might transfer that heat to the fish much quicker.
I was sent a shipment recently and the sender didn't put my last name. So the courier asked me to email them a copy of my passport or driver's licence. I rang them directly and was told that this is the only way of providing my identity. I said hell no and the package was sent back (they ended up resending it with my full name).
I find the worst culprit to be healthcare providers. I've had two recently ask me to send my credit card information in the regular mail. I drove down to one of them to do it in person, and they put my details in a filing cabinet. I sure hope that lock is good!
(Pro tip: if you ever need to send CC details via mail and you cannot arrange an alternative, use registered post with signature so you can confirm it made it to the recipient)
Most of the time, you only need to listen to music on your phone or your computer, right? My main collection (mostly FLAC) is on a NAS with RAID.
But then I've got some scripts that maintain a copy of that collection, except converted to MP3 at a variable bitrate [1]. I just store the entirety of it on my phone. It's 107GB.
Adding a new album to my phone is as simple as using a SMB app to copy from my NAS.
Now when I'm stuck in traffic under a tunnel, or driving through the country, my music keeps playing!
[1] - a variable bitrate (VBR) keeps a smaller file size but pretty decent sound quality. it just lowers the bitrate when there's silence or simple sounds, where a high bitrate isn't required.
Interestingly, I'm finding it hard to shake that initial visual image, even though I know it's wrong. Brains are weird.
He's got a number of articles if you Google his name, and he's also appeared in a few podcasts (eg Lex Fridman's).
Dopaminergic literally means "related to dopamine". It's the first Google result.
And how is the word "dissimilar" academic technobabble?
Let's have good-faith discussions in future as I think this is a really interesting topic :)
The best you can do is try to explain and contextualise everything your kid might be seeing, which is very hard to do.
Also, not all parents are engaged with their kids as well as they should be. Having bad parents doesn't mean you're not worth protecting.
> Or ban having sex without the use of contraceptives if you are so keen on banning.
I'm not sure what that means.
(Obviously, "banning it" is not so clear-cut. Are you going to force Instagram to require that everyone uploads an ID to verify their age?)
But part of the danger is the ubiquity of it I think. Every teenager has social media, so there's this massive peer-pressure. If you don't have it, you get picked on. I wonder if banning it would reduce the numbers at least enough to reduce this effect.
I'm definitely not saying this is some silver bullet... But I think we have to do something, and maybe this is a reasonable starting point.
It's not clear how you could effectively regulate this stuff - especially in our highly polarised political climate. The right will immediately target "wokeness", and the left will immediately target "hate speech". And the kids will be totally forgotten about.
That's why I think, don't bother trying to regulate social media. Just ban it for under 18s when they're most vulnerable.
I don't relish this solution either. When I was 13, I was on forums making online friends. I loved it. But it was clearly different back then, before smartphones, before content-creators, when the internet was mostly nerds.
(I don't use social media, but I do use YouTube. I was amazed how quickly, after watching one fitness video, it immediately started showing videos of the most ripped, steroid-abusing bodybuilders, and how I could achieve their "amazing" physiques. Then videos started popping up about all types of performance-enhancing drugs. SARMs, trenbolone - it was crazy how quickly it devolved to this)
However when I first listened to him, my reaction was "this is very impressive, but I don't know why, I just don't feel it". What struck me was that when I read up on him a bit more, that was a pretty common reaction among people.
I don't really have the words to describe any of this. There's just something missing there. Soul. Which is a strange thing to say, because he probably does pour his heart & soul into his songs.
I just can't get into guitarists like Steve Vai, Yngwie Malmsteen, Stevie Ray Vaughan, etc. I can't even get into John Mayer (though he can be more tasteful with his improv). It's all just a big dick-measuring contest. Believe it or not, this is not meant to be ironic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=46qjDJ0lLdE
Give me Townes Van Zandt, Leonard Cohen, Neil Young, Joni Mitchell - all fantastic *songwriters*. The Beatles have so many simple songs - eg Blackbird (simple two note chords), Twist & Shout (three chords), etc, but they're all beautiful and will live on forever. I cannot imagine people listening to Steve Vai in 50 years, because I can't imagine why people listen today.
We're all characters. At the end of the day, some people do need to be treated a little bit differently. It's not "unfair"/"unjust", it's just called being human.
If you fire everyone who isn't some homogenous nice person we'll have pretty boring teams.
Who hasn't worked with someone a little brash, a little odd, a little immature, but if you actually took the time to get to know them is a pretty good person overall?
I worked with an engineer who clipped his nails at his desk and took his coffee into the bathroom. Socially, he could be rude. Professionally, he did not take criticism well, and liked to do things "his" way. But he was also generous with his time if you needed help. If you broached things very delicately, he could take some feedback. He was given projects to work on that allowed him to work pretty independently. And his rudeness was probably just social awkwardness, as he could be alright if you had a chat with him one-on-one.
It didn't destroy team morale. Everyone recognised he was different. He wasn't a jerk, he just had autism and/or anxiety.
Someone once said to me "meet people where they are at".
For ear training (eg intervals), I use the Perfect Ear app. [1]
For transcribing, I use software called "Transcribe!" [2]. You can repeat specific parts of a song, and also slow it down without altering the pitch (known as "time stretching").
You can also use Audacity for transcription but Transcribe! does tend to be a bit easier to use.
- [1] https://www.perfectear.app/
- [2] https://www.seventhstring.com/xscribe/overview.htmlAt the moment it autoconnects (even if you're already connected to another device), AND autoplays. Doubly annoying.