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My 12-year old son recently got a quest 2, and loves it. The killer feature is playing games with live audio with his friends. He comes out of the room sweaty and exhilerated.

I've been amazed by it. I had earlier headsets that required a cable to a PC and base stations mounted to the walls. Although beat saber was fun for a while, I pretty much gave up on it.

But the social aspect of the quest 2 seems really great for a 12 year old boy so far.

Congrats! Not sure how many employees you have, but as you get into the $200-$500k owner discretionary earnings level, definitely take a look at small business retirement plans. If it is just you, or just you and a family member, you can use something like a Solo401k to defer up to $69k in earnings to retirement accounts. The “personal” side of that (like $22k) can be Roth.

I really like the admiralcloudberg blog, which provides extensive analysis of plane crashes and the NTSB investigation that follows.

I hadn’t thought of it, but I think the idea of similar investigations for self-driving car accidents is a really great idea.

Though, one recurrent theme of that blog is that blame and persecution are generally counterproductive to understanding the accident and improving safety.

What concerns me, and I don’t see mentioned as much as I would expect, is: how will people be compensated for generating new content if ChatGPT takes over?

I believe the innovation that will really “win” generative AI in the long term is one that figures out how to keep the model populated with fresh, relevant, quality information in a sustainable way.

I think generative AI represents a chance to fundamentally rethink the value chain around information and research. But for all their focus on “non-profit” and “good for humanity”, they don’t seem very interested in that.

Yes, but its not really clear to me how to interpret these layoffs.

1. I could understand firing a few top executives, but is laying off a quarter of the staff likely to make the cars safer? Shouldn't they be adding people focused on safety if they intend to continue to pursue it?

2. Far more people each day die in GM's not-self-driving vehicles. Why are they not firing people over that?

I guess the generous perspective is that maybe they are trying to change an internal culture? Or maybe reduce their cost base so they have a longer runway in which to emphasize safety?

But a concerning perspective, for me, is that they are irrationally prioritizing the negative publicity associated with a single rare/newsworthy incident over the unpublicized/not-newsworthy daily drumbeat of human-caused auto deaths. And that doesn't seem to be good for safety in the long term.

I am curious how people are using Phind.

I actually had a discussion with Phind itself recently, in which I said that in order to help me, it seems like it would need to ingest my codebase so that it understands what I am talking about. Without knowing my various models, etc, I don't see how it could write anything but the most trivial functions.

It responded that, yes, it would need to ingest my codebase, but it couldn't.

It was fairly articulate and seemed to understand what I was saying.

So, how do people get value out of Phind? I just don't see how it can help with any case where your function takes or returns a non-trivial class as a parameter. And if can't do that, what is the point?

I use the myq app to open my garage door open regularly. The app is slow to open and generally annoying. For example, the whole interface is initially blocked, so you tap to open and it doesn't register the tap, still doesn't register the tap, then finally it does.

I was not aware of there being ads in it, but I just looked, and you are absolutely right, there is an ad at the top. It looks like its for their home security camera.

Based on my experience with the company, I would not purchase additional products from them. Not based on my desire to use home automation or homekit, just on the fact that the app is poor.

The garage door openers themselves, however, which have battery backup and which open quietly and with a gradual slowing near the finish, are pretty decent. Mainly I wish they had a better, faster app, as the garage door is the smart home thing I used most (followed by maybe Rachio).

“How to sell at margins higher than your competitors”, which profoundly improved my pricing strategy at the software business I started.

“Self esteem” - which altered how I saw myself and understood my own behavior when dating.

We historically used Parallels to create virtual machines used as build environments for MacOS based software. Then, when we switched to apple silicon, it stopped working (you could install a MacOS virtual machine, but it was based on an apple dev image and you could not connect to your own apple id for signing, etc.)

We gave up and bought a few mac minis. Does anyone know if those issues have been solved by cheetah, or some of the other virtual machine managers mentioned by @dinkblam?

If you want that immersion, I think $3500 is totally reasonable. I paid more than that for my two additional monitors.

The problem for me is that I like monitors better. I like the feeling of real space around me. I cannot conceive of wearing googles on my head all day. I just don’t want to.

And I definitely don’t want to be separated from other humans by googles. It just not attractive to me.

I find it much easier to imagine commercial uses (perhaps visualizing a planned building in its real environment) than personal uses.

My in-laws did this (think they got 1/4), but they ended up with a bunch of cuts they weren't used to/didn't like and ended up throwing away a significant amount.

This article is super generic. It could have been written about any career path -- Some people who dedicate their careers to ascending in a single corporation regret it, Some people who aspire to be corporate lawyers regret it, Some people who become ski instructors to have more time to ski regret it.

Careers are long, and I think the key is to try things, learn what suits you, and generally try to evolve towards things that are a better fit for you.

They aren't mentioned in the article, but Butler Motorcycle Maps fit with the theme.

You can currently access the same data via an app called Rever (which is great for actually driving a route you have already planned), but the physical maps give a better overview, and more accessible editorial content, than the app does:

https://butlermaps.com/

They are more useful for deciding where you want to go in the first place.

As developers, I think it is really interesting to think about why this is true/possible. (I also find it true that PDF brochures for automobiles are a better way to understand the different trims than the car's website). All the filtering/searching/data analysis features of software seem so powerful, but sometimes committing to a single, static format for presenting information yields a more comprehensible result.

This is interesting, but to be honest it’s more learning than I personally want to take on for this use case.

One feature that I miss from code editors is “record actions”. The last time I remember having it was maybe in visual studio around the late 90s. It would record whatever you did (keystrokes/copy paste/find replace/etc). At that time, I found that I could often address use cases similar to those I think you are targeting by thoughtfully recording the right sequence of actions.

I just discovered cloudberg a few months ago, on HN. I agree the writeups are amazing.

What I enjoy most is that frequently, the crash appears to have a clear “culprit” early on, then cloud berg points out 5-7 other factors, any one of which might have prevented the accident. If the series had a theme, I think it would be that airplane crashes are less about human failings than systemic ones.

Thanks, this is actually very useful, and I will almost certainly use it.

But, I still think there are real issues here, regarding empowering parents to guide their children to appropriate resources and away from resources they view as negative (it’s not just sex, either, it’s stuff on YouTube as well). The tools just aren’t that good.

One thing I’d really like on YouTube is the ability to accept YouTube’s default recommendations, but then whitelist/blacklist additional channels at my discretion. Currently it’s YouTube’s recommendations, or curate everything yourself, making the latter really hard.

I just upvoted this, and thought about posting something similar myself. I am right now buying "how to talk about sex" books for my 11 year old son. My wife and I are super sex positive.

But I look on Pornhub, and the idea that that might be my children's first impression of sex makes me sad. Its fine for adults, but not good for forming accurate impressions of how to connect with another human being.

My favorite book so far, by far, has been "The Hush Factor" by Karen Rayne. It has almost nothing about sex itself, its almost all about communicating with emerging adults (it would really be good for anyone who has a teenager). But its key thesis is that you are trying to help your children develop the capacity to have healthy sexual relationships.

I think the people downvoting this comment probably don't have kids this age (if you do, I'd be curious to hear your perspective). But I love my kids, and I care about all the kids that age and hope they will find good, healthy partners to sleep with eventually.

Even as someone who is quite tech savvy, it’s difficult to control access to this kind of material. This specific effort may be heavy handed, but there is a problem here that I believe is real and deserves attention.

I worked on the medical resident scheduling problem for a while, and there is a giant body of work on all kinds of staff scheduling problems going back to the 1960s at least.

The two classes of solutions that I considered where optimization solvers (see Gurobi Optimization for example), and meta-heuristics (see the book Metahueristics: From Design to Implementation). If I remember correctly, the people at Gurobi started at a previous company which was spun out of an airline, but I might be confused. All the algorithms in both classes of solutions are so nuanced that it can take years to begin to grasp how their strengths and weaknesses interact with your particular scheduling challenge, and how the way you formulate the problem interacts with the ability of the algorithm to solve it.

All that said, the real problem for me was a human one: If you produce a viable schedule X, the organization involved will always want to alter the rules to stretch the available resources to cover more, and simultaneously all the schedule staff will want more flexibility and nuance in expressing their preferences. You, as the author of scheduling software, are caught between them. Neither side is ever happy with the result.

I occasionally daydream about revisiting resident scheduling (I don't recommend it, the people who use your software leave every year, are not business oriented, and don't understand the complexity of the task until they've tried it on their own their first and only attempt). If I did, I would focus less on algorithms, and more on incentives to reconcile the tension between the organization, which wants to cover the most shifts with the fewest people at the cost of flexibility and preferences, and the staff, who want more flexibility and more preferences satisfied. I think that is the core problem at a business level.

I agree on the therapist. Some are better than others, plan to try a few before settling on one.

The other thing I’d suggest is begin exercising regularly. Jogging is great because it only requires shoes, and you can do it almost anywhere. It’s something you can do for yourself that will definitely make you better off in the long run. You can tell yourself: “even if all my other plans fall through, if I keep up this exercise, I will be better off in a year than I am now.”

Regarding the wife and kids and career angle, speaking as someone who has all that, keep in mind that they open some doors but close others. I can’t hike the pacific crest trail, or sail around the world. Honestly, it’s really hard for me to get away for a few days to do something exclusively for myself, and if I do I feel guilty about it. If the wife and kids don’t happen for you, keep in mind that that also yields a freedom to explore alternatives which will not be possible if they do.

Fair question. I think I used that word because at the beginning of the talk, the person who had organized the talk gave a five minute ibtro about how admirable it was that he was willing to acknowledge the difficulty of his ADHD, etc.

Then he stood up, was clearly having none of it, said he thought it was an advantage, and then gave a long talk with no reference to it.

I guess it was weird because he didn’t seem into that angle at all.

But he was a great speaker, really inspiring.

Edit: I wasn’t necessarily trying to advocate that his perspective was correct for anyone else, but just reporting that this is what happened as a matter of fact.

I saw the guy who founded kinkos speak at Babson business school about 20 years ago. Weirdly, he was there due to some sponsorship related to disabilities because he had ADHD.

He got up and in the first 30 seconds said he thought ADHD had helped him, didn’t think of it as a negative, and just came because he wanted to tell his story. Like so many founders (esp of retail businesses, I find), he was super charismatic and had a very practical, easy to understand model of the business. It was the best talk I saw in my brief time at babson, and I saw a bunch of good talks by founders.

I believe the guy who founded jet blue also has ADHD and feels similarly. Everyone has their own perspective, but if you get a chance to see the Kinkos founder speak, I recommend it (he might be pretty old by now).

I am the OP, and I have a DS 918+ and I have been very happy with it. But I am not a hardware expert, so I don't claim to know what hardware you should buy.

What I like about synology is the operating system/software. You can connect to it with a web browser, and it has something akin to a traditional operating system interface that lets you control all its functions.

I have found it very good as a file server for business/home office use, and as a backup target for multiple mac computers using time-machine. It also has very good online support, both from synology itself, and lots of freelance youtube/web help.

The other thing I personally really like is its "hyper backup" feature, which replicates all your NAS files (or those you choose) to the cloud, so they can be restored later.

I have also found it to be totally trouble free. I just installed the drives (they have a list of compatible ones), choose my RAID, and it has worked seamlessly for many years (I have a DS218+ as well that has worked well). It sends me emails reporting drive health, confirming backup completion, etc.

Thanks for this. I just bought new 14tb drives for my synology nas, and I looked at your data when I did so.

Separately, my nas running RAID 10 worked as it was supposed to: I hot swapped the drives one at a time over several weeks, and went from 7tb storage to something like 24tb with no downtime or hassle. The device has been sitting in my basement for years, and it was cool to see the raid technology work as intended after all this time.

Thanks to the mhandley for posting this. I have now read a bunch of these posts (on 'admiralcloudberg') and they are absolutely fascinating.

The ones I find most interesting are those where I remember the media coverage at the time. So often, the post has fascinating details which emerged later. For example:

https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/days-of-our-discontent-t...

I remember this crash of a Jamaica-bound plane after 9/11, and I remember the press reporting initially that the tail had been repaired at the factory, and then a few months later that the NTSB had issued a directive that pilots shouldn't respond to wake turbulence too aggressively.

However, the cloudberg post has fascinating details about how the particular characteristics of a training scenario for the A300 had led many pilots to conclude that the proper response to wake turbulence was massive inputs to the controls. It would have been easy to conclude the pilot who made them was just incompetent. But in fact, evidence was he was very competent, and that he had learned what the training taught him quite well. The trainers did not understand what the implementation of their simulation was teaching until after the accident was investigated.

Also, the industry did not fully understand what tests for structural integrity of the tail really said about its capacity to withstand inputs at lower speeds until after this crash. The details are just fascinating.

Or this one:

https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/lost-souls-of-grammatiko...

About a plane where everyone is unconscious and it circles until it runs out of gas. I remember the coverage at the time, which presented it as a mystery. It turns out it wasn't such a mystery, the compression system on the plane was left in an incorrect state by maintenance, and the pilots repeatedly failed to recognize it. The details behind those short statements are fascinating.

Anyway, thanks for posting this.

It is exhausting. My kids are 9 and 11. It’s different, but still all consuming.

Still, I think it is very hard for anyone to predict what some one else’s experience will be having kids. It depends on the kids temperament, yours, your spouses, how your relationship works, What the expectations are in your community, and so much more.

The older I get, especially now that I see my parents really aging, the more I see life is just complicated. Kids or not, you have to find happiness where you can, and accept that sometimes things are imperfect.

Agreed. I bought a VR headset a few years ago with the idea of using iRacing to practice for actual track days. It was a plausible use case with a lot of significant practical advantages.

But in reality, it was just unpleasant to use. I just didn't like having something strapped to my face. Ultimately, 3 monitors provided an adequately immersive experience for learning without the hassle/discomfort of having a headset on. Honestly, it was kind of better anyway.

I suspect that what people will quickly find is that although a VR meeting might in certain respects have theoretical advantages, its just not better enough (or maybe even better at all) to overcome the hassle. I don't want to go into a meeting room and strap on a headset, especially not the headset everyone else has been strapping on for the last month. Comparing zoom to a headset, I'd take zoom.

Exactly. If you value something, pay for it. It’s a way of sending resources to an organization so that it can continue to do more of what you value. I remember When my parents bought World Book so we could have it on our shelf at home. It had absurdity less information and was vastly more expensive.

I use Wikipedia a few times a week, my kids use it, I am happy to pay for it, and to give them some room to fund new related efforts.

To be honest, what I love about legos is the free play aspect.

When I play with my kids, (now 8 and 10), I find that the key thing is not what pieces we have (admittedly, we have a lot of pieces), or instructions, but developing some theme or challenge.

The theme could be ‘space’ or ‘under water’ or ‘I’m going to build the taller possible leg structure’ or ‘I’m going to build a vehicle that can be blown across the floor with a fan.’ Once they have a theme, they will do amazing stuff.

Also, I believe it’s important to have a big slush pile of pieces. It’s amazing how much builds change when your are scrounging for piece X, and you see piece Y and think, actually…

I see that this app is technologically interesting for the developer, but it doesn’t address my core problem: inspiring kids to get started on free creativity. For that, I’d more like a Lego theme of the day app, maybe slightly inspired or guided by the kids ages or genders. If I did that, I’d have the kids submit pictures of their results, and use those over time to assess and improve the quality of my suggested themes at different ages and Lego piles sizes (there is your AI, if you must).

The pitch would be ‘inspire your kids to new creativity.”

Wow, very useful. Thanks for sharing this.